In short:
- Improve the web-based market code to spawn multiple markets only accessible from certain points in the universe.
- Start adding routes in the universe (that require warp gates). Connecting end-points to web-based markets.
This adds new, or revamps old, professions: Trader, Hauler, Convoy Guards, Raiders.
I’m a new player here on HWS, but have quickly fallen in love with the community. I’ve really missed having a group of good nuggets to spend time with in a game rather than queuing up with randoms in teamgames.
I saw the amount of content created for this server and was astounded. It’s fantastic! I’ve been a founding developer for such a server back in NWN2 and I know it requires a lot of sleep to be sacrificed. My hat is off to the devs!
I set my sights on building one or more of basically everything. Taking a deep dive into pvp builds and more. I found that I didn’t want to lose resources before I was ready for it so I decided to hunt for rare resources among the unknown stars. And basically this has been my whole experience. I’ve built everything I really want to and it has required no player interaction.
My idea for this community is simple, yet effective, at creating organic/authentic player interactions. Expand the idea of the market to a multi-market system where you can actually trade for profit and generate true supply and demand.
At first glance this sounds like a lot of work, but I don’t think it has to be. This is something you can start small and build on.
First of all the code for the current web-based market is something that can most likely be duplicated into multiple markets with relatively small amounts of work. Look at it as blueprints and spawning them in. I’m oversimplifying as there is no point to becoming too technical at this point.
Then you link these markets to specific places in the universe. Meaning - you can only access a market if you’re at the location.
Traveling to these locations require that you travel through the universe. Now lets say you want to make a small early game profit: You could set up a safe route for this avoiding pvp-zones and maybe you only make 3-4% profit. But if you start setting up trade routes through the pvp-zones to the more dangerous market zones you could suddenly make 10-30% profit.
In order for this to work we would have to use warp gates so people couldn’t just T2 Warp around. So I imagine having pvp sectors with 2 or more fixed destination gates where you have to travel (unsafely) to a gate that takes you to your destination market.
I think that once you pass through one of these “tradegates” we would have to disable the OCD so people can’t just haul stuff safe from any raiders.
Long term:
- Add a central market where you can place buy orders. Haulers can accept contracts to go buy specific resources and haul them to the central market.
- Create a supply / demand market. An example (not intended as a good idea) is splitting the universe in 4 large chunks and each chunk is missing some ores. Meaning you have a true demand for resources.
- Add buy orders so players can sell a certain amount of goods to web-based npc’s in the new markets. This means we can generate “trade quests” that becomes a race with evil raiders along the way.
To clarify exactly how these markets are populated with orders: Some “outpost” markets won’t have enough players to create any significant traffic. For this we need to use web-based npc’s that have buy orders - they want to buy from us but only a limited amount. In addition we need web-npc’s to sell stuff. So when we visit an outpost market maybe they sell an ore at a great price, but they are limited to sell only X amounts each day. These sell orders should be somewhat dynamic so that you can’t always go to X and buy Y amounts of Gold Ore and earn lots of cash. It needs to be more challenging than that. Add some randomization to it and it will be great.
I think this would yield a lot of player interactions and a lot of fun!
It would create a much more interesting purpose for pirates. There would definitely be a market for convoy guards. Traders would suddenly be a viable profession instead of just mining.
Most of the entertainment and interactions is generated by the players and requires relatively small amounts of work compared to the possible yield.
Edit: I’m going to be editing this post here and there as the idea is fleshed out while I discuss it with people.