Usable Parcels

[DeletedUser]

Proposal
In a few sentences, state the general concept of your idea.
Make Parcels ([item=733000]) upgradable, stuffable & auctionable and give your parcel a name.

Current Workaround
If there is method players have used to work around the current system? (For example shopping is used to bypass foreign purchase prices.)
Players sell items individually and parcels are not used in the game.

Details
State the bulk of your idea. Remember to include all necessary details, mechanics and explanations of your idea.
First, we make Parcels upgradable. Upgraded parcels can hold items. A level 1 Parcel can hold 1 item. A level 2 Parcel can hold 2 items ... and a level 20 Parcel can hold 20 items.
Second, we make these Parcels auctionable. That's right! I can stuff all 4 different Pepperbox Revolvers or any auctionable item into a Parcel and then auction that Parcel on the market. Non-auctionable items may not be put inside a parcel, ever.
Downsides of using a Parcel:
The minimum sell price is the sum of the Purchase Prices of the items in the parcel plus the cost of the parcel. If you want to sell a Green Shirt at the Sell Price, you can't use a parcel.
When you sell the parcel you lose your upgraded parcel. However, at some point parcels will simply be everywhere. Having a level 50 Parcel will be rare, but really only handy if it's actually used.
When items are in a parcel, they are not accessible. You have to actually take them out of the parcel before they will be in your inventory and thus usable/wearable.
Upsides of using a Parcel:
Parcels could be used to sell 50 Amulets, but this feature already exists. Parcels would really only be used to bundle different items together for a single sale. This is their biggest feature.
I could for example bundle (2) Trout, (2) Ham, (2) Sugar, (2) Grain, (2) Berries, (2) Flour, (2) Corn, (2) Beans, (2) Turkey, (2) Steak, (2) Tomato, (2) Glass of Water, (2) Oranges, (2) Salmon, (2) Potato & (2) Warm Meal for the Anti-Diet Week quest or simply bundle a complete Doc Holiday set.
Lastly, we should make these upgraded parcels nameable. The same rules for appropriate chat applies to parcel names. You can be temporarily banned or recieve infraction points for a parcel with a foul name. This would allow you to name a parcel Amulet Supplies to sell to a Tonic Peddler for crafting.

Abuse Prevention
If there are any loopholes in your proposal state what your idea has done to close them.
If non-auctionable items cannot be placed in a parcel, the chance of abuse is greatly reduced.

Visual Aids
Put any mock-ups here. Those that are large screenshots should be linked, smaller windows can be displayed using the image tags.
Using the standard upgrade pips should be sufficient for the standard design. Allowing the parcel name to be viewable via mouse-over would be really nice.

Summary
General rap up and thoughts. Should include why the Innogames and the player community will benefit from implementing this idea.
This proposal would provide a means for bundling items on the market and provide a use for parcels in this game while utilizing one of the greatest new features in the game.
Administration
Does this idea meet the Ideas Guidelines & Criteria? Yes
Does this idea appear on any of the Previously Suggested Ideas List? No, not like this.

 

[DeletedUser23252]

Parcels, Smuggled goods, loot bags........taking useless products and making them useful?

 

[jarograv]

I like the idea of bundling stuff together (ex. full bart's set or all the materials needed to craft 10 bayos), the only issue is that the game is coded in such a way that each parcel would need a different item ID which would require millions of item IDs.

 

[DeletedUser]

Item IDs

It wouldn't require millions of them. Thousands? Yes. Many will be recycled or used to make better parcels. Would anyone really want more than maybe 5 or 10 of them? You could just sell the parcel. There aren't more than 10,000 players on any world. Tracking 50,000 - 100,000 items is not hard. Most interns could handle that code. Think about how many parcels would be consumed while making a level 10 parcel that can hold 10 items. The answer is 59,049 parcels and the cost would be over $2.8 million ... but they would exist. Someone will make one.

 

[DeletedUser34315]

That's a cool idea. Not sure how complex it would be to code, but I've definitely wanted to buy/sell an entire set at a time.
Perhaps instead of a new item id for each possible parcel combination, just make some sort of container class that has references to the item id's of what's in it and their quantity?

 

[jarograv]

It wouldn't require millions of them. Thousands? Yes. Many will be recycled or used to make better parcels. Would anyone really want more than maybe 5 or 10 of them? You could just sell the parcel. There aren't more than 10,000 players on any world. Tracking 50,000 - 100,000 items is not hard. Most interns could handle that code. Think about how many parcels would be consumed while making a level 10 parcel that can hold 10 items. The answer is 59,049 parcels and the cost would be over $2.8 million ... but they would exist. Someone will make one.

I've been told that simply allowing players to give a custom name to their item would require a new item ID to be created. The way the inventory system in the game is set up is that each unique item requires a new item ID meaning that if you wanted to 'craft' this parcel with say full eaton's set, there would need to be an item ID allocated to it for you to craft it. Based on my modest inventory of about 1000 auctionable items (far less than the actual amount of auctionable items) there are 956,826,127,790,986,000,000,000,000,000 combinations of between 2 and 10 items which would all require a new item ID to be made (yes, that's what the math actually works out to - 956 octillion). Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of auctioning a whole bart's set at once, it's just the game's code does not allow it to be done. Even just combinations of two items results in just under a million combinations.

 

[DeletedUser]

Absolutely not

Your suggestion implies that to remember every player's start date you would need to seven years worth of dates in unique ID files. That is absolutely not the case. We don't need 956,826,127,790,986,000,000,000,000,000 unique IDs for the system to remember what you're wearing right now and we darn sure don't need that many IDs to remember what the upgraded parcel is 'wearing' either. I think rather than recklessly speculating, this solution should be left with a group much more qualified, interns for example. The simple concept here is: Do you like the idea? Yes or No.

 

[DeletedUser36011]

Your suggestion implies that to remember every player's start date you would need to seven years worth of dates in unique ID files. That is absolutely not the case. We don't need 956,826,127,790,986,000,000,000,000,000 unique IDs for the system to remember what you're wearing right now and we darn sure don't need that many IDs to remember what the upgraded parcel is 'wearing' either. I think rather than recklessly speculating, this solution should be left with a group much more qualified, interns for example. The simple concept here is: Do you like the idea? Yes or No.

It's not reckless speculation. I would hazard a good guess he has spoken to a developer on the idea rather than pulling crap out of his preverbial

 

[DeletedUser]

It's not reckless speculation. I would hazard a good guess he has spoken to a developer on the idea rather than pulling crap out of his preverbial

So you think the system requires 956,826,127,790,986,000,000,000,000,000 unique IDs to remember the 10 items that you're wearing right now? There are 1637 players with unique names on World 1 (english). Do we have to create (9.56x10^29) x 1637 unique IDs so that the system can remember what each of them is wearing? I don't think so. I think that sounds like a very hazardous guess to me.
Abraham Lincoln loved to ask the question, if you call the tail a leg, how many legs does a donkey have? Four, just because you call it a leg, doesn't make it a leg. Just because you call someone a developer doesn't make them a developer. Actual developers solve complex problems in amazingly simple ways. Let them develop the actual solutions and you will be amazed.

Back to the question ... Do you like the idea/concept of a parcel that can be stuffed with items and sold on the market?

 

[DeletedUser22685]

So you think the system requires 956,826,127,790,986,000,000,000,000,000 unique IDs to remember the 10 items that you're wearing right now? There are 1637 players with unique names on World 1 (english). Do we have to create (9.56x10^29) x 1637 unique IDs so that the system can remember what each of them is wearing? I don't think so. I think that sounds like a very hazardous guess to me.
Abraham Lincoln loved to ask the question, if you call the tail a leg, how many legs does a donkey have? Four, just because you call it a leg, doesn't make it a leg. Just because you call someone a developer doesn't make them a developer. Actual developers solve complex problems in amazingly simple ways. Let them develop the actual solutions and you will be amazed.

Player IDs and item IDs are completely different things. Putting items into a parcel is not the same as equipping items as a player, as each parcel would itself be an item requiring a different ID in order to be distinguishable from one another. Jaro is saying that there would need to be different parcels with different IDs to encompass every single possible combination of one or more items, which at this point is true. I doubt it will ever change.

The idea of parcels, all coding aspects aside, would definitely have some uses, although the ability to sell multiples of one item at once has made it a little less useful than it would have been when it was initially suggested a few years ago. I'd probably never use them myself, but I can see how they might be attractive to many players. Ultimately, the aforementioned ID problem gives this a very slim chance of actually being considered.

 

[jarograv]

Like I said above, I love the idea

It's just that I've talked to people who work on the programming side of the game (as has futu most likely), they've stated as recently as a couple months ago and as far back as a few years ago like futu said, the ability to 'package' items requires a new item ID due to the way the game is coded. Yes, if the dev team had the time and budget then they could probably recode the game so each item isnt contained in it's own ID, however this is real life and this game is a product that they have budget and time constraints that make recoding that impossible.

That being said, there may be a way to accomplish nearly the same thing that would allow listing items as a group on the market. Rather than receiving something that is a parcel containing say 10 fools gold and 10 feathers to make amulets with, they would instead just receive the 10 fools gold and the 10 feathers as a straight market delivery so when you search it would look something like this...
[spoil]

[/spoil]
And on the current bid tab you would just see that you have 10 fool's gold and 10 raven feathers waiting for you at the market somewhere.

I'm not really sure if the way I put it would be possible from a development perspective, but it would be nice to be able to auction stuff off in lots

 

[DeletedUser36182]

I was going to say about the same thing as jarograv. Why not have a generic container and if it wasn't possible to mouse over to see contents, you could still list them in the comments area when posting them on the market. If it requires a unique id# for such an item to maintain the contents list would it be possible to tie it to the player id# to maintain the item list and just use a generic product id# for the container itself? If that were possible, you could then make the container a new crafting skill used by all but requires crafted items from each profession to produce.

 

[DeletedUser22685]

I was going to say about the same thing as jarograv. Why not have a generic container and if it wasn't possible to mouse over to see contents, you could still list them in the comments area when posting them on the market. If it requires a unique id# for such an item to maintain the contents list would it be possible to tie it to the player id# to maintain the item list and just use a generic product id# for the container itself? If that were possible, you could then make the container a new crafting skill used by all but requires crafted items from each profession to produce.

I think what jaro was suggesting doesn't involve an actual item at all. It would be a kind of "virtual" item that appeared that way only on the market, which is a pretty neat idea.

Tying the item to player IDs is pretty interesting as well, although I'm not sure if it would be possible. One problem I can see is players owning more than one container. I'm not a developer though, so I'll leave that kind of thing to the people who know what they're talking about.

 

[DeletedUser]

I've been told that simply allowing players to give a custom name to their item would require a new item ID to be created. The way the inventory system in the game is set up is that each unique item requires a new item ID meaning that if you wanted to 'craft' this parcel with say full eaton's set, there would need to be an item ID allocated to it for you to craft it. Based on my modest inventory of about 1000 auctionable items (far less than the actual amount of auctionable items) there are 956,826,127,790,986,000,000,000,000,000 combinations of between 2 and 10 items which would all require a new item ID to be made (yes, that's what the math actually works out to - 956 octillion). Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of auctioning a whole bart's set at once, it's just the game's code does not allow it to be done. Even just combinations of two items results in just under a million combinations.

I think you are correct in your reasoning. What you're saying makes sense. Of course I'm not a developer for this game.