I am mainly a CoF player, but recently tried Merchants Guild. The gameplay progression in Merchant’s Guild is significantly worse due to CoF’s Prophecy mechanic. It gives you a purpose towards grinding faction Reputation. In Merchant’s Guild if no one is buying your low level stuff, you are basically forced to just keep grinding echos to slowly gain reputation in order to be able to buy gear you may want, but honestly by that point, you probably wont need to buy the gear because you will likely have dropped similar.
My suggestion would be something similar to prophecies for Merchants Guild, like a bounty system. Example being… “Kill X Immortal Eyes, Reward 10k Gold and 2K Favor” and of course the targets can be the same as CoF prophecies, just rewarding you gold and Rep for MG.
That would cause MG to become vastly stronger then CoF, which wouldn’t be good.
I’ve written in several threats by now what MG needs to have a enjoyable experience. I’ll repeat it again.
A exclusive currency instead of Gold.
A extremely high taxation (15% is low) unless a proper permanent viable and sought after gold sink is introduced. The same goes for exclusive currency.
Proper search functionality (sorting by highest value, sub-sorting the second most wanted affix by highest value beyond that, as a start)
A re-work of the whole rank-mechanic, the current one is beyond awful. Gear needs to have a sort of internal ‘power level’ which the base as well as each affix and the respective tier needs to increase accordingly (low tiers less then high tiers, can be handled via total end-multiplier after total tiers are added together) uniques need to also be included in that based on rarity and acquisition rate (common boss is less often acquired then common timeline unique for example)
a limited amount of available listing slots to avoid market flooding and ensuring people have space to provide their items accordingly, this ensures newer player can sell items even later in a cycle.
Those are the major points if I haven’t forgotten anything off the top of my head.
Im not sure I would say it would make MG better. I would still play CoF a majority of the time as trading in this game is very dependent on player count, and a high player count doesn’t necessarily mean MG players, because later in a season most players are in CoF due to the market being scarce
Players starting as MG also stay MG, the changing of factions is so extremely punishing that you usually can’t switch after using it a while. You can only start a secondary character and start from scratch or basically restart for your gear at nearly rock bottom most of the time.
People buying your stuff or not has no impact on your reputation. You gain reputation in MG in the same way you gain it in CoF: gaining favour via XP (2 reputation per 1 favour gained) and spending favour (2 reputation per 1 favour spent). This means that listing items is what increases your reputation, not actually selling them.
