It's back: the shops are filling with crap. Well it's not really crap but who's gonna buy a tommygun if you can craft it or buy it from a player with cheaper price? Not to mention the radios.
Instead of being interesting sources of various equipments the merchants just exchange crap for caps.
Read summary if you're too lazy.
Players can buy unique and rare items from merchants with caps. Also basic equipment which the merchants have infinite or high but regenerating ammount of. This means that a rich player can get a big deal of stuff without need to craft or gather. Merchants could also have special offers for players with good karma/barter. This offer would be unusually profitable to the player and unique to this merchant/faction only. For example if youre liked by Ncr you could buy a combat armor from their armory for very good price. But only once per month or so.
To sell their stuff players should sell big ammounts of certain goods instead of various lot of random items. Like 20 bottles of booze to a bartender. 1k 5mm ammo to ncr rangers, 10 tommyguns to mordinos. With such trading you could increase your karma towards that faction because everyone likes to trade. But if you trade with someone, you will be eventually hated by this faction's enemies. So if you continiously sell condoms and sex dolls to New Reno Sex Workers, The Wright family will hate you.
Unsafe towns could have good prices for goods, so buying booze from Hub and hoarding it over to new reno could provide you a nice deal of money, but beware of robbers. In contrary certain towns could have good prices for goods that can be bough from unsafe towns only. The miners of redding are known of being addicted to jet, so you can sell jet there for good price. To make it even more interesting, you could basically sabotage redding's mining capability because the miners are high. This could open interesting pvp possibilities. Would you like to hunt some drug dealers? interrogate the miners and get the names of the drug dealers. Then put an end to their bussiness.
Because players cannot trade with everyone, they can only receive the best offers from certain factions. This could work as basis for incoming faction-based gameplay.
Summary:
- Players can only pay with caps
- Trading nets you karma
- npc merchants only buy big deals of same equipment
- players can earn a fortune by buying from safe town and selling in unsafe, or reverse.
- Trading could have impact on game world