Hello!

    I was wondering if chest shops were in the plans for Noobstown. I like he auction, but there are definate limitations. I think that chest shops and auction would work together well.

    One of the biggest drawback to Auction is timing. If I have spider eyes in the auction and the time runs out, I could miss a sale if 5 minutes later an enchantress logs on looking for an ingredient for her favorite potions. The semi permanence of the chest shops would do away with this. This would also improve the economy by making low value or low volume items profitable to sell since the auction fees are bypassed. (Yes, there would still be rent). The auction is great for higher volume or high valued items.

   The biggest drawback (the only one I have seen mentioned, repeatedly) to the chest shops is location, location, location! The shop owners who have front and center placement for their shops have an unfair advantage over those in the back. What I suggest would be /warp-shop that takes you to the shops and would work like this:

    The destination for /warp-shop would be a shop cell. Each cell (there could be as many as needed) would have a central courtyard 3x3 chunks. Each side of the courtyard would have 3 one chunk shops for the player to rent. These could be blank plots for the player to build on or could be pre-built, each identical to the other (boring, but “fair”). The buyer would warp into the center of each cell, giving each shop owner a chance at front row placement. Behind the scenes, the server would place buyer 1 in cell 1 facing North, buyer 2 in cell 1 facing East, Buyer 3 cell 1 facing South, buyer 4 cell 1 facing West, buyer 5 in cell 2 facing North and so on. Once in the shop zone, a buyer will be able to /warp shop 3 and go to cell 3, where his favorite seller of rotten flesh peddles his wares. The shop owner could have /warp-myshop to take him to their own shop.

   V6 Noobstown looks awesome. What I have suggested for chest shops breaks with the aesthetics of Noobstown since the cells would be separate from Noobstown. To help with this, I offer a variation on this theme (warping to give all owners a shot at front and center). There could be a shop zone, like in V5. The big difference for V6 would be that when you go through the entrance of the shopping district, the buyer would warp to the next store in the list.

   Just putting in my two cents. Hope to see chest shops soon!

Craftymatt13

Chest shops exist now. There won't be anything like there was at spawn in V5, but people can make chest shops within their town or I think in the wilderness.

-gg

To avoid waiting for an auction to end, there's the buyout option.
If some players are ignoring that option, blame those players and not the system.

Also, a town doesn't really need a lot of residents to make a shop work. A shop will work as long as items are kept in stock with reasonable prices and people know where to go.

In Dracomere we planned out a couple of shop spaces right away (and will add more as the town grows) because even if most people would end up preferring auctions, there would still be a benefit in having people visiting the town and walking right in front of a shop and wondering "since I'm already here it can't hurt to take a look".
That's how shops in real life work.

The real problem I think we have at the moment is that since the server is still at the beginning, most people don't want to spend money on items and prefer to get more chunks and no amount of "visibility" can change the situation.

Unless something is really underpriced, most people will just keep mining and gathering resources on their own instead.