Guild Wars 2

Currently, all over the world, unique vendors offering non-standard goods are mostly boring, rarely selling anything worthwhile noticing, with a few notable exceptions.

After an event, most of the time they’ll sell:
- Consumables like booze, grub tonics, recipes and sometimes an ally-summoning thingy.
- Environmental weapons.
- Gear.
And that’s mostly it.

This isn’t always something useful or you may want. So for many people there’s no reason to stick around until the end of the event, or even to make events at all, and they stick to high-income areas.

So I started thinking of ways to make these vendors more fun. And then it hit me.

Limited stock
This is the main and most important feature vendors NEED.
A way should be developed to set vendors to:

• Give a ‘stock’ to a particular item in a vendor’s inventory. Every time the item is purchased, the stock goes down. When it hits 0, the entry stays there, but you can’t buy the item anymore.
• Set if the stock is per account or per character. So you can’t get to the point where a vendor will appear with several characters, do something with one, and then switch and buy stuff several times.
• Set when a particular item will restock in a vendor.
  • Never: The item is offered only once per character or account, and then the vendor never offers it again.
  • After some time passes: 3 hours, a day, a month, a year…
  • After a character or account does something: Get to a certain level, get to a certain point of personal story, fill certain hearts, complete certain events, complete a jumping puzzle, complete some ‘secret’ quest-like chain of actions…

That way, non-standard vendors all over the world would be able do things like:

• Showing you items the vendor may sell, but not let you buy them (0 stock) until they restock.
• Having a limited number of items at a discount.
• Having a limited number of items that you wouldn’t normally be able to have in a vendor, like many materials.
• Providing alternate ways to acquire some items by traveling and doing different things all over the world, promoting exploring the world, instead doing a few again and again.
• Put limited stock of some items in WvW merchants (like offering a single blueprint at a discount, or 5 honor to each badges who participated in the capture, so they can use the money and/or karma from the event to buy them).

It won’t be exploitable, because it’ll be limited in both time and quantity.
It’ll be worthwhile to stick around to see if NPCs pop merchant icons. You could find yourself buying a 2 units of a rare material, or a niece piece of equipment for a discounted price.

Random items
This is not something really that necessary, as vendors can have ‘packages’ that can be opened to offer a random item, like the Mystery Box
But allowing vendors to have a list of random items from which they will offer just one or two, would allow some variety without having to create packages for them.
You would not know for sure what the vendor may sell when the event ends, so staying to the end of each event would be more worthwhile, especially along the previously suggested limited stock, as that would allow rare stock items, like a vendor having one or two Obsidian shards for 25% less karma than usual very rarely.

I’m pretty sure that if it was possible to do these two things that would greatly improve how players appreciate random vendors that appear all over the world, instead being those disappointing things who will only sell you a plank or a rock.