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Rating player shops and services in game.
Blair
Member
Many of you know that players will be able to buy and/or rent stalls to sell goods and services. However I would like to know what are your thoughts on being able to leave a rating or some sort of quick review of a players stall. I.e where they high quality goods, did they treat you well, and did they at any point strip down naked while emoting on your corpse after killing you to take back the stuff you got. If you like this discussion don't forget to like. 
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That's a potential problem I can think of.
First off I believe a limit of one review per player should be a given. Having a word limit similar to like twitter could be good too... I am conflicted on how to keep players from false reviews though. It wouldn't make sense to give the shops power to delete any post they want but I feel like they should be able to delete posts that alert the profanity filter? This wouldn't stop false flags or well worded hate messages but at least it would make the trolls have to be more creative while also reducing the amount of work the moderators would have to do in such a situation.
If you have any better ideas im all ears but the current suggestion seems to have a few too many holes to be worth implementing.
What did I sell to you...?
But a rating & comments/review system seems to be out-of-place imo ...
1. a player-shop in a fantasy RPG world shouldn't be an eCommerce (well although technically it is, coz we're running it in a virtual world)
2. as Bricktop said, they need to prevent trolling somehow.
We did, but it was mostly done in places like the newspaper by local guides and columnists. Or in guest books or town newsletters. In my opinion that style could work, where players have the means to promote and spruke in RP fashion. Let them put up signs and posters and collaborate with real people writing about their servers.
Giving people the ability to rate shops and stalls like they are an app gives more potential problems than it gives solutions, or anything useful. It's also super immersion breaking and hamstrings the potential for con artists and such.
Yes!
I wouldn't be surprised if the forums had a dedicated section for Buying/Selling
Oh that could be an idea. If they could make a list of items and how frequently they sell in the shop that could help with quickly finding a shop with the items you might need.
As an example:
Shop A, B, and C all sell swords within a city.
Shop A sold 10 rare sword 30 uncommon swords and 40 common swords last month.
Shop B sold no rare swords, 50 uncommon swords, and 100 common swords last month.
Shop C only sold 30 rare swords last month.
So of the three shops you would see a ranking for the item, Shop A has a more general array of goods, Shop B has a bulk of lower tier swords and Shop C focuses on quality.
The second part of this would be listing an average cost that each item sells for in each shop. So maybe Shop A rare swords sell at a higher price than the ones at Shop C, while the common swords at shop B would sell cheaper than the swords in Shop A. Now the advantage that Shop A has over the other two is that it is placed closer to the market place center or a bank. So perhaps it costs more to shop there but it is more convenient.
This could create a system that fleshes itself out naturally, giving shop owners a competitive system that can easily be checked on to track other's prices, as well as making it easier for a player to decide where to go and shop when they need a specific item.
But in all seriousness, I don't think there are enough degrees of freedom for the quality or experience of the stall to be that variable outside of the actual items being sold. Also, if prices do dramatically differ, I think word of mouth is actually amazing for this. Don't want to get ripped off? It may be worth going to a local tavern and actually talking to real freaking players to get a lay of the land.
Town crier but with like magic somehow.
Town Scryer?
I think having the ability to put up posters would work, and maybe even signs in houses for if your running for mayor!
https://knightsofember.com/forums/members/winner909098.54
What measures would change your decisions to use one vendor over another?
I remember back in FF14 I advertised my crafting service in my player blog (Square Enix had this nice feature that every player can write their own blog on FF14's official community site (Lodestone?)), and it worked out pretty well for me.
(Off-topic) Actually an official community blog might be a useful feature - a place for ppl to share their play experience, advertise their services or player-held events etc.
But that still doesn't solve the trolling-reviews issue
There's not really any way around trolling, even on RL review sites. I once saw an Amazon review that said "Great product, fast delivery. Will use again." And they gave it 1/5 stars. You've just got to hope that the positive reviews outweigh the negative and/or trolling reviews, sort of like a wiki. Any ol' idiot can post on there, but it gets more and more accurate the more people add to it.
I think this problem could be exacerbated in an MMORPG though, because the biggest guilds could designate "our shop" and get all their members to rate it. You already see the guild identity of shops in other games with stalls so this would be a logical thing to do.
On the otherhand, maybe that's just part of the advantage of running a merchant guild.
This is also enhanced by the fact that there are likely to only be a few hundred potential customers for your stall, unless you are in a metropolis - at which point it grows to a few thousand.
A guild of 300 people absolutely could sink any player stall they want with a system like this.
Also, I don't really see the point - for three main reasons.
The first is that players can look at items before they buy them. There is no real way players can be rated on the quality of their product, when players are able to see the exact quality of that product. Since services are limited to repairs and enchanting (as far as we know), I don't see a need for reputation here, either.
Second, stalls are temporary - you only rent them for a period of time. This means the stall itself can't really have a rating - though the character could.
Third, players often have merchant alts - for various reasons. If a players alt has a bad rating, they would just make another alt. A rating being account wide seems somewhat unlikely, due to the desire of the developers to have a degree of spy and intreuge in the game - which dictates that characters on a given account not effect each other (it would be possible to spot a spy in your guild if ratings go to the account rather than to the character).