[Suggestion] Allow Player Shops in the Frontier

If remote signs worked in the frontier & took from your shop in town, you would still have to come to town to stock your shop. That would get people coming to town and still have a shop in the frontier with no chest to worry about being robbed

But there are other towns as well. It is natural (optimizing transport) that shops will be in a "market town". But not just one "market town" for the whole country. Smaller settlements will have smaller shops that suit their local needs and will (have to) go to town if they need anything else.

I'm arguing for a natural development of the in-game economy, and thus community, without tweaking and/or manipulation. If there is an intervention, there ought to be clear and sound reasons and explanation for it.

There might be a reason or two for not having chest-shops in the Frontier - other then the small effort needed to have chest-shops there automatically locked and other than the associated locking fee - but what is it and what is the consideration behind it?

There Are outposts out in the wild... Some have over 20 players. The ability to be able to have small Strip malls (A branch of connected stores of different types), or have small shops for say Minecarts at rails, or have small Variety Stores for quick items (Saplings, Wood, Coal, Stone, Gems).

It may seem its bad for the economy, but there are already people who live in the wild. Having to go back to town, and transporting all the items back to the outpost is always a pain.

The way i can see it, is if they are concerned with the locking, why not have each chest shop cost say Tokens (As in you are not in town, so then you are using items you gather while out of town), and when you make the chest shop it would cost say 10-100 tokens, per chest and it would auto lock when you create the chest. To be able to access the chest, you just add say a access sign under or above the chest for players who want to access or just buy from the shop.

Just what i though....

~Finch

You can already lock chests for free with the Anti-Grief protection. Not always as convenient as a lock sign, but if you have a locked room with several chests it might be even better. Asked about the locking fee in that context, Krysyy wrote that she doesn't care about it.
I don't think that locking (or locking fee) is a significant question or problem.

Putting any significant fee on chest-shops in the Frontier would probably make more problems than it's worth.

If it would be Tokens - "oh I need to kill a Momentus to add few chest-shops" ... would be quite strange IMO. It would favor older players, which I don't think would be good for EMC. Also, what if you want to create the chest-shops with an alt in order to have separate rupee account for the shops?

If it would be rupees then it would increase the margin / price of the product by more or less a fixed amount - making otherwise cheap products significantly more expensive.

And what when the shop owner needs to change the price? If there would be any fee like 50% when you need to move a locked chest, then each price adjustment would be penalized - also a strange and unnatural thing.

I posted that on the first page as i am really sure you did post it somewhere. And it makes sense as then its like a established area. (Also stops players from placing them anywhere and even in places they are not allowed.

When they are, would it be like a Locked Chest or like a chest as if its in your residence?

Can you please explain the reasoning behind this decision?

My 2 cents for what they're worth after reading this thread. If I've misunderstood something, feel free to correct me.

Having a market in your established outpost after Empires update comes out makes a sense. Hooray for frontier life! There are boundaries to your outpost. There's usually a leader or ruling committee, or the population of the outpost rules it together in some fashion. A market or shop/s would go in designated areas within the boundaries of that outpost for that community. If someone were to leave EMC or that "Empire", the leader would have rights to clean up after them. This sounds manageable and would be a good feature.

Now imagine being able to place shop chests/signs willy nilly in the frontier. An outpost in the wild next to an ocean would suddenly acquire 100 chests selling boats. Any high traffic areas such as PWU would get chests slapped down selling food and swords, etc. Kill me now please. This has the potential to be a giant mess and eyesore. Who is going to clean up after players who have left EMC or abandoned that "shop"? It sounds like a hard to manage idea.

That's exactly what we already have, especially after the Anti-Grief update. Automatically locked Chest-Shops wouldn't change that.
(BTW, it is possible to manage that and it wouldn't be too complicated.)

I assume that every bigger settlement would become a part of en "Empire" and thus have the ability to use chest-shops. That's probably good enough. (Except for settlements that for one or the other reason will not be able to become a part of an "Empire".)

I still wonder what is the reason behind disabling chest-shops in the Frontier independent of "Empires".