Job Boards and Drop Boxes.

[Battlepaw 585]

The Idea:

 

Hmm was thinking about this when Aeris suggested adding clay to traders in bulk.  Would be an interesting feature, have job boards, like the current recruitment boards, that players can come by, use paper and a small nail to tack a job onto.  You pay the silver then too, it comes out of your bank, and is in deposit for the job, if you have enough to cover what you set as the price.  (That way people won't put bogus jobs up for insane prices)

 

How it works: 

 

When you look on the board, it will list the jobs,distance from the board, server, etc. if you accept the job it will be removed from the board or , unless you can't meet the conditions in time, then it will go leave your "list" and go back on the board.   If you own the board, or if you are the mayor of a job board, you can prune it when you want of dead jobs, troll posts, etc.    The jobs would time out anyways if they stay up for a while without anyone accepting them, and the money would go back into the poster's bank.  

 

Basically it will mark the location of the materials the job giver wants at a location on your in-game map.   The delivery dropbox.  The player then goes to that deed, and interacts with the, drop box item or whatnot to drop the items off, when they do so it will pop a box open, "do you want to add this item to the drop box "  Once you have satisfied the requirements, you have traded the amount of items to meet the conditions with the object it considers the job "completed" and automatically pays you the set amount.

 

It would be limited no doubt, and some tweaking would be required to put limits on the size of the orders, perhaps having the drop box only able to hold 300 items, and behave like a large crate.    Heck or just making the requirements met by a certain avg QL of a type of material, in a Crate and you load that into a drop box.    

 

It would take a silly amount of coding to work, but its something I can see actually be a possible alternative to the mail system, and something that can give players something to do.   

 

Perhaps a few requirements:

 

To be able to post a job, you must be part of a village that has a drop box, and you must have that posting character linked to it, or any drop box.   Theoretically, you could put a drop box next to the board, and have that as the destination.  That way players can just load up goods in crates, go to the market, then fill orders on the board.    

 

When you are picking up your order, you have to be in a Wagon or Cart with enough space for the crate, you get on as driver, then select the drop box and you pick which order you want to pickup.

 

Drop Boxes, have to be able to be pathed to, or perhaps abuse of blocking off access to drop boxes or whatnot being against server rules.  Alternatively, perhaps both the board and the dropbox is a GM placed item, and is put at the spawn deed in an open area.   

 

Wrapping it up:

 

A lot of ways to do this.  I'm open to suggestions, I doubt it's anything that will ever be implemented, but its interesting to try to theorycraft something like this, and who knows, perhaps our discussion here can think of ways to make some sort of system like this that could work.  If your read my entire post, you may have noticed I devloped the idea, during the course of the post, so bear with me, its just a rough outline, 

 

This would only be something allowed on the Freedom servers, or at least I have no idea how to put this on Chaos, or Epic without serious problems lol.   

 

Heck if your using crates for everything, it has a few disadvantages, like you losing the crate, etc, but the dang things aren't hard to make anyways, and its a tradeoff for making money.   Perhaps making a minimun set ammount like 1s or something, so player will be less tempted to put jobs up for trivial things, and no matter what the job is I think 1s is worth more than any crate

Edited June 1, 2014 by Battlepaw

[KanePT 699]

A while ago there was a talk of player-created quests. This idea would certainly cover that.

[Battlepaw 585]

A while ago there was a talk of player-created quests. This idea would certainly cover that.

 

Ya would be interesting,  Reading over my post a few times, and pondering the idea, I think it would be kinda cool to go to a market in freedom,  unload my knarr with raw materials, find job listings with requirements I can meet, and make a few silver.    Just ride up to a dropbox, accept the job, and unload the crate with the raw materials, get paid, etc.   Fill multiple orders if I have additional crates, etc.   

 

Would be an awesome way to exchange things like dirt, cooked meat, farmed goods, etc for hard silver.  Stuff in bulk, or anything you can put in crates. Mix and match until you have the required materials in a crate, then turn it in.   

 

When you fill a job, the poster gets a mail in his mailbox with the message that his job was filled, and he can go pickup his goods at the indicated drop box. (About dang time the mailboxes were useful for actual messaging)   

 

Heck if Rolf ever allows us to crate up animals, so you have something to move the wagon or cart you put on your ship, it would be perfect.   Hell, or even be able to sell crated animals too (One per crate, or put inside a special animal crate) with the required type of animal, or traits on a horse.   

Edited June 1, 2014 by Battlepaw

[joedobo 1,187]

It's an okay suggestion.

 

Tho, I'd rather see a buy merchant. Buy merchant owner would "program" what it buys with regular expressions and some simple logic. This idea plus an information index that lists merchant data would be awsome...who, was what, for how much, and where.

 

Buy merchant

Every time a player tries to sell to the merchant it generates a string and sees if the regex captures meet conditions set by its owner. Placing a buy puts the money on the merchant, When a player sells to the merchant it exchanges appropriate coins.

 

merchant: "Jim wants to sell me 50 units of clay, 50.00ql, 0.00dmg for 10 iron each.

regex: "([a-zA-Z]+) wants to sell me ([0-9]+) units of ([a-zA-Z]+), ([0-9.]+)ql, ([0-9.]+)dmg for ([0-9]+) iron each.

group 1 = "Jim" or "?+"

A specific player, in case Jim. Could also do all players with ?+.

group 2 = 50

group 3 = "clay"

group 4 >= 50.00

group 5 <= 1.00

group 6 <= 11

 

This does need some refinement for dealing with large volumes of stuff. No one can trade 1000 bricks in one transaction. The system should support such a scenario.

 

For enchanted items you'd have more groups.

Merchant: "Jim wants to sell me 1 unit of shovel, iron,79.00ql, 0.00dmg, 75woa, 70coc for 2 silver each.

[Battlepaw 585]

It's an okay suggestion.

 

Tho, I'd rather see a buy merchant. Buy merchant owner would "program" what it buys with regular expressions and some simple logic. This idea plus an information index that lists merchant data would be awsome...who, was what, for how much, and where.

 

Buy merchant

Every time a player tries to sell to the merchant it generates a string and sees if the regex captures meet conditions set by its owner. Placing a buy puts the money on the merchant, When a player sells to the merchant it exchanges appropriate coins.

 

merchant: "Jim wants to sell me 50 units of clay, 50.00ql, 0.00dmg for 10 iron each.

regex: "([a-zA-Z]+) wants to sell me ([0-9]+) units of ([a-zA-Z]+), ([0-9.]+)ql, ([0-9.]+)dmg for ([0-9]+) iron each.

group 1 = "Jim" or "?+"

A specific player, in case Jim. Could also do all players with ?+.

group 2 = 50

group 3 = "clay"

group 4 >= 50.00

group 5 <= 1.00

group 6 <= 11

 

This does need some refinement for dealing with large volumes of stuff. No one can trade 1000 bricks in one transaction. The system should support such a scenario.

 

For enchanted items you'd have more groups.

Merchant: "Jim wants to sell me 1 unit of shovel, iron,79.00ql, 0.00dmg, 75woa, 70coc for 2 silver each.

 

Ya no reason you couldn't have both, that would be interesting for smaller transactions, for like High QL lumps, or anything you can fit into a player's inventory. The only problem I can see with that, is the theoretical ability to store huge amounts of stuff on untouchable merchants on pvp server, perhaps limit what a merchant can carry in it's "Backpack" or whatever, and that you can't trade stuff a merchant can't hold.  Heck for that matter, storing raw materials without decay.  At least with drop boxes and crates, you would still theoretically have the crates sitting in drop boxes work as if they were sitting in a cart, they function with the same decay loss in item count, if you let them sit there too long, and only allow them on the PvE servers.  

Edited June 1, 2014 by Battlepaw