Heheh.

The black market is run by a shady person (of course!). Once a day he/she offers an item not found easily, like warlock items, battlefield items, and premium shop items. He does not take silver or gold as currency, instead he takes a large amount of vermillion. Hundreds of it, the item he is selling is hard to come by afterall. What he does with all that vermillion is unknown.

Once a day means only one item can be bought everyday. There will be several items to chose from but only one can be chosen. If you try to return to the shop after a purchase, he will simply be gone, nowhere to be found. Shady people selling strange items can't just stand around.

A good place for his "shop" could be under the trading tab.

I am thinking the amount of vermillion needed to purchase an item should be substantial. Around 400, to both make it a challenge to get such a rare item and to deter a flood such rare items.

Warlock items along the lines of eggs, pills, deviance enchancers, not the wild symurghs and such unless they would be sold near the cap since they were costing more during events selling warlock items. Also sold will be battlefield items like snake eyes and spirit in a jar.

For premium items the usual potions, scrolls, food, and other cheaper items.

The main purpose of this? To be able to get warlock item when the event isnt going and to have an alternate way to get premium items. Also offering a way for players who can not get to the battlefield portal a way to get the special items needed for top level buildings.

Vermillion will become more valuable. Though this could be bad and good depending on if you are buying or selling it. Gold to silver/ gold to vermillion price will shift. This could also be bad or good.

The rare items being sold may become too common. The shady person should only appear once a week or once every other day if this is a concern.

So...ideas? I'm pretty excited to buy weird magical items from a sketchy stranger!

I like the general idea, but I think it would be better if you could exchange a high amount of something other than vermillion. vermillion is about the only material that is worth anything at the moment, because you can use it for something other than crafting and building (which most of the time you only have to do once). So if for example the vendor would exchange items for 600 shells, you could make them worth something again. and yes, many people are stocked up with shells at the moment, but once you have bought an item you would actually have to go out and find new ones.

You could also say, that since you are buying from a sktechy stranger, there is a chance that the item you bought is fake.

Ollie... the sketchy stranger must be Ollie.... that is all.

Oh my gosh yes Ollie! I totally forgot about him. He is planning something with all that vermillion! Could tie into the lore and a future story/event!

The items are rare and powerful, you cant expect to buy something like that with a cheap and common material like shell. The point of using vermillion is because it is hard to gather large amounts which would make it hard to get the rare item thus preventing a flood of powerful items.

For common items, like shell, I could gather hundreds in a day and be capped in just a few if I set the astrologist to it.If not vermillion it would need to be something not used as often but still hard to gather. Like magentite, hops, and other materials like that. Actually, im really liking the idea of using magnetite. There can be all kinds of scheming uses for that type of material,if we got with the Ollie idea. Id would prefer magnetite over vermillion.

As for the fake items if it is used it would need to be a low percentage or many people, including me, are going to murder the guy next time he is seen. And that would not look pretty, plus who else would give us magic stuffs? xD

I actually think that vermillion is not that rare to find, especially compared to something like magnetite. in my whole exploring carreer I have only found about 700 (including the ones I produced with my golems), so a price of 400 would be really high. It would be nice, if we could have some concrete information about which materials are how easy to find. I get your point about the amount of shells you find, but I would take something from the middleground like marble, ore or adamantine.

As for the fake items, it was just an idea. I agree that the percentage would have to be very low and I don't think the black market vendor would come with a "murder" option :-P

I like this idea but agree with Loki110 that it should require random common materials instead of vermillion or something else that's rare. 

What about using common materials so more people can trade regularly and significantly increase the percentage of fake items to prevent devaluing the real ones.

Also, it wouldn't be as infuriating to spend the common materials on a fake.

I don't agree with letting common materials be used. Yes, common materials end up just sitting in your warehouse collecting dust after you max out all your buildings, but they are common. They aren't meant to be difficult to find in large quantities. Vermillion is fairly common as well but it's always in demand since there are always new pets to be researched so that one I can agree to have used in this instance.

Anything that allows Ollie to be fully developed in the in-world story is fine by me XD

If only NPC came with a murder option. Oh how wonderful it would be.

It would be really nice to have a real chart like that to be able to reference to instead of remembering how often we see this or that material. Maybe one with percentages! I think the closest I got was my island guides (which are super dusty) with common, uncommon, and rare depending on how many times I saw them on islands. But this is just from one person's experience and as I learned while chatting with Sylvii during the event, there can be a huge difference between what you get and what your neighbor gets.

If we want him to be Ollie, then the item needs to be something that could lead to something else. Like some material that could be used to build something pretty interesting. Not just some big  fancy house interesting, more like potential world altering thing interesting.

So, if it was a rarer material like magnetite than the amount needed would need to be lowered but still balanced to keep the magical items rare and still obtainable without having to go insane. Or the material is one that is uncommon so a large amount can be obtained and used to purchase the items. Or it is a common material but the items have a high chance of turning out to be fake and breaking.

The last option im not as fond of because if Ollie is trying to get the material to build something then handing out fake items a lot will make the purchaser of that fake item less likely to return to do buisness. This in turn would slow down the progress of whatever he is building. Then word could spread about the fake items, and it could seriously hurt his progress. BUT, if we are going with just some random no lore drifter (which is no fun at all) then fake items would work.

Maybe Ollie has a hand in Alchemy and wants vast quantities of items to change into other things. May he can accept odd things. Zinc, rhodium, pigments, are materials that we had for a few events...  Maybe bring them back? 

Or use less common items in large quanities: like ore, marble, magnetite, lazulite and so on... In this I agree with Monues.

The only way I would agree if it were to be common materials is if the amount to trade was 500 or greater. We could use a good "dump" for those items. I know junkyard exchanges have been suggested. 

The item requested each time being a different common material in very high amount to be able to prevent people from being able to stash a ton of one material in preperation for the next time he shows up? Him asks for a randomly different material each time? I dont know if the coding for that would be difficult or not, but that would be pretty neat.

Having it be a different common/uncommon material each time he shows up, every other day, and that material requested it in a high amount. I would love to find a use for all the capped stacks of building stuff I have laying around, but I also wouldnt want those rare magic items to suddenly become common. This I think would be a good balance though.

If one of the mentions so far are implimented do become too unbalanced I would think there would be a way to tweak it a bit to balance it, changing ratios or such, with an update.

I like this idea, but where will you find all that virmilon?

Monues (#19564) wrote:

The item requested each time being a different common material in very high amount to be able to prevent people from being able to stash a ton of one material in preperation for the next time he shows up? Him asks for a randomly different material each time? I dont know if the coding for that would be difficult or not, but that would be pretty neat.

There is something similar already, Battlefield Quests.

Anyways, this idea can be useful/helpful for those players that don't really go to the battlefield, as a way to earn the blueprints and materials there, so I will support the idea. (Also like was stated many times, good way to give usefulness to the items again.)

Now then, as a way to balance it, may be instead of showing what item you're buying, do it like the battlefield and make it random. You won't know what it is till you exhange -- Would also go in line with the Random Box, made by Ollie himself, no?

That makes me torn between wanting it random or being able to choose what I buy. Sometimes I need specific items, but having a mystery of what youll get is always fun.

I love the idea but i agree with Loki vermillion is the only thing worth something if this idea comes to friution and you choose a diffarant item that item will become worth an awfull lot more and lets face it you can get vermillion just as you can get shell with a golem.

Perhaps Ollie (or whoever) would offer a choice of say, 3 random items when he shows up.  After all, he's trying to attract multiple customers, right?  That way there would be the selection of items, but also a bit of that random grab-bag fun.

In a similar vein, he would always be accepting vermillion at whatever the rate is for that, but he might also accept some huge quantity (500+) of a random common material.  The explanation here is that he needs more than one type of material for whatever his secret project is.

In any case, this is a fun idea! I like it.