Safe Zone

[Flame]

okay, so let's go back to crossroad value.

But, men, did you noticed how much time need, take a sign on another city to have a travel on that city? need permission - need time to walk on the map and the luck to find someone online. need lots of coincidence to be applied and i'm tryng to get a sign of one city from one week.

Now look. A public place is needed, but if no for the market, at last for a Place with signs. You build a crossorand, the you can choise if go on that public place and put there your sign. Everyone will take a copy of teh sign if they want, so teh markets are all over the world.

[Devour]

Centralized market is a cancer on the game's economy. We need multiple markets in different regions, and dedicated merchants sailing ships or driving caravans between them.

That depends entirely on how large the game gets, and how easy it is to transfer goods. Personally, I hate the whole travel thing, due to the fact that raiders etc can't work along supply / trading routes, but it's impossible to trade at this point in time due to how slowly you travel without a boat and how little a boat can carry compared to the usual size of trades.

[Zirikana]

I agree with both points, that a centralized, safe and easily accessed market would wreck the economy of the game, and also that trading as it stands now is impossible. I don't really know what's going to happen in this next update as far as trade is concerned, but putting up some kind of caravan system like i've heard others post about is not a bad idea. Trade should have some kind of barriers, like needing to schlep your stuff across the map and find people to trade with, since there is no inherent "value" in anything in the game other than it's scarcity or the difficulty to access it (guess we could say the same thing about real life commodities too...) But it shouldn't be impossible to have significant trade either.

[minck1]

A centralized location without guards (npc or player) is just a invitation to slaughter people. Getting people to raise their combat skills so they can stand guard for hours is unlikely to happen. If fast travel options are left in, a NPC guarded location isn't that game breaking. They don't have to be godly, but strong enough to defeat any player 1 on 1 in most situations.

[Cookie]

The real barrier to trade seems to me to be trust.

I wouldn't dream of trading with most of the people who post trade offers on the forum because they have such rapacious reputations. I would assume that if indeed they wouldn't attack me for lulz they would mark me down as worthy of raiding. Not to mention that I might be buying stolen goods or contributing to making certain not very socially responsible players even stronger by supplying them. Similarly I wouldn't dream of trading openly on irc or the forum. The announcement, "I can supply sausage grinders...." or "Will dig cellars for food, all materials provided, will travel," seems to me equivalent to saying, "Hey uber players, see if you can track me down. I have loot!"

Having a safe zone would mean that I could actually meet with people to trade. I would still be a bit leery though of trading with a main.

However the devs have shot down the idea of player to player transfers of goods, proposed in order to prevent theft when the goods were on the ground, because they want to have the possiblity of fraud and theft in the marketplace. I think they are not yet ready to establish a trading safe zone. They want us to take measures to protect ourselves and prevent these things not to make it automatically easy. Mind you, in case you find this idea depressing, it does appear that perhaps they decided that the stronger dishonest players preying on the weaker had gotten imbalanced too far and are trying to get it rebalanced with the upcoming character wipe.

[Twentytwos]

Honestly i wouldnt mind standing guard posts in a trading community, of course guards would have to be equiped and feed since all ther point would be dedicated to combat. I would also like to see caravans as well a huge wagons that take 3-4 people to pull but at a walking pace. I think i would bring alittle adventure into the game with people working together and avoiding the bandits of the world.

[minck1]

Honestly i wouldnt mind standing guard posts in a trading community, of course guards would have to be equiped and feed since all ther point would be dedicated to combat. I would also like to see caravans as well a huge wagons that take 3-4 people to pull but at a walking pace. I think i would bring alittle adventure into the game with people working together and avoiding the bandits of the world.

For how long would you do this? An hour a day? 2? 7 days a week for months on end? Without losing attention (no watching TV)? Even if you were being paid LP, food and coin, I don't see anyone doing this for more than a few days or possibly a couple weeks. If you donated 1 hour a day 4 days a week (not excessive play time) it would take 42 players with no overlap to guard this with 1 guard. If griefers brought 2 or 3 people, you wouldn't stand a chance. While I applaud your volunteering, it would take an army to defend someplace non stop.

[Twentytwos]

Well you wouldnt just be standing in on spot, you would patoling,interacting with the population and what not. My best friend is a police officer and ...... well his job is beyond boring i hav been on many ride alongs and 9/10 nothing happens or respond to ridiculous calls that require a huge amount of paper work for a stolen apple. But on the same note thats what make a community, i image you would set up a enforement team with 2-3 ppl in charge and when you long on you report to them and decide if you want to be on duty or not. Fortunatly im retired so i have the time lol, and you are correct it would take 7-8 dedicated people to run a fully enforcement team.

[Zirikana]

Yeah, having a dedicated security force made up of people from a village would be awesome, but just logistically improbable in this phase of the game where there simply aren't enough players. The "yeoman guard" model 22 suggests seems promising, but again it relies on there being a critical number of people from your village playing every hour of the day.

The only real "security" seems to come from the threat of revenge. Outside of having/hiring NPC guards, i don't know what else there is to do about it.... and something about the idea of introducing npcs into this game, I find just plain revolting...

[Cookie]

There could also be market hours when, with the system I described, the market would be closed and only a village member could re-open it. Of course with players in all the time zones in the world this would be inconvenient to a bunch of them and it would leave the door open for competing market places to open in order to get the after hours traffic -not necessarily a bad thing.

Would this system work, do you think, if the market were only open during weekends and during the six hour peak window when the most players are logged on every evening?

Would the system work if the market keeper were not strong enough to protect against one or more hostile player killers? It would be much easier to find a noobie willing to earn some stake money/supplies or a village member willing to stand in as store keeper in order to encourage his own small business than it would to have a strong figher player ready to take on any thief who shows up. It might make more sence to have a ranger who could do the law and order thing on call after some hapless Market Keeper were murdered than to try to have the market constantly patrolled by a high level fighter. I'm thinking security, like they have in banks rather than lots of guns. Suppose the market keeper let you into an enclosed trading booth instead of into the entire Market Zone? But this, of course is getting very cumbersome.

The means have to be found to deal with three types of trade disrupters - killers, thieves and griefers, all of who have different motivation and mess things up for traders in a different way, and the system would have to be good enough to encourage trades people to use it.

It seems to me that people could be encouraged to use the system with free beer, so that you knew however far you had to teleport to get to Market Town you could burn off the travel weariness the journey would cause. Whether free beer would be enough for them to pay Market fees to make it all worth while to the citizens of Market Town is another story. The difficulty for most people would be getting there at all. If the new map has 49 supergrids it will be a long time before anyone can jump far enough to arrive even assuming the Market Town citizens work out a way to make a central market in the center grid. It seems to me that crossroads went private really quickly and are used as a means of keeping people out, not give them ways to travel.

But of course perhaps we would be happy with a network of markets. That's the way the ancestors did it. Haymarket was open on Wednesdays, FIsh Market was only open until an hour after dawn, Horse Market was only open on Saturdays, and the Cheap was only open in the mornings, whereas the butcher would send a message round the neighbourhood villages when he had a drove coming down and was about to slaughter so he might be open only twice a month. The Hiring Fair was only in the fall just before the Harvest Season and the tinker and the cobbler travelled the roads until snow made it impassable. (Woe betide you if the tinker missed your neighbourhood one season as you would have to wear your boots all year slit open so you could get your feet into them.)