Bazaar Overhaul - A Many Worlds Approach to a Player Driven Economy

[leaden rover]

Started working on this idea a week or so before I saw the Bazaar Revamp notes for Test Realm. To be clear, this suggestion is completely separate from that and does not at all comment on the content in that post. This is a suggestion for a way to overhaul how the game design of the bazaar is done to change how it interacts with the game on a fundamental level. From my perspective, the changes KI has made in the recent revamp don't really change much about the Bazaar.

The goal here is to address what I perceive as limitations of the current Bazaar:

• The current Bazaar is only in one high population location. This can cause lag for people in crowded/full realms that are in the Bazaar.
• The current Bazaar does not support players in getting to the most late game of the content because it restricts what reagents can be sold.
• There are several items we would like to trade in the Bazaar that are not available for trade.
• Reagents cannot be easily obtained by players seeking to craft.

While some of this is down to flaws with the current gear system, my goal is to take an approach to make crafting more possible and also make it more worthwhile to buy and sell gear we would currently write off as worthless.

Proposal:

1. Spread out the item types.
   This is the first step to dealing with the bazaar problem and it's already partially implemented with the TC bazaar being accessible from the library. Moving furniture, TCs, Reagents, Snacks, etc. Away and letting Elik Focus on gear would reduce the number of players sitting in a single area.

2. Stratify by level.
   Create multiple bazaars that can take 30-50 levels of gear each. In the case of housing bazaars, I find it unlikely that a merchant in Mooshu will have the same interests as a merchant in Zafaria, so selling world appropriate housing at the correct vendor should be the plan. This means having bazaars scattered around the spiral. A reagent bazaar in Krokotopia, for example, a furniture bazaar in Marleybone, etc. Snacks and reagents have tiers so some bazaars might only accept items within their range of tiers available.

3. More Bazaar Types.
   With so many items to want, like fish and jewels, that aren't in the bazaar, more places to trade with other players would be ideal.

4. Unlock "No Auction" Reagents.
   Since not all reagents can be sold to every bazaar, wizards need to progress to certain stages of the game to be able to sell items. This means that world specific reagents can be unlocked and simply available at high level bazaars. Players that already have the best gear can simply sell the reagents they don't need.

5. Limit other "No Trade" and "No Auction" items.
   These reduce the ability for wizards to actually spread the wealth of items they get from drops that they can't use. Reducing how many items are "No Auction" will improve the economy and help wizards feel confident in their ability to progress through the entire game.

6. Introduce Bazaar Badges
   By trading in each bazaar in the spiral, you can unlock badges. These range from trading at every bazaar to buying and selling lots of gold worth of items to a single bazaar. Each badge unlocked would increase the gold cap of the player as they become a better seasoned merchant.

7. Allow "uncrafting".
   We need a mechanic better than pet feeding to get value out of "No Auction" gear that we can't use or don't want. It would be ideal to have it break down into reagents relevant to the world or it's construction. Some form of gear scrapping or uncrafting would go a long way, even if it costed energy, to helping players get the gear they want, as suddenly off school drops can provide valuable reagents for crafting.

I know there are problems with this suggestion, but character count won't let me discuss them all, but I see a lot of the "problems" as features. I don't think we should have one place to go when we want to empty our backpacks. I think that's lazy design, and while worked, it doesn't now.

[twin sand]

Ngl number 7 slaps

[dense zephyr]

I disagree on point 1. I like one-stop shopping/browsing and I don't want to have to run all over the place to get stuff (or to sell it to help my fellow players out).

Crowding in bazaar is not an issue since 90+ percent of realms are pretty deserted, even in bazaar. If it bothers you, switch realms, don't ask KI to do a lot of work on the bazaar and ask the rest of us to give up one stop shopping.

[lilac jay]

3. More Bazaar Types.
   With so many items to want, like fish and jewels, that aren't in the bazaar, more places to trade with other players would be ideal.

I would like your idea of creating a fish shop, for example, where players would sell their fish and others would buy them.
However, I think it would be good for both sellers and buyers to have any of the 9 categories of aquariums craft/one time before buying or selling a fish.

Usually, each fish falls into one of these, which gives them the corresponding token to sell or buy fish in that category.
For example, a regular keeper fish if they make a regular keeper aquarium.

It's not all that easy to add fish in a shop , as each fish has its own size and rarity, so it has its own value in gold. But a fish shop could find a solution with a mid-range value, depending on what category it is in and its rarity.

[red phoenix]

An idea I had that would probably work better is

When you sell each fish to Lucky Hookline, it drops a reagent form of that fish (Or a part of it like they do in the CSR)

And THAT is sellable to a bazaar

Vs the fish themselves

It would also make fishing more appealing because at least you get gold out of it too, whereas right now you need to burn a ton of energy just to craft anything that required like 10+ fish

[lilac jay]

I agree and I like this idea.
As for my thought on the token to sell or buy fish, making at least one aquarium of the corresponding category out of 9 at has the following reasons:

1. Since one will be able to buy fish without having to fish for them, or sell them for the catch of the day for gold, it will be a small cost to get involved in fishing just once by making a fishing craft. Then he would have an unlimited pass in that particular category. And I would be happy to sell fish to everyone, having wasted energy and time and crowns maybe getting elixirs etc to catch fish. But it's important that they have done some fishing too, to unlock the category they want. I'm not limiting myself to the crafting an aquarium, any other suggestion I would listen to but it would have to be fishing related.
2. We know that the fish are also transferred to other characters via share bank, in an aquarium. Of course these fish cannot be counted in our anglers tome. Anyone who buys fish from others, either to resell them to others or transfer fish on others characters, should at least know that they are transferred to the share bank through the aquariums. So the aquarium who will craft, it will be usable in the future. Furthermore, we cannot say that we sell fish and buy without an aquarium. It's not dead 😂 , so as a concept the aquarium is symbolic too. And some players might want to put them in aquarium in their houses. So they should at least know how to craft it. Anyway, most of them are in the regular keeper category and maybe the players are interested for the tall keeper category for snacks.