Buying and Selling from Merchants (Question Inside)

Yes, merchants should have their own items that they sell all the time.

Similar to EQ1 they should also be able to sell items that players sold to them.

Use to enjoy finding something of value on a vendor.

The option to buy back should be available first, in case you accidently sold something you didn't mean to. After that, yeah I guess being able to buy back other people's junk from the merchants could be interesting.

I loved to go vendor-diving in EQ one particularly for tradeskill items, gems, jewels, etc. I like when vendors have both "dumped" items from players and have their own wares.

I like the idea but I fear that certain vendors would become the accepted hubs and certain areas/vendors would become vastly over crowded. Some sort of limiting mechanism to prevent this would be good. Certain vendors accepting only certain items so we don't have to look through 200 pages of junk to find that cool piece someone actually vendored

I'm all for a free trade systems. Arbitrary restrictions take away from the realism. who's to say that the NPC merchant/vendor will want to sell an item that a player sells to them. If we're going to have an adaptive AI, the AI should follow human models of behavior such as greed, ego, fairness, etc. Just like humans, there should be good (lawful) and evil (unlawful) NPCs and every combination in between. Some merchants might be fair, others may be greedy and driven by profit. They could change over time too. Players should be able to haggle and barter with NPC merchants as well. Fixed and/or arbitrary pricing should be avoided. Pricing should be demand driven. Legendary item sell back then should be based on availability/demand, faction standing/relationship, NPC AI decision process and behavior model.

In other words ... Yes!

Option 2 for me, NPCs should sell their own items, but also be able to sell items that are sold to them from other players. I believe all items should work this way, even if the item is unique.

I think that merchants should indeed sell what players sell them, with the caveat that there should be a very short window (2-5 mins perhaps) where one could buy back their own goods, just in case it was sold accidentally.

If you sell it to a merchant, then the merchant has it. What they do with it afterwards is up to them. Some items should be re-sold if they are in that merchant's line.

For example, if you carry back a bag of rusty swords and bat wings to a weapon merchant, they might put those rusty swords up for sale. But the bat wings, they'd likely pawn off to another merchant.

Of course, my preference would be that merchants will only buy certain items depending on their business. So that weapon merchant would buy the weapons, but would send you on your way looking for someone else interested in the bat wings. And some items might be absolutely useless except to "Junk" merchants. (After all, who wants to buy a stock of waterlogged sandals someone fished up)

I chose time window for buyback.
Although extremely rare I have had a time or two where I sold something I did not intend to and didn't realize it until I was at the vault and looking for it to stash away.

I would switch to social buyback with static purchasable if they did a system like EQ2 where you can tag something as 'Not For Sale' to avoid any mistakes.

I also liked the vendors having stuff other players sold in EQ1. What I would like to see improved is the usefulness of the static items that can be purchased.

You accidentally sell something, you better find out quick before someone else snatches it up. No WoW buy back menu garbage.

How it works in Everquest 1 is the best, like others have said going merchant diving for lowbie crafting materials or finding that some high level character vendored bronze armor! Even nowadays I go around to find materials since people love to vendor the silks and ores in PoK.

I like option B. It a cool option because as people get upgrades they would be selling back items that are good for starting in that area. Of course it would have to have a very robust sorting feature. I wouldn't want to sit at a vendor for 10 minutes paging and paging to find the one specific thing I wanted.

This could maybe be tied in to an 'economy' of sorts. Maybe items stay with the vendor for a week, but the more items of that type that show up the lower the sale price gets.

I'd be interested to see how vendor diving would affect whatever in-game auction house was implemented. Expecting some Vork characters to pop up, should be entertaining.

As for the "200 pages of junk" comment, maybe vendors would only sell back items at least somewhat related to their normal wares. To promote players manually sorting these out, they could pay more (e.g. 10% increase) for wares that fall under that category. Even if it was a bit of a hassle, I know I would at least bank junk and go on armour vending spree, for example, to get my 10% bonus.

I don't consider this a key question for the development of the game, but is indeed a hard question, i'm used to soulbound items, so selling them is like destroying with benefits, because no one else can use them, and the other thing i sell is the grey items, useless for everyone, unless you like to collect them (weird). Also selling low level greens and blues, just because it's a long way to the auction house but thats it. So i don't get why the merchant would sell stuff i sell to him, maybe because the stuff i sell to him is REALLY useless. But if a low lvl (wich in this case doesn't work because there's no vertical prograssion) wants to buy a low lvl item i sold it would be nice for the merchant to have it.

I like the idea of being able to buyback items accidentally sold to a merchant ... but why would the merchant agree? WoW-style (where you buy back for the same price you sold it for) makes no sense. And if the item goes into the dumpster-diving section of a merchant's inventory (EQ1 style), then it should be fair game. Buyer beware is one thing, but seller beware should be the first corollary! I used to love to spend my Sunday morning dumpster-diving in The Bazaar - you could get such great bargains there.

I like how it works in EverQuest 1. It would be cool if merchants that sell specific wares were able to use raw materials themselves. For example; if I sell a gold bar and a diamond to a jewelry crafting merchant, that merchant over time can use those raw materials to craft a gold diamond ring, and sell that in place of the gold and diamond.

I personally believe that there should be a realistic market for items throughout the game. The price should vary in both purchase price and sale price based on rarity in a given area. This would promote people transporting goods to remote places to sell them, and travelling to the area of origin to buy them. I would only do this for items that would have some worth to players. I don't think every vendor should keep 800 rusty swords in their inventory. Unless of course, you institute recycling where a crafter can break down grey items and use them to craft new items. This would create a market for products that would otherwise be useless. Rat tail soup anyone?

With haggling and bartering, you will avoid accidentally selling something because you will have to engage the vendor in a dialogue. And if after you this dialogue you still feel like you made a mistake, well, guess what ... decisions have consequences, just like real life. Life doesn't have a redo option, neither should trading/selling.