Dudes, one of the most frustrating things to do is to peacefully get money without camping a mob or gambling when the MUD hasn't crashed for a few days. I came up with a solution.

In the four protected cities, let there be an exchange trader. After the MUD has been up for 24 hours, the trader asks for certain goods the city needs (like salt, silk, ore, etc). These change randomly every 4 hours or so. These goods can be acquired in a variety of ways: sprinkle some on mobs in a certain area, sell them in limited quantity from a faraway town, hide them, put them in specific areas (ore from mines). When you bring them back to the trader, you get cash for them. If you make this a repeatable quest, perhaps ever 25-50 items you bring, you get a set amount of commerce exp too.

Something like this should be easy to set up, benefits the game as a whole, is completely automated, and can be expanded to large quests for an imm that wants something to do during a weekend.

How do you stop people from hoarding these goods? Put a rot timer on them. You could even expand the use of some objects. For example, use pick rock in a mine and randomly get ore. Also gives Outlanders reasons to kill more people when the pickings are slim.

You're all thinking that I'm a genius, right? I know. I'm ####ing awesome.

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One problem with a system like this is that it if the rewards are sizable, it lends itself to being gamed. If the rewards aren't that great, compared to looting peoples gold and selling their gear, most players are still going to opt for the quicker, easier solution.

I haven't taken a poll, but I imagine that you would fall into a minority of players who would rather do the equivalent of spamming invoker spells in the mines by Fort (mining) for 50 ticks.

The only good I see a system like this being of is for low level players who can't yet kill mobs for piles of gold or a set of dragon scale to sell. It would basically be an improvement to the “Kill X of Y mob and I'll pay you” quests which don't really get you rich enough. Nonetheless, if I see some random future enemy dude die on eastern with 35 gold, I'm probably going to take it and no longer need to waste my time mining ore or farming potatoes.

All that said, having more shopkeepers who deal in an even more diverse set of goods would be nice. There are a lot of seemingly valuable but actually not-so-much-so items scattered all of Thera that most people leave on the ground or sacrifice because they are worthless. Having more shopkeepers interested in a golden goblet or a pouch of rare spices would be nice.

It would also be nice if some of the armor and weapons dealers sold decent equipment. There is some decent gear for sale, but IMHO, it makes sense for shopkeepers in Galadon (the New York of Thera) to sell goods we (the Legendary Heroes of Thera) want, thus replenishing their coinage, which is drained within an hour of a crash.

Getting gold isn't hard, it's just slightly less time consuming and annoying than having to farm or some #### like that. I know how to get a lot more gold in 30 minutes than I've ever bothered to actually go and collect, though.

In general, the improvements we've seen to the commerce system in the past few years have been pretty nice and I'm sure with a few more rounds of tweaks and improvements (in the same direction) we'll have a commerce system that will afford us the coinage to feed our soon to be village-slaughtering, magic-hating families without devoting two hours each session to mining coal or milking cows.

Nah, it makes sense. He's not suggesting you replace one with the other, you would have two options:

The farming/exchange market system would offer a labor-intensive but low-risk way to get gold, PK, stealing, and looting offer a quick and easy but very high-risk way to get gold.

It balances out, and you can take a pick depending on your preferred playstyle. If you want to spend hours farming ore from a mine, have it your way, we'll give you some gold for it. If you want to risk blackjacking someone on the Eastern road, we can give you some more gold for that too. These things aren't mutually exclusive.

Not that I think it's really needed; like that other guy said, I don't want to play WoW, but it's not like such a thing wouldn't have a place in CF.

Yeah, I thought of the comparison to WoW, but I'm not quite suggesting that. With a rot timer on the "goods", they're only useful for a limited time. Furthermore, the reward would be personal (in the form of eventual commerce experience) that you wouldn't want to sell off your things. Also, the problem with WoW is that you can buy gold from an outside source to get materials you need to make ####. Not the same kind of lameness here. You pointed out that it was a low-risk way to get gold, and that's what it is - while also encouraging people to explore. I am the last person to want to see WoW remade in MUD form, but that doesn't mean everything WoW-like is exclusive, especially when it has real world similarities.

I completely agree, but one thing the Immortals probably take into consideration when undertaking a coding project as massive as this would probably be is how much use the feature will get.

It's very possible I'm wrong, but I suspect that the number of people who would choose to farm, mine, etc. above the current alternatives would be few. Perhaps it's pessimistic to think so, but I think most people would opt to kill mobs, kill players, steal, loot, raid stashes, barter, sell scattered eq, etc. before utilizing a system like this. If that's true, then the wrench time may be better spent on other things (like improving the current commerce system).

The system would add some RP flair on top of providing yet another way to gather coins, but it would otherwise probably end up being used about as much as the current bounty system.

A lot of MUDs pride themselves on things like extravagant commerce systems, farming, mining, blacksmithing, player-owned homes, etc. CF is, let's face it, more about PK and the things that revolve around PK more than it is RP, from a mechanics angle. Sure, we have religions and cabals and all that great stuff, but nobody actually role-plays the farmer or the baker. IMHO, the system we're discussing seems more suited to a game where “realism” is more important and players wish to RP in ways that would simply get you laughed and and full looted on CarrionFields.

It would be great if I could take a pick and a shovel, dig out some ore, take it to a PC blacksmith who would melt it down and make a sword out of it so I could go open a can of whoop-ass. In CF, however, most of us would rather just take the pick and pincer somebody with it.