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Player Vendors
I haven't really seen this in any forums, ever, but what does it really mean to be a player vendor? That is to say, if the game provides NPCs to act as vendors why would any player want to act the part of the merchant? Will there be in-game warehouses to store your merchandise? Will you be able to craft new recipes to help stay competitive in the market? Will you be able to hire other players and/or nonplayers to handle things while you're not online? Will crafting guilds be a thing? Will you be able to assign quests to other players when you need materials you can't get for various reasons?
I'm asking all this because it's a dynamic I've seen in series that revolve around MMOs, like Log Horizon (which is well executed and understands its medium to some extent, and also happens to only have factions in the sense that guilds and in-game nations can technically be considered factions) and SAO (which is poorly executed and doesn't seem to know its medium, despite showing 3 separate MMOs with different systems all 3 are poorly thought out or executed and it's never explained why these broken aspects never came up in the beta testing). Being able to operate your own business in-game sounds really appealing to me. The idea of establishing a guild to further develop crafting skills for all the crafters that are part of it is also a nice thought, the guild could have players that go out to gather resources for the crafters while the crafters, in turn, make better gear and distribute some of that to the more actively adventuring players so they can better perform their harvesting is also a fun dynamic to think about. Also, the idea of having a lasting impact with your crafting, like building a structure that is operated by you or another character is fun to think about. I would love to see player built structures that are used as either housing or businesses for various player merchants and/or crafters.
I'm asking all this because it's a dynamic I've seen in series that revolve around MMOs, like Log Horizon (which is well executed and understands its medium to some extent, and also happens to only have factions in the sense that guilds and in-game nations can technically be considered factions) and SAO (which is poorly executed and doesn't seem to know its medium, despite showing 3 separate MMOs with different systems all 3 are poorly thought out or executed and it's never explained why these broken aspects never came up in the beta testing). Being able to operate your own business in-game sounds really appealing to me. The idea of establishing a guild to further develop crafting skills for all the crafters that are part of it is also a nice thought, the guild could have players that go out to gather resources for the crafters while the crafters, in turn, make better gear and distribute some of that to the more actively adventuring players so they can better perform their harvesting is also a fun dynamic to think about. Also, the idea of having a lasting impact with your crafting, like building a structure that is operated by you or another character is fun to think about. I would love to see player built structures that are used as either housing or businesses for various player merchants and/or crafters.
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Regarding some of the suggestions you made, I very much agree with them. The systems I knew consisted on the player sitting down his character and then a a small text windows would appear over the character's head, if you clicked on it you interacted with the shop. Being able to setup your own physical shop ingame could be quite interesting and it would definitely feel very immersive. I don't necessarily chant for these features, because I am happy as long as players can act as shops, the format doesn't interest me personally, but I would welcome more complex and immersive features.
We've yet to see many of the details of the upcoming crafting system, but I sincerely hope you don't get disappointed in the end. I have come to notice a certain trend in MMO development, people who really love crafting always have these big dreams for the crafting systems, but they almost always end up lacking most of what people were expecting, nor are crafters ingame as important and unique as people assumed they would be. This is because even in games that I played in which heavy restrictions existed to being a crafter (and you needed crafters in those games), I and any player worth their soul, had our own crafter alts. So, a guild of artisans is usually just not a successful venture.
From what I've been able to gather about Ashes of Creation, crafting was one of the first things about it because they wanted to be on par with the other mechanics of the game.