This week's update brings you the wonderful world of merchantry! Buying and selling goods in all sorts of ways. Let's get to it!

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"War? What is it good for? Well business, actually."
- Jarcob Alghan, an Aspalarian arms merchant

"Profiteering? Hardly. Were we merchants to stop the flow of commerce flowing through Teladir for even a week, we would be handing the Sovereignty scum a victory far greater than any they could win on land or sea."
- Armon Gher, peddler travelling around Teladir


All pursuits, from hunting to war, from sailing to homebuilding require many disparate goods. Where one is unable or unwilling to craft these items personally, the merchants of Lithmeria are happy to step in. All manner of trade takes place on a daily basis, with goods as diverse as concoctions and entire ships changing hands regularly.

Commerce can be found in many forms, from small stalls to entire chains of shops spread across an entire continent. Mercurial activity is also not confined to full time merchants alone. First, auction houses are operated throughout Lithmeria to allow goods of the highest quality to be sold to the highest bidder. Second, many of Lithmeria’s larger, more established merchants are more than happy to lease space on their shelves for the wares of a layman in exchange for a cut of the profits.

As the years have passed, the merchants of Lithmeria have sought and found a myriad of ways to compete successfully against one another. The true bounty is in successfully combining quality products, competitive prices and a unique layout to draw in custom.

The merchant classes upon both continents have steadily but surely increased their influence. While not a match for the political or military leaders of either the Sovereignty or Accord, they are more than aware of the power of gold to shape events. In the future, whether they will use their growing sway for the betterment of their nations or for their own ends is anyone’s guess.

"You’re a decent swordsman...it’s just a shame for you I can afford to hire six of them."
- A wealthy merchant commenting on the execution of her would-be assassin

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A short log of me touring the Test Bazaar is here: http://nogfx.org/logs/699

There are four main types of merchant related establishments, which I'll cover here.

SHOPS
Shops are the main type of merchant outlet with which we are all probably familiar. Shops here are rented in the central Bazaar of each city. There is a monthly gold cost to rent the shop, the cost of which goes up with the size of the shop. The main system of shop keeping revolves around the use of "shop containers": shelves, bins, display cases, and the like. Each type of container has its own unique purpose and benefits, as well as a cost to have one installed in your shop. The various containers can be named and re-arranged freely on your WARES list to make sorting your goods that much easier, and the access given to the various containers by others can be set seperately to allow varying levels of access to those who help you run your shop.

In addition to adding containers there are two main upgrade types that a Shop can have. Shops can expand in size, adding multiple rooms and becoming a shopping center in their own right if grown big enough. As each room only has so much space for container items this is a very handy thing to upgrade for the expanding shopowner. The other main upgrade category is a Shopkeeper, which at its most basic allows you to add a personal touch to your shop as you can customize their appearance, name, and messages they give to greet and thank customers. Shopkeepers can also be trained to perform many tasks, such as automatically pricing certain types of goods based on criteria (you can set up a simple formula for pricing weapons for example and your shopkeeper will price anything you with accordingly for you. A few other sample shopkeeper training options include offering discounts to people or groups and allowing people without the ability to properly evaluate or examine an item to inquire about it and get the information on it, and to list items on the Broker lists for you...which brings us to our next establishment-type.

BROKERS
Brokers allow non-shopowners to sell their goods on the market as well, and allow someone a fairly centralized location to browse the goods of a type. There are brokers for Weapons, Armor, Materials, CLothing & Jewelry, and Elixirs. Anybody with a little bit of skill at Merchantry can place a listing at a Brokerage for a fee of 10% their listed price. Goods will remain on the Broker's list for a maximum of 17 In-Game days (1 RL week) before being returned to the seller along with half the listing fee. Shop owners who have a Shopkeeper trained to have Brokerage Connections can choose to list their goods within the shop on the Brokerage as well, and will instead pay 10% of the price at the time of the sale.

AUCTIONHOUSES
Auctionhouses are pretty straight forward in what they do, they enable to put things up for auction. Auctions can last anywhere from 1 to 50 In Game days (10 hours to just shy of 3 weeks in RL time) at the discretion of the person putting the item up for auction. When making a bid your new bid must either exceed the current bid by 10% or 1000 gold, whichever of the two is lower. Once time runs out, assuming a bid has been placed the winner will be mailed their item and the owner will have their gold (minus a 10% fee) deposited into their bank account.


RAFFLEHOUSES
Finally, rafflehouses. The name for them may not quite be set in stone, but they serve two purposes. The first is, as the name implies, setting up raffles. You can set it up with as many tickets as you want, and you can determine how many winners need to be drawn at the end of the duration for the raffle, which is also player set. We see this mostly being used for fundraisers and similar events run by citizens. The other main purpose of this establishment is for the purchase of "tokens". Tokens can be purchased to represent non-tangible goods, or something else that can not be sold over the auctionhouse or in a shop normally. When a token is purchased it is sealed with the purchaser's name to prevent counterfitting of tokens. The main purpose I see these tokens being put to is to make things like certain types of fundraiser auctions much more easily managed.

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There will not be an update next week, as we are focusing on knocking out the remaining Tier 2 skills so that we can open for a Combat Beta. In that vein, I will instead be posting a thread about applying for Beta sometime next week, we look forward to hearing from everyone who is interested. The Combat Beta primarily focuses on PvP and testing the various classes for balance as we advance, to make sure that the flaws are thoroughly hammered out before we release.

Can shops be co-owned?

(this all looks awesome by the way)

How would you define co-ownership?

Shops can be co-managed by setting the permissions of various 'bins' to include other people. If you had a shop and you gave me permission to fully operate every bin, we'd be co-managing. I don't know if you'll be able to set permissions to allow someone else to buy upgrades, re-desc your shopkeeper or sell the shop. Personally, I think those are big decisions that are fine left to just one person except in extraordinary circumstances (one person quits the game suddenly - a non-point because Lithmeria will be a vortex of awesomeness from which no one can escape.)

How will shops be built? You just mention renting

More than just that, one of the problems Imperian used to have (not so much now, due to a dwindling playerbase) is that a single city/council can have a limited amount of shops, so younger players pretty much have to wait for someone to go completely inactive (assuming that said person didn't just leave someone to manage the shop in their absence) for such an extended period that the mortal leadership deals with it (which can take months, or longer if the inactive player happens to be buddy-buddy with the leadership).

In a year, how difficult will it be for an up-and-coming new player to obtain a shop?

Shops must have a single owner, but you can give enough permissions over the management of your shop to someone else that they are effectively on par with you. They can't get rid of the shop, but you have the option to let someone else do everything else.

Shops originally start out as a stall with a single basic shelf. The shop is then "built" by the various upgrades improving its size and later adding additional rooms.

Finally, and I can't believe this slipped my mind making the original post...

Shops in the bazaar are treated as virtual rooms, and so can be created in virtually unlimited amount. Exactly how we are going to make shops accessible to players is uncertain. Either a sort of listing and you can ENTER <shop> from the Bazaar, or perhaps having them in a 3x3 Bazaar area and make them special exits, evenly distributed among the rooms. Would make it feel a little more real at least. Suggestions on the topic are welcome.

Perhaps an area can be entered that is set aside from the actual city. This area can be continuously expanded as needed without taking up room in the city itself.

This would allow players to walk about the bazaar, for a more realistic and tactile interaction but won't cause a lack of room by having too few hexes to expand upon inside the city proper.