Shroud of the Avatar gives its shopkeepers a Victorian makeover

Lipstick on a pig.

One fact you may not know about Shroud of the Avatar is that it allows players to stock and operate their own virtual shopkeepers to sell crafted and looted wares… But if you don’t pay real money to buy your own house, and then more real money for the Commission Free vendor, the NPC vendors will charge you 10% of the sale price when it’s placed, and if it doesn’t sell in 7 days, they delete the item entirely and give you a fraction of the NPC value.

And that NPC economy value is deliberately terrible, because like everything else in this atrocious game that I regret ever backing, everything including vending is built to make Real Money Trading the only supportable option.

The Commission Free Vendors only came in the Citizen Pledge and upwards, and certain housing bundles, by the way. That pledge cost $550.

But still, as long as you can rent a vendor in someone else’s home, and reset your items every 6 days so they don’t just destroy them, being a merchant can be great fun, right?!

Atos: The economy is doing amazing well in my opinion. Inflation is just about exactly where I want it, the gold to COTO values are pretty much exactly where I predicted they would be, but there is too much stagnation on vendors. I think that is one thing I regret is not putting some long term cost for items on vendors or having some kind of auto purge for old things. Mix that with a modest pre-launch player population and it results in a LOT of items sitting on too many vendors. I have ideas on addressing that BUT first I’m waiting for launch to see how things change with lots more players. I think local economies develop but less in the way we expected. Trade towns evolved but it is just too hard and too punishing to all to try and restrict trade to specific areas for the economy. There is still some locality stuff but not as much as we talked about the first year or two.

Oh.

That’s Chris Spears the developer talking about the last Release. Does anyone have the “This Is Fine” house on fire macro to hand?

COTO are the Premium Currency, in case you didn’t know. Yes, they openly talk about manipulating the exchange rate of the Premium Currency in order to keep the price to Gold and thus Real Dollars viable.

But strangely, they’ve not quite grasped that when you are so focused on creating a game for real life rich Sellers, and actively destroy the items of anyone who couldn’t afford a permanent vendor, you don’t end up with many Buyers. Even with an (a-ha-ha-hah) “modest pre-launch population” of a record of 500 concurrent players in Spears own words elsewhere.

But hey! Whiskers!

I really wish they would make this game not run like ass at high settings.

uhm…strange and sorta looks like old, old visual tech to me.

He looks hilarious.