# Barter marketplace ## overview.md ```yaml id: barter-marketplace title: Barter marketplace area: design summary: Player-to-player item exchange with no in-game currency — pure barter, with both a web interface and an in-game interface. repo: land-of-lor depends_on: ["server-architecture"] ``` ## What this is The system by which players trade items and blueprints with each other. **Load-bearing design constraint: there is no in-game currency.** All exchange is barter — a player can offer N units of a common item for one rare item, or offer a wide bundle of assorted items seeking one specific ingredient they lack. This exists almost independently of the game itself, with **both** a web interface and an in-game interface to the same underlying marketplace. ## Why it exists Currency-free barter follows directly from settled design pillars, not as an arbitrary constraint: - **"Everything is priced — no god-mode"** (`docs/README.md` §4): conservation of matter means nothing is free, but value is expressed as trigram opposing pairs and composition, never a scalar. A single fungible currency would reintroduce exactly the kind of scalar power-ranking the four-axes system is built to prevent. - **Blueprints are tradeable by construction** — "the pattern works whether or not you own the blueprint, which makes blueprints tradeable and gives an economy for free" (§8, and workspace `CLAUDE.md`'s settled pillars). The marketplace is where that tradeability actually gets exercised. - Cooperation-over-PvP (a recurring thread across all three LoR attempts, per workspace `CLAUDE.md`) — trading is one of the explicitly-named cooperative mechanics, alongside joint machines and consensual arena wagers. ## Scope - Listing mechanics: offer X of item A for one of item B; offer a bundle for one specific rare ingredient. - Both interfaces to the same marketplace state: an in-game UI (presumably reachable from the Ingredients/Blueprints inventory tabs, per `thought-specs/inventory-interface.md`) and a standalone **web interface** — meaning this may need its own client, separate from the game client, talking to the same server-side marketplace data. - Ownership/authority: the server (see `server-architecture`) is the single source of truth for what any player holds, which this marketplace depends on directly. ## Non-goals - Not introducing any currency, exchange rate, or scalar pricing mechanism, even as an internal implementation detail — if a "value score" creeps in to make matching easier, treat that as a design red flag against the no-currency constraint, not a shortcut. - Not the recipe/blueprint system itself (see `spell-crafting-interface`) — this epic only concerns exchanging what already exists between players. ## Key open questions - How offer-matching actually works without a common unit of value — direct 1:1 listings (I have this, I want that) seem straightforward; open-ended "best offer" matching across dissimilar bundles is genuinely harder and undesigned. - Whether the web interface is a full second client or a lightweight read/list/offer view. - Anti-abuse: since there's no currency to launder, what does scarcity/fraud even look like here (fake listings, duping) — not yet considered in any source doc. - **Half-formed, worth carrying forward:** if `object-system-experiments`' gatherability-tiering idea lands (a small arena-gatherable ingredient core vs. a long tail reached by crafting/trade), does this marketplace end up implicitly specializing around trading *for* arena-viable ingredients specifically — i.e. does "what's tradeable" and "what's arena-legal" collapse into nearly the same question? Or do they stay genuinely separate (the marketplace trades the full 64; arenas just restrict what you can *bring in*, not what exists)? Nothing decided — flagging so it isn't lost. ## Relevant docs - `land-of-lor/docs/README.md` §4 (no god-mode, opposing pairs over scalars), §8 (blueprints as tradeable knowledge). - `land-of-lor/docs/thought-specs/inventory-interface.md` — the Ingredients/Blueprints inventory tabs this likely surfaces from in-game. - `land-of-lor/CLAUDE.md` — cooperation-over-PvP as a recurring cross-attempt thread. ## status.md ```yaml updated: 2026-08-05 parked: true tasks: {"backlog":1,"needs-input":0,"ready":0,"doing":0,"review":0,"done":0} open_questions: [] tag: parked next: Parked — nothing to do here until server-architecture's ownership model exists to design against. ``` ## Task summary 1 backlog · 0 ready (parked, so nothing is marked ready regardless of what's underneath). This epic isn't being worked right now. ## Open questions None tracked. The real open design questions (offer-matching without a value unit, web-interface scope, anti-abuse) are recorded as plain prose in `overview.md`'s "Key open questions" — they'll be answered naturally when this epic is actually picked up, not generated ahead of time. ## Next Nothing — this is parked. Revisit once `server-architecture` has a concrete ownership/inventory model, or if Kris explicitly asks for it. ## tasks/ (1) ### barter-marketplace/001 — Spec the listing/offer data model ```yaml id: barter-marketplace/001 title: Spec the listing/offer data model epic: barter-marketplace state: backlog priority: 1 blocked_by: ["server-architecture/002"] estimate: M created: 2026-08-05 updated: 2026-08-05 claimed_by: null claimed_at: null delivers: [] review_artifact: null ``` ## What to do Design the listing/offer data model for player-to-player barter — direct 1:1 listings and bundle-for-one-rare-ingredient offers, per `overview.md`'s scope. Needs a real inventory/ownership data shape to design against, which depends on `server-architecture` settling how player inventory is authoritatively stored. ## Definition of done A data model doc: listing shape (offered items, wanted item(s)), how a match/acceptance is recorded, and how it ties into whatever ownership model `server-architecture` lands on. No currency, no scalar value field — see `overview.md`'s non-goals. ## Where the work lands `land-of-lor` repo. ## Docs to read first `overview.md`'s no-currency constraint (read this first, it's load-bearing) and its open question on offer-matching without a common value unit; `server-architecture`'s eventual ownership/inventory model. ## questions/ (0) ## deliverables (0)