As I’m sure most of us are aware, the Local Market system as it is now is one that is… functional, but with many restrictions. Most players have learned a few ways to get around some of the more limiting aspects of the LM (Such as posting ads selling 1 DW for 100,000 or vice versa), but these solutions are clunky at best, and at worst can be preyed upon by bad actors. I’ve thought of a few ways to solve/mitigate some of the issues which I’ve noticed which should be purely Quality of Life changes.
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Blacklists/Whitelists. Most of the time players are fine with their LM ads being accessible to anyone from the public (with the requisite rating, ofc), but sometimes you may want to make an exception to that. Perhaps there’s a specific player that you want to take the ad in order to fulfill a deal that you’ve made with them, or there’s a group of players that you have good relationships with that you’re willing to offer discounts for that you don’t wish to offer the general public. With a whitelist, you can add qualifiers to your LM ad that only the person(s) you designate may see the ad so that it doesn’t get taken by somebody else. Or perhaps there’s people you’d rather NOT have access to your ads. Perhaps there’s people you’ve interacted with who frequently fulfill their sides of the contracts at the very last minute (if at all!) and after a few instances of it happening, you just don’t want to have to deal with them anymore. A blacklist is the opposite of a whitelist- you add qualifiers to your LM ad so that the person(s) you designate may NOT see the ad, so that it doesn’t get taken by them.
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Corporation options. In order to function properly, corporations require the ability to use the local market. However, since the market is very much public, there is always the threat of corporate ads getting taken either by a random player outside of the corporation unknowingly, or by a member of a ‘hostile’ corporation to intentional sabotage their operations. Many corps have skirted this by posting 1 currency ads so that it isn’t desirable to do this, but this does add an extra degree of complexity to the game as most corps don’t have an internal market where the goods they’re selling are actually on valued at 1 unit of currency, which often results in multiple ads being needed for singular transfers of goods, or internal tallying to see who has traded what. With corporate markets, this could all be alleviated, and corp members could feel free to post whatever for what it’s actually worth without worrying about the ad being sniped out from under them. Potentially corporations could be added into the blacklist/whitelist system, as I feel like this would be the more intuitive option for players, as well as probably being easier to code (And would also allow for edge-case scenarios such as when a corporation power structure has a member who is effectively a part of the corporation but technically is a member of another, which happens most often with governors).
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The ability to save ‘default settings’ for the 2 prior suggestions. To put it simply, if you’ve got 3 people who you really don’t want to trade with, or if the vast majority of your LM trades involve your corp or your friends, then you won’t want to have to type that in again every time you make a LM ad.
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The ability to ‘rent cargo space’ when doing shipping contracts. As it is now, if you have multiple goods you want to ship to the same destination, you have to make 1 ad for each different type of good being shipped, which is time-consuming first of all, but additionally forces you to pay the LM fee multiple times and also clutters up your active contracts. With renting cargo space, you’d simply tally up how much space/tonnage you need to take up with all of your items together, and then make an ad for however much you’d need. Maybe you’re given a separate inventory buffer which you could then place items into in the meantime, with the inventory buffer having as much size as the space you requested. Then you’re given an item (Similar to the ‘locked’ items you get after you’ve provisioned your shipment but before it’s been picked up) that changes in size based on how much you’ve put into the new buffer (so that the space in your normal inventory is still taking up just as much room as before to prevent people from cheesing this feature to get free temporary inventory space?). Might be hard to code but I’d love an idea similar to this.
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More direct trade options? This one is lower on the priority list, but if it’s not too difficult to code in, maybe there could be functionality for simply GIVING people stuff without needing at least 1 unit of currency or 1 good in exchange. Additionally, it’d be nice if you could directly trade goods for goods or currency for currency.
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Maybe also ad the ability to issue refunds on contract cancellations. I don’t know how many times it’s happened to me where I put up what I thought was a ‘buy’ ad but was actually a ‘sell’ ad and somebody took it and immediately paid me for something I didn’t have, or gave me items I didn’t actually want. I’d love to have the ability to say “Oops, I’m sorry that was an accident, here I’ll give you your stuff/money back” or alternatively cancel the contract completely if the other party hasn’t fulfilled any step by that point. If implemented, there should probably still be SOME rating hit (maybe 1/10 of a what you would’ve been given had you simply breached the contract) to avoid people intentionally cheesing with this.