Player Vendors - high rent slow sales

[Khaylara]

Citan has wrong impression that ability to search the market kills prices and the market itself. Would love to discus it, but my poor language skill makes it very expensive for me....

I don't think that's true unless Citan said that somewhere and I missed it. He added search function for inventory/storage, the game's still in development and he knows we need a way to find an item especially when all vendor rooms will be fully rented

edit-game market related I think a forum trade section would be beneficial especially for items hard to sell like gear, for example I have excessive amounts of good UA/mentalism gear but they sell very slowly or don't sell at all so I can't afford to keep a shop open. I'd post it in the trade section and see if anyone needs it. Since on forum we can private message even someone who's offline (just an example, I don't remember what gear I have xD)

edit2-tbh I know Citan doesn't want a trade broker/auction house but the current system feels like a dysfunctional trade broker anyway. People still undercut, buy cheap and sell expensive etc. I would centralize it for ease of access, create one trade broker NPC and keep the consignment system for the odd item here and there. No need to discuss a trade broker btw, Citan made it clear he doesn't like the idea but I thought I'd mention that it feels like almost the same thing anyway, just much harder to search

[Mikhaila]

Citan has wrong impression that ability to search the market kills prices and the market itself. Would love to discus it, but my poor language skill makes it very expensive for me....

Citan is correct. Both in theory and in practice. If a product has a good supply, price will be driven down. A player can see the lowest price and will of course prefer to buy it at the lowest. Merchants understand this, and selling something for less profit is better than not selling anything at all. It works in MMO's where players can see the data, it started int he real world with the internet, and it's expected buyer/seller behavior. It also allows the build up of resistance to paying a higher price for goods, even when there isn't a lower price available. Players wait for someone to put more up for sale. Only if an item is in high demand and buyers want it immediately do we see prices stay higher.

You need two things to have an economy: buyers and sellers. While I'm absolutely sure buyers would be happy to have a great search function, (and some even want delivery! ) this won't be good overall for the game economy. Anything that has sufficient supply will see prices drop. On the other end, rare items will be bought up by sellers if under priced, and they'll list the item on their own vendors at higher prices, and prices will go up on those.

[Mikhaila]

Ok, where is your shop and what times do you restock, so I can start camping it? Metal slabs are indeed hard to find - I tend to snap up all lower levels as I see them. I have seen people sell masterwork metal slabs before, and those actually seem like they stay in the shop for a few days before someone buys them. Not sure if that means they are too high-level, too expensive or people don't mind running their own Ilmari surveys.

Anyway, I'm still curious about the time/profit ratio involved: How long does it take you to farm up items to restock your shop, or are you just putting up things you'd normally vendor? When you say you sold 100K - what part of that is profit over the vendor price? Just wondering... I'm definitely willing to believe that running a shop is quite profitable these days.

Low level slabs suffer from a couple of things. The first is that players would rather do Motherlode surveys in Ilmari than Kur. Cold is more difficult to deal with than thirst. Flat is easier than mountains. Kur involves a lot of running around obstacles, up and down cliffs, using water breathing potions for the large amount that seem to generate offshore. Ilmari is mostly running in straight lines and avoiding static mobs. In Ilmari you'll get speed bonuses, in Kur it will be rare. Secondly, players level mining up quickly, and would you rather hunt for slabs worth 10 or 50 councils each, or 150 and 200? A player can run some Ilmari surveys and sell to a vendor and be done. To make money on Kur surveys you need to be selling those low priced slabs for a lot more than basic value to players that need them.

I prefer Kur to Ilmari, but if I just want to spend an hour making a bit of cash, i'll be in Ilmari.

As to what I'm selling and where I farm, it's mostly Kur and Gaz. I really like the look and feel of the cold areas, and since the rest of you hate snow, i have a lot of it to myself I grew up in the Sierra Nevada, I like snow and mountains. Currently in Philadelphia and the entire state of PA is way to fething flat for me. Closest I get to mountains is in PG . I tend to just accumulate things as I run around: Wood, silver, gold, tundra lichen, hides, saltpeter, notus books, explosive runes, wolfsbane, metal slabs. I turn the hides into winter clothing. Dump to vendor, collect each day. My profit margin over just vendoring things is probably around 50%. But that also means I'm not using up vendor cash pool, which we all know is an important resource. I max out most of the vendors each week and dump a lot of stuff to favors to gain more places to sell. So having a player vendor stall is a huge bonus. It also means daily trips to the market to restock, so a bit of work. Used to it. I merchant in most games i play, do ebay at home, and have owned game/comic stores for years and sell a lot of collectibles.

[Crissa]

Citan is correct. Both in theory and in practice. If a product has a good supply, price will...

Not exactly. Yes, he's constraining the supply with the stalls. But the cost of the time and effort to search through those stalls limits the demand. Limit demand, and you've dropped the multiplier.

The cost of the stalls also raises the floor of the market. Yes, the market works for sellers now, because there are enough determined buyers. But it doesn't work for buyers, who end up spending far longer than the sellers, in the market.

Anyhow, right now it's just a matter of being clumsy. It's not going to kill the market. Yet.

PS: I find thirst easier to manage. A stack of water that I can drink on the run and oasis I can jump into is easier than constant ticking cold.

[Asashoryu]

A comment I made in another thread, that seems more appropriate to expand upon here:

Ideally something similar to how the storage bookshelf in Serbule functions for storage should be implement to search across and allow purchase of all player vendor and consignment items 'in zone'. Serbule returns from such a "broker" wouldn't need to match similar searches in Serbule Hills or Eltibule, but I shouldn't have to waste a hour running around to several dozen player vendor stalls and NPC consigment vendors trying to find something that might not even be up for sale.

Imagine a "broker" NPC that's present in various cities and villages. Through the NPC, a player can search across all player-vendored items in the 'zone', whether sold by player vendor or by consignment. From that, a player could choose to have the NPC 'locate' the vendor (some iteration of map marking, glowy navigation line, whatever.) allowing them to run directly to the source, or buy it on the spot with an added "broker" fee applied to each item so purchased.

These "broker" NPC services might be gated behind favor and/or relevant skills (perhaps having Industry at a certain level to use the service in Serbule, Gardening past a threshold to use a similar farmer NPC acting as a "broker" in Serbule Hills, or being in Animal Form to use the Raven NPC acting as a broker in Sunvale. Perhaps race factors into it in some areas, with biases presented as increased "broker" fees, or barriers to access. Favor and/or Industry levels could further reduce the "broker" fee imposed for clicking 'buy it now', as it were.

Aside from making markets more accessible, while not outright eliminating some amount of segmentation (per zone), such a system would make it so more than just the first room full of vendors on the right are worth their rental fees, and also allow greater visibility of limited, specific items sold via NPC consignment prior to players having sufficient industry skill to employ a player vendor.

[Mikhaila]

The assumption that just the first room on the right are worth it is just false. Many people actually say they skip the first room and go to the 2nd and 3rd, since the vendors in the first don't refill/change stock much. Once you know who sells what, and who is continuously empty because they just use a vendor for storage, you don't need much in the first room. I could have easily moved my vendor to the first room and didn't. I'd rather be in the third room.

[Mikhaila]

Not exactly. Yes, he's constraining the supply with the stalls. But the cost of the time and effort to search through those stalls limits the demand.

Some people actually don't mind going stall to stall. It's called shopping You see different things, get an idea of what different people are selling. Prices are different on different vendors, so it can be a bit of a treasure hunt. Some people don't like it, others don't mind it.

It could be made less clunky, i agree. And is not helped at all with the lag in Serbule.

[ArkadyRandom]

The entire player market system frustrates me. It feels overly complex and convoluted to me for complexity's sake itself. There are too many steps and clicks to get and find what I want. Figuring out how to try and participate in the selling aspect is not fun.

I don't like having to manually go to each stall, but if the system must be that way, make it easy to get in and find things quickly so I can move on to the next.

The quest notepad is sufficient for keeping notes on who sells what at a price, but there should be something better. If there is no broker system (EQ2) or AH (LotRO) then the player stall system should be fun. There should be tools to help both buyers and sellers. The idea is to move items from people who don't want them to the players that do. The current system seems to put up frustrating roadblocks to that goal.

[Crissa]

Some people actually don't mind...

I didn't say no one was shopping. Clearly some people are. But that's also economics: As the market is crowded, or difficult, more will opt out. I think Citan is choosing this intentionally, by making it difficult, that means only people dedicated to their task will do their shopping.

I'm not sure it would really stop someone focused on buying low and selling high or cornering the market; but it does raise their 'cost' of doing business.

It could be made less clunky, i agree. And is not helped at all with the lag in Serbule.

Yeah.

One thing I'd like is better pathing. If I'm clicking on a stall to look at it, it wouldn't be all that difficult for my character to path around the displays (and even between other players) to look at the next store. I wouldn't even mind if my character used walking speed to do it.

A second thing would be to highlight the stalls that have the item I'm looking for. Who has food? Food I haven't eaten? Who has prisms? Who has skins? Books? Clothes of my level that I can wear?

There's some ways this can be done. A board listing or slash command; vendors could 'shout' (use some sort of tell system) that shows up on players' Nearby or Combat messages; glowing highlights or markers. The icons on the ground are a start, but I don't know what most of them mean. I think right now they're random, but they could be useful for this in the future.

I think Citan's experiment is fascinating, and although I don't like the market as is, it seems to be functioning right now (vendors are being utilized by players and selling out their inventories). And that's awesome. (And why I like PG. It just does things differently. Experimentally.)

@ArkadyRandom I think you hit on it: The system should be fun.

Right now, shopping, I don't feel fun, I feel frustrated as I try to navigate through the maze of vendors and players and lag.

[Mikhaila]

Crissa: I said "some people don't mind". I agree with you, you absolutely did not say "no one is shopping". And you shouldn't imply that I said you had said that.

I specifically tried to make my comment neutral. "Some people don't mind" mean't exactly that.

I'm not trying to argue with you, I'm just trying to put forward a different point of view.