Ideas for a healthier game economy

[Khaylara]

I've been mulling over this for some time. What triggered me to post was another topic about work orders and the other trigger was realizing how much time I waste sifting through vendor stalls and consignment to find 1 ectoplasm or one gem to try an extraction.
So my ideas without any particular logic

1-make the vendor stalls cheaper but limit the types of items. For example if the room says "Potions" you can't place armors and weapons in your shop. Even NPCs refuse to consign certain items. Imo this system would encourage specialized shops, thus specialized crafts (not necessarily a craft like leatherworking or tailoring but also surveying, gardening etc).The stalls are currently too chaotic to find anything and there's no price competition when you simply have to check every single stall for a certain gem you eventually give in and buy it at 250 cause you don't have time to search ALL the shops.

2-remove the stalls kept for storage. If a stall is empty (the content is not shown) that stall should be closed. Maybe with a penalty for using it as storage room.

3-remove the option to sell things to certain NPCs or/and lower their money pool. For example Lamashu, Yogzi, Amutasa...they buy a lot of carpentry, tools, leather rolls etc which would be much better in player shops. Make it the viable way to sell things. I would definitely buy meditation stools, wood, many would buy tools etc from a shop that sells slightly above the face value and not double the price as it is now with used tabs. Just an example btw, the same thing can be said about the NPCs who buy scrolls, foods etc


4-remove work orders or account lock them just like player stalls, per account. I lvled crafts w/o work orders and it's doable. At the moment it only creates inflation and forces people into exploiting the system.Related, next point

5-don't allow dualboxing/multiboxing on multiple accounts for muling or any other purpose. One account should be enough. Let me detail why before anyone flames and the topic gets locked:
-multiboxing for storage on like 5 different accounts allows players to circumvent the whole storage-favor system. Why would anyone travel between their storage spots when they can stay in serbule and transfer wood, gems, bones to a separate alt for each material. Very convenient but not how it's intended to work.
-multiple accounts in a guild-coin pouches=inflation and unearned cash by one player.
-multiple mules=the materials get hoarded and used by one player and are not being circulated into the game market. The result is a player in "single player mode" who doesn't need to buy or sell almost anything. No need for any interaction with other players in the game market (at the moment many players do this because it's the only viable way to make cash or level tradeskills)
-work orders completed on multiple accounts
-player stalls on multiple accounts

6-Increase/adjust some of the prices. For example nobody is going to buy a piece of cheese if I'm selling it at real market value. I mean who's going to pay 2200-2500 for a piece of cheese. What goes into it-a stomach is 1500+, couple of mushrooms, 2 bottles of milk sold atm at 250-300 each, firkin/barrel/kilderkin (wood+hoops/slabs), some sort of textile like cheesecloth. My idea is adjust the face value for really valuable items like stomachs and apply point no 1 to create competitive pricing.

7-Also needed-decrease the amount of gear drops but increase their value. Same with crafted pieces, those should be even more valuable.The argument I made for cheesemaking can be easily applied to tailoring and leatherworking. A piece of purple max enchanted 70 gear is around 1k+. A vervadium sells with 3k minimum in shops (?!). Ofc we can farm it but i'm talking about the case in which we buy materials (that's how it usually works in a healthy economy, buy raw materials from others, sell the finished product, you make a profit, they make a profit).

No flaming please, discuss/add but keep it civil, if we start arguing it breaks the ToS and it gets locked. Bring arguments to support you ideas or to debate mine, no personal attacks. Thanks and looking forward to reading some other suggestions

[ShieldBreaker]

For the most part I'm fine with the way things are at the moment. Of course there is always room for improvement.

My biggest concern at the moment is how is the money going to get drained out of the economy when we get to actual end game content? Once you buy all the skills and abilities, get your end game gear do you just stop trying to accumulate wealth? Are there going to be recurring cost that you will have to grind out super high level work orders to be able to maintain what you have?

My current biggest problem with the economy is that I have no idea what prices anything should be, or what skills sets will be of interest on gear. I usually end up just putting stuff in my store to face value during the last couple days of selling. Also I have stopped bothering to consign stuff. I like finding player work orders for recipe/ability scrolls, still worry a little if they are overpaying but they put up the order so.

Unfortunately I've only got questions, and no solutions or answers.

Okay while writing I came up with 1 idea.
End Game Services for a % of you gross income for the year. Mainly to drain off excess councils.
Something along the lines of if you want a teleport code for direct access to the capital or another land you can have unlimited access for 10% of your gross income payable up front, based on you previous years income. You would be able to check how much you will owe so you can budget accordingly. Obviously there would be other ways to get there, a boat fee per trip, or a gate toll, sneak in, bind to a nearby teleport and walk.
If you had 20 or more of these type of services my hope would be everyone would find 9 they think worth the money and 11+ they can live without. This would clear out 90% of players income each year leaving the other 10% to live on. And if you don't play as much your not worst off, the price of the service comes down.

[Khaylara]

True, I'm treating the issue as if 70 was the endgame (it is for now though) but the market model exists. My overall concern is that we don't have a proper game economy. That was not particularly an issue when we had 15 active players but it feels like an issue now. Anecdotal scenario but the way I imagine things:

now: X low level player finds an unidentified poetry book (worth 150 councils cause the price is imho not adjusted according to rarity), sees its value and sells it to Hulon. Y high level player knows the value buys it off used tab at Hulon and resells it with 20 k (or uses it). In this scenario X player loses because the face value of the item doesn't show it's a rare item thus valuable.

my scenario: X low level player gets an unidentified poetry book worth 3k face value (adjusted price), figures out it's worth a bit of cash but they can't sell to Hulon cause Hulon doesn't buy it. Ideally they will sell this book via their own stall or ask about it on trade and get a better price for it. What if Hulon wasn't buying scrolls but we'd have a dedicated room in the citadel with only scrolls and potions? (we have now but we can put any item in shop anyway-see point 1). Right now only a limited amount of players have the knowledge of the real market value of items and with more new players the problem amplifies. It's going to take newer players a while to learn the ropes and stop selling valuable items to NPCs.

Very good point on draining gold at the future endgame. I can only guess that it will be nearly impossible (or it will take a very long time) for people to unlock and max everything. Level 70 is currently a hassle and we still have 3 unlocks to go to the future cap level. Paying taxes or having very expensive high end services is certainly a good idea for when the game is fully finished and launched. We had this issue before skills started getting uncapped above 50, we had nothing to do with the cash we made for a good while.

[Niph]

now: X low level player finds an unidentified poetry book (worth 150 councils cause the price is imho not adjusted according to rarity), sees its value and sells it to Hulon. Y high level player knows the value buys it off used tab at Hulon and resells it with 20 k (or uses it). In this scenario X player loses because the face value of the item doesn't show it's a rare item thus valuable.

When opening the vendor sale window, the item could have some overlapping icon or text indicating there is a pending work order for it.

[Vinnicombe]

now: X low level player finds an unidentified poetry book (worth 150 councils cause the price is imho not adjusted according to rarity), sees its value and sells it to Hulon. Y high level player knows the value buys it off used tab at Hulon and resells it with 20 k (or uses it). In this scenario X player loses because the face value of the item doesn't show it's a rare item thus valuable.

This was actually me last week. I got an unidentified poetry book and had no idea of its worth, so I sold it off and then the next day I see a player work order for the item, paying 10k. I felt like I cheated myself. While I just try and move on whenever I realise I've made a big mistake like that, and I've done a few times now (played for less than a month), I don't think that's a good attitude for everyone to have when the player base really starts getting big once we hit Steam.

A few players getting screwed out of what seems like a fortune if your first couple of weeks isn't a big problem, but potentially hundreds of players screwing themselves? Shouldn't be ignored.

[Tagamogi]

1-make the vendor stalls cheaper but limit the types of items. For example if the room says "Potions" you can't place armors and weapons in your shop. Even NPCs refuse to consign certain items. Imo this system would encourage specialized shops, thus specialized crafts (not necessarily a craft like leatherworking or tailoring but also surveying, gardening etc).The stalls are currently too chaotic to find anything and there's no price competition when you simply have to check every single stall for a certain gem you eventually give in and buy it at 250 cause you don't have time to search ALL the shops.

I think the current system works really well, actually. Unless I'm bored, I always use the shop name and description when shopping. If I'm looking for gems, I only look for shops that advertise "gems" and just don't bother checking a shop that advertises as "buy my stuff" or "everything you want" or something generic like that. I think this actually rewards shop keepers that come up with a clear vision for their shop, and if they want to have a custom category like "Cotton, ectoplasm and level 60+ swords" instead of just "potions" and can fit that into their shop description, I think that's fine. I'm always puzzled by the game's predefined categories anyway.

One improvement I would like is to be able to actually see the shop name and description without having to click on a shopkeeper first.



2-remove the stalls kept for storage. If a stall is empty (the content is not shown) that stall should be closed. Maybe with a penalty for using it as storage room.

That would be nice, although I don't think a penalty is needed.



3-remove the option to sell things to certain NPCs or/and lower their money pool. For example Lamashu, Yogzi, Amutasa...they buy a lot of carpentry, tools, leather rolls etc which would be much better in player shops. Make it the viable way to sell things. I would definitely buy meditation stools, wood, many would buy tools etc from a shop that sells slightly above the face value and not double the price as it is now with used tabs. Just an example btw, the same thing can be said about the NPCs who buy scrolls, foods etc

4-remove work orders or account lock them just like player stalls, per account. I lvled crafts w/o work orders and it's doable. At the moment it only creates inflation and forces people into exploiting the system.Related, next point

I think both of these would be very bad, especially combined.Right now, if I want to level a craft skill, I have multiple different options:
1. Fill work orders. This will allow me to make money while leveling my skill, but I will only be able to progress slowly since the work orders per month are limited. (Leaving aside alt turn ins; account locking there may be a good idea.)
2. Craft items and vendor them. This allows me to progress as fast in my skill as I can find the mats, and as I can afford. I'm assuming here that selling to a vendor is going to be a slight loss compared to other potential uses of the raw materials.
3. Craft items and sell to players. This forces me to progress very slowly since I have to depend on a variable player market to level up my skill. I'm going to guess there's not going to be a lot of demand for rough leather gear, for example. This may also force me to to take a loss selling these items if the players trying to level a given skill oversupply the available market.
4. Craft items and destroy them. I can level as fast as I want, assuming I have cash.

In most games I've played leveling a skill pretty much comes down to 4. People make money from combat and then blow that money to speed level crafting skills, entirely eliminating the fun of crafting until the skill's max level, imo. I usually end up playing a mini game with spreadsheets trying to decide how I can lose as little money as possible while combining methods 2 and 3. It's sometimes entertaining but also frustrating when sometimes the best answer is really just "get money elsewhere and burn it until you are x level in the skill."

I love, love, love the Gorgon work order system.



5-don't allow dualboxing/multiboxing on multiple accounts for muling or any other purpose. One account should be enough. Let me detail why before anyone flames and the topic gets locked:
-multiboxing for storage on like 5 different accounts allows players to circumvent the whole storage-favor system. Why would anyone travel between their storage spots when they can stay in serbule and transfer wood, gems, bones to a separate alt for each material. Very convenient but not how it's intended to work.
-multiple accounts in a guild-coin pouches=inflation and unearned cash by one player.
-multiple mules=the materials get hoarded and used by one player and are not being circulated into the game market. The result is a player in "single player mode" who doesn't need to buy or sell almost anything. No need for any interaction with other players in the game market (at the moment many players do this because it's the only viable way to make cash or level tradeskills)
-work orders completed on multiple accounts
-player stalls on multiple accounts

I'm going to wait until the new UI before I vehemently disagree with you. :) My interim opinion: I started out playing the game as intended, and vendored things I couldn't use. Unlocking new storage and finding new storage NPCs was absolutely thrilling. However, over time, and as I created an alt on whom I wanted to keep exactly the same items as on my main, the limited storage just became less and less thrilling and more and more a nuisance until I finally gave in and created storage alts for my convenience and sanity. I would like to get rid of my storage alts and I'll give it a serious try when the new UI comes out but if it doesn't give me the storage options I need to enjoy playing, I'd want to continue using storage alts.

I've played games that allowed considerably more storage, and they do not turn into single player games where everyone hoards. As far as I can tell, some players just like to hoard, and other players are perfectly content to get rid of things they are unlikely to need. There are usually enough players in the latter category that the game economy gets along just fine.

As a side issue, whether a single account per player is feasible would also depend on the number of available character slots. If I play long enough, I will eventually want to have all possible races and animal forms. That's more than 4 slots.



6-Increase/adjust some of the prices. For example nobody is going to buy a piece of cheese if I'm selling it at real market value. I mean who's going to pay 2200-2500 for a piece of cheese. What goes into it-a stomach is 1500+, couple of mushrooms, 2 bottles of milk sold atm at 250-300 each, firkin/barrel/kilderkin (wood+hoops/slabs), some sort of textile like cheesecloth. My idea is adjust the face value for really valuable items like stomachs and apply point no 1 to create competitive pricing.

One immediate problem with that is that the game isn't finished yet, and that the market value of stomachs is going to go down if their drop rate is increased (please!). There are going to be fluctuations like this throughout the game, and I don't think the NPC prices should be changed continually.

One possible option could be to just identify items that are intended to be very rare and valuable crafting materials, and don't allow the NPCs to buy them. This would encourage people to check the player market for them.

I am not convinced it's really necessary to protect players from themselves to that extent though. Part of the fun of playing a game is just finding out the best way to do something at times, and if that means you make mistakes that cost money while learning, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing.

Also, some players are going to be fine just vendoring, even if they could get more money from players because the player route is going to require more effort and take more time. I always cringe whenever I see my husband vendor things in any game since he will sell things that, to me, are rare and valuable. To him, it's just junk clogging up his bags, and he doesn't care that he could get twice the money from players. (Now, if it's a hundred or a thousand times their vendor value, he might change his mind but he's still not going to lose sleep over getting the most money for them.)



7-Also needed-decrease the amount of gear drops but increase their value. Same with crafted pieces, those should be even more valuable.The argument I made for cheesemaking can be easily applied to tailoring and leatherworking. A piece of purple max enchanted 70 gear is around 1k+. A vervadium sells with 3k minimum in shops (?!). Ofc we can farm it but i'm talking about the case in which we buy materials (that's how it usually works in a healthy economy, buy raw materials from others, sell the finished product, you make a profit, they make a profit).


Going to say no again - I like the amount of current gear drops since it gives you more variety to choose from if you are looking for new equipment to wear.

As with #6 (https://forum.projectgorgon.com/usertag.php?do=list&action=hash&hash=6) , I don't think there is a need to adjust the vendor prices for crafted gear based on the current and inherently variable player market.




My biggest concern at the moment is how is the money going to get drained out of the economy when we get to actual end game content? Once you buy all the skills and abilities, get your end game gear do you just stop trying to accumulate wealth? Are there going to be recurring cost that you will have to grind out super high level work orders to be able to maintain what you have?

My current biggest problem with the economy is that I have no idea what prices anything should be, or what skills sets will be of interest on gear.

Yes, all of that. I think the money management required in Gorgon when you start out is really neat - having to actually make the conscious decision to not buy certain recipes I could use because I can't afford to buy everything at once is a very interesting limitation. I'm just not sure how that scales to higher level players.

[Khaylara]

"I'm going to wait until the new UI before I vehemently disagree with you. My interim opinion: I started out playing the game as intended, and vendored things I couldn't use. Unlocking new storage and finding new storage NPCs was absolutely thrilling. However, over time, and as I created an alt on whom I wanted to keep exactly the same items as on my main, the limited storage just became less and less thrilling and more and more a nuisance until I finally gave in and created storage alts for my convenience and sanity. I would like to get rid of my storage alts and I'll give it a serious try when the new UI comes out but if it doesn't give me the storage options I need to enjoy playing, I'd want to continue using storage alts."

At the moment I use those too (though only one account-4 chars) but we shouldn't be forced to find ways around it by resorting to alts. That means something is wrong with the current system:P I doubt the new UI is going to change that aspect though.

With the learning curve for new players...I disagree here. I noticed even few player work orders that I'd call plain scamming, like 850 councils for 10 strong rennet (10 stomachs). When you have the vendor NPC buying it for 40 councils you will sell it at 850 per 10 cause it sounds like a good deal...when the value is 15 k at least. Minor "scams" like these will be very hard to control once the population increases.

Also Niph's idea is great and it could be applied to other items.

[Tagamogi]

At the moment I use those too (though only one account-4 chars) but we shouldn't be forced to find ways around it by resorting to alts. That means something is wrong with the current system:P I doubt the new UI is going to change that aspect though.

Yes to both of that. I think (hope?) that the new UI is going to fix some aspects of the current system that particularly drive me to use alts, though.



With the learning curve for new players...I disagree here. I noticed even few player work orders that I'd call plain scamming, like 850 councils for 10 strong rennet (10 stomachs). When you have the vendor NPC buying it for 40 councils you will sell it at 850 per 10 cause it sounds like a good deal...when the value is 15 k at least. Minor "scams" like these will be very hard to control once the population increases.

I think some of those orders could be posted by new players who were looking for a particular item and posted for a value that made sense to them without being aware of the actual market value. 85 councils as an ingredient for mild cheddar cheese makes perfect sense to me too, if I look at it from a cheesemaking and worth of cheese perspective. I think the reason it is not worth 85 councils is more that there hasn't been time to do a cheesemaking skill review yet rather than that the game is trying to create an inflated stomach market. Probably... So, I'm not sure how much of an economy problem these items are going to be once the game becomes more polished.

( As an aside, I don't think posting for 10 rennets would be a very effective scam. Someone who has had played for long enough to accumulate 10 stomachs is probably well aware of their value at that point in time. Then again, scammers tend to be stupid, so who knows... )

[Crissa]

Stomachs are just broken, so I'm not sure how they're a good example.

[Khaylara]

...they aren't broken(?!) and the accent is on "example". I just used stomachs and poetry books as example of items which are market valuable but not face value valuable. If that makes sense.

[Crissa]

Not enough stomachs drop to warrant the skill. There several critters that should, that don't... They're just stupid rare.

[Khaylara]

"Craft items and sell to players. This forces me to progress very slowly since I have to depend on a variable player market to level up my skill. I'm going to guess there's not going to be a lot of demand for rough leather gear, for example. This may also force me to to take a loss selling these items if the players trying to level a given skill oversupply the available market"


Replying to this part-You are right, aside from tailoring gear with pockets, crafted gear in general is near impossible to sell to players, there are too many skill variations for that (I tried). I would say the NPCs like Joeh or Larsan will have to stay, it's pretty much a standard in games to have weapons, armors and accessories NPCs. I was really in this case talking only about some of the NPCs, why sell amazing skinning knives or statues to Yogzi when players would definitely buy them. At least that was my logic, maybe a bit extreme. Let's say lower the options instead of removing them in order to force some useful things into the players market. Players buy their tools mostly from used tabs anyway where they pay double the price the crafter got for them. Nobody benefits, it's just NPC cash sink.

Maybe people have other preferences when they buy off player stalls, I pretty much buy anything that's well priced (i.e.gems at 150-200) even if I don't need them straight away. Scrolls that I know are rare (maybe friends need them), faded books, notus records, leather, wood, femurs, poetry, even flowers. So sell them to me not to Jesina or Marna:P
At least that's the end goal for me, I don't know if everyone feels that way and I'm no specialist in MMOs economy. It just seems better to have player interaction on a market than player-NPC interaction for everything.

[rastaah]

Have not read the thread except the original post , my input is as a low level and just starting I have never had enough money to buy anything I want, I struggle daily and have nothing and no money. I have done some work orders, I have done things and I make no money. My girl has about 3k and never had more than around 5 or 6k ever. (Level 25 in some stuff)

I would not want to see anything changed for the worse, this could be a game breaker for many. I don't want it easy or I'd have posted and complained about how hard it is but to read a post to make it harder, had to stay something <3

[sudostahp]

"Craft items and sell to players. This forces me to progress very slowly since I have to depend on a variable player market to level up my skill. I'm going to guess there's not going to be a lot of demand for rough leather gear, for example. This may also force me to to take a loss selling these items if the players trying to level a given skill oversupply the available market"
Replying to this part-You are right, aside from tailoring gear with pockets, crafted gear in general is near impossible to sell to players, there are too many skill variations for that (I tried). I would say the NPCs like Joeh or Larsan will have to stay, it's pretty much a standard in games to have weapons, armors and accessories NPCs. I was really in this case talking only about some of the NPCs, why sell amazing skinning knives or statues to Yogzi when players would definitely buy them. At least that was my logic, maybe a bit extreme. Let's say lower the options instead of removing them in order to force some useful things into the players market. Players buy their tools mostly from used tabs anyway where they pay double the price the crafter got for them. Nobody benefits, it's just cash sunk into NPCs.

A single player would be capable of supplying the entire server with adequate amazing skinning knives, utility knives, and organ knives. Since multiple servers have toolcrafting, prices are driven down near cost.

Equilibrium is an important concept in economics. Prices stabilize where the supply curve meets the demand curve. As supply increases, demand decreases. There's no market for most crafted items since most folks either have the skill, or have a guild mate that will do it for free. Work orders pick up the slack in the system and make crafting profitable through an artificial market. Even the most expensive skill in the game, Cheesemaking, will never be profitable.

As for new players selling stomachs and poetry books under market value, while markets are efficient, there are inefficiencies in markets that can cause undesirable outcomes. Another player mentioned a tooltip on items with a current outstanding work order. That's hella smart.

[Hoxard]

1-make the vendor stalls cheaper but limit the types of items. For example if the room says "Potions" you can't place armors and weapons in your shop. Even NPCs refuse to consign certain items. Imo this system would encourage specialized shops, thus specialized crafts (not necessarily a craft like leatherworking or tailoring but also surveying, gardening etc).The stalls are currently too chaotic to find anything and there's no price competition when you simply have to check every single stall for a certain gem you eventually give in and buy it at 250 cause you don't have time to search ALL the shops.

2-remove the stalls kept for storage. If a stall is empty (the content is not shown) that stall should be closed. Maybe with a penalty for using it as storage room.

I agree with this heartily. Ideally, store owners should be focusing on specialized shops. I don't think it should be forced, but I do think it should be incentivized. Most of the stalls are just totally random stuff and it really kills any interest in checking them.
One improvement would be to have a shop's decorations be automatically updated based on what you have in stock, so if you have six stacks of gems, a stack of flower seeds and two pieces of random gear in stock, it'll show the gem decorations whether you like it or not.

Another nice feature would be the ability to reserve slots for a specific item to allow easy restocking and to notify customers if you're out of stock temporarily.
For example, one of your main sellers is baked beets. You decide to make a reserved slot of baked beets. If the stack in that slot runs out, it will show up to customers as "Buy 1 for 6000 councils : Baked Beets(Out of Stock)". You can then swing by with a stack of baked beets and hit "Auto-Restock" and it would automatically refill that slot with the same pricing information.



3-remove the option to sell things to certain NPCs or/and lower their money pool. For example Lamashu, Yogzi, Amutasa...they buy a lot of carpentry, tools, leather rolls etc which would be much better in player shops. Make it the viable way to sell things. I would definitely buy meditation stools, wood, many would buy tools etc from a shop that sells slightly above the face value and not double the price as it is now with used tabs. Just an example btw, the same thing can be said about the NPCs who buy scrolls, foods etc

I don't agree with this however. NPC used tabs have a significant factor in the market price of items. If you can buy it off someone's used tab whenever you want, then there's no way players will be able to sell it for more than double face value. It prevents people from driving the market prices of things to ridiculous levels, unless those things are also ridiculously rare and/or never vendored. Vendor money should also be a viable option to fund your adventures if you're the kind of person who hates player economy.



4-remove work orders or account lock them just like player stalls, per account. I lvled crafts w/o work orders and it's doable. At the moment it only creates inflation and forces people into exploiting the system.Related, next point

5-don't allow dualboxing/multiboxing on multiple accounts for muling or any other purpose. One account should be enough. Let me detail why before anyone flames and the topic gets locked:
-multiboxing for storage on like 5 different accounts allows players to circumvent the whole storage-favor system. Why would anyone travel between their storage spots when they can stay in serbule and transfer wood, gems, bones to a separate alt for each material. Very convenient but not how it's intended to work.
-multiple accounts in a guild-coin pouches=inflation and unearned cash by one player.
-multiple mules=the materials get hoarded and used by one player and are not being circulated into the game market. The result is a player in "single player mode" who doesn't need to buy or sell almost anything. No need for any interaction with other players in the game market (at the moment many players do this because it's the only viable way to make cash or level tradeskills)
-work orders completed on multiple accounts
-player stalls on multiple accounts

Don't agree with removing work orders, but they absolutely NEED to be account locked just like stalls are. In addition, muling/multiboxing should be straight up banned, end of story. It leads to issues with storage, it leads to issues with supply and demand, it leads to issues with inflation, it leads to issues with player stalls. I will be sad to say goodbye to my music alts and their gardening buffs, but honestly even that is something that really shouldn't be allowed.

I know it's something that would cause a lot of stress within the community, and would be very difficult to enforce, but if you discourage it enough the practice will just naturally die out once other options become more convenient.
Suggestions include

-Alleviate the need for mules. Add more storage that is more easily accessible, increase stack size on problematic items like milk, crafting supplies, etc. Add more ways to increase your max inventory.
-Set starting inventory really, really low. Compensate by drastically increasing the bonus inventory slots granted by endurance.
-Make tailoring pockets add an endurance requirement so that you can't deck out a level 2 mule with +40 slot rags.
-Make trade window capacity scale based on inventory size. A mule with level 4 endurance and their tiny 15 slot inventory will only be able to transfer 3 items at a time, which would add a lot of frustration to the muling process, particularly to those without multiple monitors.


6-Increase/adjust some of the prices. For example nobody is going to buy a piece of cheese if I'm selling it at real market value. I mean who's going to pay 2200-2500 for a piece of cheese. What goes into it-a stomach is 1500+, couple of mushrooms, 2 bottles of milk sold atm at 250-300 each, firkin/barrel/kilderkin (wood+hoops/slabs), some sort of textile like cheesecloth. My idea is adjust the face value for really valuable items like stomachs and apply point no 1 to create competitive pricing.

I think in the case of some value dissonant items, like stomachs, that the solution should be to make their rarity match their existing face value. The fact that stomachs are work 1500c a piece is unforgivably broken and is the kind of thing that should be hotfixed imo. Even if it's just a temporary solution until animal husbandry comes out, stomachs should be cheap and plentiful. You should be able to get them off every sheep and cow and deer you come across, and one stomach should be yielding much MUCH more than a single rennet. Their market value should be 5c, just like their face value.
Examples of other items that were once like this and have since been fixed includes: Tufts of fur, wool, lemons, fish scales, powdered mammal

Other value dissonant items, primarily poetry books, should have their face value adjusted to match their rarity. I don't entirely agree with just how rare poetry books are(especially now that the skill is required for bard), but I do think they should be rare and valuable, and the face value should reflect that. Recipe scrolls are a good example of what poetry should be like. You get your rare drop, it's face value is 3500, you instantly know that this is hard to get and worth a lot to people who need it.


7-Also needed-decrease the amount of gear drops but increase their value. Same with crafted pieces, those should be even more valuable.The argument I made for cheesemaking can be easily applied to tailoring and leatherworking. A piece of purple max enchanted 70 gear is around 1k+. A vervadium sells with 3k minimum in shops (?!). Ofc we can farm it but i'm talking about the case in which we buy materials (that's how it usually works in a healthy economy, buy raw materials from others, sell the finished product, you make a profit, they make a profit).

This, I'm not really sure how to feel about. I think in order for dropped gear to be nerfed, transmutation needs to be buffed significantly, otherwise dropped gear is totally useless and the only reason to do dungeons is for the max enchanting crystals. This is already sort of the case for crafters, but that's another topic.
Also, in order for crafted gear to be buffed, armor vendors would need to be nerfed significantly, which is not a good plan, and dropped gear would need to be buffed astronomically.

I think currently, the best system for selling gear is to have customers commission gear to be crafted and pay for the raw materials consumed, with a markup for skilled labor and profit. There's really no other way to predict what will sell, because you have no idea what skills potential customers are using, what level they are, what mods they want, and what items they want. A system that facilitates gear crafting commissions would a do a lot to improve that slice of the economy.
My idea is an advertisement board that would allow crafters to advertise and outline their services and customers to find people who can make what they need. Sort of like player work orders, but reverse. Combine that with improvements to custom chat channels, and you have an excellent foundation for crafting commissions.

[sudostahp]

I like the idea of made-to-order, player crafted gear. I know that I'd happily pay a few hundred thousand for a set of gear with the skills I want. It would mean I wouldn't have to store the materials, and there would be a considerable margin for the crafter. The problem right now is that the system is too random to support it, and it's too much of a gamble for either party. We also need more crafting specialization -- one character shouldn't be able to create every leather working and tailoring recipe. There are also no rare recipes, which is the solution that other games have offered.

I'd be happy to give up my mules if existing storage wasn't so inconvenient, but I feel that this is also unenforceable and a lost cause. What's the difference of playing two accounts and having a main account and a mule account? You can play two accounts, but just play one at once.

Figuring out a better storage system is going to be important for the new GUI, and I'd support better storage scaling depending on character level if it were more convenient to access items. I find myself often just buying whatever I need instead of trying to remember where I stashed a stack of maple or oregano. I just want a single bank vault that's convenient to access. Perhaps instead of unlocking slots with NPCs, slots could be unlocked in a vault by raising favor with certain NPCs. There's no benefit in forcing players to keep spreadsheets and spend time running back and forth.

[Khaylara]

I think you guys are right about not removing some items from vendors but I don't really know how to fix this: there were quite a few shops which had tools at base value (mine included at some point) but people wouldn't get them from the shops, they'd still go to used tabs. Yes, I normally craft for free when people ask but I wanted to offer them at base value for others that didn't ask but needed them. So basically there's no competition between player stalls but competition between a player stall and an NPC used tab.
Maybe increase the mats needed (especially because there are options now to get a lot of metal slabs) and increase their base value? Don't really know tbh but that's how we make money sometimes, craft a bunch of leather rolls and sell them to Lamashu. Then someone actually shouts to buy great skins or whatever. I'd rather sell to players.

"Also, in order for crafted gear to be buffed, armor vendors would need to be nerfed significantly, which is not a good plan, and dropped gear would need to be buffed astronomically."
Hox, could you please detail this? I don't understand the nerfing part, I was just thinking to increase the face value of items tagged as "crafted by ..."

About gear crafted on demand at high prices the idea is great if there's demand. The rng involved in crafting gear is a bit of a downer but if I can sell a piece of max enchant yellow with about 30k (and people could transmute it to customize it) it would probably balance the cost without requiring materials from the "customer".

"I agree with this heartily. Ideally, store owners should be focusing on specialized shops. I don't think it should be forced, but I do think it should be incentivized. Most of the stalls are just totally random stuff and it really kills any interest in checking them. "

"Forced" only by the fact that you wouldn't be able to add weapons in a shop placed in the "Potions" room, that's all. Just to make the shops easier to browse.

[Tagamogi]

-Set starting inventory really, really low. Compensate by drastically increasing the bonus inventory slots granted by endurance.
-Make trade window capacity scale based on inventory size. A mule with level 4 endurance and their tiny 15 slot inventory will only be able to transfer 3 items at a time, which would add a lot of frustration to the muling process, particularly to those without multiple monitors.

Limiting inventory based on endurance is far too harsh to new players in my opinion. I regularly run out of space on the newbie island as it is.

Now, if you want to limit the number of items you can trade at a time based on endurance, that could actually be an interesting proposal to limit the attractiveness of mules. I wouldn't want to ban mules outright - it's hard to police and if storage in the game can be sufficiently adjusted that most players don't feel the need to create mules, I don't think it matters if a few players want to keep mules around to store their special town dresses or whatever.

[Crissa]

I like the idea for the vendors, but perusing them is really tough with the UI right now.

Anything to make the shops easier to interact with would be awesome.

[Khaylara]

Have not read the thread except the original post , my input is as a low level and just starting I have never had enough money to buy anything I want, I struggle daily and have nothing and no money. I have done some work orders, I have done things and I make no money. My girl has about 3k and never had more than around 5 or 6k ever. (Level 25 in some stuff)

I would not want to see anything changed for the worse, this could be a game breaker for many. I don't want it easy or I'd have posted and complained about how hard it is but to read a post to make it harder, had to stay something <3

My suggestions are meant to improve the ways for newer players (like yourself) to make cash. Atm the whole system is catering to older players who have maxed crafting skills and the possibility to get involved in trades or complete high level WOs sometimes multiple times .

If you could afford a stall you could sell the raw materials you make for a better price than you sell with at the NPCs. Simple stuff like a stack of pork, if you sell at the NPC you get 1k, if I buy it from that NPC I pay 2k. Why not sell it directly to me for 1.8 k? You make extra money, I pay slightly less than I'd pay to Fainor, everyone wins. Providing I don't stash pork on my army of alts (cause ideally I wouldn't be allowed an army of alts) I should buy it from you, the newer player. That would be a good trade system.

At least that was my logic, I probably didn't transfer thought into text that well:)

PS 3-6 k for level 25 is not bad at all considering you're training skills while leveling. Not trying to make things easy for newer players per se, just more balanced.

[rastaah]

I have actually neglected most skills etc but I do have the most needed :) And I did manage Animal handling but no I have hardly any skills also as I can't afford my recipes and such, some are very expensive. I am pretty much stuck, right now moving in real life so not playing a ton but will be again once moved and will try to work on money but again, this is the one part of the game I do not like as I see it as being a siren song for people selling pixel currency later as quite frankly I don't find it fun to never have any money.

:(
just sayin' and might help to have a newbs perspective.

Having said that if any other people who are new have figured it out, let me know :) I would love to do better.

3 to 6k is not a lot when you have nothing for your character and can't afford most things.

[Yaksnot]

I disagree about player vendors, the idea is cute..i guess...but it doesn't work. Its seriously a shitty version of an Auction house. it sucked in AC it sucks here. sorry but that's just the blunt truth of it.

It could be reworked in that you buy space on an auction type board to keep the skill slots, but yea get rid of player vendors. its a complete pain in the ass to find anything and it honestly usually just faster to go out and farm something real quick rather than slog thru all the vendors.

only exception is if you want to power thru something and need like 20 of an item, but then of course there is no way to find the best price, on an item or even the item itself!, other than going thru every single vendor and writing down the name and location of the vendors that are listing that item for sale so you can compare and contrast the number of said item vs how many of that item is being sold by each vendor that you have located.

I honestly just see it as another bottleneck for time. The idea was kind of neat and reminiscent of AC, but with no quick way to find what you are looking for an compare prices, its just a complete waste of time.

I understand that some people like it this way and I wouldn't be surprised if most of the people that like it that way have either A) some gain by keeping the current system or B) don't realize there are other ways to do things or C) like some kind of role-play time sink bottleneck aspect of it.


my 2 cents on the vendors...

Yak

Edited for clarity and redacted where too much profanity

[Khaylara]

Not sure if my post was confusing but...what I said about player stalls was that they need to be better organized by sections exactly so we can find things easier and not spend half an hour browsing and getting increasingly aggravated. I have a different opinion on auction house type of games. I can't talk about AC but I loved AH and player stalls in other games. There's going to be no auction house in PG (as stated by Citan several times), the player stalls are here to stay so imo we should come up with suggestions to make this type of market work for the entire playerbase.

[cratoh]

I've been mulling over this for some time. What triggered me to post was another topic about work orders and the other trigger was realizing how much time I waste sifting through vendor stalls and consignment to find 1 ectoplasm or one gem to try an extraction.
So my ideas without any particular logic

1-make the vendor stalls cheaper but limit the types of items. For example if the room says "Potions" you can't place armors and weapons in your shop. Even NPCs refuse to consign certain items. Imo this system would encourage specialized shops, thus specialized crafts (not necessarily a craft like leatherworking or tailoring but also surveying, gardening etc).The stalls are currently too chaotic to find anything and there's no price competition when you simply have to check every single stall for a certain gem you eventually give in and buy it at 250 cause you don't have time to search ALL the shops.

2-remove the stalls kept for storage. If a stall is empty (the content is not shown) that stall should be closed. Maybe with a penalty for using it as storage room.

3-remove the option to sell things to certain NPCs or/and lower their money pool. For example Lamashu, Yogzi, Amutasa...they buy a lot of carpentry, tools, leather rolls etc which would be much better in player shops. Make it the viable way to sell things. I would definitely buy meditation stools, wood, many would buy tools etc from a shop that sells slightly above the face value and not double the price as it is now with used tabs. Just an example btw, the same thing can be said about the NPCs who buy scrolls, foods etc


4-remove work orders or account lock them just like player stalls, per account. I lvled crafts w/o work orders and it's doable. At the moment it only creates inflation and forces people into exploiting the system.Related, next point

5-don't allow dualboxing/multiboxing on multiple accounts for muling or any other purpose. One account should be enough. Let me detail why before anyone flames and the topic gets locked:
-multiboxing for storage on like 5 different accounts allows players to circumvent the whole storage-favor system. Why would anyone travel between their storage spots when they can stay in serbule and transfer wood, gems, bones to a separate alt for each material. Very convenient but not how it's intended to work.
-multiple accounts in a guild-coin pouches=inflation and unearned cash by one player.
-multiple mules=the materials get hoarded and used by one player and are not being circulated into the game market. The result is a player in "single player mode" who doesn't need to buy or sell almost anything. No need for any interaction with other players in the game market (at the moment many players do this because it's the only viable way to make cash or level tradeskills)
-work orders completed on multiple accounts
-player stalls on multiple accounts

6-Increase/adjust some of the prices. For example nobody is going to buy a piece of cheese if I'm selling it at real market value. I mean who's going to pay 2200-2500 for a piece of cheese. What goes into it-a stomach is 1500+, couple of mushrooms, 2 bottles of milk sold atm at 250-300 each, firkin/barrel/kilderkin (wood+hoops/slabs), some sort of textile like cheesecloth. My idea is adjust the face value for really valuable items like stomachs and apply point no 1 to create competitive pricing.

7-Also needed-decrease the amount of gear drops but increase their value. Same with crafted pieces, those should be even more valuable.The argument I made for cheesemaking can be easily applied to tailoring and leatherworking. A piece of purple max enchanted 70 gear is around 1k+. A vervadium sells with 3k minimum in shops (?!). Ofc we can farm it but i'm talking about the case in which we buy materials (that's how it usually works in a healthy economy, buy raw materials from others, sell the finished product, you make a profit, they make a profit).

No flaming please, discuss/add but keep it civil, if we start arguing it breaks the ToS and it gets locked. Bring arguments to support you ideas or to debate mine, no personal attacks. Thanks and looking forward to reading some other suggestions


Ok, so I'll have a go at responding to some of your ideas :)

1. Quite a few points here. I agree that they are very expensive, and could do with being lowered. The chaotic and totally user-unfriendly aspect could be sorted by a total rework of the vendor stalls area, and making them more like conventional brokers from other games. Make NPC brokers in each area. Have a weapon/gear room with a cloth armour vendor, leather armour vendor and heavy armour vendor. Crafter room with a harvestable item vendor (skins, animal parts etc) , gardening vendor with seeds, fruit, veg, flowers, an alchemy vendor with reagents, potions etc you see where I am going with this. Make it easier to list what you have for sale, and easier to find what you want to buy.

2. Quite agree, but by doing what I said in pint one you make this moot.

3. Quite disagree. Increasing favour to increase money pools is a core feature. It's also one of the only ways to recuperate cash spent making endless combines only made in order to scrape a few points to get next level. Your point that you would buy these items holds no water in reality because there simply isn't enough demand to make it viable. There are already a few stalls run by enterprising people who sell tools. And there are already people who sell wood and all the other stuff.

4. No. Why should someone be penalised for making alts? People enjoy making alts. Synergy skills for example from level 35 carpentry giving +1 hammer makes it worth levelling it - and levelling industry on extra toons is to be expected - making alts is expensive.

5. Muling is part of practically every game I've ever played. People who play a lot always seem to end up doing it. I'd rather it stayed. I have several mules and have stuff stored across multiple storage and alts. Doesn't stop me buying and selling stuff, and I certainly don't play in 'single player mode' so this point is erroneous.

6. The market value of cheese is not as high as the components, just because it is a pretty broken skill at the moment, on account of the way that stomachs are broken.

7. This makes no sense. Why reduce drops then increase value, that changes nothing. Crafted gear just got reduced in value, so yeah, Eric has now priced it at what he thinks it ought to be. I think it is a bit cheaper than it should be. The point about vervadium is really just off - here's why. Vervadium is used of course to max enchant gear. It's free to have a few goes each day making max enchant gear. In order to have extra goes, you need to buy vervadium from someone who doesn;t want to try themselves, therefore vervadium is a luxury item, so it will have a high out of wack price. That should not be included in any resale price. The whole buy/sell/healthy profit thing is not vald with vervadium.


In my own opinion a healthy economy is driven by ease of commodity trade between players. One way to kill a healthy economy is to stifle the way that cash flows into it. Another way to stifle a healthy economy is to make player to player trade difficult.

[Khaylara]

"7. This makes no sense. Why reduce drops then increase value" - Imho too many drops in places like DC, nexus, lab, gk, most not even worth keeping for sale because of their low price (unless we save space by distilling ofc). I thought getting less drops that would have a higher value would be good.
I do think crafted gear should be pricier than dropped gear. It's harder to craft than to kill 1 elite so I figured the reward should be higher. And for max enchant it should be even higher because vervadium and winterprize don't grow on trees. Again effort-reward.
Gear wise what I meant was the price of any gear should be a tad higher than it is.

"Another way to stifle a healthy economy is to make player to player trade difficult." - at the monent IT IS difficult at least that's what I think. I just spent 20 minutes browsing shops for 1 item that's probably not even for sale. I'm better off going to farm it at this point. So if anyone sells it, their loss I just don't have the patience to browse all that jumbled mess in the citadel.

"4. No. Why should someone be penalised for making alts? People enjoy making alts. Synergy skills for example from level 35 carpentry giving +1 hammer makes it worth levelling it" I do not understand this part but my reasoning is just leveling industry on 10 toons shouldn't be enough to fill high level work orders. If those toons have the skill to craft the items, sure but crafting with 1 toon and distributing to 10 sounds like an exploit to me. Also Industry leveling is fairly easy imho even without transferring items.

[sudostahp]

"Another way to stifle a healthy economy is to make player to player trade difficult." - at the monent IT IS difficult at least that's what I think. I just spent 20 minutes browsing shops for 1 item that's probably not even for sale. I'm better off going to farm it at this point. So if anyone sells it, their loss I just don't have the patience to browse all that jumbled mess in the citadel.



AC had a plugin that addressed this perfectly. /trade !search vervadium

Any tradebot with the item would reply that it was in stock. Citan could even set it to reply with a price and location of the vendor.

Simple, elegant solution that doesn't require rent-a-vendors to have any restrictions or complications.

[Yaksnot]

Not sure if my post was confusing but...what I said about player stalls was that they need to be better organized by sections exactly so we can find things easier and not spend half an hour browsing and getting increasingly aggravated. I have a different opinion on auction house type of games. I can't talk about AC but I loved AH and player stalls in other games. There's going to be no auction house in PG (as stated by Citan several times), the player stalls are here to stay so imo we should come up with suggestions to make this type of market work for the entire playerbase.

-shrug-

It needs to be easier to use, and until people can find items faster and compare prices it will never be anywhere near fully utilized. I understand people use them and I have personally made thousands upon thousands of councils from them. bless you people. But I wont be touching them until they get reworked. For me it is an absolute frustration, that is zero fun and something i will absolutely avoid until fixed.

again its a cute idea but needs to have a command to be 1) easier to find items and the ability to 2) compare the price of items

-shrug-

Yak

[Khaylara]

Yaksnot that's why I thought it was important we have a suggestions thread. And I can't pretend to know anything about implementing sudostahp's idea but it sounds good.

[cratoh]

I really don't see what the big deal is about having a broker as we basically have already just got loads of individual brokers. Anyone can run around and find what price soemthing should be by demand and price accordingly - the current system just makes it really annoying, and time consuming in a laggy area.

[Extractum11]

time consuming in a laggy area.

Yep, I find myself going through the vendor stalls less and less because of this. Especially when half of stalls have the same stuff at the same price every single day. Having a centralized broker could help combat some of the ridiculous price gouging.

[Aionlasting]

I'll just quickly say my peace. Disclaimer: I have not read this entire thread.

I think the vendor stalls, while a very cool idea, don't work very well.

There is something very frustrating about endlessly searching for an item, or trying to compare prices, to make the best deal.

While an auction house system is very efficient and easy to navigate, it's also very impersonal and seller unfriendly.

Ac2 had an interesting way of doing it by having several "mini" auction type vendors that weren't all linked but resided in major cities. The vendors auctioned only specific item groups such as trade reagents, or gathered resources, or quest items, or weapons, or armors, etc... it was an interesting mix between two systems of vendor stalls and auction house.

I don't know the answer to the economy thing but I hope the vendor system changes as its current form is just hard to work with.

[Eachna]

4. No. Why should someone be penalised for making alts? People enjoy making alts. Synergy skills for example from level 35 carpentry giving +1 hammer makes it worth levelling it - and levelling industry on extra toons is to be expected - making alts is expensive.

Why should someone be punished for *not* making alts? If the devs character-lock everything, then players who have paid for an account but only play one toon don't have all the resources they've paid for. (note: "paying" in free alpha means paying through bug reports/testing/feedback, but later on we'll also pay money for accounts and subs).

When specific game elements (storage, work orders, etc.) are account-locked then the person with the account gets to decide how to distribute their account resources the way they like.

If you have one toon, then you get all the resources on that toon.

If you have multiple toons you get to distribute those resources to the toons that need them.

This neither rewards nor punishes either play style.

So, with an account-wide system, if I had 4 character slots, I'd get 4 sets of account-wide bank slots. 4 sets of account-wide starting bag slots. 4 specific work orders per 30 days. As I unlocked favor, I'd get 4 sets of favor storage slots and 4 favor vendor cash pools, and so on. I'd still pay the same "costs" in councils or favor gifts or time played or cash, but I'd be able to use the resources the way *I* wanted and apply them all to my single character.

If you like alts, you should enjoy your alts. You should be able to play the game the way you enjoy playing. I don't care what you do as far as advancing your character(s), the rate you do things, how many councils you have, and so on. I want you to have fun in your corner of the game, just as I want to have fun in mine, and that means you being able to play the way you want to play.

I want to play the way I want to play. I only play alts in games where skill trees or classes are locked to characters. If a MMO has 10 classes and I want to play half of them, I'll level 5 alts. The same with crafts. But I don't *like* alts. Alts are a necessary evil in those games to get to the content/powers I want to experience.

I got behind Project Gorgon because the skill system is designed to slightly favor single characters. I can get all "content" on one toon. I'm *so sick* of alts and I don't think I'll play on a new MMO where I need to alt to get my content. By tying all of the sunk-cost play benefits to characters (things like work orders, favor gains, storage), there's this back-door pressure to alt/mule. Having come into the game thinking "I've finally found a game where I don't need to alt", and discovering I do need to alt after all is very frustrating.


5. Muling is part of practically every game I've ever played. People who play a lot always seem to end up doing it. I'd rather it stayed.

You'd *rather* mule? Really? You'd *really* prefer to log in/out to get to your things, drop stuff on the ground in obscure corners, and make notes in a text file or the in-game notepad on where you stored that one stack of needed items?

You'd rather do the muling dance than have a well-designed storage system that allows you to put everything you need on the character(s) that need it? You know what you like better than I do, but I suspect you wouldn't "rather" mule than have a better storage system. I think you'd "rather" mule than have the storage system we have now without mules.

People mule because newer MMO game devs repeatedly design storage systems that *require* it. In the early days of MMOs storage limits were designed in general so everyone (even crafters) had enough storage for their role. Crafting systems were designed differently (as far as the ratio between the number of pieces needing to be stored and the amount of storage you had). Games that weren't built this way collapsed because in a subscription-based economy a single account had to have everything a player 'needed' to play.

The newer systems we're all used to now come from F2P. Monetize everything. Want a mount? Buy it. Want storage? Buy it, one row/tab at a time. Want content? Buy the zones in a handful of mini-packs. It's an entrenched part of MMO culture. F2P (and B2P) works off the theory that there are things the devs know you need and they deliberately give you "less than" what you need to the the point that you feel at least a little bit uncomfortable playing. Then you give them money to release the tension of that discomfort (buying it in the cash shop), or stubbornly making yourself more uncomfortable by going through the incredibly annoying process of setting up multiple mules for "free" (or the one-off B2P price).

There will always be compulsive/OCD-ish packrats who must own "everything", but they're a tiny portion of the population, even for MMO players. Getting to the state where "people who play a lot always seem to end up doing it" is because storage is one of the two *easiest* ways to extract more money out of players (the other is experience gains).

The devs here at PG didn't (and still don't) "have" to create systems that push people into muling/alt-ing. They chose to do this. At any time they can also choose to extend the existing systems so the various "sunk cost" benefits apply to be account-wide, and then give players the genuine freedom to play the way they like.

In the future, they can sell extra character slots in the store. The more slots you have, the more "whatever" advantage you have. Then, the people who put the most strain on the game are paying for it.

And for those who don't want to pay extra? They're at least getting the benefits they paid for on their single account without the annoying mule/alt dance.

[Eachna]

1-make the vendor stalls cheaper but limit the types of items. For example if the room says "Potions" you can't place armors and weapons in your shop. Even NPCs refuse to consign certain items. Imo this system would encourage specialized shops, thus specialized crafts (not necessarily a craft like leatherworking or tailoring but also surveying, gardening etc).

I don't necessarily like the idea of forcing people to limit their shops. I saw a suggestion elsewhere in this thread that the shop tables should display the contents of the shop, and I liked that.


The stalls are currently too chaotic to find anything and there's no price competition when you simply have to check every single stall for a certain gem you eventually give in and buy it at 250 cause you don't have time to search ALL the shops.

I'd like a way to *search* all the shops while only being able to *buy* at the specific shop table.

This provides a benefit to both buyers and sellers.

Citan wants to protect sellers from a central Auction House system. AH's (in general) drive prices down (the lowest price wins the sale).

Without aggregating selling information, it's difficult to find price (or inventory) information. Also, inexperienced sellers have no idea what to sell their items for.

So, by listing the items available in a central place, it helps give people the information they need to make the buying choices they want, but you still have to pick it up at the tables (so geography still "matters").

When we eventually have vendor tables in other cities this will still protect regional sellers.



2-remove the stalls kept for storage. If a stall is empty (the content is not shown) that stall should be closed. Maybe with a penalty for using it as storage room.

I'd rather the storage system be overhauled so that people don't feel the need to use vendors for storage, rather than punishing people for using them.

I do think if you insist on using a vendor for storage the stall should appear closed. Also, storage vendors should automatically relocate to the far back corner of the merchant area -- prime selling areas near the doors in/out should be reserved for people actually selling stuff.


3-remove the option to sell things to certain NPCs or/and lower their money pool.

I like the NPC vendors and I wouldn't want them to significantly change in function (other than to perhaps find a way to limit the amount of new money they inject into the economy).

Maybe part of a NPC's cash pool comes from money you've given them to buy stuff they sell (so that swapping alts wouldn't make a difference because the alt wouldn't have given them money either?)


4-remove work orders or account lock them just like player stalls, per account. I lvled crafts w/o work orders and it's doable. At the moment it only creates inflation and forces people into exploiting the system.Related, next point

I'd like to see work orders account locked.


5-don't allow dualboxing/multiboxing on multiple accounts for muling or any other purpose. One account should be enough. Let me detail why before anyone flames and the topic gets locked.

I agree 100% with the sentiment behind this. Instead of trying to hunt down and punish people who multibox, the devs should adjust systems so there's no "perceived need" to.

By setting all the passive unlocks that come from councils, favor, or play time (*OTHER THAN SKILLS*) to be account-wide, and then selling additional character slots on a single account for real $$$, there's *NO LEGITIMATE REASON* for a single player to multibox.

I wrote more about this in a previous post in this thread.



6-Increase/adjust some of the prices. My idea is adjust the face value for really valuable items like stomachs and apply point no 1 to create competitive pricing.

I'd like the items with badly coded drop rates to be fixed (like stomachs). Items that are meant to be rare should be properly priced (like poetry books).

Then, after this is all fixed, I'd like prices adjusted.



7-Also needed-decrease the amount of gear drops but increase their value. .

I agree. I'd like less trash loot and more cash payment for the trash loot we get.

[Crissa]

I'd like to see work orders account locked.Do you mean lock the turn-ins? Because locking the work-orders to an account wouldn't stop the alt-itis.

And I like that I can pick up and trade the orders when I fail at them.

[Eachna]

Do you mean lock the turn-ins? Because locking the work-orders to an account wouldn't stop the alt-itis.

And I like that I can pick up and trade the orders when I fail at them.

Yes, I mean turning them in by account. Right now you can turn in one specific work order per 30 days per character. So if you have 4 characters you can turn in 4 of that work order per month but you have to cycle through and log in each character to do so.

If we instead had it locked to the number of character slots, and an account had 4 slots, then one character could hand in all 4, or two characters could hand in 2 each, etc.

How do you fail at a work order?

[Yaksnot]

Citan wants to protect sellers from a central Auction House system. AH's (in general) drive prices down (the lowest price wins the sale).


Im going to assume you know what your talking about on this one. And I am wracking my brain to the logic behind this. So lets keep prices artificially high so that people are either going to A: pay artificially inflated prices over a working AH or B) are more inclined to farm it themselves rather than go thru the hassle of searching thru player vendors, which ironically enough will alienate customers so the vendors make less money.

seems like circular thinking to me

-shrug- im over the whole system ive sent in suggestions, posted ideas, really unless/ until it changes I dont bother with them. To the people that do: have fun your a much more patient person than I am

-Yak

[Tchey]

I played dozens of MMOG (maybe 40-50), DAoC, Shadowbane, Vanguard, WoW, Anarchy, Neocron, Face of Mankind, Age of Conan, Auto Assault, City of Heroes, Seed, Leelh... and a long list with them, since 1999.

I've never used mules. I HATE "muling". I can reroll a lot, i don't care, to play something new, different, etc, but the simple idea to "mule with an alt" always repulsed me. My toon should be sufficient to have a fully enjoyable experience. If i need out-of-game trick to play in "good conditions" (map, storage, skills...), i feel the game has some serious broken features.

And about inventory, i feel Gorgon has issues. Too small, too limited, too spread over in different places and access, too clunky to manage...

[Khaylara]

Citan wants to protect sellers from a central Auction House system. AH's (in general) drive prices down (the lowest price wins the sale).


Im going to assume you know what your talking about on this one. And I am wracking my brain to the logic behind this. So lets keep prices artificially high so that people are either going to A: pay artificially inflated prices over a working AH or B) are more inclined to farm it themselves rather than go thru the hassle of searching thru player vendors, which ironically enough will alienate customers so the vendors make less money.

seems like circular thinking to me

-shrug- im over the whole system ive sent in suggestions, posted ideas, really unless/ until it changes I dont bother with them. To the people that do: have fun your a much more patient person than I am

-Yak


Yep, I can confirm Citan doesn't intend to implement an auction house ever (he stated that several times in the past). So we kinda need the player stalls more organized at least by categories of items or with a proper search function.

[rastaah]

Yay so happy we won't have an auction house and we will keep those stalls. I love that idea as it reminds me more of how DAOC was done (but with houses not stalls) and I had sooooooooooooo much fun in DAOC running around the neighborhoods shopping directly from the houses.

It was a good way to see peoples creations on their houses AND shop for good stuff. And guilds could sell stuff like that too. That was the best system I've ever seen but this one is a good runner up.

[Crissa]

I would like a better way of remembering where everything is, though. Maybe your client could save the stores you've seen, and the search function could work locally, though that? Like, business cards or something we could collect. We wouldn't know there was new things, but it would be a start.

[Tagamogi]

I love that idea as it reminds me more of how DAOC was done (but with houses not stalls) and I had sooooooooooooo much fun in DAOC running around the neighborhoods shopping directly from the houses.

This actually seems like a really nice idea to get people exploring housing neighborhoods. I've had limited experience with player housing (EQ1, Lotro), and while it was fun to buy a house and decorate it initially, the neighborhoods always seemed really deserted.

If we had shops inside houses in PG rather than the current keep area, this actually would allow us to have more sellers too, and the shop rental prices could be lowered since we aren't competing for a fixed amount of vendor stalls anymore. I've been thinking about Citan's original post on this where he said something to the effect that the stalls allow people to enjoy playing shopkeepers. I think this is true to a certain extent - I love being able to pick a name and decorations and message. But inevitably I run into the problem where due to the increasing daily rental costs, I just can't keep the shop running profitably. If I decide to sell low-profit items for a reasonable price, I run into that no profit problem much sooner. At that point, I can of course dump spare cash into keeping my shopkeeper game going and making sure nobody else steals my NPC shopkeeper but it seems a bit silly to spend lots of money in order to run a store.

So, what I think could be fun:
- Create a central search function that shows which items are being sold where, but not their price. So, price-conscious players can visit all the vendors to compare prices, while other players might just want to head to the nearest vendor, and nobody is going to waste their time looking for an item that isn't on sale anywhere.
- Allow shops in player housing in addition to the keep area. The keep area could still be used by players without a house.
- Lower the daily store rental cost, and maybe just keep it as a flat fee rather than increasing per day or make the cost increase much more gradual.
- Add a sales tax, so that players selling expensive items will pay more money and players selling less expensive (or no) items will pay less. The current system doesn't really encourage playing around with items if you aren't sure they will sell or if the items don't have a large profit margin. Replacing a large rental fee with a small rental fee + tax on items sold may encourage more diversity in what's being sold.

On a totally unrelated note, do people still buy things from the Consignment tab? I've pretty much stopped checking them since the vendor stalls came out...

[Dragone]

I like the idea of having areas of certain type of vendors based on what they are selling but what I would love is let's say a board just like the one for players work orders to be in each area and instead of clicking on each single vendor all the vendors products gets displayed to you on 1 board, needing a weapon I click on the weapon board, any vendors that put any weapons for sale all appear in 1 board.

Hopefully all this " broken" economy issues are looked at, after all we know the game is going to be wiped what should be addressed is what can we do after reset to stabilize economy, I would say observe and study current market and learn from it.

[Crissa]

Even with player housing, there will be a fixed number of in-game stalls. There's a limit to resources.

But you put up a good point; maybe the stall setup could be saved and only show in-world for the time you spend? That way you're not paying for when you don't have enough to sell or whatnot.

I just wish there was a better way to figure out who's shop was whose and to find them better. It takes so long to visit each of the stalls to find what I'm looking for. So many clicks.

I haven't seen anything in the consignment tabs that I could buy since the stalls came out.

[Eachna]

There's a lot of discussion about buying from shops, but an economy has two sides, and selling materials also has issues.

I feel like we need an option for harvesters to sell their raw materials to buyers. I tend to pick up everything I find on the ground out in the world. I know it refreshes fairly quickly, and I dabble in enough different crafts that I can use most of it. I sell the things I don't use to NPCs for cash.

One thing I can't use enough of is wood (there are other items also, but wood is a good example). I pick up much more than I use. I'd much rather sell it to a player than a NPC. There are a few issues with this.

I never know what is a good price. I have to catch someone in Trade whose looking for the exact wood I'm unloading, which is hard because of my timezone (fewer people in Trade). Too often I'll have cedar and they'll want maple (or vice-versa). Buyers expect me to have full stacks, and often I want to unload a smaller stack because I need cash for something now. It's a little bit ironic that we're told not to hoard stuff because of limited storage, but the only consistent way to get better than NPC vendor price is to hoard till we have a full stack. :( I have to find buyers online because it's very rare for people to waste work order slots on wood. Some do, and I've sold to them where I've seen them, but again they usually want full stacks (unless it's something extremely rare).

Once I sort out the my wood, then it starts all over again with my fruit, or hides, or whatever. Selling harvested materials for the best price becomes its own job.

I, when I'm wearing my harvester hat, don't want to deal with these issues. I don't really want the "best" price, I just want "Better than the NPC vendors." But there's no infrastructure for this. Storage is tight (especially in Serbule) for aggregating partial stacks into full stacks. Traders need to be able to buy a lot of diverse items, not just a few items (like with work orders). I need them to be able buy when *I'm* online which happens to be when most American or European players aren't connected, not when they're actually online. And so on.

[Tagamogi]

It's a little bit ironic that we're told not to hoard stuff because of limited storage, but the only consistent way to get better than NPC vendor price is to hoard till we have a full stack. :(
Yeah, pretty much all of the game mechanics reward players that are able to hoard, which is unfortunate. A similar problem is the vendor stalls increasing in cost if you rent them multiple times - that means that in order to make the most money from your vendor stall, you need to hoard up the items that you are planning to sell for days or weeks until you are ready to rent a stall and can fully stock it.

Going back to your actual problem - I'm not sure if making it easier for players to sell to other players is necessarily in the best interests of the overall economy. If everyone can easily sell to other players for more than vendor price than nobody is actually going to sell to the vendors. Taking money out of the economy is actually a good thing since it slows down inflation, so if a player sells an item to a vendor for price x, and a second player buys it for twice x, that's x money removed from the inflation pool...

That being said, I do get what you are saying. When I play, I often think that I'd just like to be able to toss up a couple items on the auction house and get them out of my inventory. :) Selling to other players also feels more rewarding since I know that an item is actually going to be used.

I wonder if it would be possible to modify the player work order system to allow partial completion of a work order. For example, I think it would be nice if someone could put out a work order that says "I want up to 1000 pieces of maple wood and will pay 50 councils for each piece" and different people could then turn in smaller amounts of wood, 3 or 10 or 50 or 89 at a time, until the total 1000 pieces have been collected. I think that could help a lot with common consumables like wood and hides.

[Crissa]

I think the current situation we're getting the worst of both worlds: Deflation to the common items but inflation on the player market.

All I need are prisms, but... I can only get them from players right now.

[ShieldBreaker]

I'm not sure if this will actually help the economy, but I think it would be really fun and it might help the economy.

Idea:
Extend the Player Shopkeeper system to allow them to buy items off other players at face value.

-limited to the cash on hand of the Shopkeeper (allow owner to add money to the shop for the purpose of buying stuff)
- maybe with some controls as to what % of cash on hand or a set amount by owner.
-limited by the Retail Management so purchased items don't exceed the shops inventory size. (maybe allow some bonus extra slots for bought items)
-Allow the player to choose what items should be purchased, I'll buy resources but not weapons. etc...
-Allow the player to set rules of what to do with bought items, hold as hidden items, put up gems at X2 face value.

in future iteration more complex rules could be added, if someone has Poetry book X in inventory offer then X councils for it. Or only buy gear with face value of 200-1000. Only buy from guild members, Only buy from Player X etc.

I can see at least the one downside that new players would have less incentive to build favor with NPC because I would think these new money pools would fill there need to sell stuff when the NPC money runs out. They would go to the players stalls first and sell what they could.

For people filling your shop with junk it would be optional to buy stuff, and it would just have to be a risk you take. You aren't out anything but time because the items face value is what you pay. And I be thrilled to find something cool I want that happened to be sold to my shop.

Rules for Account wide characters (aka alts)

If your Alts could be the only ones that could sell directly to your own shop, it would still be helpful and cool. This could also have much simpler structure, all stuff sold by an alt automatically gets hidden, or put up at X2. No need for trying to limit what would be bought.

[cratoh]

Everquest 2 did a nice thing. Centralised broker, but if you went to the house where the person had sales crates you could get it minus the broker fee.

Maybe add a central search feature (broker) then penalise a player if they buy direct ratehr than going to house(presumably that's where it is headed) or to the player stall.

[Khaylara]

I liked the search function idea a lot, i wonder if it's hard to implement (growing increasingly frustrated searching so many shops when i need 1 gem)-let's say i need quartz, i get in that area and type /search stalls quartz and the stalls that sell it get highlighted or with a !! over their heads (or something simple like that). I'm not a programmer so I don't know how hard that would be to implement but it would be amazing and save so much time.

[Crissa]

I'd love player stores with limits cash. NPCs do that, so I'd expect a player store to do the same ^-^

[Eachna]

Yeah, pretty much all of the game mechanics reward players that are able to hoard, which is unfortunate.

Unfortunate, or planned given they're selling storage for real money once B2P starts up?


If everyone can easily sell to other players for more than vendor price than nobody is actually going to sell to the vendors. Taking money out of the economy is actually a good thing since it slows down inflation, so if a player sells an item to a vendor for price x, and a second player buys it for twice x, that's x money removed from the inflation pool...

Selling to vendors injects new money into the economy.

Selling to players removes money from the economy (through taxes, listing fees, etc.)

Selling to vendors removes items from the economy immediately.

Selling to players keeps items in the economy for the short term but most will eventually consumed.

It's better for the overall economy to sell to other players than vendors. It removes some of the money that the vendors inject into the economy or at least prevents the injection of "new" money, and it still results in the consumption of items.


I wonder if it would be possible to modify the player work order system to allow partial completion of a work order. For example, I think it would be nice if someone could put out a work order that says "I want up to 1000 pieces of maple wood and will pay 50 councils for each piece" and different people could then turn in smaller amounts of wood, 3 or 10 or 50 or 89 at a time, until the total 1000 pieces have been collected. I think that could help a lot with common consumables like wood and hides.

Well, with the caveat of not knowing how hard it would be to rewrite the code, I think partially filling work orders is a very good short term solution.

Combine that with a new skill (or expanding existing skills) to give more work order slots and we could eventually have Traders.

There are going to be people who want to do this (buy low, sell high, wheel and deal). All that needs to be done is to give them the tools to do it.

[Tagamogi]

Unfortunate, or planned given they're selling storage for real money once B2P starts up?

I'm going to go with "unfortunate" here. I spent nearly a year seeing assorted forum posts by newcomers to the game begging for some way to throw money at development before the latest Indiegogo project and the current donation system were finally implemented. It could of course have been a nefarious plot to trick us all into doing extra bug reporting since we were feeling guilty for not being able to pay for the game (thank you, it worked), but generally I don't think making the most money off the game has been a developmental priority.

I think the promised extra VIP storage is intended as a pleasant convenience, not a necessity. I don't think the way storage is currently working really supports that intention, but well, that's another discussion.



Selling to vendors injects new money into the economy.

Selling to players removes money from the economy (through taxes, listing fees, etc.)

Selling to vendors removes items from the economy immediately.

Selling to players keeps items in the economy for the short term but most will eventually consumed.

It's better for the overall economy to sell to other players than vendors. It removes some of the money that the vendors inject into the economy or at least prevents the injection of "new" money, and it still results in the consumption of items.


Oh, hm. Interesting point. I was thinking of dropped loot as injecting money into the economy, not NPC vendors when they actually buy that loot. I think it depends on whether that loot is something that other players want or not.

The scenario I'm thinking of is something like this:

We have player A and player B, both with 100 gold. Total economy cash: 200 gold.

Player A loots an item that player B wants. He sells it to player B for 40 gold. Now player A has 140 gold, and player B has 60 gold. Total economy cash is still 200 gold.

Alternatively, player A sells the item to an NPC for 20 gold. Player B sees it, and buys it for 40 gold. Player B still has just 60 gold, but player A only has 120 gold now, and the total economy cash has been reduced to 180.

Fees and taxes may reduce player-to-player profit, but the reason players engage in it is that they are going to do better than just selling it to an NPC.

I do think player to player trade is a good and fun thing to have. I like it. What I was trying to get at is the possibly nitpicky point that a healthy economy isn't necessarily just about letting players make the most amount of money - there also needs to be some way to reasonably take money out again since everytime someone kills a mob, there's fresh loot and cash coming in that just didn't exist before. There are lots of of ways to take money out of the economy though, so I don't know if penalizing player trade is really an optimal thing to do. Trying to think of the big picture here mostly makes my head hurt. :)



Combine that with a new skill (or expanding existing skills) to give more work order slots and we could eventually have Traders.

There are going to be people who want to do this (buy low, sell high, wheel and deal). All that needs to be done is to give them the tools to do it.

I'd be careful to distinguish between traders and resellers. Traders add something beneficial for their customers - maybe they buy up cooking ingredients and sell meals, or they buy things from an NPC in an inconvenient location and sell them at at higher price in a more accessible spot. Resellers just snap up items and resell them for a higher price, without adding anything but the increased price tag. If a game makes it too easy for resellers to do this and dominate whole markets, they suck a lot of fun out of the game for everyone else since both people that buy from them and people that sell to them are going to end up feeling vaguely cheated.

I like the idea of being able to set up a fur trading post or something like that, I'm just not sure if this can be implemented in a game without slipping into reseller territory.

[Khaylara]

"I'd be careful to distinguish between traders and resellers. Traders add something beneficial for their customers - maybe they buy up cooking ingredients and sell meals, or they buy things from an NPC in an inconvenient location and sell them at at higher price in a more accessible spot. Resellers just snap up items and resell them for a higher price, without adding anything but the increased price tag. If a game makes it too easy for resellers to do this and dominate whole markets, they suck a lot of fun out of the game for everyone else since both people that buy from them and people that sell to them are going to end up feeling vaguely cheated. "

Resellers are usually attached to auction houses. Players do that now too but they are lacking the tool that would make it easy (auction house). Afaik Citan doesn't intend to ever implement one of those and any mechanic too similar to an AH would probably not be considered. That's the reason I tried to stay away from any "central market" suggestion tbh, I kinda agree that such a thing would be detrimental to this particular game community.
I would be happy with a centralized (not central) market.Imo between chaotic player stalls, rafflers, player WOs, consignments and Trade chat, all applied to a very small community there's no actual market, trades are simply too...scattered to form a cohesive market.
I'd go with organizing the player stalls, polishing the WO board (as it was mentioned partial filling would be nice to have) and providing some sort of search function.
Speaking of rafflers, dispensers etc there is a massive problem with those-when they get deployed in crowded areas (and logic says that's where they should be deployed in order to be used) they get wiped with whatever junk is on the ground. It's really not worth using them atm as vending tools. Maybe one of the overflow rooms in the citadel could become a gambling room (for rafflers and such) and they could receive a different code to distinguish them from dropped rubbish.

[Crissa]

Resellers also provide liquidity to the market. Right now, there's a hard ceiling on what they can extract and a hard floor on what they can pay - becaue vendors buy and sell items as well.

[ShieldBreaker]

"...
Speaking of rafflers, dispensers etc there is a massive problem with those-when they get deployed in crowded areas (and logic says that's where they should be deployed in order to be used) they get wiped with whatever junk is on the ground. It's really not worth using them atm as vending tools. Maybe one of the overflow rooms in the citadel could become a gambling room (for rafflers and such) and they could receive a different code to distinguish them from dropped rubbish.

I was thinking something along the same lines. What I was thinking, was rafflers setup within the radius of your market stall would get different handling. After reading your post I thought maybe if there was a room in the same area for rafflers people with stalls would get the ability to put down extra rafflers in the raffler room. But maybe the clean up of zones, is optimized as best as can be, and drawing off extra spaces from the top for gadget boxes would exaggerate existing problems with clean-up.

Other ideas: Player Shopkeeper maybe give out or sell raffle tickets for any gadgets by the player in the world. Maybe have options for tickets for raffles with purchases of so much. Basically Shopkeeper become a centralized hub for all raffles of the player and maybe all vendor gadgets of the player.

These ideas might also have interesting tie-ins with Player Housing as well.

[cratoh]

Resellers don't hurt economies where reources are unlimited. That's all just in your heads. If one guy decides to buy all 'uber hat of dragonslaying' and then list them all for 1000 plat, the next guy just goes out, kill the mob that drops 'uber hat of dragonslaying' and lists it either at 700 plat, or whatever he feels he wants for it.

This idea that suddenly having easy trade fucks up the entire world, and floods the market, and does all this terrible stuff is really just such bull. It just makes trade easier.

[Khaylara]

I don't get how/why resellers are good, even for a real economy. They are the middleman that makes everything more expensive that's all.

My suggestion would be to focus on giving suggestions on how to improve the current situation instead of asking for an auction house since Citan said repeatedly he won't implement that. Someone suggested houses could be used as a trading post, it sounds like a good idea in my opinion but it might be impossible. From what I remember they said about housing that houses will initially be instanced flats which won't be able to host a crowd of people (Unity limitation). It would be great if it was possible, we'd be able to put a sign on the door like "I'm selling gems, stop by". Maybe that will happen in later stages of the development?

[Tagamogi]

I don't get how/why resellers are good, even for a real economy. They are the middleman that makes everything more expensive that's all.

In real life, I think they add a lot of convenience. We may not be thinking of the same things here, though. I'd consider pretty much any store I shop at to be a reseller. For example, I could probably drive around and find a farmer to sell me some eggs, drive around some more and find another farmer to sell me broccoli, get on the phone and see if I can get someone to ship me bananas... Or, I can go to the grocery store and find everything I want in one place.

In a game, this mostly doesn't apply.


Resellers don't hurt economies where reources are unlimited.
Resources aren't unlimited, though. I get your point that pixel loot is theoretically unlimited, but the players' time and effort to get that loot is not. Resellers for common drops like femurs are not going to have much luck in achieving market dominance, but if somebody with a lot of free time decides they want to buy up all available poetry books and resell them, they could probably get very close to a monopoly on them in an auction house style system. (Also under Gorgon's system but it would take a lot more effort on their part.) Stuff like that may not kill an economy, but it does tend to make other players noticing it pretty unhappy.



This idea that suddenly having easy trade fucks up the entire world, and floods the market, and does all this terrible stuff is really just such bull. It just makes trade easier.
I'm not quite convinced... Where I'm going from: I played WoW for a number of years, and the auction house there was a frequent source of complaints in my guild. People perceived it as vastly overpriced and would go out of their way to avoid it, farming materials themselves or trying to set up trades on their own with other players they trusted not to overcharge them.

Players still used the auction house, so arguably it was successful. Just nobody seemed to like it much. I was one of the few players I knew who traded regularly on the ah. I did quite well with it and had fun initially, but towards the end, it just wasn't worth the effort anymore because I couldn't compete effectively with the people who had more time and patience than I to post and re-post auctions. I quit WoW a long time ago, so it's likely they made improvements to the ah since then, but the ah mechanism has rather stuck in my head as not being particularly fun.

Finally going back to Gorgon, I find the idea of intentionally not implementing an auction house pretty intriguing. PG does many things differently from other MMOs and does them successfully, so why not this too?

[Khaylara]

From what I remember from Citan's older posts on this topic I think he doesn't want resellers and he doesn't want to completely eliminate NPCs from the economy.

What I understand by resellers and why I think that is bad (and how an AH would encourage reselling).

Let's say player F who has cash already has a large amount of fire dust and he constantly farms that. Players A B C also have fire dust but they are newbies and got their fire dust while leveling. They want to sell fast so they put it in AH with 125-130 a piece. Player F who wants to make more profit simply camps the auctioneer buys every last fire dust he finds with 125 each and puts it for sale at 170 each. Players who need it have no other option than to pay the price player F asks because it's still cheaper than NPC used tab price. So player F ends up controlling the fire dust market.
At the moment it's hard for 1 person to get monopol because he would have to camp numerous NPCs consignments, go check all the player stalls etc to be able to get all the fire dust off the market. With an auction house all that he would have to do is perma camp the auctioneer and keep buying every new small stack of fire dust other people put for trade.
In general terms you can have a handful of people controlling the entire game market and I believe this is what Citan wants to avoid. In a game that has a player base of 7 k it can be partially successful to have an AH because physically 3 people won't be able to control so many items that are traded daily but PG with a couple of hundred can be easily controlled by a couple of older players.
I was okay with AH in a game like Aion where a server population of 3 k was considered an all time low but here I don't think it would be beneficial. We'd have people who just started that couldn't afford the monopolized items if a stack of dust would cost 9 k and gems 400 each and that would be the only option.

[ANT3RA]

From what I remember from Citan's older posts on this topic I think he doesn't want resellers and he doesn't want to completely eliminate NPCs from the economy.

What I understand by resellers and why I think that is bad (and how an AH would encourage reselling).

Let's say player F who has cash already has a large amount of fire dust and he constantly farms that. Players A B C also have fire dust but they are newbies and got their fire dust while leveling. They want to sell fast so they put it in AH with 125-130 a piece. Player F who wants to make more profit simply camps the auctioneer buys every last fire dust he finds with 125 each and puts it for sale at 170 each. Players who need it have no other option than to pay the price player F asks because it's still cheaper than NPC used tab price. So player F ends up controlling the fire dust market.
At the moment it's hard for 1 person to get monopol because he would have to camp numerous NPCs consignments, go check all the player stalls etc to be able to get all the fire dust off the market. With an auction house all that he would have to do is perma camp the auctioneer and keep buying every new small stack of fire dust other people put for trade.
In general terms you can have a handful of people controlling the entire game market and I believe this is what Citan wants to avoid. In a game that has a player base of 7 k it can be partially successful to have an AH because physically 3 people won't be able to control so many items that are traded daily but PG with a couple of hundred can be easily controlled by a couple of older players.
I was okay with AH in a game like Aion where a server population of 3 k was considered an all time low but here I don't think it would be beneficial. We'd have people who just started that couldn't afford the monopolized items if a stack of dust would cost 9 k and gems 400 each and that would be the only option.

You make a very excellent point Khaylara....Ooooh I still need more fire dust :)

I am one (read: used to be in my gaming prime O.o) of those "resellers" that have been mentioned. Not in PG though as I do not see a need for it nor do I have the time and dedication to that cause as I did several years ago. I find PG to be a community driven environment, whether that be player to player interaction or the sense of community as a whole. We all help each other out as needed etc. Reselling for profit as a "thing" can have dire consequences in my experience.

I was very good at making profit, skimming the fat off profit margins, and generally being "That Guy" that always had good stuff to sell, or vast quantities of "that thing".

I didn't farm much, I just played the market very well. All thanks to the auction house (or whatever flavor it came in) and some handy add on's and online databases where i could keep track of supply, demand, and opportunities for profit. I actually made less money farming and selling at 100% profit, then playing the market and making very small profit on large quantities of items, in less than the time it took me to farm etc.

Searching, buying, unstacking, stacking, reselling is much quicker than farming/selling if you know how in game AH mechanics work and know how to manipulate player's emotional attachments to certain needed items in games. I played the AH for profit more then i played the core game.

I ran several accounts and could create a false sense of competition between my own characters and this would make a buyer feel at ease, knowing that there are "some" "not so expensive" stacks/items, but would ultimately have to buy an expensive stack of far too many items because they needed two more of that item. I was so nasty...I know. They would then take that expensive stack, take the two items they needed, put the rest of the stack on the AH at a much lower price (usually the original "normal" price) to sell quickly and to try and undercut me to make that sale, at which point I would buy my own items back, make profit, smoke a fat one, easy money. Buyer is happy as they have the items they need, they sold the rest of the stack they didn't want, and I was happy cause it was all part of my plan.

I believe I did hold the monopoly on some things in WoW at one point. It was short lived though as many people did exactly the same thing I did, so dominance skipped from player to player etc. The outcome of that monopoly is that I (and my competitors) to a large extent regulated the price of said items. It was incremental, lets say over a two week period, but eventually items were 50% dearer then two weeks prior, and it remained there until that item tanked and the bubble burst. People realised it was easier to not use the AH, farm it themselves or spam trade channel to buy it direct from other players. The economy was very much affected by what players like myself did through playing the AH for profit.

Rinse, repeat, I moved onto the next item/s of the day, until that tanked, and the vicious circle repeats.

Player to player trading, and trading with a player by proxy using a player vendor, slows and has a leveling effect on in game economies by allowing people to find something they need with a bit of know how and leg work, rather then having 200 stacks of it hit them in the face on the AH. Someone will always end up doing what I did with an AH. A large portion of those 200 stacks would belong to one player.

Not having an AH allows someone to have 10 stacks of stomachs, selling them for 1850 a piece, making one or two sales a day, but still being beaten by the guy that has 3 stacks and selling them for 1250, selling everything, and being happy to do so all day every day, cause he knows people will come back to him for stomachs. The AH would allow 10 stacks to buy 3 stacks and then sell 13 stacks for 1850 forcing a price onto players, as the AH is the only quick and easy source of buy/sell.

There is no win win there for the player economy, only a win for one guy....the seller, Mr Entrepreneur. Being forced to use an AH would suit 10 stack man perfectly. As his profits rise, so does his hold on the economy as he has more buying power. Supply is very high, Demand is high but cautious or rising prices, Price is unstable, player economy fluctuates as price is too high and weakens in the long run. Players look for other sources, such as farming, or 3 stack man.

However, this could still occur with player vendors, the difference is that 3 stack man will always have stock and doesn't care who buys it as long as people come to him first or only him and then 10 stack man will eventually realise that 3 stack man is onto something as he cant seem to make more then 2 sales a day. He is losing a lot of profit not selling what he has. 10 stack is then forced to not sell said stomachs or reduce his price to suit and take a loss. Either way someone holds "the market" for stomachs, but not in the sense that profit margins dictate price. What dictates price, is what people are willing to spend without needing to go and farm it themselves. Supply is high or constant, Demand is high, Price is stable, the player economy wins. Price is then determined by the drop rate of stomachs for instance, which is an unchangeable natural occurrence in the game.

I hope that last section makes...

[Khaylara]

I haven't been much of a market person but my husband seems to enjoy that more than the game itself, just like you:) I did reduce his profits by undercutting and doing direct sales though xD

I do like auction house in other games especially the convenience of it as Tagamogi said. But you are someone who did that "profesionally" in other games, you like reselling and playing the AH minigame and even you don't think it's suitable for P:G because, yep, it is a community driven game and I doubt that's going to change.


Side note-I only used fire dust as example, I am aware it's easy to farm etc but it's easy for higher levels. Baby fire mages still need it for research and I wouldn't like to see new players dropping it because they can't afford artificially gonflated prices.

[Crissa]

Without resellers, things aren't available. If someone doesn't resell something you can't get, you wouldn't be able to get it.

That said, there's ways - like Khaylara points out - of making the resellers jump through hoops which makes it had for them to corner markets.

[Khaylara]

"Without resellers, things aren't available. If someone doesn't resell something you can't get, you wouldn't be able to get it."


Sorry Crissa I don't follow your logic. Yes, things would be available AND at lower prices if someone wouldn't hurry to buy them , hoard them and resell them at their set price.

In order to block a reseller from cornering a market you have to do the same thing (providing you have the cash to do so) and constantly undercut them until people will stop buying from the reseller.

This discussion is futile since Citan already expressed his firm stance on auction house.

Related-I noticed the player stalls have their slot number displayed now, my hope is that will lead to a search function:)

[Tagamogi]

I didn't farm much, I just played the market very well. All thanks to the auction house (or whatever flavor it came in) and some handy add on's and online databases where i could keep track of supply, demand, and opportunities for profit. I actually made less money farming and selling at 100% profit, then playing the market and making very small profit on large quantities of items, in less than the time it took me to farm etc.

Searching, buying, unstacking, stacking, reselling is much quicker than farming/selling if you know how in game AH mechanics work and know how to manipulate player's emotional attachments to certain needed items in games. I played the AH for profit more then i played the core game.

Hah, yes, all of that. Thanks for bringing back some warm and fuzzy memories here.

Random aside: You don't have to be a total jerk in order to play the ah game. I'd buy raw materials on the ah, craft something and then sell the crafted items on the ah, which I like to think is non-jerky. ( Well, ok, the other crafters trying to sell the same items might have thought I was a jerk but I generally didn't bother with trade wars. If someone else really wanted to sell stuff for less than its cost, fine, I'd sell something else.) I had a couple alts covering cut gems and glyphs - consumables with a large variety, so if someone was dinking around with trying to dominate the druid healing gem market, I could always sell my warrior dps gems until they got tired of the game. I hit the gold cap on my glyph alt somewhat accidentally, then kept going because the ah game had become more interesting than the game itself by then.

WoW had a special weakness to the ah game by allowing all kinds of mods, imo. All you needed was some understanding of supply and demand and a nicely programmable mod, and making money without ever setting foot outside of town was very, very easy. Either that, or I just had too much free time. ;)



However, this could still occur with player vendors, the difference is that 3 stack man will always have stock and doesn't care who buys it as long as people come to him first or only him and then 10 stack man will eventually realise that 3 stack man is onto something as he cant seem to make more then 2 sales a day. He is losing a lot of profit not selling what he has. 10 stack is then forced to not sell said stomachs or reduce his price to suit and take a loss. Either way someone holds "the market" for stomachs, but not in the sense that profit margins dictate price. What dictates price, is what people are willing to spend without needing to go and farm it themselves. Supply is high or constant, Demand is high, Price is stable, the player economy wins. Price is then determined by the drop rate of stomachs for instance, which is an unchangeable natural occurrence in the game.

Sorry, I don't think I follow this one. If the 3-stack player is able to have a steady supply of stomachs, then he could also post his 3 stacks on the ah without caring who buys them, and just keep reposting his new stacks every day? And if 3-stack doesn't have a steady supply, then 10-stack can still buy him out and resell the items, even in a non-ah economy?

Or do you mean that by setting up specific shops, buyers are able to identify sellers they like, and are more likely to buy at their shops rather than searching for a better deal elsewhere?



This discussion is futile since Citan already expressed his firm stance on auction house.

Possibly futile, but fun! Sorry for derailing your thread with a trip down memory lane. To stay vaguely on topic, I think there are two problems with an ah type system:
- resellers can drive the prices of rare/high demand items very high
- competition can drive the prices of common items very low. (This is, imo, a problem for people who want to craft and be able to sell their products at a reasonable price.)

So, if there was a way of avoiding this, I think it would be a worthwhile discussion and who knows, Citan might change his mind. I just don't see any easy solutions, so yes, we should probably focus on ways to improve our current shop system to make it a bit more user-friendly without becoming an ah system. I should probably check if I can log in and see how the new shopkeeper location system looks.

[Khaylara]

Tagamogi I think it's fun to just discuss it too but I didn't want people to go into arguments about it that's all(AH has been a controversial topic in PG and people tend to get angry about it):P

"I'd buy raw materials on the ah, craft something and then sell the crafted items on the ah"-non jerky but not a reseller imo, you'd put skill into crafting. A reseller is nothing but a middleman. To use your example with the warehouse and the grocery store, when you buy bananas from the grocery store instead of the warehouse, the grocery store staff put effort into transporting, unpacking, pricing etc so they don't cash retail fee for nothing.
In my opinion a reseller is someone who just camps the auctioneer, snatches everything that people sell cheap and just sells them more expensive, no effort or skill put into it. Buying materials and selling the finished product is more than fine imo.

[cratoh]

Could endlessly go around in circles on this, as some people think the AH is end of the world and other people think no auction house is end of the world. However, one important thing is that people often talk about how bad WoW was. It was pretty bad, as people automated using the AH. But when 100k people automated it as ridiculous. That's why I think people have a kneejerk on the AH idea.

Current situation -

Log in, decide to buy X item. Go to vendors. Check all vendors, check all used tabs, ask in trade. an hour later realise you've been playing for an hour, and have to go, and don't have what you need.

Future AH situation -

Log in, decide to buy X item. Go to merchant hall, check 'town crier/auctioneer' for list of all item X for sale. Select what stall to buy it from, run to that stall, say A1 with new system, buy it. Play the game, enjoy life for an hour.


I do not disagree with people saying 'there will be resellers' There already have been - I played around with gems for a while out of interest. Others play with other harvestables etc, and sure - people do buy them, but also people do under cut, and that is good, it stimulates trade.

The current situation limites trade, makes people waste hours trying to buy something, and needs tweaking badly. The new designations for zone and stall number is a SMALL step in the right direction. Now please give us a trade crier/auctioneer/broker whatever you want to call it.. so we don't hve to waste hours running around looking.

That'd be great.

[cratoh]

So, if there was a way of avoiding this, I think it would be a worthwhile discussion and who knows, Citan might change his mind.

Exactly, hence testing phase, and feedback etc. It would be really nice if there were some simple survey things on log out, one time only. Or an ingame poll on log in, to see what people were interested in, for example

'what QoL improvements would you like to see improved?' or whatever. Forums are a tiny tiny proportion of active players opinions.

[Khaylara]

I really don't want this to turn into a debate. The situation you described is exactly why I started this thread but I think it can be solved by other means than an auction house and without putting up with wannabe biz tycoons.

I made few suggestions about having more organized player stalls, many people pointed out a search function would solve the browsing without getting what you need issues. There are endless suggestions on this topic. Being realistic an auction house would be convenient but it would make player stalls and NPC consignment (and any other form of trade) obsolete except maybe some direct player to player interaction for specific crafted items.

PS before I start a suggestions thread I actually ask for opinions ingame, sadly not many use the forums so I do my own "surveys" if you will. I realize that's not reflecting all opinions ofc (not by far).

[Crissa]

Sorry Crissa I don't follow your logic. Yes, things would be available AND...Literally no. If people can't resell stuff, then it goes off the market. It's not there if you can't hunt it yourself. It would be hoarded off the market. Unavailable at any price.

Basic economics.

But you're right that there are some things that can be done to limit it - but reselling has to exist or the market does not.

[Khaylara]

I still don't understand the logic. If a person just buys everything and doesn't resell it that person is not a re-seller. It's simply a person who likes to hoard.:confused:

Quoting myself but "In my opinion a reseller is someone who just camps the auctioneer, snatches everything that people sell cheap and just sells them more expensive". Buying all mats and selling a finished product or just buying to hoard for later=not reseller.

[Eachna]

I still don't understand the logic. If a person just buys everything and doesn't resell it that person is not a re-seller. It's simply a person who likes to hoard.:confused:

You were saying you don't like resellers and/or they don't provide a useful service. If we don't have resellers then all we have is hoarders or crafters. You "have" to have the ability to re-sell items in game or there's no functional economy.

[Eachna]

Quoting myself but "In my opinion a reseller is someone who just camps the auctioneer, snatches everything that people sell cheap and just sells them more expensive". Buying all mats and selling finished product or just buying to hoard for later=not reseller.

A reseller is not just "A person whose business practices Khay doesn't like." :D. A reseller is someone who buys a product in one place/one listing/from one NPC and sells it to a different player. It's a play style. Like using a Sword instead of Archery. Would you dislike people who preferred melee over ranged combat?

In PG, resellers provide a few useful services.

* They remove items from the Buy Used tabs (that have a limited display time) and move them to player vendors/sell on the trade channel/consignments where they exist until they're sold or deliberately destroyed. Those items aren't "lost" over time.

* They find items in remote areas (Kur/Illimari/Gazluk) and move them to the higher population areas (mostly Serbule).

* They find inefficiencies in the market. This is the part that you and some other people in this thread dislike (this is where items are highly marked up). You're blaming the wrong people though. People who don't like this should be pointing fingers at the devs and asking them to resolve the underlying problems that cause the inefficiencies.

Resellers are "bug testers" for the economy and are just as valuable as people who endlessly spam combat skills and find abilities where the combat numbers don't match the written text or endlessly re-roll crafting mods to find where Transmutation breaks.

Devs build the game on assumptions: "I assume that skill will be this measurable amount of popular" or "I assume that mob will be hunted with this measurable amount of frequency and drop a specific item at a predictable rate".

We as players have to guess what assumptions and secret values the devs assign to things. One way we guess is by assigning our own cash values. If our cash values don't come reasonably close to the NPC values, then there's a "problem". We end up with rare and desirable drops like stomachs or poetry books highly inflated over the council values set by the NPCs.

After some time, the devs are supposed to track down the source of the inefficiencies and resolve them. If they don't it's not the fault of the resellers that the items are inflated. The items are inflated because the devs have made bad assumptions (or a typing error) and not "fixed" the mistake.

[Khaylara]

This is exactly why I didn't want to discuss auction house. I am guessing that nobody read my definition of a reseller and everyone keeps pushing descriptions that have nothing to do with an auction house honestly. Buying from a used tab in Rahu and putting things in a player stall is exactly part of the "no AH" argument because that NPC exists and is being used as part of the market. How much more simplistic can I put it. I am referring to players who CAMP the AH, snatch everything cheap, leave the other players without ANY other source of buying the items and resell everything more expensive. If I find stacks of femurs ONLY with 10 k at the auction house, what am I gonna do? Go farm them myself in places where they drop plenty aka Anagoge and crypt therefor taking those resources away from newbies.

Inspite of the fact that we don't have an auction house follow this example-player X buys ALL stomachs off the AH. Cheesemaker A needs them but can't farm as many as they need. Player X resells them with 4 K each and keeps buying fast every stomach that is under that price. Other sellers will naturally want to make more cash and also start selling stomachs with 4 k. Cheesemaker A doesn't have any choice but to buy with 4k instead of 1.2 k. I fail to see how that's a good thing fpr everyone, a piece of cheese would end up costing 4k + or everyone would give up on buying materials and just farm themselves. Both consequences tend to kill trade.
Side note, I actually suggested that their value should be higher due to the rarity and maybe that's going to be adjusted or maybe they will be made less rare. But that doesn't mean we need an auctioneer to artificially gonflate the price above its real value (given they drop better now I don't think they should cost above 1 k anyway).

I don't want to quote myself again about my definition of an auction house reseller. . I did everyone the courtesy of reading their replies, please do the same without browsing through my post and picking on out of context phrases. According to what I understand by a reseller no, I don't believe it's a good thing.

Can we please discuss how to improve the current system without more futile convos about a word's definition? I appreciate the effort that went into writing long replies but I didn't start this thread to have people writing novels about my opinions, I opened it because the current system is not easy to use, it makes trades harder and it needs some tweaking. Last thing, instead of trying to change Citan's mind about a core game feature I think our time is better spent only suggesting things and letting him decide if he feels our suggestions have any value in them. For "criticize Khay's every word" please open own thread:)

edit-use imagination and picture there is no other source of buying things except AH, no stalls, no used tabs, no consignments.

[Niph]

It seems to me people want to reconcile two conflicting expectations:

. Players that want to buy something would like that to be easy: search feature, hand-holding to seller location, remote delivery, and so on.
. Players that want to sell something would like to make a profit (over the cost of farming the item) through high price, or sell fast (or provide a service to the community, making the item available and not hoarded/left in used tab) through a low price.

A reseller would undercut people selling too high, and prevent fast sales or the community service by buying items that are priced too cheap. If you try to prevent that by making it difficult for players to sell, or to buy, people complain. If you make it easy, people complain as well (maybe not the same people of course).


Now for suggestions:

- There could be a fixed player price, i.e. in stalls you can only sell or buy at that price, and it's driven by the economy: when a new item is on sale and previous ones didn't sell much, the price goes down automatically. It goes up if the same item sells fast, and eventually the price is balanced.
Pro: no reseller.
Cons: need some code and 99% of the players are probably going to hate that.

- What we really want is not to make selling or buying difficult, we want it to be difficult to automate:
. put a limit on the number of items one can sell or buy,
. introduce a bazaar time window (say 1h) when you can buy followed by a cooldown (say 10h) when you cannot.
Again, 99% of the players are probably going to hate that, but you wanted suggestions!

[Moki Mofiki]

I like the idea of a stat on all items that show its average sale price over the past week/month. This is something that will help those that aren't sure what the going rate is to see what the average is. Even then people will try to sell much higher or lower but will allow noobs to not be ripped off and create a more stable economy. Just my $.02

[Khaylara]

I like that too but how to prevent a new player from selling say a poetry book that hasn't been traded before with 150 g to an NPC?:) You mean like it would show an average price of that whole category not just that one item?
Also like Niph's first suggestion (I don't know if that's difficult to code)

Another idea that might've been suggested already (providing it's not that difficult to write)-any item that was sold once gets tagged and can't be resold. It can be manufactured into other items that can be sold of course but the raw material can't be sold more than once.
I experienced that in another game that had an AH and items were being tagged to prevent reselling. i.e. I buy berries from a used tab/player stall/AH and I can't just go place it in my stall for a higher price cause it's tagged. I can make berry juice and sell that finished product in my stall.

None of these ideas/suggestions applies to player to player trade, people would still be free to make their own deals and pay as little or as much as they choose to. I'm only looking to brainstorm in order to make the player stalls/consignments/vendor boxes less frustrating to use.

[Khaylara]

"- What we really want is not to make selling or buying difficult, we want it to be difficult to automate:
. put a limit on the number of items one can sell or buy,
. introduce a bazaar time window (say 1h) when you can buy followed by a cooldown (say 10h) when you cannot.
Again, 99% of the players are probably going to hate that, but you wanted suggestions! "

Lol yes, the first part hits the nail, I'd like to see trade simplified but w/o encouraging automating or leeching it. Limiting the amount of items u can buy or the bazaar time window ugh, yup, everyone would hate that cause it's unpractical. If someone wants to buy 40 stacks of cotton to powerlevel tailoring I say let them as long as they don't buy with 2 k and resell with 4 (which is "jerky" imho)

[ANT3RA]

I had a think about this last night before dozing off to sleep....yeah my life is like that :)

What I have noticed over the years is that some games do things much better then others and some just don't care what community expectations are or what they desire out or a trading system or the economy.

I have not put any thought into how all of these would function together or if all were needed, only that these things worked very well in other games. PG is unique and hence requires a unique set of rules and mechanics in terms of trading.

The Concept:

- There are two types of values (read: guides) listed on an item.
- The base vendor/item price remains the same as we currently see it.
- The game also determines and illustrates a min, max and avg prices for all items according to basic supply and demand of the player economy through player vendors and consignments. This is determined on a sale price avg from those sources, not from a listed price which can be skewed by the player base. Both buyers and sellers can see these prices and hence can determine what something is worth before buying it, whether from a player vendor, consignment or player to player trading. The game generated prices fluctuate according to this supply and demand structure. The min, max and avg prices determined by sales according to supply and demand are somewhat of a failsafe in terms the economy. This system can be skewed and manipulated by the player base but that would require mass council expenditure to raise avg prices for items. It can be done and with the right forethought and accounts quite doable.
- Players can choose to sell and buy at the min or max price of the day, or at any price therein.
- The min, max and avg prices are fixed according to supply and demand of the day by the game (think stock exchange). Players cannot deviate from those prices when listing items at any source. As these figures are calculated of sale prices it stops players from listing items beyond the max value of an item. Is also stops players from listing items lower then they are currently worth in order to make things cheaper.
- Time is a factor in this idea, as supply and demand to some extent can stagnate according to how many players are actually seeking said items or playing the game.
- Time can also be fixed, lets say 24 hours @ 1% reduction (i just pulled that out of my arse) in values due to poor demand or to over supply.
- The same can be said to a market going gang busters, 24 hours @ 5% for price increase due to over demand and under supply in the market.
- Player vendors are available in all zones, not just serbule.
- Vendor (any source) to item distance is a factor in this system.
- If a vendor (any source) is located in serbule and you are selling venison, prices are ABC. If that vendor is in Rahu and you are selling venison the prices are XYZ. Venison is not available in Rahu so the price for XYZ is somewhat higher then ABC. Distance determines how much you pay some said items. This bit needs some more thought.
- A skill can be added, lets call it Mercantile, whereby trading, that is selling and buying from vendors, or any source for that matter gives you XP to said skill. Higher Mercantile skill allows you to sell more at your player vendor or consignment, possibly increases council limits at vendors just like favor, reduces core basic item prices at vendors, allows you to deviate from set game prices at a fixed rate. The rate would not be sufficient enough to determine the market of the day. Players still have the choice of doing the leg work and buying cheaper from other sellers.

- There are more things i need to write down but have to run somewhere...

This is all well and good, but I have not factored what actual coding this would require and how feasible it actually would be in practice.

[ANT3RA]

I love you guys so much i postponed my meeting somewhat. I still need to finish my coffee anyway...

- According to your Mercantile skill and distance to item factor, vendors will give you base price or slightly more for items meeting a certain criteria. Rahu and venison is a good example. Vendors in Rahu love venison but cant get enough of it so will pay more. Ilmari absolutely hate lemons and pay a base price for your stock. Serbule vendors are nuts about lemons and pay slightly more. Greenburg will give you his first born for lemons. Sims has enough lemons, so he doesn't count.
- A search facility, hopefully GUI based, would be ideal. I can search for lemons and find that I need to go to the desert to get the best prices.
- The market can be regulated by the game by allowing only a fixed percentage deviation from min to avg to max prices. Example lemons are Min: 640 Avg: 800 Max: 960, this is a 20% deviation. When the price changes so do min and max, but always at the % deviation. Extended example, lemons are Min: 666 Avg: 832 Max: 998.
- The 20% fixed deviation acts as another deterrent to market manipulation.

The benefits of such a system are thus..

Price is determined by the free market ideology of supply and demand and calculated by the game as a price guide. Free will allows players to pay min or max prices as they see fit at that time. Players have a direct impact on prices, be this from wanting those juicy lemons so much that prices go up, or farming too many of those juicy lemons and prices slowly go down. If people stop buying lemons altogether price slowly go down etc.

Having a min and max price, which can be initially determined by the game if required (this idea needs more thought), restricts players from posting items, above max price, and at over the top prices to make bank. It also stops players, or at least gives them less incentive, to buy everything at min price and then resell at max price.

Granted this will be possible. But as the min and max prices are determined according to avg sales, it is not a very feasible way to make money. You have purchased everything at min price, hence lowering the avg price of that item, which also lowers the max price. You are hurting yourself if you wanted to make bank by buying all the cheap stock. If you post everything at max price, chances are nobody will buy your items, and source it from elsewhere. If nobody buys your items, market prices (min, max, avg) will change according to the rules, and your items will gradually get cheaper by a predetermined rate and you start loosing coin every cycle.

New players are safeguarded and can make an educated guess as to what something is worth. Crafters are safeguarded as prices are ultimately determined by them and are always guaranteed a predetermined return.

Player to player trading is still unchanged, however the min, max and avg prices are a significant determining factor to a successful trade.

Ok I am spent atm :) Maybe I'll have more later.

[Khaylara]

I think that's what Niph meant aswell but your post goes into details. I think the concept is great and is way more evolved than my "increase face value" suggestions,it's tailored to a smaller playerbase and less restrictive. I assume Citan occasionally reads the feedback since we don't really know how much coding is involved. I think some major changes are going to be implemented when he adds the capital city and my secret hope is that he plans to centralize the market there.
We just have to wait and see but I wouldn't be surprised to find these suggestions as game features later on.

[Moki Mofiki]

And all I was thinking before I dozed off was "I hope my daughters don't wake up too early". ANT3RA ... that is a pretty awesome system and coding aside would be great.

[Silvonis]

I assume Citan occasionally reads the feedback since we don't really know how much coding is involved.I think some major changes are going to be implemented when he adds the capital city and my secret hope is that he plans to centralize the market there.

He does and I personally make an effort to read every single thread written here on the forums!

We have plans for the storage management in Project: Gorgon as we continue through development. That includes the ability to have all storage boxes in a particular land area (i.e. Serbule) accessible from a tabbed GUI interface letting you quickly manage all of your storage boxes in that area from a single location rather than having to run from box to box. There will also be an ability to search through your items to find its location - although that will likely be implemented as a receipe or accessible through an NPC.

[Crissa]

What I would really like is a button to compress my inventory into a storage. Basically, grab all the items that match stacks in storage, and put those items (and compress stacks) into storage. That way I can drop off the items I'm keeping easily then split out the ones I want to walk away with. That's like 90% of my interaction with storage: Adding to stacks.

[Khaylara]

He does and I personally make an effort to read every single thread written here on the forums!

We have plans for the storage management in Project: Gorgon as we continue through development. That includes the ability to have all storage boxes in a particular land area (i.e. Serbule) accessible from a tabbed GUI interface letting you quickly manage all of your storage boxes in that area from a single location rather than having to run from box to box. There will also be an ability to search through your items to find its location - although that will likely be implemented as a receipe or accessible through an NPC.


I know storage is off topic but thank god!! That made my day :D

[cratoh]

I find the notion of controlled pricing and whatnot utterly baffling. If people want to play the economy game, then let them, as Eachna said, it's a play style and its going to happen whatever system is in place.

Antera, I skimmed as it's late, over you ideas and the general impression I got was of an auctioneer type mod like from WoW. Part of the fun of playing a trade style in games for me at least is getting to know markets over a period of time, and doing it myself. I greatly disliked the automation in WoW and greatly enjoyed pitting myself against other people playing the trade game in EQ2.

[cratoh]

Inspite of the fact that we don't have an auction house follow this example-player X buys ALL stomachs off the AH. Cheesemaker A needs them but can't farm as many as they need. Player X resells them with 4 K each and keeps buying fast every stomach that is under that price. Other sellers will naturally want to make more cash and also start selling stomachs with 4 k. Cheesemaker A doesn't have any choice but to buy with 4k instead of 1.2 k. I fail to see how that's a good thing fpr everyone, a piece of cheese would end up costing 4k + or everyone would give up on buying materials and just farm themselves. Both consequences tend to kill trade.
Side note, I actually suggested that their value should be higher due to the rarity and maybe that's going to be adjusted or maybe they will be made less rare. But that doesn't mean we need an auctioneer to artificially gonflate the price above its real value (given they drop better now I don't think they should cost above 1 k anyway).



What actually happens here is the cheesemaker either stops making cheese, or goes and farms stomachs or gets some from a friend, or trades something they have for stomachs.

What also happens is everyone who wants some cash starts farming stomachs. Then they start listing them for 3k. Then the original guy starts having to decide whether to keep buying, or give up. So he keeps buying, but people keep farming stomachs and listing them at 3k. Then he isn't online and 3 people list, first at 3k, then 2800 then 2500. Then the cheesemaker, who is farming stomachs thinks, hm might buy some.

And, in the end, everything evens out, and there is no problem. Because, there are an infinite supply of stomachs.

[cratoh]

I like the idea of a stat on all items that show its average sale price over the past week/month. This is something that will help those that aren't sure what the going rate is to see what the average is. Even then people will try to sell much higher or lower but will allow noobs to not be ripped off and create a more stable economy. Just my $.02

This is a kinda nanny state of control. There is a trade channel. So a new player has something like 20 femurs, and some mushrooms, and some animal parts and so on all the usual crap. Pretty easy to look at a stall and figure out what they are selling for roughly.. Then, they get a UR bacon recipe, or a poetry book - ask in trade, its what it's for.

[cratoh]

One of the core reasons I hoard and have hoarded since I begun playing is because it is just so hard to trade and find what you want/need at any given point because there is no easy way to list or trade items.

Facilitate more simple trading, eliminate peoples' need to hoard every damn thing. Facilitate easier trade and easy search features for traders, stimulate player driven economy and suddenly hoarding goes.

Over time prices come down, as people stop hoarding and we end up with less complaints about storage as you don't need to store everything cos chances are a simple vendor search will find you some.

Make it hard to trade, and then people just go it alone, and do it all themselves. If you want a healthy game economy make it more simple to trade, it just seems so obvious.

[Crissa]

This is a kinda nanny state of control. There is a trade channel. So a new player has something like 20 femurs, and some mushrooms, and some animal parts and so on all the usual crap. Pretty easy to look at a stall and figure out what they are selling for roughly.. Then, they get a UR bacon recipe, or a poetry book - ask in trade, its what it's for.That's terrible and spamming as one or dozens of newbies are asking about every damn item every few minutes.

[cratoh]

That's terrible and spamming as one or dozens of newbies are asking about every damn item every few minutes.

Not really, people have a tendency to watch chat, and get an idea of stuff. Also, it's a nice way to start a conversation sometimes as well via trade as someone asks a Q and then we can send them a whisper to explain stuff if they need it etc.

Finbarr.

[Crissa]

Not really, people......Newbies can't watch chat when they're not online. So that means they'll ask all the same questions over and over again. Because there are always new newbies.