Letters to the Players

Since some items in the game can stack while other items are unique and cannot, the Consignment Vendor system will actually consist of two flavors of vendor. The first flavor will handle stackable items, such as traits and trophies. The second type of vendor will handle unique items, such as weapons, armor, unique treasure items, etc. October will see only the first flavor of vendor appearing, those that handle stackable items. The second flavor of vendor should be appearing in November. The remainder of this letter will explain how the trait and trophy vendors will work. When our November episode approaches, we'll try to provide you with another letter explaining how this second flavor of vendor will work.

How to List Traits and Trophies

The six crafting towns (Cragstone, Cavendo, Ikeras, Hakata, Linvak Tukal and Ondekodo) will each have 4 vendors. These vendors will each be focused on a different type of crafting component, so one vendor will only sell mined trait, a second will sell only refined trait, a third will sell butchered traits and a fourth will sell trophies. These vendors will be found inside new buildings with interiors located somewhere in the town. However, these buildings won't be completed when October launches. Players will have to work together to complete the construction of these new buildings. Look for more details on that farther down in this letter.

Once a world has finished construction of a building, you will be able to go inside and find that the vendors are already there and ready for business. Immediately you will be able to list three items on each vendor in each town. In November, we will be introducing a dynamic in which you can pay for a permit to list more items on vendors. More information on the system we are considering can be found farther on in the letter. For October though you will be limited to 3 items per vendor.

To create a listing on the vendor, you'll need to bring up a special dialog box where you can then drag a stack of trait or trophies you want to sell. Once you've dragged over what you want to sell, you can specify how much gold you want to charge per unit. After confirming that you are done with your sale, the vendor will begin listing your item for 5 real-time days. Of course a vendor has a family to feed, so he won't list your item for free. He will charge you a 1% gold fee based on the total asking price for your item.

After a sale expires, the vendor will keep any proceeds from the sale of your items or any unsold items for three additional real-time days. This gives you time to go back to the vendor and pick up these items. If you don't pick up your item within that time period, the vendor will destroy the items. To help you remember what you've listed with a vendor, we are planning on having a command or similar reminder system that will tell you what you currently have listed and where you listed it.

Another thing to be aware of is that a vendor only has so much shop space, so you'll have a maximum number of items you can list with a particular vendor. This maximum number applies to all characters on your account, so if one character uses up all your shop space at a particular vendor, you'll have to go to another vendor to list your items. In addition, if a vendor's shop space has been completely consumed by other players, you won't be able to list any items on that vendor until some items are sold.

When listing items for potential buyers, vendors will combine stacks of items that are being sold at the gold per unit into larger stacks. If part of that combined stack is sold, the payment is divvied out and given to all the players whose trait made up that combined stack. How much of the payment a player gets depends on how long the trait has been listed. The older your trait, the more likely it will be that you will receive more of the payment. Exactly how the vendor divvies up a sale is explained in the example below. This example also describes how a sale is setup and how a player receives any proceeds from the sale.

Example: Slumpy (Stubby's half-brother) is a plucky young miner and has a stack of 1000 iron that he wants to sell through the vendor in Cavendo. He approaches the mined trait vendor and sets that he'd like to have his iron listed at a rate of 20 gold per unit of iron. The total asking price for the entire stack is 20,000 gold, so Slumpy is charged a 200 gold fee by vendor. After paying the gold fee, Slumpy is free to go off on his merry way. Later on 9 other miners come up and list their iron on the vendor at the same price as Slumpy. When displaying what iron he has for sale, the vendor decides to list all 10 of these individual stacks of iron as one combined stack of 12,000 iron selling at 20 gold per unit.

Following all these miners, another miner by the name of Gouger approaches the vendor. He also has 1,000 iron to sell, but in setting up his sale on the vendor, he decides he wants to sell it at a rate of 30 gold per unit. So in listing all the iron he has for sale, the vendor would list Gouger's iron as a separate stack, since it is being sold at a different rate than the other iron in his inventory.

A customer approaches the Cavendo mined trait vendor and sees that he has 12,000 iron selling at 20 gold per unit. The customer decides this is a good price and purchases 3,000 units of iron off the stack. The vendor takes the payment 60,000 and transfers the 3,000 units to the customer. The vendor is now left to divvy up the 60,000 gold to the players whose iron made up that combined stack. First, the vendor divides the amount of iron sold in half, so 1,500 units of iron. That 1,500 iron is divided again, but this time by however many players made up the combined stack, so 10 players. This means that 150 units of iron are deducted from all 10 of the individual stacks. In return, the vendor credits these players with 3,000 gold. Next, the vendor tries to deduct the remaining 1,500 from Slumpy's stack, since his stack is the oldest. Slumpy though only has 850 iron left in his stack, so his entire stack is consumed and the vendor gives him 17,000 gold in return. The second oldest stack then has 650 units of iron deducted from it and they are given 13,000 gold in return.

Slumpy returns to the vendor a day later to see if any of his iron sold. To his delight he finds 20,000 gold waiting for him. Gouger, on the other hand, is out of luck since his price was set too high and no one bought it.

Example: Sloppy (Stubby's 1st cousin) is a crafter and would like to purchase some wood. She approaches the Cragstone mined trait vendor and selects that she'd like to see what wood the vendor has on sale. She sees that he has wood on sale for 21 gold a unit. She decides to purchase 300 wood and has 6,300 gold automatically deducted from her.

After the building is completed, everyone can enter the building and every character can immediately list three items per the vendor. Since each vendor maintains a separate stock, in theory one character could list three items on every vendor in the game world. In November, we will introduce a system where you can purchase a permit from a Merchant's Guild representative that will allow you to list additional items on a vendor. Currently we think there will be 4 levels of permit: the first level will give you one additional slot, the second level will give you two additional slots, and so on up to a maximum of 7 slots. This permit will only last 30 days, so after it expires you'll be back to only being able to list 3 items. Don't worry though if you have more items listed than you currently have a permit for. Vendors won't remove any sales you currently have listed. The only thing you would be prevented from doing is listing additional items. You would need to purchase a new permit for the character if you wanted to list additional items again.

Example: A player has an account with 3 characters on it, Sloppy, Slumpy and Sluggy. The player bought a permit for Sluggy, so he can now list 5 items. The other two characters, Sloppy and Slumpy, can only list 3 items, the default value. In addition, the Consignment Vendor system has been setup so that a vendor will only accept a total of 7 items from all the characters on a particular account. If Sluggy approaches a vendor and lists 5 items, he cannot list any more items on that vendor. Also, that vendor will only accept 2 more items from other characters on that account, since Sluggy is currently using 5 of the 7 slots the vendor has allotted for that player's account. If Sluggy were to approach a different vendor, they would find that they had permission to list 5 items again. This new vendor would also have 7 slots available for that account.

This is mostly due to some technical limitations. We also like the fact that it will bring more life to the crafting towns, as players will have a reason to visit each town to see what is currently on sale.

This is for a number of reasons. The first thing to consider is that if a vendor becomes too popular and lists too many items, his shop will bloat up to a tremendous size, making finding anything in his inventory very difficult. In addition, we also don't want one particular town to become so popular that it makes the graphics lag unbearable. Along with this, we want to encourage players to move around to different towns, since it adds to the feel of the game.

There are a couple of reasons for this as well. For one thing we don't want players to use all the character slots on their account to list items, which could prevent other players from listing items on the vendor or causing the vendor's shop to get too large. We also want to try and prevent players from using the system as a way of transferring items between characters on the same account. The Consignment Vendor system is not the solution to this problem, although we haven't forgotten this problem and have been discussing possible solutions.

At the moment we don't think we will be, since the capital cities are easily recallable via the Nexus Stones and the other crafting cities are one or two portal jumps away from those cities. However if we see that it is causing a problem and is affecting the market in certain cities, we will consider it.

The building interior actually exists in a different land block than the town. You'll gain access to these interiors by using a door located on the exterior of each building. After a short transition --which we are planning on making different than our default portaling transition-- you'll find yourself in the building interior. Using another door located inside the building will take you back outside. There are a variety of reasons for doing building interiors in this way, but the foremost is that it reduces lag in the cities, since the players are not all located in the same land block.

Actually the system was originally going to allow you to do this. In discussing it with Vanguard, there were opinions on both sides of the argument, but most thought straight gold would be probably be best. In addition, going to a straight gold value allowed us to calculate the fee more easily.

The quest will work much like the Ludward's Dream quest, in that players will have to craft unique items and hand them into the NPC. The NPC will then keep track of how many items he's received, and when certain thresholds have been reached, cause the completed building to appear. (Prior to the building being there the construction site will be surrounded by a series of walls, similar to how a construction site in a major city is surrounded.) The difference between this and Ludward's Dream is the NPC will not assign you the recipes for your quest. You'll be purchasing the recipes you want to create.

I can give you a definite maybe on that. We can pretty easily do that by going to those specific world's and editing, by hand, the thresholds those NPCs expect. So FF could have more than DT. I can't say for sure that is going to happen though. To be honest, it's not a high priority at the moment. Finishing implementing the content systems is a bit more important for me right now!

Essentially I broke the donations down into 19 tiers, ranging from 75 gold to 1.5 million gold. For each 5 level break I tried to choose an ideal donation tier for that level, based on our latest gold report. Finally, I assigned a percentage experience reward for that amount of gold. If you divide the percentage by the amount of gold, you get how much percent of level each gold coin is worth. You can then multiply that out to find out exactly what percentage of level you get for each tier of gold.

There's also a max cap on the gold you can donate for each level. What I'm hoping is that this makes the gold for xp dynamic available to everyone, although it will still be easier for the very rich to complete it.

The interior would have to be the same type of zone as the rest of the world, so on DT the interior would be FFA. I am putting a protection effect on the usage of the door, similar to the capital city recalls, that will protect you for a number of seconds. (I believe it's set to something like 30 right now.) This should at least prevent you from getting jumped when you go inside.

Well when a specific threshold is reached, there will be a world broadcast saying, "X has all the lesser crafting materials it needs for it's trait shop." Huzzah! I would like to have something you examine or use that tells you the same information, so it's always available to you. That is more of a polish-y bit, so I'll worry about that later.

No matter what though, you'll always get a reward for turning in an item. (Well, since it is a crafting quest, you can only hand in 3 items a week. If though you can complete the quest, the NPC will take your item.)

Oh my friend, I'm way ahead of you! (For once!) When you make your donation, via a special NPC, he will give you a receipt. It is this receipt that you give to the Architect NPC. This receipt allows the NPC to transfer the money over to that town's building project. (Yeah, that's the ticket.) When you receive the receipt in your inventory you will get a pop-up that says, "You are going to get [Amount of Experience] for giving this receipt to an Architect. If you aren't happy with this amount, give the receipt back for a full refund." You can then make as much or as little of a donation as you'd like, knowing full well how much XP you are going to get for it.

As for the "one-time only" deal, it is one-time only per episode. When we launch an episode with a building project, like we will in November, you'll be able to donate to the new project once more. I am though stressing in-game that it is one-time only, since I don't want anyone to be confused at the time of making their donation that they can do it again.

(BTW, I would really like to make the donation repeatable. Heck, I'd like to make it turn in some gold once a minute, but I don't have enough confidence right now that it would at all be fair for everyone. Plus, I think there are a few dynamics that give a bit too much gold right now, and that would skew the numbers.)

Likely the smallest maximum stack size for any particular trait would be 1,000,000. It will probably be higher than that. Trophies are not quite set yet.

You can hand over however much you can fit into one stack and consider that one item. In addition if you start up a sale and want to head back to the vendor and "restock" your sale, you can. You will be able to pull up that existing sale and dump some more stock into it. You would be charged based on the additional stock you are adding to the sale, but it would also extend that existing sale by 5 more days.

Right, adding to an existing sale you have on a Vendor does not count as a new item. For instance, say you had 1,000 iron on a Vendor. That counts as one "sale" or "slot." If you went back to that Vendor, you could add another 1,000 iron to that existing sale. The only thing is you would have to pay a 1% gold fee on that new iron.

This is one of the reasons. If there's already 100k iron selling for 30 gold per unit, then knowing that you have to wait for that 100k to all be sold before yours is even looked at would be frustrating and discourage people from selling at the same price. The profit distribution method is really a compromise between two ideas: one that everyone who participates in a sale should get a piece of the profit, and the other that the sale that's been around the longest should get priority. We decided to split the profits in half and use both methods.

We're still working out the details of how the reminder system will operate. A new UI panel to handle reminders would be ideal, but it's not something that we'll have time to implement for October.

Nope sorry! Mostly because we feel it would really clutter up the stores if we allowed you to set a price 1/10 of a gold cheaper than a competitor.

Honestly a lot of this in a state of flux right now, so it's hard to answer exactly how we'll do it. The biggest point we need to answer right now is how much inventory space we want each Vendor to have. Right now it looks like a 5 day sale along with a 3 day grace period will work best, but that may change. Once we determine the Vendor space, we can take a look at the duration of sales and the grace period.

You can remove your items from the vendor at any time.

No. The price you pay when you setup the sale is based on the price you set for the sale, so you'll have to re-list the sale.

The stack size of trophys will be increased dramatically.

In October, there is no ability to restrict items to only certain types of characters. In the future, and maybe even November, there might be Kingdom specific NPCs that you can sell to. Honestly we haven't figured out what the shops in November will be like yet. I think though my biggest concern is that I since each vendor maintains a separate stock we have to be careful we don't add so many vendors that seeing what's on sale becomes a laborious or even impossible process.

No limit.

Not quite real-time, but you wont have to re-open the shop to see new sales. There will be a short refresh rate.

In theory, yes. It is not possible to offer unlimited consignments. But the limit on total sales for any given vendor will be set as high as is possible. And when selling items that stack, it will be a non-issue.

We discussed this long and hard, and tossed the idea out to Vanguard before coming to any conclusions, and the popular opinion was that gold should be the standard unit of trade. By setting gold as the standard, we are ensuring that it remains useful.

You will have reminders to let you know when your sales will expire, it shouldn't catch you by surprise.

Sorting will essentially be done for you. Each vendor will only sell certain types of item. Within that vendor, items will be further subdivided into categories. And within each category, items will be sorted. You shouldn't have any trouble finding what you're looking for.