Merchant tweaking? Focus: Merchants List

[CourierBravo]

ckey: CourierBravo
Over the past few months I've been playing an increasing amount of Merchant. And I've come to believe that merchant, as it currently stands, needs either tweaking or a minor overhaul. For context, I play Elizabeth Cox, a regular late night merchant character (Pacific Standard Time). The routine is usually to:
Grab things from around hideout, Load up Merchants list, Sort items in crates while furiously checking merchants list every minute to see if someone new is there
My main concern for this thread is not to do with the hideout or the mini warehouse contents, but rather the Merchants List program.

Vocabulary to note:
Contact: the NPC that a merchant buys and sells to/from

How it works, from what I've gathered, is that you get a list of contacts with one contact who's always there at the start of your list, and 2-5 others rotating in and out from a list. Each one has the options for buying, selling, and trading. Most will sell, those who don't sell do trades only, and very few buy. This rotating list of contacts has someone either leave or become available every minute. This list is mostly made up of, in order of most common to least common (based on my own experience only): contacts who sell guns, contacts who sell armor, contacts who sell mining equipment, contacts that sell robots or hardsuits and modules, and contacts who sell novelty items. The contact you have as your permanent contact is usually a novelty items contact, but the quality of items sold can vary.

I am, currently, unsatisfied with the loop it provides. I feel like my job is more to arm security rather than to sell things to player characters. How would I address this? The list below is my suggested changes, and my thoughts on them

1. Change the time for new contact/contact leaving from roughly one minute to 40 seconds.
Main concern: the cycling through will increase the odds of getting more gun contacts, with potentially more powerful weapons, allowing merchants to arm security even more powerfully
Fix: reduce frequency of arms contacts, increase frequency of novelty contacts
Pro's: A. More contacts moving in and out means cutting down on the time a merchant will spend at their hide out looking for items they think PC's will want to buy. B. makes the 'ask to stay longer' button feel more worthwhile for the cost
Con's: More flow of contacts means potentially higher chance for overpowered items to become for sale

2. Add new, lore appropriate contacts to dilute the pool
Main concern: a lot of the contacts are not lore fitting, several being very obvious references to media, such as 'the emperors lasgun shop' and 'the redshirt', going through and renaming and adding new ones will take awhile
Fix: please just make more contacts that give nice things players will be interested in
Pro's: more lore interaction, and alien species interest items
Con's: will take awhile to do

3: Change several of the already existing contacts
This is just opinion, but I don't like that there's quite a few contacts for mining and robotics that are either mostly useless due to a general lack of miners and roboticists, or are made redundant by the presence of miners and roboticists, and their pricing being very inconsistent and/or absurdly expensive.

4. Make more contacts buy, and increase amount of items they're interested in buying.
Main concern: merchant is a role that, if the stars line together, can let you just print credits. I've made over a million credits a couple times now from just buying/selling diamonds for 10 minutes. This would make doing so cheaper, letting a player just buy all sorts of crazy things and not care about the cost
Fix: make a limit to how many credits a contact will spend on buying things from the merchant
Pro's: makes buying/selling from merchants list something done more often, allowing capital to be built up for more expensive trades
Con's more OP items can be bought with some elbow grease put in, potentially upsetting the balance of the round currently being played.

I'm going to bed for now, its 3am as I'm posting this. I'd love feedback and discussion, and more suggestions. I'd like to personally try to implement a handful of changes, the more simple ones, to give myself some coding experience so I can develop things for the server.

 

Edited September 6, 2021 by Bejewledpot

[CourierBravo]

edits: was brute forcing editing it to try and figure out what symbols I was using that was not letting me post it/gettign error 500's