An area where I struggle to have fun in UO Outlands is the shopping experience. Primarily this is for the purpose of purchasing gear. This is done through a few different methods:
- I can purchase garbage gear from NPC’s, but I need to travel to many different vendors to do so.
- I can purchase good gear from players (general population)
- I need to use some third-party site that poorly tracks which NPC’s have stock.
- There used to be a third-party Amazon like site that was actually pretty good / reputable but I think that gentleman unfortunately had some life events that took him away from the game. Not sure what the status of this is anymore.
- I have to travel around aimlessly looking around portals for malls, only to double-click through poorly named out-of-stock vendors.
- I have to go to shelter and take multiple vendor mall portals and click around to find the items.
- I have to go to discord and engage in trade/sell channels, orders which may never fulfill.
- I need to use some third-party site that poorly tracks which NPC’s have stock.
- I can purchase from guild-mates (requires to be in an active guild)
- In all of the above player-driven cases the following is true:
- Slow
- Tedious
- Dangerous
- Scamming via poor trade window design from 97
- Being PK’d because despite having a city we all universally agree to buy all the high-value items outside of town?
The above situation is really frustrating, especially since this problem has been solved really well in modern MMO’s. This isn’t to suggest UO and Outlands doesn’t have specific philosophy or set of issues to deal with, but most modern options likely provide a nicer UX than what is present right now on Outlands.
I’ve heard an Albion Online-like auction system is fundamentally out-of-the-question. I think the best answers for why that is relates to real-estate and having a good vendor locations drives higher housing prices. That seems like fine logic to me, and so I’ll avoid suggesting a completely asynchronous auction system.
What I would like to propose is something that piggy-backs off the existing two systems:
- In-town vendors
- Societies
I would like to see a system whereby gatherers/crafters can fulfill orders to in-town vendors and that gear can be purchased by players. Refined resources (ingots, leather, planks, etc.) of various levels go in, and purchasable crafted gear comes out.
- As a sink, this gear could cost more materials to make than normal and the gear could cost more gold to purchase than normal.
- The gear could be non-repairable, so that it is guaranteed to break or breaks on death of player.
- This gear couldn’t be placed on a shelf.
- The rewards for fulfilling orders can be gold, society points, etc. with amounts tunable by demand and lower than what might otherwise be found by using housed vendors.
- [Edit] This gear could not be salvaged / recycled into materials.
This kind of combat-related gear is something that everyone needs a supply of all the time. Making it difficult to access the supply is frustrating and not very fun. Having vendors for the more exotic craftables and rare loot seems perfectly fine, but everyone needs leather, bone, plate sets, etc. Having a system that makes these more accessible even at a higher cost/risk would go a long way in improving the UX in my opinion.
[Edit, reply to @kr0ax from Discord]
@kr0ax [Discord]: Believe it or not but roaming for, browsing through and/or stocking vendors is a lot of fun for some folks.And stealing stuff from players and/or killing players in front of vendor houses is also a lot of fun for some folks. An auction house in the cities or similar "one finds all" systems will kill all that for these ppl instantly.I guess the impact would be rather negative. I might be wrong though. The only thing that is really tedious and annoying is
the amount of clicksone has to do in order to go through all vendors and all bags in all the vendors in a vendor house. A black board at each (vendor) house with a search function that will automatically look through the vendors would suffice I believe.
I can totally understand wanting to maintain the existing fun game loops that people are currently playing. I am suggesting that we keep everything we have now for vendors, and we introduce a new mechanism that has its own costs pros/cons that some players will take and some won't. The goal, I think, shouldn't be to remove any of the existing fun that players are having, but instead to fix issues in UX. This suggestion keeps all of the most valuable/rare loot (MCDs, aspect, scrolls, non-gear crafted items, etc.) in housing vendors. It creates a new class of gear that has the above-listed down-sides but which can easily be bought and crafted into in-city NPC vendors. It keeps the existing class of gear (which has none of the above-listed down-sides) in housing vendors. This way the most common combat gear is readily available but isn't as utility friendly in some ways that traditional gear is. Anyone who wants to purchase rares or traditional gear would still be able to do so via housing vendors and experience the loops for shopping around, stocking vendors, PKing, stealing, etc. What I am proposing would maybe shift some players out of those loops some of the time, but definitely not all of them, and definitely not for all types of items, and definitely not all of the time.
