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Diealot

Carrier Pigeons

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Yes,  carrier pigeons.

 

Given the worldly nature of the EL playerbase, having a mail service would be quite helpful at times.

 

Let players mail eachother messages, gc, or items via carrier pigeon (or stagecoach, or whatever). Charge a fee for sending things, perhaps proportionate to their weight in EMU (since more EMU means more carrier pigeon needed to deliver). Charging by EMU would eliminate having to value each item and would discourage people from mailing huge quantities of things.

 

Additional pricing strategies could be set up to help combat spam. Such as increasing the price per mail sent per in game #day. Putting a hard-fast limit on the number of messages would also work, but in my opinion is less desirable.`

 

Add new NPCs to mail (there's plenty of space for new NPCs) `since most of us have the storage NPC chat bypassed (though I suppose sto keepers could serve this purpose also)

 

Last, if the recipient has the sender on #ignore, then the item/message will not be seen in inbox. Also, require a skill that is not oa to be level 40 or higher in order to access the mail service in order to help combat spam and ignore override.

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For (short) messages, wehave mercator already, and that's free to use.

 

And what uses do you see for mailing low weight items that cannot be done through bots?

The way you explain it, all you can do is send gifts, with a price tag based on emu, and that would mean

it's a feature most useful for sending gc, i.e. for gc sellers.

And I don't think you'd get that kind of thing in the server code (esp. as it's something that, as far as I can see,

has no benefit for the game and no profit for radu at all).

 

Otherwise, for regular trades, how do you propose to arrange payment?

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It's not meant to replace most trading and isn't the same as trading a bot...

 

It could replace/supplement small trades where both parties trust one another to send payment so they don't actually have to meet.

 

It could be used to send gifts.

 

It could be used for guilds to 'pm' the same message to multiple people (without items attached, probably)

 

It could let people who are often not online at the same time trade one another (assuming trust)

 

It could let you send longer messages than mercator allows. Not everyone is as terse as you.

 

With longer messages, mini-guides and things could be sent to new players (particularly those on android) to give better help. (it can be difficult to chat on droid, and can be difficult to access the huge variety of help sites available to those on the full client).

 

Furthering on helping newer players, giving them items (and advice) would be more convenient. They don't have to be frustrated that they can't get to wherever the other person is, and the non-new player can quickly get back to  whatever they were doing.

 

Should I continue?

 

Sure, it won't make radu profit directly, but quality of life improvements (even if small) could help retain some new players who would then decide to purchase some of the other services radu provides.

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A lot of MMO's have mail systems. Some even have Cash On Delivery options. Someone posts that they are selling something and you pm them and say you want it. Instead of meeting up they can just mail it to you C.O.D. and you get it when you visit storage next or whenever you swing by the mailbox. 

Another use I can think of is sending stuff between alts. Especially on the Android client since you can't have 2 windows open. 

 

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Trading on trust/assuming trust... Experiences with that are "not very good" (to say the least). Most of the "stolen character"

stories have an abuse of trust as the criticial point. So, I'd rather not see anything that requires trust implemented on the server,

thank you. (and "sending gifts" can, and thus will, be abused for trading against payment). And I don't think there's any great hurry to

impement anything that will help gc traders.

 

And what about this scenario: Player X places char A at a sto near coal, char B at sto near sulphur, char C at sto near needed flowers,

char D at sto near iron, and mixer char E at any old store. Presto, no need for all that pesky walking around to get your ingredients to

the mixer, instant steel factory with minimal time loss... (unless fees are high enough to make this unattractive)

 

Reducing helping new players to "they ask X, send them book Y" isn't going to work, many have difficulty enough to follow

one-line instructions, and won't even read longer texts. If you want to give a new player items, you can go to them

And if you don't want to spend time on helping new players, should you be doing it?

 

Basically, in a game like EL, I see such a system reduce interactions between players even further. Allowing alt interaction already had

a big influence...

Edited by revi

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9 hours ago, revi said:

Trading on trust/assuming trust... Experiences with that are "not very good" (to say the least). Most of the "stolen character"

 

 

There are quite a few people I would trust with such a system, and quite a few I would not. The point is irrelevant because this would not be meant to replace normal trading. If you don't trust anyone... don't use it as a trading system. The current one will still be there.

 

9 hours ago, revi said:

And what about this scenario: Player X places char A at a sto near coal, char B at sto near sulphur, char C at sto near needed flowers,

char D at sto near iron, and mixer char E at any old store. Presto, no need for all that pesky walking around to get your ingredients to

the mixer, instant steel factory with minimal time loss... (unless fees are high enough to make this unattractive)

Uh... no...

You still have to go to sto and/or to a mail npc...

And if you're getting charged by the weight, you're not likely to send 1000s of iron via pigeon.

 

9 hours ago, revi said:

Reducing helping new players to "they ask X, send them book Y" isn't going to work, many have difficulty enough to follow

one-line instructions, and won't even read longer texts. If you want to give a new player items, you can go to them

And if you don't want to spend time on helping new players, should you be doing it?

Actually, I want more people to spend time helping new players.

Making it easier to do so might get more people involved instead of the same old faces in @@1

 

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Actually while it is in a way of Beta test and not fully tested, you can donate to mercator with /mercator donate name and put some items in, that this player can then take off mercator with /mercator get amount Item  or  mercator get all. While i do know that the System works well for people who are registered by me and i am able to make sure that everyone who have things on him can collect if something goes wrong, i am not yet 100% sure that the permission rights works to a 100 % on player who did not use the system in the past. Mercator can be used to send messages to offline players, there is an Android app that can handle the messages as well

 

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Thanks Vino, I didn't know mercator was getting such a function (:

 

I think a very loosely similar function exists in EternalBroker, if he's still online. While both of these are pretty neat features, having them restricted to the location of one bot makes them less useful than what a game wide mail service would provide.

 

The feature that Mercator has where he relays messages to an app however is very cool, and perhaps some thing similar could be integrated into the proposed system and the official EL droid app through notifications. While it would be less convenient to use the above vs. Mercator's current relay system, being able to send longer messages is a bonus as is having it be integrated into the official (droid) client.

Edited by Diealot

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the location is not the problem main problem is storage

My suggestion would be that all bots should have storage access where they stand, you remove the ability for them to walk to storage to trade, but give them full access to storage. then we have just the 300 different items limitation that way such a trade system could be made with quite a few of the bots if the owner would like to as for the places well its not to hard to travel from one map to the other so it does not matter as long as a storage is close by.

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Removing the option to get the bot to store would hurt those owners that use their bot to buy raw ingredients,

as the option to trade in store allows fast emptying of the bot (instead of x trips between bot and store).

It would also require server side changes, as bots are now just a marked form of player character (cf. the ants).

Otoh, once there are server changes, the possibility for a trade bot to move, fight, harvest could also be removed

(have the server zap them to their spot in case of accidental death, e.g. through bombing). Always better to have

the server enforce restrictions.

 

And of course, while the bot may have access to its storage, it can't send items to another bot for retrieval on a different map

(one of the key points of the original proposal, I think). And that's about the only thing that cannot be done with the current

bot system, unless we allow special bots that carry items from one bot to another (and they are allowed to do only that, to

avoid abuse of the mobility)

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I had a bot that bought lots of ores on side, and back then had so often a full bot that it exceeded the 2 time run to sto a week policy.so i had hours over hours of mixing on bot side, and then move what was left over after. so i know what i expect of a bot owner (and it was still worth for me) well if radu as i remember he did suggested years ago once to create an item that make bots non stackable items stack on bots, it would already help a lot. I do not see a need for items to move from one place to the other,  as storages have access to all of an players inventory and players do run over el in a matter of minutes do do all kind of stuff. Using a bots storage has more advantages then disadvantages.

That said i always would have liked the idea of walking NPC's

 

 

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i did think long ago that there should be ability to trade across maps , but only if both parties are in a store, ie if 1 is in srm store and 2 is in mm store.

 

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