Shops full of pointless stuff?
The guy before you unloaded his inventory full of fnfals and took all the goodies?
Feel like bursting other traders?
If you agree on these this thread is for you. If you don't have a clue what's wrong with shops, read the spoilers.
Npc shops have problems which are related to player ammount, item restocking, supply and demand.
The more players, the more people buying off the goodies.
Item restocking means theres most of the time nothing to buy because players check the shops often and some even have a clue about the restock timers.
Supply and demand means that players never sell anything that someone else might need. Reno shops were full of healing powder for example. In addition players always sell large doses of cheap stuff than few expensive items.
Solar wrote here (http://fodev.net/forum/index.php?topic=20497.msg170224#msg170224) how prices can be adjusted with reputation. For example to get khan rep you have to bring in ranger dogtags. It's all cool and fun but problem still remains: shop will be flooded with stuff nobody wants. It doesn't matter if you get 1000 caps or 500 caps from half-broken CA, just get more. It's really easy to get big ammounts of items. If they are sellable, just get as much as it takes to buy off what you want from the shop. Current situation is kind of where nobody has fun because everyone is doing the same thing.
Shops should encourage players to sell them good stuff they don't need so that other players who need them can come and buy them off. Allow me to propose how this can be done. It's a wall of text, but if it scares you just gtfo.
Each shop has a limit of how much certain type of items they want to buy.
Sg merchant has limit for all sg guns and ammo in the game like this:
10mm pistol: max 5
Desert eagle: max 5
Gauss: max 5
When someone buys off one of those guns, he creates demand in the shop. What will happen is that the merchant will want to fill his supply of guns. So if you buy 10mm pistol, the merchant will want to buy it back. Once someone sells the gun to the merchant, he soon will restock an additional gun and also increases the maximum supply by one.
So if you bought 10mm pistol, the merchant has 4/5 of them. When someone sells that gun to him, after like 30 mins he restocks and now has the one that was sold +1, resulting in 6/6 10mm pistols. This way more wanted items have bigger supply.
Now you probably don't expect people buying 10mm pistols, but think of the same thing with gauss, p90 or drugs.
If some weapon isn't bought, its supply will drop slowly over time there's only 1/1 stock of it.
Prices need to be global and same for everyone and everybody. Shops have infinite caps.
Prices could vary in this way: the longer a shop is out of products, the more the salesman will pay for the missing product. However, the time it takes to prices to rise could go hand in hand with the reducing supply. So when price increases by x the supply decreases by 1. So when the product is in state of 0/1, it has biggest demand and price. But it should take time, like 10 hours before the first price increase takes place.
Benefits:
- Players handle the restocking
- Players with caps will buy the items they want
- Players who need caps and have items other people want will sell those items
Downside:
- Certain shops will become hubs of trading while unsafe town shops will be abandoned due to their unsafe nature