Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Trading

This is obviously a suggestion, and not mandatory, but I think maybe it would be a good ad-on to the site?
Basically what you would be able to do is trade your characters, and items that you have bought from the store with another player.
There really isn't much I can say, but I think you get the gist of it. Anyway, not sure if this would cause problems, but just a suggestion I think would bring more players! ^^

I believe this was suggested before, but was rejected, at least for the character part. Think of it this way, let's say that a person traded an anon character away that was currently in an active rp. Imagine how confusing that would be for the other people in said rp. Quite frankly trading characters would result in a lot of sticky and confusing situations.

The only time this is really an issue is when people start trying to trade user accounts instead of letting the new owner of a character make their own RPR character page. Pretty sure I've caught wind of this in the past.

If you play on the game Furcadia, where character named trading and selling is a huge thing, and RPR character profiles tend a shift with the characters, we can't really help that. And when that happens a lot of people typically make note that such and such character is under new management--also Old User deletes character profile, New User makes new character profile when this occurs.

It does cause a bit of an issue when it comes down to anonymous characters, who from an outside glance can't ID who plays them. It opens up the floodgates for abuse. I'm pretty sure Kim and the rest of our moderation team would not be comfortable with the easy trading of character profiles.

I'm also strongly uncomfortable with this idea - the character trading side of it at least, pretty sure we can already pass inventory items around as gifts if I'm not mistaken. However, I'm absolutely biased here. I've seen features like this on other 'character storing' sites and I strongly feel that in every case it was a detrimental feature to those communities. It made them far less of creative writing based arenas and much more like art galleries or even shop fronts for 'adoptable' artists. I can think of a couple off the top of my head that come across this way almost entirely (toyhou.se for example). It definitely attracts a certain crowd and promotes 'collecting' mindsets over more writing based self expression and story building. I feel like a healthy RP community does not engage in character trading as a common occurrence - the difference between a writing based character community and an art based one, basically. I've always felt that RPR was focused more on the creative writing side of things and would hate to see that change.

My personal opinion aside however, it does seem functionally best for someone ending up with a character - for whatever reason - to just create them their own new profile, as there are likely to be differences in presentation anyway. It definitely avoids any confusion! I suppose I feel that it doesn't need to be made any easier and that making it so could be problematic.

Now, an actual trade system for items rather than relying on the gifting system is a bit more compelling - not sure how many people would actually find a use for it, but I can see it potentially coming in handy.

We will not be adding character trading, now or in the future, for all the reasons already brought up. Privacy and confusion over who you are talking to tops the list of reasons why characters are not tradeable on the RPR.

We can gift items, but a "trade" system where each person has to show what they have in the pot and then agree on the trade, which will execute simultaneously, is definitely something I've considered. Low priority for now though.