Here's my suggestions: Be able to link a shop sign to a chest nearby, not just below it but anywhere on your res, or even on a neighboring res. Be able to have shop signs buy and sell EXP, since new EXP will not be introduced through this, it would have no effect on the EMC TEXP rankings. Be able to sell sets of items (Armor set, Tool Set, Potion Set, etc...) from 1 chest with 1 purchase. Be able to sell or buy custom items (Enchanted books, written books, EMC items, etc..) without having to do the [slot 1] "trick". (Think a solution is in progress for this though) There is a plugin that has this ability and is quite easy to use. I have it on my home server for my kids. Since the plugin itself would more than likely not be used, here's the link for the devs to see what I am referring to. Maybe some of the coding can be used. http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/signshop/
No, that probably wouldn't work. You would have to purchase XP by the number of orbs. Because the amount of XP needed to get between levels changes as you go farther up, the levels could get hugely skewed. The equation is exponential in nature, going between elect 39 and 40 could take you between 1 and 10. Because people rarely if ever have absolutely zero XP, a sell-by-level system wouldn't work.
If the XP thing takes away from your XP, wouldn't it become annoying say if you were enchanting something but then someone comes to your res and takes 10 levels now you need to go get 10 more levels for your enchantment? besides that it sounds fine to me. I can't think of when I would use the sign not near the chest, but if you could give me an example of that I would probably support it.
Say you sell bows. If someone needs a lot of bows, that would be hard to fit in a double chest. Therefore you can have a chest somewhere else that has hoppers connected. Therefore you do not need to have hoppers and chests in your main selling area.
Buying exp might work if it was an EMC Only sign - Not player signs ... So no one would be taking fair advantage of the usages. But the process would be there if you needed quick exp, but didn't have time to go to the wild. Selling, however, wouldn't be fair - as some players could set up an alt account to afk at a grinder, get exp, switch servers, sell it to their main's shop for free ... and then the shop having exp re-bought ... for practically free money.
I see your point about the player shops selling exp, but the empire would not sell the exp as it adds "unearned" exp to the game and affects the TEXP leaderboards, unless the devs, aka aikar, can code in that bought exp does not count.
With the plugin I referenced, you can have multiple signs reference the same chest too, for different items. for example, if you want to sell a armor set but you also want to let your shoppers buy just the pieces that they need, you can set up 5 signs and point them all to the same chest (which can be in a another room). below is how you would set it up. 1 DC(which has 54 slots) has 12 helmets, 12 chest plates, 12 leggings, and 12 boots 5 signs: 1- helmet 2- chest 3- legging 4-boots 5- armor set - would sell a full set each time they clicked the sign. Or if you had a lazy shop owner who wants to put all his/her mob drops in the same chest, they can do that and just have multiple signs to sell the different drops, like string, bones, rotten flesh, etc...
How would multiple of these shops work? So they would have to code it so the shop would check a players xp even if the player is afk, earning xp, or not online at all. I can see tons of glitches happening with this. How would you put this on the sign? Nothing is wrong with the slot system right now...
I don't follow what you mean, you can link a sign to whatever chest you want, be it 5 signs to one chest or 25 signs to 25 chests. The players xp is constantly being stored in a database on the server, which is why if a server crash, either Mojang or EMC, you pick up right where you left off. Shouldn't be too many glitches with it. The idea behind this and as with the plugin I referenced, you don't type anything in the sign other than Buy/Sell and the price. When you start to link the chest and sign by clicking on the chest, it checks the inventory of the chest and whatever is in there when you click the sign is what is being sold/bought. After the link is made you can add more to the chest so it stays in stock. Yes it works, but wouldn't it be nice to fill a DC of Looting III enchanted books and being able to sell 5 at a time. I know, it's improbable that someone would want to buy 5 at once, but it could happen.
