The following notes form an outline of how player operated and owned
shops could work.
1. Shop Options
If buying an item would overstock the shop on a certain item, should
the shop buy it and then try to sell it to another shop or just refuse
to buy the item?
Guild discounts, for sales, and bonuses, for purchases, could be set
up, should the owner wish to favour a particular guild.
The owner should be able to set the amount and quality of advertising
for the shop (more on this below).
Obvious options to set are upper and lower limits on prices for an
item to be bought by the shop.
Other options would include either percentages of profits or certain
amounts per day to go to various guilds: the money going to the thieves'
guild would be in lieu of getting burgled; the money to the fighters'
guild would be for mercenaries and guards; the money to the wizards'
guild would be for anti-theft spells. In other words, these are options
to deal with being shoplifted.
2. Shop Success
Sales and purchases to and from a shop by players are unlikely to
keep a shop afloat (and interesting!) so there needs to be a system
to multiply up what players do and take into account the options that
the owner has set. A purchase or sale by a player would be taken as
representative of a whole chunk made by the city's inhabitants. The
city's hospital could buy items from a shop with which to outfit the
NPCs which it generates, recycling items to save on memory as well
as making trade for the shop. Advertising by shops would induce passing
NPCs to enter and buy something. Better or more adverts would give
more purchases and a better chance of entering the shop.
3. Operating versus Owning
There are two possibilities for shops, like housing. They could be
rented from the merchants' guild, given a deposit, weekly rent and
percentage of the profits, or they could be bought outright. Given
the monopoly and interests of the merchants' guild, only members
or suitably influential citizens (i.e. high level players) could
actually own a shop. The rent for a shop could be dependent on
the average number of users on the mud, reflecting how much trade
the guild thinks the shop ought to be generating. If the shop is
rented, it comes with a guild approved clerk as part of the lease;
if the shop is owned, such a clerk would have to be separately
employed. Either way, the storeroom for the shop is actually a
container that saves its inventory, being accessible from behind
the counter.
4. Phases of Development
Phase 1: Code a sample shop that uses a container with saved inventory
as the storeroom. Connect the shop's transactions to the owner's
bank account and log transations in the shop's ledger.
[This phase has actually been carried out, although more work needs to
be done on the logging aspects, given what has been learnt from coding
Tarnach's. Creators can see it the results of this first phase at
/d/guilds/merchants/Ankh-Morpork/heroes/shop_front.]
Phase 2: Build in the options except advertising and burglary related
stuff.
Phase 3: Work out mechanism for representative sales, and connect to
the city's hospital.
Phase 4: Code the merchants' guild leasing system so that players can
rent shops.
Phase 5: Add advertising.
Phase 6: Work out the burglary related stuff that occurs automatically,
on a semi-random basis.
Phase 7: Hook "shoplift" into the shop burglary system so that players
can now be involved in meeting a shop's lease holder's victim
quota.
Phase 8: Allow players to buy shops.
