How do shop or market stall owners get items?

Basically any way you'd want. You loot/mine it have agreements with people doing this for you, buy from auction, or through private trades.

Is anyone still using this? When I was still active, the main issue I saw was that in order to buy or sell through booths was it was not connected to the auction, and thus you would have to roam around. Which, in my opinion, defeats the entire purpose. Why pay 100k PED for a stall, booth, anything, if you can just use the auction? Sure, the fee might be slightly higher, but you most likely make faster sales, unless you happen to have a salespoint close to a TP.

In which case, MindArk might at any given point decide to fuck you over and move your point of sales further away. That happened to us when VU 10 hit, and nobody in Goteborg gave a fuck, despite us paying a premium for the location. So don't bother with shops or spacecrafts or landareas or planets or moons or anything else MindArk will try to encourage you to invest into. You *will* get screwed by MindArk. In fact, they happen to have a 100% track record on screwing over anyone investing in these.

In fact, I would advise you to just abaondon the game while you can. Save yourself some frustration and more importantly, money. Anything MindArk touches will turn toxic.

This "game" is going nowhere. They ride whichever trend gets viral (but only after the trend dies, so look out for Squid Game Red Light, Green Light hitting Entropia in 2022) and desperately hope their incompetence will be shileded by capitalising on the wave of new players.

They have not managed to get a new influx of players for ages. If they do manage to get new players, they will drop off after extremely short periods of time. There is very little entertainment offered for your money. Why would anyone stick around?

The great majority of the existing playerbase is only staying becayse they spent thousands of dollars in this frankengame. If that had not been the case, they would have been long gone, but somehow all of these people were convinced that "sKiLLs rEpReSeNt MoNeY" and are desperately hoping some new influx of idiots will relieve them from their skill "investments". Except, nobody is buying them.

Personally, I had hoped back in 2008 or so, that the new planets would finally mean that MindArk, the incompetent Swedish clowns running this game, would be held accountable by their partners. The opposite turned out to be the case, with MindArk stiffling creative content and talent just to order their own incompetence. The planet partner scheme was and is a big failure because MindArk favors their own subsidiary, after an attempt to sell that one off fell through because they lied about the numbers.

MindArk went through a number of CEOs over the last few years. Lootius knows that a great number of people on this forum worked extremely hard to try and support these numbnuts. We spent countless hours of our own private time, and an amount of money I don't even dare to take a guess at to promote this promise of a game. We published an actual magazine, at our own cost, only to have the current chairman of the board who actually never worked a day in a real company before in his life, attempt to sell it to a third party as if it was his creation.

MindArk.does.not.give.a.fuck. They are talentless hacks, without any vision whatsoever, hoping that anyone would be willing to buy into their dream. Unfortunately, some people did. Go ahead. Go ask the planet partners how they feel about this collaboration. Because of NDAs, they might tell you they are delighted. God knows why. Fuck all has been achieved for them in years. Talk to them off-the-record, you'll hear different stories. No planet partners have been signed on in the last decade. Apparently even shoddy marketing stories run thin.

MindArk does not give a fuck about their players. MindArk does not give a fuck about their partners. All they care about is spending in their casino. There is no great new influx. There hasn't been in a decade. All that happaned is press releases, none of which mattered. There was a mobile game, which enticed players to invest. That ended up a fluke, and so MindArk doesn't mention ComPet anymore. That'd be embarrassing, after all.

Other attempts were made to raise capital. Space ships were sold. That flizzled. Statues were sold, and subsequently some of the buys had to wait years for their statues. A moon was sold. It sold at minimum buyout. But then!

Kids, get comfortable, because this will blow your mind! MindArk wanted to launch their own cryptocoin! A bunch of idiots from Sweden were going to hide the fact that they for 15 years had not ever managed to release a bugfree release and launch the equivalent of the Unity Asset Store. You would be able to literally sell ANY game asset on here, but it was on the bLocKcHaIn and run by MindArk. A swedish bunch of hacks, who rather than Unity, who have proper devops procedures in place to ensure quality releases. A literal bunch of nonos, claiming they would literally liberate the world of game development by somehow.. uhm. moving people to their proprietary blockchain system. Because "WE IS MINDARK AND BLOCKCHAIN". What could possibly go wrong?

A modest 12 million USD required to put this into place was suggested (and MindArk is well known for their suggested investments leading to new groundbreaking tech), but when that was not reached (by a long shot), a "mysterious investor" showed up making the ICO a success. I feel encouraged to add that the original terms for the cryptocoin had a clause in there that "inverstments are to be considered as a donation", so whoever the mysterious investor was, he or she clearly was very savvy.

Mere weeks after, the project was announced to be abaondoned. The mysterious investor who generously donated his or her money, apparently got cold feet. I honestly feel the world missed out on this amazing opportunity where MindArk, failed to revolutionarize the gaming industry.

Thank god, that MindArk now will completely cvhange the game by switching to Epic. I mean, after all, the past 13 years of disappointment clearly were caused by Cry Engine, rather than a lack of talent in coding/storywriting/creative development. I truly belive MindArk should add several additional layers of management in order to sovle this current hiatus that exists since roughly 2011.

Oh, and fuck David SSimmonds.


Entropia's actual punchline ought to be: "What a strange game. The only winning move is not to play".

 

Shops are a lot more useful on lower population planets where the auction is less active.

When I had shops I tried to be as self-sufficient as possible while also providing for the local needs (on rocktropia at the time)
I would sell my own crafted and looted items and mined resources, and try to import things that were needed that I could not loot or craft myself.

 

*bump*

100 PED reward for someone to write a article/guide for how shops work in Entropia for players interested in this area of the game. If interested please sent a pm.

 

We are not in a hurry. Better to achieve high quality than meeting a deadline :)