I've been toying with the idea of adding in, for lack of a better word, pawn shops. This would allow players to sell some of their items via a special shoppie. I'm sure there are already snippets for this kind of thing but I would rather not use someone else's code when adding in new stuff. The fewer people I have to credit for new features and stuff like that the better. Maybe it's just me, I don't know. That's always the way I've worked.
Don't get me wrong, I have installed stuff that are works of others. Come to think of it, I have only installed one, well, one collection, of others work and that was the Lua scripting stuff done by Nick Gammon. All the previous snippets that were added were done by the previous implementor, Drazuk.
Anyway, back to the pawn shop... the idea is to let players sell items they have for whatever price they want. This would be a (probably) better alternative to the live auction as there isn't always a lot of players on to bid on items. This way, a player can put up an item for sell and others will be able to look through these items and purchase any that they want. The money gained from the sell will go to the seller once they log back in to collect any money from sold items.
The basics are easy enough to do. I'm now trying to figure out the best way to store the data to files and what format to use. Lua would make it pretty easy to write and read all the data back, but I think that would require some additional work done so that the spell affects on items can be stored as well 'cause I'm not certain if they are or not. I guess I could find out first...
Comments
You may want to keep an eye on that. Allowing players to control shops will usually end up with nobody buying anything from NPC shops and only from player shops, or vise versa. This can have a serious effect on the economy and the value of gold or whatever currency you use, not to mention that value of certain items.
I'm not saying that will always be the case, but it does happen more often than not.
I've already addressed some issues with gold value and the likes. For instance, we have randomly generated items that pop, well, randomly, and the usual stock items that pop all the time. The stock items have no value because they always pop. Randoms are also flagged as such, so it would be easy to disallow selling stock items.
I had removed the value of stock items because players were killing the local cityguards and selling their equipment repeatedly to obtain large amounts of gold. Stock items in shops, once bought, have no value. Items in shoppie's inventories are extracted if they are killed and players cannot steal from shoppies. The only way to obtain items from a shoppie is to buy them or if an immortal steals the items or slays the mob.