There are ways to make the Merchant’s guild even more interesting while keeping them very thematic. The farming feels objective-less other than “farm favor so I can sell/buy”, despite there being depth in the fact you are basically farming for dozens of builds. Although, there really needs to be a couple supporting systems that make this feel better IMHO.
The Merchant’s Exchange - This one is a simple concept. There will be a single NPC that allows you to trade your Favor for another player’s Gold. Or you can trade your Gold for another player’s Favor.
- Listing Favor on the Exchange affects your reputation like normal.
- Favor purchased this way does not affect your reputation.
- Using up your favor after you’ve purchased it affects your reputation like normal.
- The most valuable trade is the only one available to purchase. All favor purchased is done in order like this. For example, you buy 1000 favor and the most valuable trades are in as 800 favor for 80000 gold, 100 favor for 11000 gold and 200 favor for 24000 gold. Inputting the value of 800 will cost 80000 gold. Putting in the value 900 will cost 99000 gold (but refund you 8000 gold). Putting in the value 1000 will cost 120000 gold (but will refund you 17000 gold).
- There would need to be a gold tax on exchanges to discourage razor thin favor-flipping and this as the added benefit of siphoning some gold out of the economy to counteract eventual inflation.
- There should also be an auctioneers fee for purchased items. This would be a minimum additional cost to purchase an item that is added to the base cost of the purchase that does not go to the seller. It would be a small value exactly equivalent to the favor cost. So a t7 exalted would cost 4000 extra gold that would disappear from the economy, while most smaller items would be between 200-1000 gold.
Contracts, Ledgers or Work Orders - Basically a similar system like Prophecies, but without the added target farm or lens functions (as those would be CoF exclusive). Instead of buying lenses and using prophecies, you would walk up to a Work Order board and use Favor to start Contracts.
- When you fill out the contract you’d get the reward.
- Instead of items, the rewards would be things such as Gold, Gold Find buffs, Wealth Shrine multiplication, Arbor Vault discounts, Haste buff 5 seconds whenever picking up gold, Turning shard/rune monoliths rewards into wealth explosions…
- Several of the contracts could be unique to Merchants too such as “Activate a Wealth Shrine” or “Purchase at least 3 vault affixes for Arbor” or “Complete a Gold Monolith”.
- “Refresh the ledger” would cost favor (and still give rep for spending favor) and give a new list of Contracts.
- There would be no need for lenses or any other adjustment to this. CoF gets lenses to boost their prophecies, MG gets buying and selling as a result of filling out their contracts.
There would be some inflation from getting more gold, but this wouldn’t be an increase or decrease in your purchasing power. Basically if items went up 3 times in price but you are making 3 times as much, there’s no difference in purchasing power.
The benefits are two-fold.
- You would NEED to be in the Merchant’s Guild in order to farm the gold effectively for your faction.
- This method of farming and using favor creates a cycle that just feels better as favor and gold are working together in tandem to provide a better “Merchant” experience when you are murdering monsters in the timelines.*