Welcome to Project: Gorgon!


Project: Gorgon is a 3D fantasy MMORPG (massively-multiplayer online role-playing game) that features an immersive experience that allows the player to forge their own path through exploration and discovery. We won't be guiding you through a world on rails, and as a result there are many hidden secrets awaiting discovery. Project: Gorgon also features an ambitious skill based leveling system that bucks the current trend of pre-determined classes, thus allowing the player to combine skills in order to create a truly unique playing experience.

The Project: Gorgon development team is led by industry veteran Eric Heimburg. Eric has over a decade of experience working as a Senior and Lead Engineer, Developer, Designer and Producer on successful games such as Asheron’s Call 1 and 2, Star Trek Online and other successful Massively Multiplayer Online Games.



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  1. #1
    Senior Member Golliathe's Avatar
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    Price controls

    What do you guys think about the player market?

    Let me limit the scope of that question a bit and ask:

    1. How do you feel about market monopolies and price gouging?

    For all its flaws one thing I thought was neat about black desert was that there was a maximum and minimum you could price items to sell in the market. Let's not mention the other market flaws as this game isn't even close in structure in that regard.

    The simple question is how would you feel if stomachs could be sold on player vendors for say 500-2000 councils and they would not sell them for more (or less)? This would also prevent lemons being sold for 1,000,000 c.

    *note* that if you wanted you could stand around in town and sell stomachs for 3,000-4,000 if you wanted.

    Should everything be limited? No. But if you sat down and thought about it... you could pretty easily make a list of things that really probably shouldn't be able to be exploited. Here are a few items to consider : metal bars (ahem... shame on you people for trying to sell the simplest version for well past 150c), gems, glowy crystals/vervadium, runestones, etc.


    You may not be aware but every game always has some people who have been labeled professional bank sitters (label origin from UO and their magic bank system). In this game you will see people who go around to vendors, buy everything priced fair/cheap and resell them.

    The short version is that this creates greed, angst, and overall just takes away progress from low level characters who are forced to pay a premium because they have no other choice.

    But such a system only works when there are no price controls. Why? Because Mr. Banker has to sit in town and try to gouge people for his goods. He can't really go out and adventure if his vendor refuses to "steal from the poor".

    *before it gets mentioned: I am not in the poor category. I have more bank slots than a number of rich people I know and a hefty amount of cash on hand; I also have no expenses aside from any new undertakings I wish to begin.*

    2) Let's look at a few items!

    We already have a listing for stomachs. And no before anyone asks I have all the cheese/stomachs I need right now so the current stomach debacle isn't affecting me.

    a. What do you think about stomach gouging?
    b. what do you feel about runestone gouging?
    c. How would you feel if there was a "blanket" check on all items (with a few exceptions for the ilmari outliers) that prevented more than a 20x cost increase of the original item? As an example that would reprice many tier 1 books from 200-4000c in price.


    3) Before you weigh in I just want to point out to you that there are some people with 10-100m who basically can buy out any influence most people think they might have in the market.

    You'll see things like: someone posts 500 gems at 200 each. And then a banker comes along and buys all those gems - to hold and reprice at 400+ each. Largely speaking no one is going to pay 400 for a gem unless they want 1-3 or something like that. But when priced at 200 each people will gladly buy 30-50 at a time. This is good for the market and helps keep a friendly atmosphere.

  2. #2
    Member DamageIncorp's Avatar
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    Price controls are not good for the market and actually create dead weight loss.
    There are no monopolies in game.
    If you invest the time, you can hoard anything you like.
    If you don't have the time, you might have to pay a steeper price. Either way, every decision comes with an opportunity cost.
    Let's keep the market free!

  3. #3
    Senior Member Golliathe's Avatar
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    I'm not looking to buy or sell anything right now. I can't think of a single thing I need that I can't get.

    Quote Originally Posted by DamageIncorp View Post
    Price controls are not good for the market and actually create dead weight loss.
    There are no monopolies in game.
    Price controls help everyone and no controls benefit rich players the most. Funny how I see so many rich or zero expense players saying please let me continue to charge whatever I want for items in my shop.

    You could still sell items out of your shop with price controls. The difference is you would have to waste time manually delivering them. And that's the point; an automated seller with unlimited pricing allows for tremendous afk money making potential with minimal input.

    This is a problematic idea as it keeps some people locked out of the market and allows others to put a strangehold on it.

    There is of course a more simple idea- just reverse tax all goods sold from vendors. You make the tax scale so that anyone who sells over X amount in a month owes a flat fee before they can run a merchant again. Say you sell a 50,000k scroll for a recipe you got from a lvl 20 boss. Maybe that kicks you up to the "you owe 10k and 5% of last month's total income" tax bracket.



    I thought I made the point but let me say : not everything needs a control. Some things like recipes would be easy to do a catch all with a 20x base price.

    High commodity trade items like bars, gems, etc would be beyond easy to set a fair price based on what is needed to get them.
    How many bars are there? How many different gem surveys are there? Add in a few specific price points for runes, crystals, vervadium, lace, fey felt, hippo feathers, etc and then see what happens.

    Quote Originally Posted by Ranperre View Post
    neither you nor anybody else has a right to be able to buy things in the market at a given price. Go put up a work order. This is a transitory problem that will go away when the cap is raised.
    I'm not trying to ruffle feathers. This isn't a witch hunt.

    I asked a question - what if we made the process softer for everyone. High profit trading would require active attention (read as less automated massive income).


    And while you seem so opposed to the idea I noticed that F-25 is empty. Did you move? Did you get bored selling bars? Or did someone push you out?


    I hope nobody is thinking what I am thinking but someone could probably ruin the market for everyone (with the words I quoted from you in mind) with the help of about 30 players.
    Last edited by Golliathe; 03-27-2019 at 04:16 PM.

  4. #4
    Junior Member Wemedge's Avatar
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    Stomach and explosive rune prices have skyrocketed lately, and it seems like it is 100% due to resellers. I would always sell stomachs for 900-1100 based on market and explosive runes between 2500-3000, which had been fairly stable forever. Then I started seeing 10k runes and 4k stomachs. After checking my logs, the same names seemed to always buy me out on those things. And checking their stores showed stacks plus of the items at the goofy rates. Thus normal shoppers never got to even see them for sale at my rate.


    So I raised the rates on mine somewhat. Either a reseller will pay me double than what I expect for an item to keep me cleared out, or have to lower their price so their stacks don't gather dust. And as I farm most days, refilling my stocks isn't much of a problem. I've seen others take this tactic as well.


    As for doing anything about reselling in general, I don't feel any limits should be put in place. Only suggestion I can think of is maybe have items flagged, so that they can only be listed on a vendor once, like as in it wouldn't even appear on the add to store screen if had been on a vendor before. Or maybe have a sold from vendor tag, so people who use them as storage wouldn't have their items tainted.


    At any rate, since items can be infinitely farmed, not many can afford to infinitely buy out others to resell. And definitely not the people I clocked, lol. And as higher prices tend to attract more people to farm/sell themselves, eventually the reselling should take care of itself.

  5. #5
    Senior Member Ranperre's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Golliathe View Post
    And while you seem so opposed to the idea I noticed that F-25 is empty. Did you move? Did you get bored selling bars? Or did someone push you out?
    Wemedge undercut me below my replacement cost (base materials + effort) and "stole" the daily market on the popular ilmari slabs. I was still selling enough to get by, but it also coincided with me finishing everything, so I decided to take a month off. I'll bring the shop back in a week or two, still figuring out how much I want to charge while I wait for my shop cost to decrease.


    Quote Originally Posted by ProfessorCat View Post
    I have never purchased bulk items, and then turned around and sold them in my own store, but I'm inherently not against this either.
    I'd have this happen to me when selling sulfur and saltpeter. The buyer made no attempt to hide himself, and I'm pretty sure he lost on the transaction as trying to control that market is just a crapshoot.


    Quote Originally Posted by Wemedge View Post
    Stomach and explosive rune prices have skyrocketed lately
    You quit for a good period and that was when the market went haywire (for runes, at least). Not that I'm berating you one bit, but there was a correlation with your drop in supply and an increase in price.

  6. #6
    Senior Member Ranperre's Avatar
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    Rule of acquisition #285 : No good deed goes unpunished.

    Who gets to set the price range? It couldn't be tied to value, as many items are worth over 20x their value and it wouldn't be reasonable to have our 2-3 devs manually price items. I'm one of the people that can afford to pay 4-500c per gem. But if they get that expensive, it becomes worth it to me on a cost per hour basis to survey for my own. That's how almost everything is in this game for base materials (e.g. stomachs, gems, slabs). Also, neither you nor anybody else has a right to be able to buy things in the market at a given price. Go put up a work order. This is a transitory problem that will go away when the cap is raised.

  7. #7
    Senior Member poulter's Avatar
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    I am against price gouging /market manipulation, but I don't think price control by the game is a good idea either.

    I would rather see a 'don't sell to' feature (like /ignore) where I (as a player-vendor) could decline to sell items to people I deem to be non-desirables e.g. gougers (or even for RP purposes).

    People don't have to buy at inflated prices: they choose to do so, but reputation should matter and gougers might learn from the downside that there are penalties in PG if you consistently display what is judged by many to be 'poor' behaviour.

    And yes, I do occasionally price some rare items at exceedingly high values, but more for bragging rights, rather than with an expectation of them selling.

    Market impact of gouging
    For example - Gem pricing:
    I used to buy 200+ /week from players (& did so for years), but now if the price is above 250 /gem, I survey my own.
    This results in new players no longer benefiting from 'quick' cash and I spend a few hours /week surveying.

    As I can make c. 60k councils /hour, the issue for me is not the price of items, but convenience and my desire to avoid feeling being 'ripped off'.

    I believe people buy by choice, not necessity, as they could grind the items and sellers should be free to set whatever price they want, whilst gougers /market manipulators should experience negative reputation impacts.
    Last edited by poulter; 03-27-2019 at 10:50 AM.

  8. #8
    Senior Member Tagamogi's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by poulter View Post
    I would rather see a 'don't sell to' feature (like /ignore) where I (as a player-vendor) could decline to sell items to people I deem to be non-desirables e.g. gougers (or even for RP purposes).
    I've been thinking about something similar as a buyer: I'd like to have the option to blacklist some player vendors, so they just don't show up in golem searches for me. I can of course always keep a list myself of who I consider to be a price gouger but it would be handy if the game could do it for me, so I don't waste my time walking over to their shop before remembering that I'm not going to buy from them.

  9. #9
    Senior Member Deldaron's Avatar
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    I agree with Ranperre's points here - it gets messy and complicated if you try and cap the market. However, I have definitely seen instances where I can't find an item on the markets that I'm looking for at a fair price and, while I don't buy to resell, if I see something well priced that I need a lot of and don't foresee grinding for soon I'll often buy out the stock leaving just the the poorly priced alternative and I do not think I'm alone in this regard.

    I think one thing to keep in mind that goes often underutilized is the player work order board. I use a TON of nightmare flesh and I don't find much so I'm always tossing up orders and they usually get filled. If you can't find a fair price in the markets you can turn here.

    As a counter point to vervadium, stomachs, and runestones (which are expensive because they are in high supply or low demand) let's look at gems. A year ago the standard price for gems was about 300 - I've seen it at a steady 200 and last I checked it sat around 250. You still see people sell them for 400+ but I've rarely seen moments where there were no gems for under 300 even if there wasn't the gem I needed. I actually think this is underpriced and the market keeps it low because players are willing to price what they think is fair.

    One thing I think I could get behind is if items purchased in the market could not be sold in the market (either ever or within x hours/days). This would at least prevent buying for the sole purpose of market control, though I admit I have no idea how complicated this would be to implement.

    On a final note, I don't actually think the market is broken. If someone is gouging too much people won't buy the items, if people don't buy the items they lose out and then the next time someone posts at a fair price the bank sitters either don't buy it or they adjust their price to a market acceptable price. This gives those that are getting bought out two options, increase their price to match or sit tight and enjoy the benefit of quick sell out. So gems become 400 instead of 200 for most of the market and those that sell for under sell out faster. Keeps it lively. Also - if an item is routinely overpriced at market that's not an abuse it's an opportunity. Gather the items to sell and sell them at a fair price - announce your price in global and convince the market that the bank sitter is gouging them.

  10. #10
    Senior Member Celler's Avatar
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    Stuff given freely with limited effort involved from an event on player stalls at 30k plus prices to be honest I dislike .

    I don't like it when new folks are lead to believe things are worth a certain price, when many would gladly give them those items were they to know they needed them.

    All that said, I would not like many controls, apart from perhaps the ability to limit the amount an account can buy from you and the ability to blacklist an account from trading with you at all.

    I have not run a shop in a long time, last time I did all the cheap stuff I put up for new folks just went to re sellers.

    If folks want to try and make a game within the game of market domination etc. I can live with that but thankfully I'm pretty self sufficient.



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