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Markets — tents, merchants, shopfronts

Canon

Two player-market surfaces, split by what physically trades on each:

  • The bazaar (Grand Exchange) order-matches fungible goods — ores, crops, materials, Bounty Notes, Life Essence: identical stackables. Canon elsewhere; unchanged here.
  • Market tents are the unique-goods market: enchanted gear with its rolled magnitudes, upgraded items, curated bundles — everything whose identity lives on the individual ItemStack and therefore cannot order-match. A tent is a vending stand: fixed-price listings that sell while the owner is offline, proceeds crediting the owner's Coin balance.

Tent economics. Rent is periodic and paid in Coins; tent upgrades — size, listing count, displays — are bought with Coins; premium pitches are owner-tuned (auction or first-come). Featured slots advertise a tent in high-visibility spots for a paid duration: Coins only, rotating, with anti-abuse limits (one slot per player, the shop must be active, a cooldown before re-featuring). Rent, upgrades, and featured fees are the market-side Coin sinks named by D-CURRENCY-05.

Tent ownership is player or — slot reserved — guild: guild-owned tents (selling Great-Works or raid output into a shared guild balance) are deliberately deferred to the guilds session (D-MARKETS-06).

NPC merchants. Region merchants live on their adventure island — the island's portal gate is the merchant gate, no separate unlock machinery. The hub keeps its rotating shop ring (staff ruling 2026-07-16: rotating NPC shops respawn around the hub and always come back). Merchants are both halves of D-CURRENCY-05: they buy player goods at the owner-tuned floor price (the Coin faucet) and sell their catalogs (a Coin sink). Anything progression-flavored in a catalog passes the one shop audit of D-CURRENCY-04 — rate hooks only, never a progression write.

Rotation and the no-FOMO edge. Rotating stock shows a visible timer; per-player daily/weekly purchase caps are flow control, not expiry. Rotating and limited items return — with one owner-ruled exception: rare server-wide exclusives are allowed, cosmetics only (a one-off run that never returns may exist as a look, never as any non-cosmetic item). The ruling defines the no-FOMO promise's edge and is recorded as a 2026-07-16 vision amendment.

Merchant variants — wandering, timed, hidden, rare-spawn — are welcome flavor inside those same rules: whatever wanders, returns.

Decisions

D-MARKETS-01 — bazaar trades fungibles, tents trade uniques (ratified 2026-07-16)

The split is mechanical, not thematic: order matching requires identical goods, so the GE gets commodities and tents get everything with per-item identity (enchants, upgrade tiers). Each surface does what only it can; neither undercuts the other.

Rejected: tents as social storefronts selling the same goods as the GE (the GE wins on price and tents decay into decoration); tents replacing the GE for player selling (re-litigates the ratified Grand-Exchange amendment).

D-MARKETS-02 — tents are vending stands: offline sales, escrowed proceeds (ratified 2026-07-16)

Fixed-price listings sell around the clock; proceeds credit the owner's Coin balance. The market stays alive at all hours and rent stays worth paying. Fixed prices also blunt scam listings — what you see is what you pay.

Rejected: attended-only selling (tents dead most hours; a trade window with extra steps); attendance-scaled listing caps (two modes to explain for marginal social texture).

Periodic Coin rent; Coin-bought size/listing/display upgrades; featured visibility paid in Coins only for a rotating duration under anti-abuse limits. All owner-tuned in data.

Rejected: profession-mastery-earned tent tiers (locks casual sellers out; needless cross-system coupling); one flat tent size (drops V1's long-term shop-owner goals and the deeper sink); MobCoin-paid featuring (the MobCoin shop stays the sole MobCoin sink, D-CURRENCY-06).

D-MARKETS-04 — region merchants are island-gated; the hub hosts the rotating ring (ratified 2026-07-16)

A region merchant's gate is the island portal that guards it (D-WORLD-SYSTEM-02) — advanced merchants feel earned because reaching them is. The hub ring carries the rotating shops per the 2026-07-16 staff ruling. Merchant reach becomes another reason to climb the island ladder.

Rejected: all merchants at the hub (adventure islands lose economic pull; "every island unique" suffers); a separate merchant unlock track on quests/reputation/bosses (rebuilds the gating machinery world-system rejected; reputation does not exist).

D-MARKETS-05 — everything returns, except cosmetic server-wide exclusives (ratified 2026-07-16)

Owner promise-edge ruling. Rotation and limited stock always cycle back — urgency is "sooner or later", never "never again" — except a rare server-wide exclusive run, which is permitted for cosmetics only. Nothing non-cosmetic may ever be permanently unobtainable (P2A wall logic: exclusivity is the thing money can never buy — nor can lateness, outside looks). Recorded as a 2026-07-16 vision amendment beside the ranks/crates boundary rulings.

Rejected: strict everything-returns (cleanest promise reading — owner chose collector scarcity at the cosmetic edge); unlimited server-wide one-offs including non-cosmetics (breaches the promise outright).

D-MARKETS-06 — guild tents: slot reserved, design deferred to guilds (ratified 2026-07-16)

Tent ownership is typed player-or-guild from day one, but guild-tent mechanics — proceeds into the shared guild balance, stock rules for Great-Works/raid output, who pays rent — wait for the guilds session, which owns the shared-balance design (and raids are an empty V1 placeholder). The socket exists; the wiring lands there.

Rejected: designing guild tents now (forces early calls on the undesigned shared guild balance and raid rewards); player-only tents forever (loses a Great-Works-flavored economic surface).

D-MARKETS-07 — the V1 corpus fate table (ratified 2026-07-16)

V1 idea Fate
Reputation-gated merchants / reputation discounts Dead unless a reputation system is ever designed
Event merchants / seasonal market events Deferred → events-world session
Auction systems / auctioned featured slots Deferred — future expansion; revisit after tents ship
Guild markets / guild shop showcases Deferred → guilds session (D-MARKETS-06)
Multi-currency merchants (event/profession/reputation/crystal) Dead — merchants trade in Coins (D-CURRENCY-01 roster); the MobCoin shop is its own ratified system
Wandering / timed / hidden / rare-spawn merchants Adopted as variants inside the always-returns rule
Shop ratings / marketplace rankings Deferred — social-hub flavor; revisit with the social session
"Progression items" in merchant stock Bound by the D-CURRENCY-04 shop audit — rate hooks only

Rejected: designing the deferred items now against undesigned systems.

Tuning

  • data/markets.json — tent rent cadence and amounts, upgrade tiers, featured-slot durations/fees/limits, rotation timers, per-player purchase caps, the cosmetic-exclusive policy flag, merchant floor-price philosophy. Owner-edited; V1-derived examples are illustrative.

Implementation

No owning mod yet. Tent listings and escrowed proceeds are a natural lib-storage consumer question — stop condition: a new SQLite consumer needs a ratified design doc first (root CLAUDE.md); the alternative is riding bazaar.db alongside GE escrow. Decide at implementation spec time, not here. Merchant catalogs are owner-edited JSON (config, not storage).

Open questions

  • Tent listing/proceeds persistence: new lib-storage DB (needs the design-doc gate) vs a bazaar.db extension — implementation spec decision.
  • Guild tent mechanics — guilds session (D-MARKETS-06).
  • Merchant catalog content per region + floor-price philosophy per profession — owner content pass with each island's session.
  • Auction systems — future; parked in D-MARKETS-07.
  • Whether featured slots surface on a market board UI at the hub, in-world displays, or both — UI probe territory (visual claims need in-client evidence).