JohnCarver wrote:Stalls are not going the direction I'm sure many are looking for, but as with everything we do, that doesn't mean it has to be the end of the discussion or development of the item.
Private, off boston, stalls are not going to be a thing. I don't necessarily see anything wrong with it other than I would want such a thing destroyable, which I think would then mean nobody would use it given the huge map sizes. Sure its nice if a town had one for their own members, but you can also leave things in a community shed etc. etc. if it is just for your own town.
Taxes will be high.
Only one character per stall.
No you cannot alt spam stall ownership.
The rest of their mechanics will will be pretty similar to those who remember them in pre-providence days.
While I have no issue with how Boston stalls look to be going (though I'm sure I'll ***** at that high tax rate once I see it), I'm more concerned with the lack of support, interest or even though put towards local stalls. JC has stated he never played Haven&Hearth so I think he's been deprived of a key perspective here on the value of a local trade. Trade with your neighbors is very fun, it has a far more 'personal' feel to it from Boston trade, even if done by stall your very likely to kin and communicate with your customers as they come buy town, and then they will haggle over the prices and we will see more player interactions. Both the buyer and seller are 'captive' to a degree and that creates a very different relationship and a long running one, long relationships are deeper and more intense, for good or ill.
Now to address some of JC's specific (and very silly) concerns. Should stalls be destructible and lootable, HELL YES, a stall should be just like a locked chest, smash it and you can pick up the contents. But this doesn't mean that we will have a mass looting problem that would make the stall useless, because we already have the solution implemented on the existing town stalls, buy/sell FROM A DISTANCE. The town simply places the stall behind a wall (or three), and the customer dose his business over the wall. Stealing from the stall is now done exactly the same way as stealing anything else in the town, by smashing the wall first. If we feel that is an adequate security threshold for everything else in town then their is no good reason to make stuff for sale any different, in fact the trading of stuff in Boston on a character or in a soon to be implemented stall is MORE secure then it being anywhere in your base.
Large distances on the other hand are a bit trickier of a problem, but I think it is a significant self-correction potential here, people disperse themselves as much as possible because all neighbor iterations are undesirable now. With local trade we will see more clustering around towns that offer stalls. Still their may be a need for some kind of distance-limited fast travel option available, I would limit it harshly, I'd say a character needs to go to the town first and then interact with some structure placed by the town (so no visitors if you don't want em) set it as their 'local town', then can then travel between it and their homestead. The distance limit would be short, no more then a half hour walk I'd think, perhaps modified by skills/humor/having a horse etc. Some good ideas have already been proposed for how fast-travel to and from Boston could be nerfed, I'm all for that so long as local travel gets put under the same system with a lower costs commensurate to the shorter distances involved.
Lastly the use of stalls inside a town for internal commerce, this is a good thing too, though I consider it secondary to the value from local neighbor trading. Internal trade would just be another option for how to organize a town. Rather then everything being a communally run castle, you wold have the option to go with something more akin to how a real town works, separate private properties that interact with each other on a purely commercial basis. These internal stalls can certainly have some kind of tax on them, mostly likely done through increased authority drain on the town.
