Bit of a functional 'nuts and bolts' Nifty! today, rather than anything sexy or cool in the accepted sense. Its to do with vendors, and crafting. At this late stage in the day, we're all familiar with the standard Vendor interface that seems to have become de rigueur in most MMOs. I use WoW as the example, but variants can be found everywhere; the optimistic 'shopkeeper' stood idly in the last bastion of civilisation before the Mountains of Doom, offering three tabs.
There's main 'standard' tab, offering consumables, reagents, ammo, bandages and for some bizarre reason mostly to do with maintaining the pretence, a range of very very bad armours of 'grey' quality, which can only be of use to those rare adventurers who sometimes wake up unexpectedly in a field, in end-game country, naked. (Possibly as a result of having once given someone else their password).
Tab two is the 'OhshitIjustvendoredmyepix!!!!1!' buy-back tab - a useful feature almost worthy of a Nifty in itself, and tab three will be the Repairs tab, where most games attempt to at least remove some made-up money from the hyperinflationary nightmare most traditional MMOs end up as.
Pretty standard stuff; you shovel monster gunk in, and money comes out, and for serious shopping, there's usually a separate mechanic entirely; the Auction House, or whatever they call it in your current locality. (Where I am right now, its a 'Military Surplus', but works in a nearly identical manner.) On the whole, it works, and in most people's eyes, is hardly anything to make a big fuss about when there's Adventure! going on 40 feet away. I did see it done entirely differently once though:
Nifty! #4: Saga of Ryzom's Vendors
Saga of Ryzom did almost everything differently, perhaps just for the sake of it in some cases; a strange and alien mob difficulty rating system, a quite curious make-you-own-hotkey mechanic, unusual creatures (the player races included), a unique blend of sci-fi and fantasy concepts and backstory and it all made for quite a challenging newbie experience, even if like me, you'd played dozens of these things before.
Much of my trial time there was spent going 'Ohhh' a lot, but one feature particularly stuck in my mind when I first swaggered up to the vendor with my customary bag of monster spleens and went to 'vendor' them, (A word itself which has become a verb, and is synonymous with 'trash' in our parlance). In addition to the usual sale, for immediate cash, there was an option to fiddle with a number box which represented a mark-up of sorts. The split was something like 40% of the item's worth as up-front cash-in-hand, and the default value of the number box represented about 60% of it's worth.
Then, and this is the clever bit, you walk away and have more Adventure! and the items stay on the vendor, for everyone else to see, for the next seven days. If some other player then decided that their craving for lizard gizzards was just too strong, they could sift through the same vendor and buy it. When that happens, you get the extra 60% of the cash paid to you as well.
It seems unnecessarily complicated at first glance, a combination of standard vendor and auction house both rolled into one NPC, but the basic problem with vendors of the more normal type, is that one man's trash is another mans' treasure. More specifically, many achiever type combat players care little for the inherent utility of a given monster organ to others, and definitely don't want to take the time to either chat-spam sell the stuff, or even travel back to the AH, if there is a simpler mechanism at hand, to just turn it into cash quickly, resupply at the same time and get back out there.
Meanwhile, the crafting types, who may need this stuff (and did in SoR) and yet who may not be that capable of carving out their own gunk, lose the opportunity forever - the gunk is gone. The crucial nub of the SoR vendors, I suppose, is that it made it easier to put the stuff on sale to others, than to not, simply by virtue of working the AH-style resale thing directly into the more normal junk-unloading system.
As I remember it, each player could have up to 128 of these resales going at once, and subsequent vendoring functioned as normal; 40% cash paid, item destroyed. After the seven days were up, the items would just vanish - the seller has already received their 40% cash for it, so it has technically been sold, rather than destroyed. Competition and market forces still had room to manoeuvre, in that the 60% figure was adjustable by the seller, allowing them to get into all the market-based price-warring that we love so much.
Having routinely been forced to dig out dozens of unsuccessful 3-day auctions from the more usual AH and have to put them all on again, for yet more non-refundable deposit money, I found a certain release in the whole idea - sell-n-forget - and was often pleasantly surprised on logging in next time to find a whole heap of income waiting me after some of the 60% bits had been bought. The other aspect of it was a freedom from my usual OCD-related nagging guilt that I get in other games; that I'm destroying items which other players might need, or can find a use for.
An added bonus was that crafting products all ended up on sale, even if they were just practice grinds, allowing the customers to decide, and bucking the trend in most games, where only the very expensive end-game items are worth the expert crafter's time and crafted 'for real', leaving very little on player-markets for the newer and intermediate players to shop for.
I am sort of reminded of early Everquest, where the vendors had a memory too. Items sold would stay on the vendor, in addition to the standard supplies. This made for fascinating 'explorer-shopping' trips, where I would roam along the Qeynos to Freeport road, stopping at every Inn on the way, seeing if any of the previously passing players had sold off the pelts I needed for my Leatherworking. The vendor would charge more than they'd paid for it in the first place, but surprisingly, it was actually still profitable to buy the pelts in this way, craft them into armour pieces, and then sell them back to the same innkeeper. And then the next passing adventurer could even buy the armour for themselves if the Innkeeper's bag wasn't too full. Good times, and it made each vendor unique and interesting to browse through. The SoR system is reminiscent of that, and in many ways, more advanced than the pot-luck grab-bag mechanic of EQ1.
Except at the very top of deliberate end-game farming, few people have the time and energy to ensure everything they come across finds a good home (nor should they be expected to), and it becomes a deliberate act of volition in any event. Not so with Saga of Ryzom, where the path of least resistance was also the most efficient redistribution of goods.
So, for offering those who did care the widest choice, without inconveniencing those who didn't care, Saga of Ryzom's Vendors; Nifty!
While enjoying some moderate success itself, Saga of Ryzom's developers, the french studio Nevrax, ended up in administration/bankruptcy some months ago, (More down to Business and Management problems, than Lack of Players/Subscriptions, I gather). After an uncertain legal limbo period, the game ended up being bought by GameForge Germany, rather than the much publicised attempt by the players themselves to buy the thing, and continued on for some few months after that.
However, it seems that things didn't go according to GameForge's plan, and on or around the 12th Feb, the servers were turned off, and have yet to be turned back on. As the game doesn't even appear on GameForge's otherwise extremely obscure list of dinky little also-ran web-games, I would imagine that it isn't coming back. I've been wrong before though, and its actually quite hard to find out exactly what the 'official' status of the game currently is. If you do want to dig deeper, this community-based forum might be a good place to start:
http://arispotle.yubovision.fr/index.php?topic=28.0
Still seems to see current posting, although not from anyone official...