Fee for vendors and automated disconnect in a fixed interval
Add a fee depending on the sum of all set prices in a vendor's shop
When a player wants to open a shop (after declaring all prices), a certain amount (I suggest 3% or 5%) of the declared/wanted price(s in sum) is deducted the moment the shop is opened. If the merchant doesn't carry the necessary amount of zeny, the skill fails.
Disconnect vendors regularly
Autotraders should be disconnected every now and then. I suggest every 100 hours (or four days). When opening a shop successfully a message/warning could appear, stating exact time of scheduled disconnect.
Rationale
Right now people are setting very high prices on everything and there are a lot of items, that nobody really wants to buy, thus costing valuable time looking through all the shops.
The combined means explained above would have three benefits:
- People would be forced to consider whether they want to risk putting items on a high (or even unreasonable) price and eventually end up losing money when nothing is sold. Therefore prices would eventually become reasonalbe when finding the balance between the fee and the chance of actually selling stuff.
- By enforcing a regular disconnect, items that would remain for weeks would disappear as people did not want to pay fee for an item that doesn't sell.
- The overall amount of shops will be condensed and the mentality to put up even several shops vending junk will change.
However I am aware that this might prevent people from actually setting up shops in the first place, since nobody wants to potentially lose money. Nevertheless shops selling items for insane prices do not aid anybody as well.
Additional Information
A small example with numbers. 50 Eluniums for 22.000 each. 1 Card for 5.000.000. 1 Card for 2.000.000. In total 8.1m zeny. A 5% fee would be 405.000 zeny. A 3% fee would be 243.000z.
Altering the prices to: 50 Eluniums for 20.000 each. 1 Card for 3.500.000. 1 Card for 1.200.000. In total 5.7m zeny. The 5% fee would be 285.000 zeny. A 3% fee would be 171.000z.