as I'm working on the main shops and bringing them back over from the main site, I wanted to bring back something that we got rid of a long time ago, the ability to haggle!

however, i wanted to tie it to something to increase your chances, and landed on active pet intelligence, but I'm not sure that feels like a good fit? i'm thinking it'll be a kind of haggling minigame, where you propose a price and the shop keeper comes back with a counter-offer, and basically a (hidden) dice roll determines how close to your offer and their offer that is.

Can you think of anything else? (haggling will also be optional 😉 you can just pay full price!)

other options:

• reputation system (that we're already using!), so you build with NPCs as you buy from their shop

I think the idea of haggling being tied to a pet's intelligence is pretty cool! I like the idea of my pets being more useful. The only thing is that I keep Teiji as my active pet rather than running around with my actual highest-intelligence pet active, because of Oracle quests and those random events that boost stats and such, so he wouldn't be my preferred haggling buddy. Would it be possible for our pets to have different "roles" or something like that, outside of simply being active/inactive?

The idea of using the reputation system feels kinda like it makes more sense, but... man, as a whiny pet person that always wants pets to get more focus, I just really prefer the idea of a pet being involved. :')

I agree with Lea - binding it to the active pet, would mean we have to change the active pet around for questing. I loved haggling for the brain gymnastic. Yet I'm not sure I'd want to use it again - esp. if it'll be a back and forth game between NPC and us - pretty time consuming? Also can't remember, what impact buffs and cards had back then. But if you offer the haggling to be optional, it'll be fine for everyone.

...reminds me: there was a distinction between active and main pet for the side bar, which never worked. Maybe this could be implemented as being functional?

I actually don't like the idea of having more extra step to purchasing. As someone who still plays Neopets sometimes where you have to offer a price no matter what, I really do feel the difference that no haggling makes. Isn't it making an optional thing kind of not advantageous for the people who are haggling anyway? It sounds like you still have plans to limited stocks in the new shops. People who aren't haggling are going to get it faster, especially the rare items you plan on having very limited stock on.

I do like the haggling idea 🤔 I think it opens up more gameplay mechanics than what we currently have which is... honestly nothing 😅 Quests are such a chore right now imo - for me it's just grind SP so I can work towards my collections. It needs more oomph!

I normally play Subeta in the background during work, so having something I can "focus" on as a break for 5 or 10 minutes after a stresfull call would be amazing!

And keeping optional I think is key here, there are for sure days where I will be lazy or need to speedrun the quests. -- Avel's comparison to Neopets is definately something to think about... I stopped playing due to their haggling / quest system, it became too annoying! Let alone bots that were on to snipe items during restock (not sure if that issue was ever fixed, it's been years).

If haggleing is reimplemented how will that affect the discount cards that we spent so much sp to get?

I can't help but to think about neopets when I read that e___e and I totally not aprecciatte the haggle mechanic in there opposed at how I like to be here, click, "buy" and buy the item, instead of having to type a number. Hopefully in subeta we will not required to click a poogle.

I read up there that it will be optional, so, users will need an extra click to say "yes" "no" to a "do you want to haggle?" question? I suposse it will be like that?

Anyway, I usually have trust in your ideas and probably this one will be a sucess when implemented, but, boi, I hear "haggle" and I shudder (?)

personally i loathed the haggling mechanic as it was not only time-consuming but stressful mentally calculating how to get the best possible deal on the first try, with the time constraint of worrying that someone else would beat me to it if i took too long thinking about it. it was such a massive relief when haggling and captchas were taken out of the equation. i would hate to go backwards in that regard.

seconding the point that having this tied to your active pet can conflict with other reasons to keep a certain pet active. honestly i wonder whether we should just scrap the concept of "active" pets. it's kind of a weird & nebulous mechanic, and rather inconsistent. there are just too many different aspects to what it means for a pet to be "active" and more often than not it just results in frustration when someone forgets to switch out their active pet, or didn't realize a certain action would automatically affect their active pet without giving them a chance to choose (such as various species/color transformation mechanics).

it's like an extraneous middle step between "this thing will affect a specific pet" and "you can pick which specific pet it will affect." yes, you can pick which pet, but only by remembering to jump through this extra hoop, and then making sure you remember to jump through it again to put it back the way you wanted it in the first place. so why not just cut out the middleman and make it a straight line from A to B?

I hate the thought of haggling - I am old and disabled and often in a lot of discomfort so the thought of extra work to buy an item makes me shudder.

As ChatLunatique has already asked, how will this new system affect discount cards if we decide to buy at the full price instead of haggling?

Much as I love a good deal – I don't see the fun in haggling with main shop NPCs. Haggling is exciting when you get a decent discount on a pricy item. Not going back-and-forth over the virtual equivalent of a dollar.

I already own a 30% discount card. Every transaction with it saves me a couple hundred to 1ks at most. If I restock 300k daily (before discount), I'm only saving 2.7 mil. over 30 days, which isn't much. If haggling replaces or adds to it, I really doubt the savings would be worth the effort of haggling per purchase for the majority of main shops given the already low prices + repetitive nature of daily restocking. It wouldn't be a feature I could see myself using in this case.

Now, if it was for a limited marketplace, I would be more interested. For example, if during Freyalise, a back alley marketplace opens up that sells limited stock of new and retired releases at a mark-up – haggling could be fun. Like, I would pay a reasonable mark-up on newly released or old books just to read them to all of my pets to avoid paying aftermarket prices and having to aggressively track restocks.

I'm not a fan of the haggling idea. It just feels like a speedbump to doing quests, which is the main thing that has me buying stuff. I definitely would prefer it being optional, but I get why you'd want to limit how many things people can buy from NPC shops in some way.

Another site I play uses purchase credits you earn from doing quests to limit how much you can buy from the NPC shops. I rather like that because I can hoard up the purchase credits until I want to use them. New items get a higher purchase credit price until their prices have come down, so there's incentive to have enough purchase credits to buy the newest things before the prices drop, and rare items stay at a higher purchase credit price longer. It can be a bit annoying to have to do quests when I need a bunch of something, but I can also buy from other players in bulk (their shop search allows you to buy up to 10 of an item at once from player shops) which can blunt the timesink there.