Phizuol wrote:Might be too extreme, but what about preventing consumption or processing for stolen items until the scents are gone? Or after a popup warning flagging the consumer/processor as a thief?
Could work, and would also let us identify hot goods which some people use to track down other people. Still, if somebody just wanted to grief your shop, they could still take your goods with an alt and drop them in water, which is why I prefer my solution.
Anyway, as long as we're talking about stalls, I'd like to vent about my main problem with them: slots. Seriously, being limited to just 5 different types of items is horrible for both the owner and the costumer. It'd be much easier to manage or browse a shop if you could fit everything into a single building with a single interface. Here's what I'd like to see:
- No limits on number of item types, only limit the total number of items. This requires scrollable lists, preferably with filters, either hardcoded (food[] tool[] raw material[]) or custom (a couple of flags, shop owner manually sets them and their descriptions and turns them on or off for each item type).
- Merge vendor and barter. This means two lists in the interface, left for customer->shop item transfer, right for shop->customer item transfer. To translate between the two, credits are used. These are not actual items, but just a unit of measurement, and the shop owner can set values in credits arbitrarily. The shop keeps track of how many credits each customer has. Alternatively, if this is too much strain on the server, credits are converted to cash (metal coins, clay chips, paper money, seashells, whatever you want) which is paid out immediately, and then the customer uses this cash to buy goods.
- Multiple pricing methods. The shop owner can select how to value goods, can be flat (ie any accepted q is worth the same), square root (price is sqrt(q/10)*base price) or linear (price is q*base price, useful for some goods like clay). Even better would be if you could able to enter your own formula for pricing based on q (price=log(base price)^q)

), but I guess it would be hard to make sure it doesn't result in division by zero or something like that.
- Currency management. Even if it's feasible for a shop to keep track of credits balance for all customers, sometimes you may want to transfer these credits between different shops that accept the same currency. The owner should be able to set any credit value to any type of scrip (metal coins, ceramic chips, paper notes, sea shells, etc), and to do this for any number of different scrip so he can make multiple denominations (for example, set gold coin to 500 credits while copper is worth 8). The important thing is to make every type of scrip customizable (stamps for coins etc) and that only that specific variety is accepted as currency (so my shop only accepts Buyan Dukats) - the idea is to make the currency system hermetic so you're only buying what you actually want rather than coins minted by a third party.