Merchant Rivalry

Drueric said:

You are making my point for me.

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Except you are failing to acknowledge that the converse is also true. Someone can upvote the original, not-fleshed-out idea because it sounds good in theory. They don't follow the thread as it gets morphed into something they never intended or wanted. Players need to have a way to say 'nay' to an idea. It's a 'community' game and the community should have a voice.

Then the way is not to up or down vote the idea from the first post, but when it's grown and defined, I think good ideas could come from bad starting thoughts, and as you say bad ideas could grow from really nice intial words, so what about just voting when the discussion is finished and the idea is at least workable?

Morfordus said:

Then the way is not to up or down vote the idea from the first post, but when it's grown and defined, I think good ideas could come from bad starting thoughts, and as you say bad ideas could grow from really nice intial words, so what about just voting when the discussion is finished and the idea is at least workable?

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while this is further off the subject of this playervoice you are already able to change your votes

Morfordus said:

Then the way is not to up or down vote the idea from the first post, but when it's grown and defined, I think good ideas could come from bad starting thoughts, and as you say bad ideas could grow from really nice intial words, so what about just voting when the discussion is finished and the idea is at least workable?

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This is where the Galactic Senator system comes into play. They can flesh out ideas with the players to come up the ideal game plan. PV is not a good forum for fleshing out complicated ideas like this one. There are many simple ones suggested in this forum that are quite complete from the start and can be decided upon rather quickly.

I really like this idea and have thought of this often. After all, the majority of Star Wars stories include a criminal organization and smugglers stealing things

I'd use it to target the issues of economy balance and powerhouse / monopoly crafters. Also adds a bit more of a crafting "end game". One of the things that always turned me off about SWG merchant system was a single entity taking over entire sectors of the economy.

As a crafter, In order to be eligible a credit threshold of sold goods would need to be reached. If you're making millions in a month, you're automatically flagged for this system. This could even be a top percentile of all vendors, instead of a static #. I'm unsure of how this would work if you used another character for vendor ownership, harvester ownership, etc. Probably best to link it to item creator and all other account characters?

The smuggler would receive sabotage missions similar to bounty hunter terminal. As the smuggler completes these missions, they receive bounty faction points and end up as an eligible bounty target. The more bounty faction points they have, the higher level crafters they go for and the more money they can make.

The crafter can pay the bounty hunter mission terminal to attack certain smugglers. There would be an inherent cost based on bounty faction points.

The bounty hunter would choose to pick up a bounty. If successful in killing of the smuggler, they would receive the credit reward (might have to take a house cut to avoid manipulation), AND most importantly the crafter is "protected" from all smugglers a short amount of time. Maybe a week. If unsuccessful, the smuggler would gain negative bounty faction, unlocking higher paying missions.

It would work best if both received mission cash for completion instead of stealing resources, blueprints, or money from the player themselves. I don't think a crafting boost would be wise here either. The danger being powerhouse groups would become even more powerful using this system.

Sabotage of harvesters would cause loss of resources and cost credits to repair. Blueprint stealing from factories would delete the blueprint. Basic concept of keeping the top percentile crafters in the game grounded so the economy doesn't run out of control and also giving them a bit of an endgame.

Drueric said:

A proposal isnt a hard object, incapable of being altered. they are malleable, able to be shaped and improved upon by more and better ideas. So long as the idea isnt just dismissed out of hand and finds its way into the game in some refined form, because its a good idea.

Thats why proposals being voted on, based on the original post is dumb. people arent going to keep reading the discussion to see that the idea has been added to and improved on by other ideas and suggestion like these. So now, the R3 guy is gonna come in here, look at the downvotes, and throw out a perfectly good suggestion, saying its "unpopular" because of the shallow downvoting system.

They should only allow upvotes with no downvote option, just like the "like" option on comments doesnt have a "dislike" option. it would toxic. And the downvote option IS toxic.

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I think that one of the key bits is to work within the limitations of the PV system rather than highlighting what you're not a fan of. We put up a proposal and people vote on it. Many voters aren't going to read all the comments and many are going to vote on it and never look at it again because they've said if they like it or not. If a proposal significantly changes the best bet is to create a new PV post and mark the original as defunct, so that people can vote on the updated version as a "clean" suggestion. It almost goes without saying to be sensible, nobody wants to have twenty tiny variations of an idea and sometimes unpopular ideas just need to be put in the bin.

I actually quite like the PV system as it stands - speaking from a dev's perspective, trawling through chaff takes a huge amount of time that would be better spent coding and the PV system really helps to highlight popular and unpopular ideas.