Keep merchants at the station, in rotation.

[Hikurac]

Something I've always noticed on Goon. Hardly anybody seems to care about money and rarely do they ever buy anything from NPC merchants. I feel like this is due to fact that unless you're in cargo or a scientist, NPC merchants are too much of a hassle to get to for the average player to care.

To address this, why not replace the merchant event with a rotation system, where a merchant is always on station, but rotating with a different one every 5-10 minutes or so. I was gonna comment about potential balance issues with the items of the current random event merchants, but in the two years that I've played on goon, I've only ever seen the wares of one, so I don't know (which kind of makes my point). If there is an issue, perhaps leave the current event merchants as random, but have a different set of merchants on rotation. Maybe give them a semi-random selection of items to sell, so that people are more interested when a new merchant arrives.

Either way, I just want something decent to spend this money on, without having to venture into an entirely different map.

[Frank_Stein]

What if we had merchant NPCS on the station? Each department has a merchant especially catered to them. They'd start off meeting together at the bar, then run through a programmed routine where'd they travel through the station, make a few stops, go to the department they trade in, then head back to the bar again.

After that, their stock of goods change, and they resume their pattern again. Sometimes their stops along their route would change, but as long as you knew their routine you'd know roughly where to find them. Maybe you can get better deals by trading with them when they're in certain areas, and worse deals in other places.

If a merchant ever dies, they simply get replaced by a similarly randomly generated merchant that slots into the last's profession.

---

OH and also there should be some fluff merchants that are randomized each time in addition to the department ones. Like, they pick three from a list each round. Or maybe they swap out each time the cycle meets back up again at the bar. Some fluff merchant types

• Clown
  
• Clothing
  
• Food
  
• Drinks
  
• Drugs
  
• Weapons
  
• Artifacts
  
• Tools
  
• Ore
  
• Art supplies
  
• Gizmos and gadgets
  
• Rare items
  

[magic mountain]

I think this is a good suggestion, the merchants are cool and they should be more accessible. Maybe on-station merchants with more mundane stuff and more esoteric/better/weirder stuff from the harder to reach merchants?

[IshmaelNemo]

On-station merchants would be nice since when there is a mechant selling something worthwhile, half the crew starts asking over the radio where the merchant's shuttle even is (and as a result tend to miss them).

[Lady Birb]

The question is, if the merchants never leave the station, how would you get to centcom early?

[Frank_Stein]

The question is, if the merchants never leave the station, how would you get to centcom early?

If we're the on station merchants, the random ones could arrive on shuttle, meet in the bar, run some stops, and then head back to the shuttle where they board and depart the same shuttle their replacement arrives on. 

Or you have on shuttle guys, and then some people that continue to arrive and stay on their merchant shuttles.

Or maybe each shuttle arrival brings new merchants that leave the same way

[Vitatroll]

Khajit has wares, if you have coin.

Me? I'd just like the ability to spend my 1e+06s on something other than the world's most expensive blunt. Plutonium will do in a pinch.

[Nnystyxx]

I maintain my suggestion that waste space in the Cog2 bar should be turned into a spot for traders to meet, like a bar-Bazaar.

Partly because doing this in literally any other part of Cog2 would somehow make any given department completely unusable because of how economical that map is with space.

The arcane inconsistency of traders appearing and what they sell always frustrated me, considering we're always asking for a way to spend our space cash. This is a great idea.

[atomic1fire]

The question is, if the merchants never leave the station, how would you get to centcom early?

I thought the badmins didn't want you hitching rides to Centcom via the merchants shuttle.

Last I checked my method almost certainly kills you now.

[Hikurac]

The question is, if the merchants never leave the station, how would you get to centcom early?

Yeah, that's what I meant by having the current random event merchants stay as random, with new merchants in rotation. Just have the new merchants come from a different location than Centcom.

[LovelyMimic]

I would love this. It could be as simple as the merchant exiting their shuttle and moving somewhere a little more convenient for the duration of their time docked with the station.

It would also help if the merchants in question weren't selling pathology stuff what feels like half the time, since it is vanishingly rarely that anybody cares about that, let alone enough to spend money on pathology equipment upgrades.

[IshmaelNemo]

I would love this. It could be as simple as the merchant exiting their shuttle and moving somewhere a little more convenient for the duration of their time docked with the station.

It would be really cool if they stayed around the public market to sell their wares (but I do like the barzaar idea). Maybe add an all-purpose  delivery pad (like on merchant shuttles) to the market for whatever traders stop by?