A real economy?

[medierra]

I think having great items on a vendor is kinda pointless anyway, if all you gotta do is look at the vendors in a town to get your great gear then it makes the killing and looting part of the game sorta mute. My suggestion was going to be the gambling vendor too, like Diablo 2 you could spend a huge portion of your gold (and usually get nothing), but sometimes get a good magic item that did what you hoped.
Soul

Well, I think the purpose of the vendor is to help fill the couple equipment slots at any given point where you've just had no luck finding anything good. Like when you're level 32 carrying around those level 7 unique boots with cool stats but 3 armor and you're finally tired of getting your *** kicked. I think there should also be the possibility of occasionally finding a really good piece of gear but not better than the best stuff that drops off enemies. If the frequency of finding good items on a vendor is about equivalent to that of one dropping off an enemy, then vendor farming is just a more boring way to obtain loot while not earning XP.

An additional means of balancing this is to select 1-2 item types where you might find a really good version on a vendor and configure most other item types so that you have almost no chance of that.

[ward_rb]

i would say a longer refresh time on vendors would be fine. usually people shop-farm in between actual gameplay. so checking the vendors, quiting then restarting to refresh the inventory doesnt pull you out of the game too much.

I wonder if it would be possible to do something like put an item on hold. You tell the vendor that you're interested in that item, and he keeps it in a separate inventory for several in-game days or so. His normal inventory can refresh, and you can still save up for the item, and we still get the nice vendor refresh from Titan Quest where they always have cool new stuff to check out.

thats a really good idea also.

[jiaco]

If I am correct in assuming that this project-x speculation is using the TQ engine, then maybe a modified caravan/vendor could be put to use? At the vendor, any item can be moved to the lay-away caravan (if there is enough space, of course) and then to extract the item from the lay-away caravan, the original purchase price would have to be paid.

This way, vendors could refresh normally, good items could be reserved and the system would not be exploited due to the limited size of the lay-away.

Dunno, just a thought.

...more thought and I wonder how this could work in multi-player. Can you make sure that the toon that put the item on layaway was the only one who could re-extract it later?

[khrotos]

Haha, in-game lay-away. Wait, what if the vendor would give you a "credit" so you could purchase the item immediately but over time you'd be charged money for the money you borrowed... it could maybe be called "APR". If you didn't pay it back you'd eventually start to get annoying dialog pop-ups and then finally hero monsters would show up to break your legs. I think we already have leg-breaking tech in the game.

I think its a cool idea though, I'll have to see if we can squeeze something like that in.

lol that would be hilarious. You're in act IV and suddenly this huge guy shows up requesting money for that spear you "bought" back in act II. You can also never beat him - if you bring his health into the red he just runs away without giving XP... to appear again at a later time!

If I am correct in assuming that this project-x speculation is using the TQ engine, then maybe a modified caravan/vendor could be put to use? At the vendor, any item can be moved to the lay-away caravan (if there is enough space, of course) and then to extract the item from the lay-away caravan, the original purchase price would have to be paid.

This way, vendors could refresh normally, good items could be reserved and the system would not be exploited due to the limited size of the lay-away.

Dunno, just a thought.

This is a good idea. I hadn't thought about the size of the lay-away.

[lufe]

I don't want to make a thread about this, but since there's talk about sellers, could you please take care, medierra, that the sellers say (after the first time you talk to them) something sensible like "good day" or "hi there"? I get sick to my stomach of hearing things like "The arcane arts are no more than secrets that you once knew" 500 times just because I need to buy something... Maybe I'm alone on this but I needed to talk about it anyways. I hate this and other sellers so much that I had to make a mod to make them squeak instead of talking - small revenge for the many times they bothered me...

[khrotos]

Why not just give them more variety?

I love the vendor quotes. There's not many games where the vendors have personalities of their own. The amount of time you spend visiting them makes them main characters in their own right.

[medierra]

I hate this and other sellers so much that I had to make a mod to make them squeak instead of talking - small revenge for the many times they bothered me...

This is a great idea! We'll just make them squeak! That will save us the expense of V/O.

Actually, I'm not sure yet how much V/O we will have. On TQ the owners felt it was important to have V/O for all dialog. I think sometimes there are valid reasons not to do that but, more practically, I know we don't have the V/O budget to do that unless we really limit the amount of dialog in the game. We want to be able to add a lot of quests and story content to the game though without incurring a huge V/O expense, so we won't be able to have it for everything. Merchants might be one of the areas where it makes sense to skip the V/O. If merchants are as they were in TQ, just glorified buttons to open up the shop UI, then maybe skipping the repetitive V/O intro for them will make some people's day.

On the other hand, it may be possible to make them into story or side-quest NPCs also. I don't have a lot of experience with the quest editor, so I'll need to dig in at some point and get up to speed on everything it can and can't do. I suspect vendor NPCs will remain glorified shop buttons though. ; )

[lufe]

By the way, any chance of doing some hottie female vendor instead of big, fat, elder and/or pompous jerks? Something in the lines of Charsi or Asheara... At least it would be a nice-to-see glorified shop button My AllSkins mod has 4 of them - to compensate the complete absence of them on the game.

[medierra]

By the way, any chance of doing some hottie female vendor instead of big, fat, elder and/or pompous jerks? Something in the lines of Charsi or Asheara... At least it would be a nice-to-see glorified shop button My AllSkins mod has 4 of them - to compensate the complete absence of them on the game.

A hot and courteous shopkeeper would break "suspension of disbelief" and ruin immersion. I mean, this is a fantasy game, but we do have to maintain some semblance of realism. ; )

[lufe]

A hot and courteous shopkeeper would break "suspension of disbelief" and ruin immersion. I mean, this is a fantasy game, but we do have to maintain some semblance of realism. ; )

Eh, experience told me that suspension of disbelief is not affected by hot shopkeepers ^^ I did as I said 6 merchants for the AllSkins mod, and the only complaint I got from immersion freaks was about Jack Sparrow.

I mean, even immersion freaks were ready to believe on hot shopkeepers, but it seems that Jack Sparrow (a merchant dressed with the Pirate set) was too much...