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[Bigworsh]

While playing fifa street 2 I got a great idea (at least in my opinion ) what every town in Mythruna needs. A bulletin board!!!

This bulletin board is going to be used by players, whenever they want to anounce something, like when a dragon is going to be hunt.
And the other thing are going to be requests by players, lets say someone needs a certain amount of wood but is too lazy for getting it by himself, so he write a request where stands how much wood he needs and want the other players gonna get for fulfilling it. And now come the important part of the story. To guarantee that the player who posted the request is going to keep his part of the deal, the system is taking the things which player 1 (the one who posted the request) promissed and after player 2 have collected the wood, he is going to the bulletin board and there he give the wood to the system and as promised is getting what player 1 wrote in his request. And last thing player 1 has to do is going to the bulletin board and getting his wood.

An other example how a request could look like, could be like this. Player 1 just as always is offering something, but, instead of an item, he wants that player 2 is going to go somewhere on the map. Sure it sounds kinda stupid why someone should post (is it even the right word ) something like that, but I think there are tons of reasons. Or player 1 could write an request where player 2 have to kill some monsters and this time I even have a reason why player 1 should do this. Maybe some wolfs are gotten hungry and they are eating the food in the town or maybe they even so desperate, that they attacking other players.

Ok, I have to aggre I wrote it a little complicated, but that only happend because of my small vocabulary.
What do you think about it. I would like to hear as many opinions as possible.

[pspeed]

I like the idea of a bulletin board.  Many Neverwinter Nights persistent world servers had something like that. 

Ultimately, (and potentially very soon) players will be able to write things down on walls, etc..  Eventually they will have to have an appropriate tool but that's later.  Without even adding anything else to the game, players could sort of use that like a bulletin board.  Maybe later I (or a modder) will add a more full-featured bulletin board that is based on the dialog system, stores messages in a database, etc..  That's the way the NWN ones always worked.

As to the other stuff, I'm less interested in doing that myself... though it's certainly a possibility modders will make their own.  There are a dozen ways that two players could arrange to exchange goods or information, locations, etc. and it doesn't "logically" make sense for that to be part of a bulletin board.  If a player wants wood and doesn't feel like buying it from the merchants then that player can arrange to meet another player in game and complete their own transaction.  Likewise, secret locations could be treated like any other item... you have a note where you write it down and you want to give the other player that note but not anyone else.

I want to try to avoid pre-designing limitations into the game until we see where griefing problems are... and a fully protected delayed exchange system limits all kinds of potentially interesting game play possibilities.  Maybe player X knows there is an exchange happening between players Y and Z and so stalks them secretly or tries through other ways to find out where they will be dropping their loot for exchange... and then steals it.  So players Y and Z are forced to be very careful where they discuss such things and maybe have a code system between them or whatever.

Otherwise, if it's just "I need wood!" then really that's a merchant problem.  Non-in person player exchanges should be for things you can't easily buy, I think.  And maybe if this becomes a big problem then some cities or towns will offer brokerage services with the appropriate fees.  And any players not wanting to resort to paying brokerage fees can go back to the "I left the bottle of dragon's blood in a hole north of the troll cave" or whatever.

All of that being said, I still haven't worked out how a player might setup a merchant that can sell things when they aren't online.  So some of the above could be handled that way, I guess.

[caesar]

what about a central market place?
A player has a huge farm of whatever and can sell his goods there. So he puts the goods in, another player buys that later (even if the seller is not online) and when the seller goes back to the markeplace he gets the gold minus the tradingfee. So you can sell stuff without being online and its safe and simple.
Possibly these marketplaces can be build by players so they keep the fee or there is one on every server.

[pspeed]

There will be merchants that you can sell your stuff to.  No need to come back later to collect the price, I guess.

You just can't guarantee that the stuff will still be there when your buddy comes to buy it.