Hahah, I like reading Brad:
Just for more clarity, I don’t want search abilities, etc. because I want price differences. Not just differences between regions, but probably within a city. To me, that creates an exciting player economy. Yes, one could argue it’s more work to have to go shopping as opposed to just bringing up a nifty screen that does all the work for you. But the shopping is the gameplay. It may not be for everyone, but neither is it necessary for a player to participate in this part of the economy and game.
Even the shopping will be hardcore in Vanguard!
See, I live here in Italy in a small town and every Thursday there’s a market. On the road, in the center of the town. I think over there you have something similar, but modern, called “supermarket”. Once again the reality surpasses the game and there isn’t really anything to learn from scratch or discover. You just have to simulate in the game what already exists. In the most natural way possible.
There are very good reasons why other games have practical search functions. Maybe they push the possibility too further but the same happened in the real life. Just in different forms. A supermarket or a commercial area in a city are structured and planned accordingly. This because it’s the seller that is going to meet the buyer, not the opposite. Without any form of structure to identify and categorize the shops, the “gameplay” will just turn out incredibly frustrating and pointless. The result is that noone will participate simply because it’s nowhere playable or usable. As in the real world, we tried to overcome these limits.
In the case of the town market above the most important trait is that the market, the same market, will be in another town the day after. This defines the job of people that search the goods for you and then bring them to you. It’s the seller that travels and makes available. It’s the seller to represent the “search function” we have today in other forms. You “browse” what they bring to you.
The whole problem is rather complex and includes even the role of the crafting (I explained some of my ideas here). In general the idea to bring back the vendor system in Ultima Online, where the limits represent a depth, may be interesting but we shouldn’t forget that it worked in that case because pretty much everyone had the possibility to mark runes and port everywhere, cutting out the problem of the travel and distance.
In the case of a new game like Vanguard it could be interesting to experiment something new and I wouldn’t renounce to give an usable and accessible shape to those ideas even if we really want to go back at the roots. Each village could still have a commercial center where the players could send their vendors. Deciding if to pay a fee to the village to take advantage of the common marketplace or keep the vendors at home avoiding the fee but without the benefit of the exposition.
A system that would be near to what happens in SWG. Giving a decent and usable structure to the market and still retaining all the original qualities that Brad doesn’t want to lose (and coherence with the setting).