If your character has the Appraisal skill, you can now "vend" treasure, selling it instantly at half its market value. Rank one allows you to vend simple treasure, including consumables and resources, while rank two allows you to vend everything, including equipment.
For those who are curious, I made Appraisal a prerequisite for vending because an item's value can be determined by vending it. To maintain the usefulness of the skill, it was necessary to tie the two together. The skill will likely be renamed as a result to reflect its increased scope. I've been considering calling it Mercantile, but I'm open to suggestions.
Note that vended treasure won't just go away. I haven't finished the final component yet, but I plan to have any vended treasure (as well as periodically-generated random treasure) automatically become the property of the Open Market. Think of the Open Market as a non-character, a faceless menagerie of silent merchants that only exist to sell goods in much the same way as I've been using the existing merchant NPCs. This will act as their replacement, while still allowing plot members the option to have merchant NPCs with whom you can actually haggle and role-play. Treasure owned by the Open Market will be put back up for sale the following day at a dynamic markup based on its sales history. Popular items that tend to sell well or quickly will automatically have higher markups, while less popular items may sell for their market value. If an item fails to sell after a month, it will be permanently deleted.
Anyway, that's the system in a nutshell. Vending of items is functional already, but the Open Market enhancement will take a bit more work. I'll post an update once I've got that part working. In the mean time, let me know what you guys think.
The open market enhancement is now live. All treasure that is vended will automatically go up for sale on the open market the following day, and treasure that remains on the open market for more than 30 days is automatically destroyed. Since we wanted to make sure and push this out quickly, open market prices have a fixed markup for the time being; I'll be implementing dynamic price adjustments later on.
Note that, in the process of testing the new enhancement, I inadvertently took some treasure off sale. If you had anything up for sale, please check your inventory and put it back on sale if it's been taken down. Apologies for the inconvenience.
I was on a roll today, so I decided to put in a few more hours of programming and managed to get random treasure generation integrated with the open market. New consumables and resources will now be added to the open market daily, a new piece of equipment will be added randomly once every couple of days, and a new piece of rare equipment will be added randomly once every month or so.
As a point of note, remember that the open market is not meant to be the one-stop shop for everything your character might need. Things you want may show up there eventually, but only at random. If you need something badly and don't see it up for sale, your best bet is to interact with your fellow PCs or make it yourself.
The same goes for really nice equipment. A few pieces may go up for sale randomly throughout the year, but the nicest equipment will need to be made from scratch, most likely after months of painstaking effort to collect all of the necessary trade skill production, materials, reagents, and rituals.
Alright, I've got the final piece worked in. Prices for open market items are now being determined dynamically. I'll post a more detailed version below for those who are curious, but the short version is that treasure that goes on the open market will be priced based on the likelihood it has to sell. Items that sell consistently will have a higher markup, while items that sell rarely will have a lower or nonexistent markup.
Here's how it works in detail. Every morning, the system recalculates the sale price of treasure on the open market by analyzing its sales history. For each piece of treasure, it takes the total number of times that kind of treasure has been sold and divides by the total number of times its been on sale. This is the success ratio.
The system then calculates another variable that I've dubbed the commoditization factor, designed to make cheaper items more resistant to markup. If an item's price is less than 16 gold pieces, the commoditization factor is equal to the price, divided by 20, plus 0.2. A Raw Rare Gem (normally worth 10 gold pieces), for example, would have a commoditization factor of 0.7. Anything with a price greater than or equal to 16 gold pieces simply has a commoditization factor of one.
Finally, the system multiplies these two numbers to determine the item's markup. An item that sells 45% of the time with a base price of 9 gold pieces, for example, would have a markup of (0.45 * ((9/20) + 0.2) =) 29.25%, giving it a total sell price of 11.6 gold. If the item has never been on sale before, the system instead gives it a standard markup of 25% (roughly in line with the markups of the old merchants). Again, these prices are recalculated daily, so any price you see on the open market is only guaranteed to stay that way until the following morning.
I had originally envisioned a speed factor that would further modify an item's markup depending on how quickly it tended to sell, but that turned out to be difficult to program. The way the system is set up now, it only matters that the item sells at all, not when it sells during the month it's on sale.
We'll see how this setup works in the short term, but it can easily be modified in the long term. If anyone has any thoughts or suggestions, please feel free to share them.
I gotta say.... thats sweet