I understand now, thank you for explaining further! I do have an issue with my merchant being able to just “buy” whatever someone wants to sell it though. For example, if someone wanted to, they could sell to him only stacks of branches until my merchant is out of coins. I’d log in to find that I’m now the proud owner of 10k branches and my merchant’s purse is empty. I hope you see how that could get annoying.
As for the vault, I’m not sure. I was thinking the merchant should only have as much carrying capacity as a named bearer has. I’m just trying to keep this as simple as possible for Funcom to even consider it.
And hey you can always run those branches through and turn them into wood or even use them to craft Flotsum roof tiles that you can sell for added profit. etc.
There are certainly many ways to implement this feature, it’s worth turning over every stone and seeing how others feel about it for sure. I’m glad you popped in with your take on the matter, Tele.
This sort of system works REALLY well in other games and makes commerce an important part of gameplay offering users alternative playstyles. The more of those you have the more users you will get and the more real money will be generated by Funcom.
I can record some ESO banking and Merchant interactions if you’re interested to see how that system works. I no longer have a trader tho as you have to be VERY active in the game to generate enough gold to bid yes, bid, on the baked-in trader stalls. But I can visit a few to show. Lemme know…
I couldn’t agree more. I absolutely love this game and want it to continue for several more years, Crom willing! I can not speak for PVP, as I only play PVE, so I won’t pretend to know what they need. However, after playing 2600 hours on official PVE, this topic has come up so many times, I just had to make a post because not every player goes to the forums. If it’s an optional DLC, I will pay for it. that way it’s not forced on anyone who doesn’t want it.
Yes, how would that work? I mean, how could I see it?
First let it be clear that I’m NOT saying that any of this would be good for Conan. It’s just another game’s idea of a commerce system from which we may or may not draw ideas from. You can see from my original suggestions and ideas above that they are not from ESO directly.
OK, @Tystin , so this 1st video just shows the overall granularity of the player inventory system in ESO. I think seeing this will help to un-confuse viewers in the later videos as it goes along. This is just what you see and can manipulate when you press Inventory. There’s no voiceover comments or directions in these so press pause or skip ahead as needed.
You can also use the youtube Play-list to navigate to the next vid if you wanna hop around now or later.
The Shop Merchant one is showing the basic Buy, Sell, Buy Back, and Repair options with basically the same sorting granularity. The Kiosk Roadside Merchants have basically the same UI but are further segmented by their specialty Wood, Leather, Metals, Foods, and so on… The prices at which the user can buy and sell items at these areas as well as the available buyable items listed, are controlled by ZeniMax. It’s a way of generating a little gold and offloading the junk you have no use for or to get started as total noob in the game. Something maybe worth noticing is that the Buy Back list is global among all of the ZeniMax controlled merchants.
The next video shows the banking system which triples as also the “Clan” bank and the “Clan” store interface. In ESO clans are known as “Guilds”. We can think of the bank part of it as pretty much the same thing as Conan’s Vault. And like the Vault it shows your inventory and the “Vault’s” inventory but not at the same time - rather, by selecting Withdraw and Deposit. In one of these three “Bank” vids I also showed the different kinds of currencies. There are (were) like two or three that matter for our consideration here. And really only Gold for what Conan’s Funcom is likely to employ. The others are special currencies for PVP, and some for buying goods and services from ZeniMax - like DLC and so on.
In the Clan Bank vid you can glimpse a part the clan I put together and built up. In ESO you need a minimum of 100 members in your clan to open this kind of account and as you see in Vid 7, you can control who in your clan, can withdraw, deposit, or use the bank funds to bid on a Clan Merchant location if given that privilege by the clan leader. The Banked items in ESO are not automatically available at the Clan controlled Kiosk like I suggested for Conan. Again, “Withdrawal” and “Deposit” show the storage and user inventories respectively.
It’s the Clan Store which is prolly the most relevant to this discussion - maybe. This is where the clan members list items they wish to sell (as I did for three items as an example) either to other clan members if we couldn’t get a kiosk (via the same menu you’re seeing here), and/or to anyone who accesses the Kiosk location on the map - which I’ll show an example of in Vid 8. There are some things you’re not allowed to sell in ESO - mostly special items and dropped by ZeniMax or things people purchase from ZeniMax with real money. For those items they just don’t go it when you try and “List” them for sale. It pops up an error or something and tells you no.
In the Clan Organization video I just kind of stumble around it the menus for my clan “Bankster’s Paradise”, so you can see some the of the privileges allowable or disallowable to the different ranks and the log files that would be populated if this were still an active clan.
Next I ride out to an actual Clan’s Trader and show that interface. Here the prices are set by individual players like I showed in the Clan Store video at the Bank. If you won a bid on a Kiosk location you can do that same thing at your clan’s Kiosk location as well - and you can see where I can’t because I’m not a member of that clan, at 2:45 on the time-line. I briefly show the ZeniMax UI again on the way there so you can more easily compare them. All those little huts are permanently baked into the map and bid on by clan leaders. It’s secret bidding so you just never know if your bid is the high bid or not until the bidding ends. IIRC, the bidding happens once a month so who’s kiosk is where changes a lot with more popular locations going for hundreds of millions of gold coins and the locations out in the boonies going for as little as 10k sometimes. The Trader “Thrall” wears the Clan’s tabard (uniform) if they set it. And as you can see some of the prices are very high - like I predicted would happen in Conan. Supply and Demand yo… Thus why I’m saying gold would probably work fine in Conan as well.
Next I try unsuccessfully at first, to track down a Wandering Merchant which are the same again, as the ZeniMax controlled booths - but who are just out in the field for player convenience. Players can kill them or just threaten them and get a little gold but if you’re seen doing so you get a bounty on you and the invincible guards will kill you if they see you - until the bounty timer runs out. I think I had my bounties accumulated to like 100 hours or 100k gold at one point.
Finally I show the player’s ability to Spawn a Banker or Merchant in the field which are pretty much the same things as the ZeniMax Banker (with some limitations) and the ZeniMax Merchant I showed in previous clips. Users can buy this ability as a DLC or earn it in some very rare special events.
I hope any that was understandable - but if it’s not just ask and I’ll try to explain what’s happening or what I meant. There might be some ideas of what would and wouldn’t work in Conan here, I dunno. Maybe useful for comparison too? -=shrug=-
I think you guys are taking the idea way too far, I do not want Conan to turn into another MMO. The game has enough of an MMO feel already, a full blown system like you are discussing now is way too much. Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of a trading system among players. We already trade with each other on a regular basis and we deserve a method that doesn’t put our loot at risk of being stolen or lost. We just need something simple and basic (like the original idea), holding ‘E’ on a player and selecting ‘TRADE’ from the rotary menu would be sufficient. Players can trade/barter for whatever they want. Some player may need Shadebloom and the only thing of value he/she has to trade is Alchemical Base.
To recap, I like the basic idea a lot. However, I don’t think offline trading needs to be a thing nor do I think a designated currency needs to be established. Players will set their own prices as they currently do.
This doesn’t need to be a DLC because outside of RP, there is no need for a professional merchant. If it were to be a DLC it would have to include A LOT of placeables and decor that could be used for other things. A trading screen is just a basic QoL necessity, not a DLC.
I have to agree with DaVice here. Any system that would be added for this needs to be barebones.
But even then, I’m kind of opposed to it. So when I play Everquest or WoW, the pacing and cadence of the game is quite slow. You can move around freely, but for the most part you are static and don’t really need to move to attack or defend.
In Conan, you’re always moving, always reacting to things. Using a menu to trade items is clunky. And yes, I know how this works. Because through Pippi, I do have the ability to trade to other players in a window. And its hardly ever used if except for the one time we tried it out. It feels off. It feels clunky. And it doesn’t feel like Conan. (No offense to the Pippi devs here, they did an amazing job adding the feature. I just feel the feature idea itself doesn’t fit, not the implementation)
And I have to add this argument. Why do we need a confirmation window? To be honest, the amount of people who will take traded items and take off running are very low. I mean the moment they do this, no one will trade with them again. No one will do anything with them again. And if its PVP, they’ll be killed and raided.
I get it, I don’t like dropping stuff on the ground. That is risky sometimes too if it falls through the world (though I haven’t seen or heard this happening in recent patches). And most of all its cumbersome for large trades.
So let me offer an alternative. Chests. Place one down, unlock it. And do your trade through there. I’ve done trades like this before and it feels way less clunky than the window setup. Hell I’d be ok if you had the ability to white list people/clans on individual chests (and doors if we’re already doing this).
Some MMORPG elements work in CE. This sadly in my experience isn’t one of them.
@TeleTesselator was trying to show me what they were talking about so I understood their point of view, it’s not a big deal.
Perhaps in your gameplay, offline trading wouldn’t be of value, but for me and others on my server, I know it would. We have a pretty active server and we all play different hours. Some are night owls who play after work and some are early risers, we can’t always trade with each other so the offline trading post was one idea we discussed at length.
As for the currency, I think that having a real economy of currency to purchase items makes trade simple and easy for others. Sometimes a player needs a stack of silk, but they don’t have the only thing I want, which could be a stack of eggs so I can cook. If we deal with currency, I can take payment to use that money to buy eggs from someone who does have them.
I don’t want to turn Conan into an MMO, but I do want to give my builds a purpose, something that will make them more than just deserted theme parks.
I mean, what’s there to do on PVE servers, other than socialize, build, and collect stuff? Out of those three, socializing and collecting don’t do anything to hog server resources. But if I build a non-functional bazaar, I’m claiming space others could use and for what? So everyone congratulates me on how pretty it looks? I mean, that’s nice, and I like it, but I wouldn’t mind building an actual bazaar with some actual merchants.
Sure. And if they added a trading screen between players, why would it be so bad if they added the possibility of the same trading screen between a player and a player-placed merchant?
I agree with you that we don’t have to have a currency or any other bells and whistles. Those are things that could be left out. But I also don’t see what’s so detrimental about adding player-placed merchants, even in the simplest, most basic form you could imagine.
Yeah, I wouldn’t mind that if it was possible on PVE(-C). It’s not.
Don’t get me wrong, I would still want player-placed merchants to be added to the base game, but at least I would have something while I’m wishing for it. Right now I don’t have anything like it unless I use mods.
This is almost what I suggested in my OP, only replace “chest” with “counter”. The way in which it operates is very much like how you described it. The player fills the inventory of items they want to sell, others interact with it to purchase.
This is exactly why I left PVP out of the title, this feature would not translate well for that playstyle.
Yeah, it’s very nice. Like I mentioned, it offers players an alternative playstyle. And the more playstyles there are available, the more players there will be, and the more money Funcom can make - thus the more development they can and may want to pour back into it. It’s not for everyone but then neither is PVP for players who like PVE or even mass storage units like the Vault, for some PVE players. Not everyone has to make and use Vaults in the game - it would be the same with any kind of trading system we come up with.
Currently in my server I have traded with another player just one time. Some guy was checking out my base and gave me a blue torch when he was done. I thought how cool, said thanks and ran to get him a radium standing light. Besides handing out a few adult unplaced bears to n00bs passing by - still wearing basically the cloths they had right off the boat, that’s been my only experience trading in Conan…
I’ve often thought it would be cool if we could set down a sharable chest on some neighbor’s property as a gift basket type of thing just for having cool neighbors, but there’s no way to do that. Setting up a currency and on-off-line trading system would solve that for just a little more design and codding effort. And the way people are talking, I could if I wanted, make everything for free with a sign board saying so and/or letting them know to just “deposit” whatever might they have or come by in the future if they don’t want the charity.
Conan’s server size alone not to mention the topographical structure, kind of makes it impossible for it to become anything like the MMO game(s) I was mentioning or that people might be opposed to. When you think about it, that limitation alone would negate the object of people’s fears and dislikes of MMO similarity.
I was thinking this, but you said it better than I could have.
Additionally, for those concerned about PVP, I think I saw in a Devstream (If I can find it I will link it here) that they were considering looking at the 3 playstyles as separate. I do think that the differences between PVP and PVE are too great to blanket us all into the same group, so while we can get the same bug fixes and patches etc, we should have features implemented according to the playstyle.
I’d be interested in seeing that if you find it - greater separation of the playstyles is something that many of us have wanted for a while, if it was feasible. That said, ‘three playstyles’ - I certainly hope that wasn’t the devs’ words, as there are four main game modes (PVE on a server and singleplayer have different requirements - as evidenced by this very thread, so cannot be treated as one). And that still doesn’t take into account other playstyles without specific modes - such as RP - which may interact with most or all of the game modes, but also have their own requirements. Like I say - I’d be interested in seeing greater separation of the game modes - but not if it results in ignoring some entirely.
Ok couple ideals first off goal funcom to be life like. Best way to do this is have trade system.
For every make shift camp would have trade/ bargain. First system needs to be in place right now ai will attack everything. So goal is make ai more neutral. The ideal I have is that no ai attack it’s kind right. So neutral be base on your armor. Dress like black hand no black hand will attack u unless u do it first.
Then most camps would have trading post buy and sell goods so economy needs to be established. On adding life to this game barrens would walk to certain camps. Now base on he’s carrying would also means his small arms escort.
So every barren there would be trading post. With route.
One more things certain camps like defarie wouldn’t use gold to trade I think they be more skins and blood . While black hand would be in all about silver and gold coin.
Dennis is a big fan of PvP in Conan Exiles. (And yes, he loves PvE too. Dennis has talked about how he has played on modded PvE servers in past dev streams. So please, no “devs only care about PvP/PvE/RP” stuff this time, ok?)
One of the things that Dennis has shown as Lead Designer for Conan Exiles is a lot of attention given to the PvP community and their feedback. He feels that a lot of what PvPers have to say have positive and far-reaching effects across the whole game, and not just for the PvP side.
Dennis said that he tries hard to keep all players in mind: the roleplayer, the builder, people who enjoy dungeons, the PvPers, and etc. He knows that Conan Exiles is a game for all those different personality types and feels he is everybody’s best pal when it comes to the changes that they make.
It looks like I misremembered what I heard in the Devstream for 2.6, sorry for the confusion I take back what I said about the different playstyles this was a couple of months ago so my memory of the statement was off.
Thus why I’m saying gold would probably work fine in Conan as well.
There’s often a lot to remember from these devstreams etc