Suggestion for the unpatroned OLD Armor and weapon shops

[Chaosprism]

Deneith has an arms place for weapons, one for armors and they all sell only +1 items. Pretty pointless and unfrequented.

Fair trades is a weapons pawn and hence has a lot of patronage.

To get these old places happening again I suggest a few things.

1) The missile seller in the weapons shop should sell NORMAL crossbow bolts and arrows. So we dont have to go to the market to buy normal arrows. (since +1 ammuntion does not stack with a +1 bow)

2) Put speciality sellers that are linked to the pawn shops, but are effectively FILTERS for certain types of weapons. (from the same weapon lists that fare trades uses)
Dragon tooth sales could have these sellers:

Like exotic weapons seller should filter out ALL the exotic weapons from the pawns of fare trades.
A guys that has a filter for Finesse only weapons.
A guy that sells two-handed weapons.
A nomad barbarian salesman selling True Chaos, Anarchic weapons only.
A simple weapon salesman for mages (staffs, daggers, clubs etc)
A throwing weapon salesman.

You could have a guy in the temple of sovereign house temple that has a filter for "pure law, axiomatic, pure good and holy weapons" only


3) Likewise Lion's head armoury should look at the stock in house k's second gauntlet goods and have sellers that filter on other things.

A docent only salesman.
A Heavy armor sales man. That filters all the goods from second gauntlet to show you just heavy armors.
A Medium armor sales guy
A Light armor sales guy.
A shield only seller. (*filters all shields from second gauntlet goods*)

[LunaCee]

No, just no... just look through the entire broker's list after it loads up. The amount of additional coding to get something like this working would be nuts. Especially putting in the checks so that once an item is sold at any of the up to FIVE locations it could show up that it would be removed from the other shops.

For example given your setup a true chaos kama of pure good would show up in the regular house D broker, the exotics broker, the chaotic broker, the lawful/good broker, and the finesse broker.

I could get behind them changing those shops to being a sort of give us X collectibles and we'll make you a custom weapon/armor with 2-3 choices from this list of properties: XXX, YYY, ZZZ. Be nice if one could take a pile of stuff over and walk away with a custom made (and of course BtA) item with generic if useful properties like resist 10/20/30, basic clicky like detect secret door/shield/jump, and perhaps for some of the rarer materials they could give the shops access to more unusual properties.

[Bradik_Losdar]

Heck, I'd be happy if the armor shops sold NORMAL helmets.

You know like one of the dozens that are littering their countertops...

[Glenalth]

That is a really neat concept that could add some more flavor to the game.

[Chaosprism]

You haven't seen the code for the "fair trade" armor brokers. Neither have I, we dont know how hard or easy it would be so it doesnt pay to go making assumptions about how much effort it would take.

They're probably all in one big list. with the 3x value range guys simply looking at different enchantment level range than the other two are.

They're putting in an auction search on "text" term which is a lot more difficult than doing what the auction house already does.

Display items based on clear parameters.


As for having it in two lists, it's only one list. The game already has to handle the case when two people try and buy the same item, it's called a deadlock event. You'd have to do it regardless it doesnt matter if one "shop" display is showing a portion of the list and the other shop has overlaps.


What I have suggested would go with the theme of those buildings and you can throw away forever the +1 weapons and armor that people get plenty of just doing quests and looting in the harbour and korthos.

The only time I ever step foot in those stores is to buy a wide or long quiver because they're not on sale any where else.

This would give me a reason to go.

I'm looking for a shield, but I dont want to have to look through 3x vendor's lists in second gauntlet goods for it. I can go to ONE vendor and know i'll see all the second hand shields (of any level). and I can sort by value to see what I can afford.

[LunaCee]

*sigh* I'm a programmer, I'm also a programmer who can do databases from scratch. And just by playing the game I can figure out to a certain extent the basic underlying structure of what they currently have set up. Can I tell everything about it? No, nor do I claim to. But I can tell you what an utter pain some things are to do.

You know the marketplace yes? You understand that each instance of the marketplace has brokers with their own unique list of items per broker? This is because at the very least each instance has its own data table (if not more than one). The weapon broker in instance 1 does not access the data of the weapon broker in instance 3.

What you are asking for is even worse. Having three currently unlinked instances all communicating with each other trying to keep their broker data synchronized... or by taking the code down to bedrock and implementing a master database per server that each broker accesses. (Which would have the side effect of making more people able to buy the stuff us higher levels dump at the IQ/Amrath brokers because we aren't going to make the hike over to House D or K to sell this junk before we go questing again.)

Even the oh so "simple" stuff has a LOT more going behind the scenes than you think.

[Quarks]

You haven't seen the code for the "fair trade" armor brokers. Neither have I, we dont know how hard or easy it would be so it doesnt pay to go making assumptions about how much effort it would take.

Heavy sigh!
An April 2006 forum join date and you haven't yet learned the most basic of rules. Please read and memorize:

You do NOT, EVER, under ANY circumstances tell another forum user that they do not know about a specific piece of code. I will guarantee you that 95% of the forum population are heavy duty programmers in real life who could set up DDO from scratch within a week.
Mind you, that's only their side job. Their REAL job is what prevents them from posting their pictures on forums for security reasons.

[Rakian_Knight]

I could see this in more the form of Cloth/Light/Med./Heavy Armor or maybe Simple/Martial/Exotic weapons at most but to have it seperate it by so many different filters isn't a good idea IMO.

Now having a pawn shop at the wizards tower that only sells wizard's items would be a nice bit of flavor but I don't think he would have anyone there to sell him anything because most people would just run to one of the other pawn shops and sell everything.

[Eladiun]

*sigh* I'm a programmer, I'm also a programmer who can do databases from scratch. And just by playing the game I can figure out to a certain extent the basic underlying structure of what they currently have set up. Can I tell everything about it? No, nor do I claim to. But I can tell you what an utter pain some things are to do.

You know the marketplace yes? You understand that each instance of the marketplace has brokers with their own unique list of items per broker? This is because at the very least each instance has its own data table (if not more than one). The weapon broker in instance 1 does not access the data of the weapon broker in instance 3.

What you are asking for is even worse. Having three currently unlinked instances all communicating with each other trying to keep their broker data synchronized... or by taking the code down to bedrock and implementing a master database per server that each broker accesses. (Which would have the side effect of making more people able to buy the stuff us higher levels dump at the IQ/Amrath brokers because we aren't going to make the hike over to House D or K to sell this junk before we go questing again.)

Even the oh so "simple" stuff has a LOT more going behind the scenes than you think.


I'm also a programmer and this is 100% correct. Good job explaining it. +1

[donfilibuster]

The database is split to save computing resources, i would be indeed too complex coding to work around it.
Naturally on a 'master database' the coding would be much much easier.
Coding by itself isn't as expensive as processing the data, which is the whole point of having instances.

On the other hand having a broker list show at multiple places is still loading the same list of results so there's no extra work.
The idea of having specialized brokers just boils down to having filters, which would be a lot of help along with search and sorting features.

Since the list is per instance, it would make sense that the filtering/search/sort would be done only on the same items you are being given at your instance.
The coding of this feature should not be hard at all, and won't cause any additional processing on the servers since it can be done on the client over the data you are already receiving.

[Chaosprism]

Yeah well maybe those 95% need to help get rid of some of the old bugs in this game :) As a side project :)


I didnt say anything about instances sharing data, i'm still talking about simply a different way to view the same data that the weapon brokers currently have. Displaying it in a different way to sort in a particular display.
Instances can quite happy have their own version of everything.

Am I having a hard time explaining this or are you reading too much into it?



Anyway it makes those old weapon stores have SOME use, currently they're worse than chopped liver on the sidewalk.

[herzkos]

kinda like the idea, however i have a suggestion that I would prefer
to that one (and would also save on some of the duplication of lists issue.)

How about, using the weapon/armor vendors as you propose but instead of selling
to the vendor/broker they put in a centralized buyer in the market. So you go to that
guy and sell all your junk, i mean treasure, and after 5 minutes or whenever his list gets full
he sends it in a batch to all the vendors throughout stormreach. each item goes to the
broker that handles that type of item.
Additionally, you could have a "buyer" in each house instead of only one buyer to cut down on
congestion around that one guy.

just a thought, yeah, i know it'll be impossible to code into the existing system and would
require a complete rewrite of the game as we know it.

[Chaosprism]

Yeah the distribution of items to the right vendors would be nice. you probably could sell to ANY vendor though and have the items find their way to the right broker.