Forgotten Kingdoms Forums

viewtopic.php?f=51&t=15490

After seeing this post I would like to suggest that npc merchants purchase items at at least half the value or sell them at reasonable prices. It does not seem fair to purchase a cloak from a merchant for over 700 plat and to see them willing to only buy it back for far, far less than worth, let alone that a pc sold that cloak to the merchant and only received a fraction of the value. (even if it is a high fraction: That is one expensive cloak!)

Almost all prices for selling things to the majority of merchants in the game are quite steep now to stem the tide of epic level items going on sale. Some vendors in cities do purchase at a higher rate, but almost all sell at a high amount but purchase at ridiculously low price. I'd like to see npc merchants purchase items at at least half the value or sell them at reasonable prices.

And for the majority of non quest rewards, there are few places to sell looted or purchased items at resale.

I do know that it is possible to trade with player chars, but not everyone wants to buy everything. Balancing prices for ic fairness and the in game economy seems like a good solution to deal with gluts of quest items players are trying to sell.

The incident you linked above was an outlier that we need to look into, but -in general- we are talking economics. If I were a poor merchant and you wanted to sell me an awesome sword of doom, can you blame me for buying it much more cheaply than I will try to sell it? What if someone walked up to you and sold you a Ferrari for a dollar? Would you not turn around and charge the next person through the nose?

The lesson here is that the value command is pretty valuable, and you don't have to sell to the first merchant you find. Outliers, as the one in the like, are obviously still interesting, but not the norm by far.

Its not an easy topic to bridge. I had been debating for some time how to bring it up, and waiting until another player mentioned something related to it. If the playerbase does not feel its an issue though, I'm happy to drop it.

I am not suggesting that you do. I am only saying that the value command can save everyone a lot of heartache, and that I believe it's reasonable for their to be -in some cases- a huge disparity between selling price and buying price.

Harroghty wrote: I am only saying that the value command can save everyone a lot of heartache,

Yes the value command is very useful and essential in the current economic system of the mud. I think everyone should use it, but it has little to do with the fact that the majority of npc merchants are buying things at a fraction of their value and reselling them at one hundred percent of more of their value. I am very careful these days to only sell things to the few random merchants that are still coded to the old economic system and are placed at random in areas. Often though these merchants are too poor to purchase items of significant value from me because they are saturated with items other players have sold to them, other times the merchants in question will buy at half value and sell for full, which is proper in my opinion.

All the merchants in the game are rated according to their cash worth. There are not ones randomly placed, there are ones selected to be wealthier than others based upon sources like Volo's coins rating system in the Volo's Guides. For example, Bradigan (who is peculiar to FK) sells travel goods; he is not a wealthy dealer in magical items. Meanwhile, Zygarth Saern and Delborggan the Blade -known for dealing in magical weapons- are wealthier and might offer you a fairer price based upon their means and their familiarity with the items you are trying to sell.

The old system where one might sell their newly acquired magic sword to the innkeep in the middle of nowhere was not consistent with our aim of this being a role-play intensive game.

That makes more sense. I was not aware that merchant prices were adapted to reflect on canon resources in FR. Though I do still feel that some costs and sales could be made more reasonable for the general enjoyment of the mud and to offset some frustrations that can happen, the above does make sense. If there is rhyme and reason to the current system I can certainly live with it. Thank you for your detailed explanation of the current system.