At the town hall meeting it has been said (by Derek I think) that a global vendor search, like some websites are offering for the luna region, is interesting but need some careful consideration as not to lessen the worth of certain real estate.
So I have been thinking: how about some central search point ingame, that allows you to search globally for an item. The results are then listed by vendor name and price. You pick one and a map is dropped into your backpack that shows the area of the vendor and a pin, where the vendor is located.
You would still have to find the region and think about how to get there, so vendor houses in town or near towns or moongates would still have a higher value than a house far off in the woods. But the ones in the woods would still have the possibility to lure customers to their shop by discounts.
With the addition of the new randomized treasure map system, there's obviously some code that allows to generate a partial map of any area of the overall map. All you (read: the devs) have to do, is to feed that routine with the vendor coordinates instead of randomly generated t-map coordinates.
Apart from that, the devs "only" need to implement the search, which would only be a database query in a perfect world and some parsing algorythm in a less perfect world. The search could be accessed by a bulletin board or a map at a certain point ingame or at the banks. Even cooler imho, would be some NPC at the merchants guild like 'Ted the Archivar' who lets you browse his documents and maps for a small fee (50gp?) and the hands you the appropriate vendor map. But that's details...
To summarize: I think that using t-map like vendor maps as a result of a global search should address all major concerns about a global search while posing a manageable amount of coding for the devs.
Thoughts?
So I have been thinking: how about some central search point ingame, that allows you to search globally for an item. The results are then listed by vendor name and price. You pick one and a map is dropped into your backpack that shows the area of the vendor and a pin, where the vendor is located.
You would still have to find the region and think about how to get there, so vendor houses in town or near towns or moongates would still have a higher value than a house far off in the woods. But the ones in the woods would still have the possibility to lure customers to their shop by discounts.
With the addition of the new randomized treasure map system, there's obviously some code that allows to generate a partial map of any area of the overall map. All you (read: the devs) have to do, is to feed that routine with the vendor coordinates instead of randomly generated t-map coordinates.
Apart from that, the devs "only" need to implement the search, which would only be a database query in a perfect world and some parsing algorythm in a less perfect world. The search could be accessed by a bulletin board or a map at a certain point ingame or at the banks. Even cooler imho, would be some NPC at the merchants guild like 'Ted the Archivar' who lets you browse his documents and maps for a small fee (50gp?) and the hands you the appropriate vendor map. But that's details...
To summarize: I think that using t-map like vendor maps as a result of a global search should address all major concerns about a global search while posing a manageable amount of coding for the devs.
Thoughts?
