Bartering In A Parallel Universe

[Please note: this is an Andy's Imagination post, purely my own thoughts and will likely not appear in game]

It's been a couple months since my imagination got an airing... well, for gaming things anyway, but that's what happens when you find Movies4Men on your satellite TV... but that's off track, my gaming imagination hasn't had much of a run out but Zynga have done their best to change that by giving us something that automatically made my head go.

They gave us the Barter Depot. A building who's name is, at best, misleading and at worst an attempt to pretend we're not crafting, we're bartering. (No, we're crafting...)

I'm fairly sure most people will have been like me, when I saw the email title I got excited thinking of the possibilities, then I opened it and read what it was all about... and realised this wasn't bartering.

So... it got me thinking. If I had designed it, what would it have been? Thus here we are, the first Andy's Imagination post based on something already in game.

I think the first thing we can all stand up and agree here is, we're not bartering. We're crafting stuff. So how do we MAKE it bartering?

Simple, we do what this game was designed to do, we get social. We don't barter with some faceless entity, we barter by trading with our NEIGHBOURS.

Everyone remember this screen where we see wishlists? (A feature no-one gets around to using any more because nothing we need is giftable)

Well, we adapt it and move it into the game.

Say for example my Great Aunt Bathsheba wants a Spanish Coin, the rare item from the Debris Collection. She's given a few choices over what she can Barter for it (to stop one sided barter based cheating), say another rare collection item like a Bear Claw, 10 Ribbons or 10 Dinners (just as an example).

Well, Great Aunt Bathsheba has finished all the School Lessons so decides to trade away 10 Ribbons for the coin and, depending on what could be coded, either sends her Barter out to be viewed in her neighbours Barter Depots or it appears when neighbours visit her.

Then, when I, being the loving and doting great nephew that I am, either check my Barter Depot or visits her homestead I see this:

Ten Ribbons for one Spanish Coin... OK, I think, I'm a bit of a thicko and still have school lessons to go, but I do have a bundle of Spanish Coins, so I accept the Barter and click the button. I get credited 10 ribbons from Great Aunt Bathsheba's inventory, she gets credited a Spanish Coin from mine.

If you wanted to be REALLY cool you could set it that when Great Aunt Bathsheba logs in there's an arrow over her Barter Depot, and when she clicks that a Train rolls into the station and "delivers" her goods! But that might be asking a little much...

Obviously there would have to be some things set as limits.

Firstly what you can barter needs to have set rates so folks don't cheat the game trading 100 Spanish coins for a manure collection...

Secondly there would need to be a limit on the amount you could do, I reckon setting 3-5 Barters at a time would be pretty fair.

Finally it would have to only be collectible ONCE, so that Great Aunt Bathsheba doesn't end up losing 100 ribbons for 10 Spanish coins.

All of that I think is fair and possibly codeable... we could have brags to pop on our wall to say we've Bartered, we could have brags to pop on our wall to say we'd put up a barter, we could have badges for "Barter so and so amount of times" that could be posted on the wall, Zynga would get their marketing posts...

So there we go. That is how I would have designed a Barter building, not as another Crafting Workshop with a different name, but a real chance to go back to the Frontier and Barter with our neighbours.