We hope you’re all enjoying your experiences within our vast and diverse universe. Your contributions and interactions make SL Colonies an enriching and ever-evolving space.
Now, we’re standing at the cusp of a significant update, and your input is crucial for us. We’re looking to revamp our Vendor system and want to ensure this change reflects your preferences, enhancing the overall gameplay.
Currently, we are contemplating two core changes, and your thoughts on these would be highly appreciated:
Vendor Management: Should we stick with our existing in-world menu system to load and manage items in the Vendors, or should we evolve towards a more sophisticated web-based management system? We’re considering this change to potentially streamline processes and make things more user-friendly, but we want your opinions. If you feel like a web-based system might detract from the immersive experience, let us know.
Buying and Selling Interface: We’re also exploring changes to our buying and selling mechanisms. Would you prefer a web-based interface, a HUD-based interface, or interaction directly with the vendors? We understand this impacts your day-to-day interactions and commerce within SL Colonies, so we want to hear from you.
Remember, these changes are for you, the community. Your thoughts, preferences, and ideas will shape our next steps. You can share your thoughts in the comment section below, or feel free to start a thread if you have more detailed suggestions.
We appreciate your time, and we’re looking forward to hearing your opinions and ideas. Together, we’ll shape the future of our beloved SL Colonies!
Best regards, Drakkhis Skaeren
P.S. Don’t hesitate to reach out to us for any other feedback or ideas you might have about the game. We’re all ears!
Any improvement would be a huge step in the right direction.
I think a web-based management system is the best option and would not detract, at least for me, from the immersive experience. It certainly would be far less distracting than most music playing on player’s colonies/ sims.
Also a web-based interface for buying & selling is again in my opinion, the best option. I find the HUDs clunky. But from an RP PoV, vendor interaction is also an attractive option providing a mechanism was in place to incentivize cross-sim interaction.
I personally found the vendor script U.I awkward and combined with the failed economy, lack of cross sim interaction incentives, and the fact that most colonies were self sufficient and could gather or make anything that I could. The latter being the main issue for me: If it wasn’t selling in the market, why would it sell in a vendor on my sim… Therefore, I concluded they were pointless for me to use.
Yes I understand the “Roleplay” aspect but I also like to infuse a little pragmatism
As mentioned before in discord the vendors will need the ability to set for bulk sales so yes the 2 cream = 1 coin thing. Not being able to do that means you will never be able to compete with a general market that can sell and buy bulks.
We still need a vendor that everyone can pitch in to sell stuff, kinda like the colony storage but vendor version. No, this suggestion will not need us to put in coins before they can add their own stuff in. It is a colony vendor! Having to go through one person in order to top up a vendor or each person having to buy their own vendors to rez and sell is counter productive and not to mention prim eating.
The search button could be better. I use to be able to type seed and i get ALL the seeds now i have to be specific, it makes reading the market so tough since i have to click them one by one.
A vendor specifically made for merchant role. Its a vendor that players can set up a request like how we used to and the merchant complete the request and get cxp and of course the coins etc. This is not web based, you have to visit the merchant’s vendor at their sim location to use this. And only the merchant who set this up can access those requests. And of course please allow cancellations and also a timer so the merchant will have to work within the time we set. No more infinite amount of time to get something done, unless we allowed it to be.
p/s: can probably combine with idea #2. maybe if stuff that are added into this merchant’s vendor it will make payout to the players putting their stock with this merchant higher after the split profit. You do the maths on that with the whole level of merchant/ bonus and god knows what else. So you have a #2 vendor for normal roles and a #4 vendor for merchant. Two different things.
Website is neater and easier to alter probably for you guys. The hud is good if i want to do some stuff and chat in SL without changing tabs, but the hud could really use a new look. XD And its slower than website obviously but understandable. Both still has its values and much appreciated in their own ways.
Personally, it depends on the type of vendor to me.
A single-item vendor works well as it is (not web-based) as it’s obvious what you are buying, and you don’t need to keep clicking next on an in-world menu.
For a multi-vendor, then web-based come in really handy, as the player doesn’t need to click next multiple times before finding the item they like.
There is another feature I would recommend and I am suggesting this on behalf of Regina as she has made this known to me.
If you are a world builder and you have a multi-vendor purchasing various different items, a way to set up in the vendor a maximum amount of stock that vendor will purchase of that product. So you don’t have a player coming along and blocking the whole vendor by selling 2,000 shrimp and clearing its funds when the vendor would also be purchasing salmon, fish and everything else seafood and now cannot.
Also, a web-based vendor is easier for the world builder. They can set up all their prices on one page and top up their vendors through their player inventory directly from the vendor settings page.
That’s quite a neat idea, to be honest. So this would be a colony vendor that is selling items to outsiders and does not require having coins put in. This might work if the vendor has a setting to enable it to be a colony vendor or has an access list added to allow other characters to manage a vendor.
Not a bad idea. Though I would change it up a little more.
Before coming up with the current market changes, I had a post about ‘contracts’ in markets like a game called Eve Online. This is what was posted:
NOTE: Keep in mind this idea was for a market system and will need to be adjusted to suit a vendor system and not related to any market.
The Contract System
The contract system comes from the idea of selling stacks of items but has been expanded to allow the selling of virtual ‘packages’ of items. So you could create packages of various stack sizes with special prices if you want, or you could create a whole package that includes all weapons parts to put together a weapon, or a profession starter kit, or a new player starter kit. Whatever you like!
To the left of the contract, the screen will be a listing of all available contracts available at the market you are visiting. Players will be able to name their contracts so they make sense to people viewing. But they will be listed alphabetically and include a price and expiry date.
When you click on one of the available contracts, you will get a peek inside the package contents to the right. The right-hand side is the contract view. In this view, you will see every item included in that package under ‘You will get’, and clicking on any of the items inside will pop up an examine screen with the items description and base value details so you can see if you are getting a worthy deal or being ripped off. You will also see a ‘You will Pay’ down the bottom which shows the cost in coins to you for you to accept the contract, and when clicking on ‘Accept Contract’, all those items will be transferred to the claim section of the market for you to pick up and it will take your coin from you.
Creating a Contract
Down the bottom of the main contract window is another button ‘Create Contract’.
The create contract screen on the left-hand side includes a list of all items in your personal inventory and how much of each you have. Clicking on any of your items will let you select how much you would like to transfer over to the contract window and move them over to the right-hand side of the screen. You can keep adding as you wish, and as many items as you wish. This list is what ‘Your Offer’ is and what you are offering to a player purchasing your contract.
Down the bottom, you then list ‘What you Want’, which is how many coins you are selling that contract or package for. Though first, it will subtract a broker fee (which is set by the system and can be lowered as a merchant profession by leveling up) and a market fee (which is set by the market owner and goes to the owner). You then also set the expiration date (which may include a cost) and it will give you a figure of how much coin you will actually make if someone purchases that contract. Feel free to adjust the ‘You Want’ section until the ‘You Will Get’ is more in line with the coins you want in your pocket.
You then click on ‘Create Contract’ and it will subtract the items from you for that contract and any fees. The items are refunded to you if the contract does not sell by the expiration date, but you will not get any fees back.
You could expand on this to allow a player to create a request style contract of what they might want to order from that land.
This is almost the exact thing as the Old Markets that we just replaced, Anyone could post their Items on it and not just the Owner, and it was not a great sucess, Orders went unbought for long periods of Time, Vendors are ment to be what a Shop Owner sets out to buy things from their shop, I can think maybe having a Access Menu that allows the Owner to Rent the Vendor out so If the Access is Set to Rent, and the Owner sets a Rent Price, then the person who payts the rent price can use the Vendor as their stores vendor, IDK will have to look into that, But the Community Vendor thing IDK, It is basically just putting the Old Markets back out
I think what he means is the vendor itself can be ‘restocked’ by the colony/group. The owner sets the items for sale and their price, but members of that colony can help out restocking when things are low on stock.
