I was around when the CoX Market launched and right away I knew there would be a problem. You had hordes of Vets with PILES of cash and nothing to buy. This drove some prices to insane levels right away. Things eventually settled down but newer players coming in after the Market launch often felt intimidated (the lousy interface didn't help) or frustrated and opted out. This meant fewer players participating in the Market and even some players leaving the game.
TPP will hopefully have a Market at launch. However I want to avoid some of the more blatant things that might turn players off and drive them away.
1) Price History: Make this a choice between 5, 10 and 20 sales. Cheap stuff with little fluctuation players will leave at 5 sales but the million-plus stuff they can watch more carefully. The longer sale history will make it tougher to artificially inflate prices.
2) Keep the glitz in and around the Market to a minimum to prevent lag. Suppress Powers, keep the shiny stuff outside. Perhaps even make it instanced.
3) Never let items run out. In the real world when there is a shortage of something, someone makes more of it to grab market share. So why not do this behind the scenes in the Market? Anything that begins to run out (Commons to 10, uncommons to 5 and rares to 1 for instance), the Market restocks from a non-player source. Now these new items will come in at MUCH higher prices due to scarcity but there will ALWAYS be at least one of whatever you want if you're willing to pay for it. This guarantees that the mad inventor who HAS to have the Purple Widgit can get it...if he has the cash.
4) Keep item scarcity in tiers. This has more to do with Inventing but here goes: Common drops should be used for Common recipes and ONLY Common recipes. One problem with CoX was that many high-ticket recipes called for drops that were only available at lower levels. This meant that new inventors were competing with 50s for the one thing to complete their Wing recipe. I firmly believe that the top-tier recipes should only require top-tier drops.
5) Don't put the cool non-combat stuff in the ultra-rare drop category. Remember when Wings first came out? Many players never got them because they dropped so seldom. Those players who clocked 40 hours a week sold the ones they had for millions. Yes, let the buyer beware, but this is for a costume piece, not a Stealth IO. When they upped the drop rate for wings the only players hurt were the greedy ones selling surplus recipes for millions. The rest of us were thrilled.
I know that the gaming community will insist on a Market and as much as I opposed it at first in CoX it turned out to be lots of fun. However I want it to be something everyone can participate in, not just a select few.
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
I agree with everything you have said Comic, but, I would like to take it alittle further. I believe TF/Trials should have an option at the completion that let's you have a choice for the type of reward.
Let's break it down even further for every type of gamer to entice everyone for team co-op.
Badgers; TF/Trial badge but, for multiple runs the badge has chevrons/stars set at different levels ie 1-2 runs Novice, 3-5 Apprentice, 5-7 Master, 7+ Special Badge
PVE; reward drop based on whatever system is used for rare/ultra rare recipe
PVE; maybe a inf/xp boost calculated on enemies defeated
PVP; PVP reward drop based on system for rare/ultra rare recipe
All of the above would also be calculated on enemies defeated ie no sponging which if you know happened in many a Hami Raid.
Thoughts?
My villain, my hero you mean. I always think of my murderers as my heroes.
This is a hot potato for crafters. (Duh.)
This in particular will be contentious unless there are other means to obtain such recipes or materials. Those crafters who cannot or are not interested in participating in (large) group events could become second class citizens, if you will, if task forces/raids/whatever are the only means to get at the necessary items to craft top tier goods. This also plays into the whole debate about whether people should be able to craft items that are as good as the loot from TFs/raids. (I've toyed with an idea of having raid gear be separate from PvE gear, much as is the case with PvP gear (for those games that rely on PvP gear). That does beg the question whether this is a level of complexity that's beneficial to a game.)
I understand your point and I agree with it. That said, your choice of example is unfortunate. Unless you want to restrict such costume pieces to high level characters there will always be the likelihood of high level characters competing for lower level resources. The only means I see of working around that is of having a kind of 'flex-crafting' system. To explain, rather than having a recipe demand [code]1x Ancient Artifact, 1x Luck Charm, 1x Clockwork Winder[/code], the recipe would require [code]2x Common Arcane Salvage, 1x Common Technology Salvage[/code]. Ideally the required materials will have to be from your level range. That would make it easier to craft those wings (which [i]finally[/i] dropped at level 44, grumble grumble) without having to go back and grinding up level 4 to 19 mobs. This ought to also make the inventory considerably less cluttered.
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Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
I understand what you are getting at Darth, this would be only one way to obtain rare/ultra rare drops, but, be calculated on a different scale to regular drops on non-TF specific mishes/street sweeping/instances. But, by doing the TF's the gamer would get a better likely of a "good" drop via the risk vs. reward.
Basically saying that by doing a TF the gamer has the likelihood of gaining a uncommon 1/3%, a rare at 1/3%, and an ultra rare by 1/3% or whatever would be acceptable via scale calculated on enemies defeated/damage, etc.
The same could be said on mishes/instanced/street sweeping but the scale would be way different say a rare only drops .02% of the time and an ultra .01% of the time.
I cannot for the life of me remember what the scale/math that was used in CoX or I would give better numbers on this, as these are only examples of what I am trying to get across.
On your PVE/PVP idea of drops I agree that there should be more of a difference on these types. PVPers are going to min/max their toons for the maximum results, PVE gear should not be this way and the results of drops/crafting should reflect this. In this way the casual gamer will not feel too over whelmed by all of it, I believe at least I can speak for myself and pvp friends that I have we will min/max the shizz out of our toons for the results we desire and if we have to jump through hoops to gain specific recipes for our toons then it is going to happen.
My villain, my hero you mean. I always think of my murderers as my heroes.
That would be the best solution, to give every approach a roughly equal chance to obtain a particular item, or rarity of item, per time invested.
I'll elaborate briefly on my thoughts of raid vs general PvE gear. For this purpose I'll use 'PvE' to mean any PvE content that is not a raid/taskfroce.
* Outside raids/taskforces (open world, regular missions & instances, etc.): raid gear would work out to be slightly worse than PvE gear of equivalent quality, providing crafted gear with an edge
* Inside raids/taskforces: raid gear obtains a bonus that makes it slightly better than PvE gear of equivalent quality.
This way someone with crafted gear can still participate in raids and a raider doesn't look like a klutz when participating in a world event, but each has a slight edge in their chosen arena.
My good man, it appears evident that you don't know PvErs, especially raiders, at all. ;)
You better believe that many of them will squeeze every last tenth of a percent out of their gear.
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Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
I understand the points in the OP but disagree with many of them. I preferred to make my money on the AH in CoH rather than farm. I did so without negatively impacting too many people, it's not required to screw people over to make money. I made my money (hundreds of billions of it) buying recipes and salvage cheap, crafting and selling the finished IOs (and not even the most desirable IOs).
Points 1 and 2 are not controversial.
Point 3 I had long discussions with the previous studio director about. The key is that the NPC sale price is high enough that the market will never normally reach that price. If not, the market will be distorted badly. You don't even need to have them on the market, could be a NPC "luxury" store that sells at high fixed prices with a pop-up warning if you were putting a bid in the AH that was higher than the NPC price.
Point 4 was irrelevant once AE came out, you could just generate a few tickets and make some really cheap common salvage rolls.
Point 5 was only a problem because you had several years worth of toons already created waiting for wings, hence my level 9 getting 37M for a set of fairy wings, the problem was not the drop rate itself, just the queue of existing toons.
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yeah.
I like the stocking idea. It will probably help control prices. There have been cases where I wanted to make a simple common item but a common piece cost many times more than the recipe itself and the other parts combined.
I also think there should be a store whether integrated with the market or otherwise where all pieces that can go on the market can be bought and sold for a set price.
We need Thrift sores!
I didn't have a problem, sometimes I was lucky, other times, frustrated. I think impatience had a lot to do with it.
I do agree with no powers in the Market (or at places like Trainers) It was really aggravating to have to stand there with a load of crap going on. Near the end we even got spammers.
Steve
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"Listen, and understand. City of Titans is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely [i]will not stop, ever,[/i] until we are live!"
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Just please don't put an auction hall right next door to (or in any case within lag range of) one of the game's key transportation hubs.
Get yourself right; the world has enough problems.
I have NO problem with folks buying low and selling high. I have no problems with folks crafting stuff and then selling it for more than the recipe and components cost. Such things work as long as there are 'twitch' buyers and I see no issue with it.
The NPC price, as I said, would be WAY above the usual Market value...maybe even ten times...however there will always be one there. One problem Redside before the Markets merged was the scarcity of items.
Another suggestion: If a character is deleted, all their stuff goes to the Market in some way.
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
I don't impatience had a lot of do with it in many cases. I know some people that was sometimes unlucky and other times just unlucky. I know a couple of people played the game from beginning to end and never seen a purple drop. Some managed to buy a few but never could get enough to get the bonus they wanted due to the price of each one and the stuff on AH. Some never accumulated enough cash to buy purps a t the asking rate and thus have no idea what it's like to slot a purple.
Sometimes people are just not lucky. While others have a lot of luck. Of course they wouldn't see a problem or know what it is like because they get it regularly. So they have no idea what it is like to play for years and never get a purple drop when they gotten enough to slot their toon or make oodles of cash to buy the rest they need. And to them it looks like impatience, or someone not trying hard enough, and see no problem because THEY never had a problem so they assume that means since they never had issues then the issue must no exist. How long are they expected to wait? 6 months? 1 year? 2 years? More? Now it's now too late to even find a way to increase their odds and try to get a purple drop for once.
Yeah stuff like that should not be depended on luck. If people get lucky, good for them, but lack of luck should not be punished and they should have other ways to get it whether it's automatic drop after so many scrap drops, or buying it from an NPC at a reasonable price. That way those that have good luck and get 2-3 drops per day or whatever can continue to do so while that may not have that luck cant also partake without being told it's due to their impatience or they are doing it wrong as if they can just magically rig the RNG that never seem to work in their favor or other insulting stuff from people that do get lucky because they cant understand it or never experienced and think it's the person that don't get as many lucky drops as them fault. Either way eventually luck runs out and when it do, those people that look down their nose and automatically assume it's the unlucky person's fault get treated with the insults and assumptions get treated the same as they treated others when in some form or another is down on their luck in a situation they have no control over.
"Got hit by a drunk? well I haven't so it's no problem. You must of been doing something you wasn't supposed to be doing." I don't think many people would like to be told that in that so what make it think that people would be receptive of being called inpatience even if they may have played logged more hours in the game than you possibly and still got no drop. How the hell is it their fault that the RNG decided they should get no drop? I bet you don't even havea logical explanation for it besides since it you got drops it means that everyone must have gotten drops. I bet things happened to you that never happened to me and I think and you probably would too it be uncouth if I said since it never happened to me, you're making it up and it's your fault for it happening. How would it look if someone said They had a game closed down so it was the player's fault the game closed down? I know how exactly that would turn out because on the old forum someone suggested it and it didn't sit well. Same concept here.
I shall do this point by point, and try to explain my reasoning with examples that I have seen in other games. I am also assuming that you are going for the way in the which the CoX market worked... which was the double blind auction system (which in my mind was just open for abuse).
I can see the advantage of having a longer price history. This is particularly to gauge how the market is going. By why limit it to such few numbers? Eve Online goes one step further, and you can view up to 180 days worth of sales information... they end up giving "number sold, buy order filled, highest price paid, lowest price paid, and average sale price". Granted Eve Online does have one of the more in depth market trade systems out there.
No preference here. I tend to have more problems with people getting in the way, than them using abilities randomly.
No. Just NO. The much higher price for the item, especially if it is a static price, will just set an upper market price for the items. Minotaur as already commented on this one... it will wildly distort the market prices
If there is a mechanism in play that bases the sale price of the "auto generated" item to something like 100 times the average sale price of the past 20 purchases.. this will be open to abuse. Badly.
Minotaurs solution though is a good one. It is removed from the market, and it also effectively sets an out of market "upper price" on stuff....
This is making the assumption that you will not get drop/loot from mobs that are too low level compared to you. This was a problem with how City of Heroes did it. Pretty much every single MMORPG out there, even if you don't get XP from the mob, you can still loot it.
Without knowing how the loot system works though, I cannot really comment. However, I would *hope* that the developers wouldn't make the same mistake as CoX did, and effectively force people to have lower level characters (if they are truly solo orientated), to be able to fulfill their crafting requirements, especially if they cannot afford to buy stuff off the market.
Define "cool non combat stuff". Does this include "enhancements"? Or is this limited to just vanity pets/costume pieces?
I can see where you are coming from, but I had 8 or so wing pieces drop in the entirety of playing CoX. Infact, I actually had *more* purple recipes drop in the year up to shut down, than I had costume pieces drop.
Anyway, I wouldn't call those players who were selling them originally for millions "greedy". If there was a scarcity of items to be sold, then they are just selling them at what the market would support. Sure, YOU would have liked them to be cheaper, but I wanted purple recipes to be far cheaper than what was on the market. But those GREEDY players were selling them for hundreds of millions.
Because they were *limited* in supply.
And yes, I did use this to my advantage by buying up winters gift Travel IO's during the winter period, so i could sell them during the *summer* at a higher price. Because I needed the inf to buy other stuff off the market.
What would I call my ideal market?
Eve Onlines market system, but I know that its economy only works because stuff can be destroyed in the game.
However, the basic Auction House system that is normally found in other MMO's can work as well... a lot of the complaints with those systems is that the interface can be a bit crap, and that the information is badly presented to you.
But that can be fixed. One thing that I have heard about is Wildstars "Auction House"... well, only part of it (and this is if i remember correctly.. it was mentioned in an interview):
When you buy something off the market.. the price that you see, is the *cheapest* price. In fact, you cannot pay "over the odds" for an item. If it is listed for 1million inf... you cannot accidentally pay 10million for it (which is what can happen in Eve Online).
I would also like items to have a listing duration, and allow a proper "bid" system for items, so that if you are not the highest bidder, you don't get it. Maybe "buy orders" like Eve Online but with some tweaking.
A subject near and dear to my heart, having used the CoX system from the days that I had a handful of measly inspirations to my name to those when I figured out how to pay to get my 7,000 slot badge, and somehow ended up making a profit despite my best efforts — all of it long, long after introduction — and having ridden other markets through good and bad and worse, all the way down to "why would I ever bother?"
I will point out that of the points in the original post, almost none of them have anything to do with "Market PvP". The thing that made the CoX market a PvP arena had to do with the fundamental design, and that design is part of what made it a *good* market, so much better than the standard MMO market that I can't even describe it to anyone who hasn't had to suffer through the generally implementations available. Which is not to say it didn't have its warts, or places it could have improved, only to point out that there are things which are cosmetic, things which seem cosmetic and aren't, and things which are truly fundamental.
Point 1: would require some study, actually, to make sure it didn't break some of the dynamics that make the PvP aspect of the market work — but I can't see any particular reason that would be likely to be an issue. More of a potential issue (but I *suspect* still not much of one) would be potential issues with long-term data storage on things that don't move very often. It seems pretty unlikely to be an issue, but I'd hesitate to promise without some analysis.
Point 2: primarily a technical issue as to whether we can suppress "flashy" powers (or in particular, FX) without suppressing the rest of the powers; for everyone annoyed by a flier with wings, there is a flier who would be annoyed by having to re-fire their travel power after walking out of the market zone. That said, I should think that at the very worst it would be possible to have at least *some* market zones set up as "quiet", the way that AE had the quiet room for editing.
Point 3: I can't go into details about it, as the proposals are highly experimental at best, but while it wouldn't be a "guaranteed provision", there may be ways to buffer the effects of someone trying to corner the market on an item. That said, part of the PvP nature of the market is that it was *deliberately* possible to have the price on an item go up drastically — which, if it went up enough, would encourage people who were holding the item to sell it, or people who could go and obtain the item to do so and dump it onto the market. Except for some of the rarest items, I can't name a time that I ever saw an item truly "cornered" (and not even most of the really rare ones) once the market setup was universal. I even tried a couple of times to see how far I could manipulate the prices, and for anything that was Uncommon or lower, the short answer was "I couldn't", at least not to any significant degree for any meaningful length of time.
Points 4 and 5 really have almost nothing to do with the market itself, and everything to do with drop rarities and how the salvage/crafting system is set up, which is really a separate topic for the most part. Anything in the market is just a reflection of a more fundamental value calculation driven by these (which is not to say they didn't have broken moments, but those would happen with or without a market, the instant that 'trade' was implemented).
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The market in CoX was hands-down one of the best things about the game. The funny thing is, I don't think that the devs ever really realised how brilliant it was.
Like the invention system, the AH allowed people to participate at any level they chose, and still benefit.
It was possible to entirely ignore the market, sell drops to vendors and use the cash to buy DO/SOs. If you hated the market that much, you never needed to step over the threshold.
It was possible to walk into the market, literally drop everything into it for one inf, and make a decent proportion of what you would make by carefully checking prices. Yes, I'm talking about salvage and uncrafted recipes. Someone once ran an experiment on the market forum rolling merits and listing recipes for one inf, and their return was great. It baffles me when people who hate the market complain about blind auctions because that feature of the market was the single biggest factor allowing players who didn't understand market pricing, and didn't WANT to understand it, to sell their drops profitably. It was absolute genius and, as I said, I think it was a complete and happy accident on the part of the devs.
And then it was possible to get involved in buying and selling and crafting at various levels, to have fun and make inf. Yes, using the market to its fullest required the investment of some time and thought, but that's true of any part of an MMO. If you wanted to reach the inf cap in five days on the market, then you had to understand it, much like if you wanted to solo +5/x8 spawns you needed to understand defense and DPS.
What it was extremely difficult to do in CoX was to control or exploit the market on a major and consistent scale.
It is impossible to create a monopoly unless you control the means of supply. In CoX, no one could do that. People could roll tickets, or merits, or put their drops on the market, and there was new uncontrolled supply coming in. Because of the way that sales and purchases occurred (semi-randomly) new supply couldn't be cornered. There were a lot more people on the forum who lost inf trying to control the market than ever made it. (I'm sad I didn't save some of the old Market Forum threads, because the Luck Charmers story, about a group attempt to change Luck Charm prices, was hilarious and instructive.)
Yes, people complained about market fixing all the time. Very largely, what they were complaining about were entirely explicable changes caused by changes in supply and demand. (If you paid attention to the market, you could see when a new AE exploit was discovered. It produced a completely predictable change in prices.)
If you want to cap prices, then a shop selling items in the only practical way to do it, but it comes with its own problems, specifically, how are the prices set, and against what benchmark? What is a piece of rare salvage or recipe really 'worth'? 'Ten times market prices' means nothing (other than, hey, exploit heaven ahoy!) Automated systems are so open to abuse it's hard to imagine even trying to implement one, but human-run systems would be time-consuming and problematic if neglected. And how often will items need to be repriced as the amount of inf-equivalent in the game rises. What seemed like a lot of inf a month into the game might be trivial after a year. What about if a new build strategy comes along, and the price of a particular IO jumps up? Do individually adjust each item's store price, or do you effectively allow unrestricted supply?
An item store will inevitably distort two significant things -- market prices, and item rarity. Randomness controls supply, in the sense that even if supply jumps, it does so uniformly. Consider the discovery of an exploit, such as the infamous Mastermind bug in AE. That poured billions and billions of inf into the game, as well as generating enormous amounts of salvage and some recipes. But those items generated were still randomly rolled from tickets. Imagine if all that inf had gone into directly buying the rarest items. Specific supply spikes, making once rare items commonplace, thereby affecting game balance.
(Incidentally, high prices for low-tier items will overall BENEFIT low-level characters. Think of it this way: How many time does a low-level character need to craft a recipe? Now, how many times does a low-level character get a salvage drop? For every high-level character dropping a ton of inf to buy a low-level item, there's a low-level character who just had that inf cascade down onto them.)
In summary, it makes me sad when people diss CoX's market, because it was absolutely awesome. It was fair to people who just didn't want to understand how it worked, and it was a source of much fun for people who did. If CoT uses a different system then I really hope it's one that's equally fair and accessible to all players.
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? - Robert Browning
Provided the price is high enough, there is no issue. Let's look at some CoH numbers as people understand them. What was mid level common/uncommon salvage worth ?
Alchemical silvers went up to 200K (vendor value 250) and alchemical golds to 300K (vendor value 1000) fairly regularly.
I have no real issue with a vendor selling at say 100K/200K to act as a cap on the market, but if you set the limits at 20K/50K you would have a serious distorting effect on the markets. Also any attempt to intelligently set vendor prices for buying or selling is fraught with danger. This was at one point discussed internally and I broke 2 such schemes and showed how to exploit them.
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Basically, if you successfully set shop prices high enough that they can never distort the market, then they'll also be so high that no one will ever buy anything at the shops, so the shops might as well not be there in the first place. It's a lot of effort for something that the market can take care of itself.
The only thing I would've changed about the CoX market would actually be to reverse a change that came with the UI revamp. The AH used to display when a sale was made, as well as the value, and that was really useful info.
(I also would've made one big supply-sde change, which would be to allow players to chose the level of rolled recipes, to alleviate the lack of supply for lower-level IOs. Patience is one thing, but items actually never coming onto the market was a pain.)
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? - Robert Browning
I thought that it was possible, via the merit vendors... or was that only for the *rolling* of the random drops?
This is more or less the point, they're not there to get in the way of normal operation of the market, they're there when the market fails as an upper bound.
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Although I liked this post in it's entirety, I really wanted to highlight this part. I would always hear a certain portion of the community in essence whining about "evil marketers" or on how causal players will never see the huge piles of Inf necessary to buy the high ticket items on the market. What it broke down to was they didn't want to invest the time into the system. That of course was their choice, but they had no right to complain that because other players did invest in the system and were rewarded for doing so.
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True but that could be said for just about any game feature even grind. Some people that grind for gear (some spend about 6 hours a day grinding for one piece and get successful) in other MMOs don't see what the fuss is about grinding for gear and say that it's because people didn't want to invest the time and it was their choice but they shouldn't complain about grinding. If they wanted the gear and be rewarded then they should invest in the hours it takes to get the gear like the people that do invest that amount of time and get rewarded for it.
In essence if that was the case, there shouldn't be a complaint about anything ever in the game world.
Not saying I disagree with you, as the market seemed pretty simple to make money off of, assuming one actually got decent drops to make money off of. But what is easy to one is hard to another. Like many here stated they don't like gear, while many people don't see why the hate for gear and think it's a great thing in other games and all it takes is taking the time to learn the system and to them those that hate gear are people that simply don't want to take time to learn.
When people are successful at something, of course they don't see it as a problem. They assume because they can do it, it means anyone can and should be able to do it. While those that are not successful at it, see it as a problem that should be fixed.
I think it's somewhere in the middle. It's easy to close ears when one is benefiting from a way that is implemented and think anyone that have issues with it is just empty complaining. When in reality, maybe the system can be improved maybe not. But it will never be known if it's never looked at and automatically closing ears to it because since some are successful it means it's a perfect system in the eyes of the people that were successful from it.
Also should always keep in mind that most people here probably at some point in time whether about COX or some other game had a complaint and felt their complaint was valid. And there probably were people that looked at the complaint, like some do about the market complaints, and automatically assume it's invalid because they made it work for them thus no one should have a problem and people are just complaining just to be complaining.
Like I seen some ex-COXers, some that were successful in the COX market complain about CO market. I could say they are just making noise too because I make a lot of money off that market and if I can make money they can. All they have to do is learn the market and take time to invest and they have no right to complain about it if they choose not to. Just as it's been said about people that complain about the COX market.
Yes, that was only for setting the level range in which the roll took place. the recipe itself would be at the character's level, or at the max level for the set if the character was higher than that level. Alignment merit rolls and Architect tickets worked the same way. It was only possible to choose level when buying a named recipe directly, and that was insanely inefficient compared to other ways of using Merits.
It was a shame because it gutted the mid-level market, and I never saw any reasoning behind it -- I assumed it was just because of the back end mechanics of random rolls. Mind you, I was never very convinced about the need for 40 individual levels for IOs, either. My preference would be for every 5 levels, like Common IOs, or even fully scaling, like the store sets. If nothing else, it would make the market interface less resource intensive if it didn't have to load so many different recipes and IOs.
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? - Robert Browning
And stuff like the level 51-53 IO's which were never in the system in the first place....
I always thought as an April fools joke, the devs should have manually filled the orders for 2BN that were storing inf on items that didn't exist, would have largely solved the inflation issue overnight.
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yeah inflation went out of control worse than the Zimbabwe currency. Then of course the gold sellers came into being.
Hopefully what ever method is used, inflation will be at least attempted to be kept under control. It kills a few birds with a single stone. Less gold sellers (And remember they stuck around COX because people were buying inf to get those things that ended up costing billions of inf., a few costing 1-2 billion for one piece.), and wont be a huge gap in price between mid level and higher end stuff.
I stored all my inf in ridiculous low-ball bids for really expensive items. Win if they don't fill, win if they do!
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? - Robert Browning
I'm going to have to agree to this. A set Market price for a recipe would be good for a ever-replenishing stock would be good, but maybe allow an "undercutting" effect as well so players can sell/buy on the cheap as well. For Example, A Blood Mandate Damage plus can normally stock sell at 5 mil, but if players have extras they can sell them at 4 mil. this would allow the market to have a "discount while supplies last!", but still have some in store for a few bucks more if someone needed to buy 1. They would just have to come up with a few extra buck instead of waiting forever and a day until someone decides to sell one.
A couple of comments, though it is late so I can only hope I stay coherent. And to be clear, this is my analysis, not a set of statements about things we may or may not do for a market.
The CoX market style is called a "blind bid" auction, and the CoX devs talked at one point about exactly why and how they made some of the decisions. I'm afraid I don't have a link (and it probably wouldn't work anymore anyway), but it was *very* deliberate. Except perhaps the loss of the sale date in the UI update; that happened in a way that I suspect reflected "the dev(s) doing the UI did not understand that it had a significant impact on the market behavior".
Pretty much every auction system in existence has a set of properties that can be summed up as "who knows what, when do they know it, and how effectively can they act on it" -- all under various sets of conditions. It is a "simple" game theory analysis (in so far as that can ever be considered "simple") to get some idea of how a given market will behave given various inputs. The hard parts are selecting which things you *enforce* out of those (in a blind bid auction, neither the buyer nor seller know the exact prices of outstanding offers, but at least the way CoX implemented it they can both see the *number* of outstanding bids, along with a history of the most recent sale amounts, and when those sales were (until the UI change, anyway).
Among other things, this relies on having "buy" orders as well as "sell" orders, and most games don't even bother going that far. But it goes well beyond that. A bit that was even more critical, and that a lot of people never really grasped the implications of, was the logic that decided *which* sell order was used to satisfy a buy order that could match multiple items, and conversely, which buy order would be used to satisfy a new sell order if there was more than one candidate. Buy orders drew first from the sell order with the lowest listing price (ties decided by age), while sell orders would match against the highest offered price first (again, ties favoring the older offer).
This particular combination resulted in a strong biasing of prices toward a stable midpoint, where the highest offer and the lowest asking price basically had a "gap" -- and each sale indicated that some new order (buy or sell) had 'crossed' that gap and hooked up to a matching order on the other side. So by watching the history you could see the ranges which that gap tended to move through, and thus have a general idea of where the bounds tended to lay. But without the specific pricing data on *outstanding* bids, it has a sort of "quantum effect", in that the thing which exposes the state of the system (allowing an observation) also fundamentally *changes* the state of the system, every time it happens. Moreover, a lot of changes to the system state are never observable at all, to a marketeer.
The "fill buy orders from the lowest sale price" rule sounds like sane shopping, until you remember that the *offered price* was always the amount used, So if you listed a sale for 1, you might well get only 1 -- but only if there was *no* offered price higher than 1. At one point, I was working on my 7k sales badge, figured out a way to make it a lot faster at the risk of losing a certain amount of money, and decided to try it and see. Very simple, really: buy in bulk, offer high to guarantee you got it quickly, then sell low to guarantee you turned it around quickly. For an item costing N, you could lose your entire offering price (well, one less than that), and that did regularly happen. But somehow, on the balance, I managed to *profit* to the tune of a couple tens of thousands, using only items in the "below 100" range. Because buyers have a strong incentive to make relatively high initial offers it took both *time* (always finite) to cancel and re-offer higher, or opportunity cost (an auction slot) to leave it low and hope. The folks who didn't want to deal with the market but wanted to get something better than a store offer "lost" that PvP match, in the sense that they could have spent more time and gotten a better price by listing high enough that lowball buy offers wouldn't trigger.
Fundamentally, however, the very nature of that particular market setup tends to encourage those with a lot of money and little time to buy, and those with a lot of time and little money to sell, and thus will tend to favor those who invest more time, more (in-game) money, or more skill over those who don't. And each of those three things is able to vary independently. Sounds like a fairly reasonable description of a "fair but also worthwhile" PvP match, to me.
Blind bid is by no means the only way to achieve such an outcome, and it is not necessarily the only useful definition of a fair system for economic PvP. But all of the possibilities can be examined and understood in context (and the context of an MMO market economy is actually fairly atypical in several ways), and the result can be selected based on having the properties *intended* for the market, rather than having to settle for whatever properties your system happens to have, if you decide it based on other factors.
Too tired to get into it now, but inflation has been discussed, and there are a couple of very interesting and novel ideas that came out of it. They need a significant amount of experimental validation, both in simulations and with real humans, before we'll know if they really work the way we hope. But if they do, the economy will be more stable when hit with short-term spikes and drops in supply *or* demand, will be *much* more capable of "self-healing" (recovering from an unbalanced state, rather than tipping past a critical point and falling into a feedback loop) and then drifting steadily but not *too* quickly back to whatever its natural balance point is, *and* will have a couple of other nice properties that are more psychological than technical. Which is to say "less annoying to players". Along with naturally scaling based on the number of players involved (even indirectly) and the market activity.
And doesn't require hard clamps that will *always* be eventually outdated when compared to reality, no matter how hard you try. If a system doesn't have the ability to keep itself "in tune" without ongoing maintenance, or needs observation more attentive than "why did the money supply go up by two orders of magnitude overnight?" then it is fundamentally doomed to fail. Okay, technically, it is doomed to fail anyway, but with the right design it should be possible to change it from "growing progressively worse" to "requires a catastrophic event to destabilize". You're just guaranteed that the latter will happen *someday*.
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Great post! I just wanted to mention, though that this:
isn't quite accurate. I don't think anyone ever worked out exactly how tied bids and sales were matched, but it wasn't purely by age. That could be easily tested (I did it myself) by placing several stacks of bids or several stacks or items at identical prices. The stacks wouldn't sell or fill out in the order they were placed on the market -- transactions would take place across all the stacks, apparently at random. So there was something else going on there, too.
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? - Robert Browning
I had too much inf for that :) he lied unconvincingly, but yes I did that too, usually on strange mid levels of LotG 7.5s.
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team and Forum Moderator[/color]
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Well, I'm not a numbers guy, and economies bore me silly, and I dislike marketing.
That said, I was pretty much able to get what I wanted on the market at good prices, and sell my loot for big profits, despite being an idiot about these things. <--edit: The ease of getting white (common) salvage from architect tickets was HUGE in both fixing availability crises and making quick profits.
The one area I did encounter difficulty was in trying to get low or mid-level recipes -- sometimes they simply Did. Not. Drop. for long periods, and thus were unavailable at any price. I wanted them only so I could exemplar down and have set bonuses.
Will City of Titans even be using recipe levels, or will they scale like some of the fancy recipes started to do late in COH (the AT-specific ones, for example)? Scaling recipes -- or really anything that would have let me exemplar with the common sort of drops most people put on the market -- would solved the "mid-level recipes unavailable" issue that bothered me without any need for some sort of automated restocking.
Captain of Phoenix Rising
That was something I wasn't too fond of. With the XP curve as it was, you tended to blaze through the earlier levels. So anything pre-25ish tended to be exceedingly rare, so you really couldn't start putting in the good stuff until you're more than halfway through the game. And even then they tended to be a bit on the "so low powered as to be essentially useless" side.
[color=green]BIZZARO MEDIA FOLLOWER[/color]
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I think if enhancements could have been slotted in and out freely you would have seen a lot of people using the lower-level set IOs. As it was the existence of the low-level set IOs was fairly worthless, with the exception of globals, procs, and uniques. If the Boosts are going to be "locked in" as they were in CoH, the "special" ones may as well not start less then level 25.
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I never set anything on fire accidentally!
The Titan Legacy - Defender of the Inner Flame
That is a good point... because until the *very* end of the game, when they introduced the Enhancement Unslotters, if you made a bad choice, you had to burn a respec to sort it out.
I know that we complain about gear based stuff for MMO's, but at least WoW has for a LONG time allowed you to keep on respeccing as often as you wanted (i cannot remember when it was introduced though), and the only limitation was the rising cost if you did it *too* often in a short period of time.
But you also had the option of wearing different gear as well... you were not just limited to one set of gear to boost yourself, you could tweak it around a little bit (and to be fair, gems added another slant, along with reforging to go through).
Oh, and then there is the weapon/armour appearance changing as well that you can do....
Flat out disallow flipping. That is the only realistic way to prevent rampant mudflation and market PvP.
Possible solutions could be either not allowing the resale of an item purchased from the market, only allowing a 5% markup every 180 days from the last market purchase price, and disallowing the resale of an item for one calendar year.
Also add a Report button for people trying to sell in chat.
As long as the powers are only suppressed, not turned off. I hated the market in Praetoria. If I went in there with a character who had more than 3 toggles, or if those toggles took more than half a sec to power up, I could be in deep kimchi if I got jumped when I came out the door from the market.
You are effectively putting a ceiling on the price of an item. While this will limit flipping (that's a good thing), I'm not sure how I feel about it. I like letting the market find its own level, as long as there are safeguards against manipulation.
I think the main reason for the level differential in dropped mats was because of the problem you cited earlier. Vets with a boatload of money and new players who needed a way to separate said vets from some of that horded Inf.
As you pointed out, market PvP is bad. It limits the number of players in the market, denying the market as a tool for everyone by allowing it to be a PvP playground for the few.
I do. Flipping is the very essence of market PvP
Now THAT is a very cool idea. Me likey!
Good points, especially the first. That would probably shoot the crazy inflation like what happened in COX and the gold sellers that followed, to ashes. Although with the report button, someone would actually have to monitor it and follow up on things that get reported. No point in adding a report button for anything if it wont be enforced or looked at.
I'm all for the Report button but I'm not sure that it's feasible to try and track purchases and sales over what will soon be thousands if not millions of items. Might gag the system. I'm all for nuking the gold sellers though.
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
Yeah gold sellers are bad for business, on a personal information level. With no major inflation, no need to buy gold, and gold sellers cant eat. But make the good stuff cost 500 million- 1 billion for one piece, then they have a healthy market to sell gold.
And even then, if report button for gold sellers someone have to be paying attention to it or else they will multiply when they realize they can get away with it and the reporting system is toothless and there for decoration. Might be an extra person they must pay, but any rules should be enforced or not exist.
Enforced consistently, evenly, and fairly regardless of relationship, wife, kid, grandma, relation, cute or not.
Hmmmm. It usually seemed to, for me, but I will admit that I can't swear to it right now. It also may have considered things with a close enough listing time to effectively be the same, and selected randomly among them (or based on internal storage logic, or some other not-especially-consistent way).
Either way, deciding by age isn't the critical piece there, though it might be worth considering as a deliberate change to the system -- would need some review to make sure the implications were fully understood.
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[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
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It won't prevent them. Inflation happens because of an imbalance in the economic model, not because of market trading. The *most* that market trading can possibly do is spread the impact of the inflation more evenly and more quickly.
"Have a policy regarding the sale of items through chat" would be a necessary prerequisite. I happen to agree that it doesn't belong on "general" channels, but I really can't see any reason to disallow folks doing it through dedicated trade channels, for example.
While it will require some care in doing, and I completely agree that the ideal would be allow powers to continue to be "active" while suppressing all effects (and FX), it is possible that there may be technical reasons that make that infeasible. If that ends up being the case, however, it seems like it should be possible to have a sufficient "safe zone" around the entrances to let folks put stuff back up at their leisure. I never understood why there weren't a set of "uber drones" or some equivalent standing just outside the door in Praetoria to provide exactly that, given its power suppression setup.
Though I have had the unpleasant experience of forgetting the toggles until "why is my health bar red, these guy's shouldn't be able to AAAAGGGGHHHdammit12345". I would very much hope that we can manage a better solution. :)
Here, I would have to say that I simply flat-out disagree, and that while it is hardly a scientific sample, I cannot name a single person I ever ran with that cared about dealing with the market *at all* (as opposed to finding it too inconvenient to *go* there to be worth the bother, which usually meant they just asked a friend who was going anyway) but could not participate in it because of the PvP setup. In point of fact, these same people have *exactly* the same behavior when playing a game where the market *isn't* PvP.
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[color=#ff0000]Developer Emeritus[/color]
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It's just an extra field or 2 on the item itself, depending on which option the devs go with (if any). And if you buy a recipe, and all the mats off the market, then craft something, guess what? What you crafted has never been on the market, so you price it how you like when you put it up.
Might also allow disassembly of craftable items, too. If you get a rare drop that isn't worth much to you or anyone else you can disassemble it for the mats. That would keep some junk items in check if too many of them get created by random roll.
My bad, I didn't specify. Yes, mudflation happens when high level characters can generate X/hour of cash without enough money sinks to account for 90-95% of it.
However, even assuming adequate money sinks to account for drops, flippers will cause rampant inflation in the market. This is what I want to prevent.
I avoid the market if I have to do flipping or other marketeering to finance my purchases. If I can walk in and place a reasonable bid, or spend a reasonable amount of time learning the price on what I want to buy, I'm ok with that.
I'm not ok with having to play the market (i.e. flip a bunch of stuff) just to buy what I'm looking for. I'm here to play a super powered hero/villain, not an outlandishly garbed day trader.
Can you explain how, please? And by that I mean, what is the exact mechanism by which flipping causes 'rampant inflation'. I'm curious because that really, really isn't what I observed happening in the CoX market.
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? - Robert Browning
I LOVE the idea of being able to disassemble stuff! You're a Tech guy who just picked up a bunch of Magic drops? Break some up for salvage and sell the rest. Got too many Blue Widgits after doing the WidgitKing TF last night? Sell some, hoard a few and melt down the rest.
Personally I don't think that flipping items causes rampant inflation. Some buyers are impulse buyers and will just click the button. I did this sometimes but most of the time I placed reasonable bids and waited a day or two. What I think was the biggest inflation issue was the uber-rich needing to buy lowby-grade salvage for their lvl 50 thing or their Universal Recipe (like Stealth). If a guy with a 50 with 500 mil on it wants to craft his Stealth IO he wants to do it NOW. He doesn't blink at dropping a mil or more for the otherwise common savage to insure that he gets it. Some players see that price and begin raising their prices.
I think the longer price ticker I suggested above would help with this somewhat. If something averages thousand per and the buyer sees one at 50 grand he'll realize it for the blip it is and ignore it. The BIGGEST issue will be how common things are versus how much income there is. If everyone has surplus Bread and the market is full of Bread the price of Bread will be low...unless a new gadget comes out powered by Bread then the price shoots up.
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
I LOVE the idea of being able to disassemble stuff! You're a Tech guy who just picked up a bunch of Magic drops? Break some up for salvage and sell the rest. Got too many Blue Widgits after doing the WidgitKing TF last night? Sell some, hoard a few and melt down the rest.
Personally I don't think that flipping items causes rampant inflation. Some buyers are impulse buyers and will just click the button. I did this sometimes but most of the time I placed reasonable bids and waited a day or two. What I think was the biggest inflation issue was the uber-rich needing to buy lowby-grade salvage for their lvl 50 thing or their Universal Recipe (like Stealth). If a guy with a 50 with 500 mil on it wants to craft his Stealth IO he wants to do it NOW. He doesn't blink at dropping a mil or more for the otherwise common savage to insure that he gets it. Some players see that price and begin raising their prices.
I think the longer price ticker I suggested above would help with this somewhat. If something averages thousand per and the buyer sees one at 50 grand he'll realize it for the blip it is and ignore it. The BIGGEST issue will be how common things are versus how much income there is. If everyone has surplus Bread and the market is full of Bread the price of Bread will be low...unless a new gadget comes out powered by Bread then the price shoots up.
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
In Tabula Rasa, i did a *lot* of schematic flipping in the early days of the game. But that was to "bring the market" into line at the start.
Sure, I know that I was loosing money on some of the stuff that i bought, but in some cases, I was there also buying stuff up and just vendoring it... because I *knew* that it was worth more than what people were selling it for. Either that or i disassembled it for crafting components which could be sold for more money than what the base item was worth...
Sometimes you cannot defeat human stupidity...
And yes, there were people putting rare drops up for 14million creds... when you would be lucky to get 1.5mill leveling through the game normally in the early stage of the games life.
Just to point out, the high prices in the early days of the game life should NOT be used to judge the state of the game immediately, because most of the time... people are still trying to figure out *what* the market can actually sustain.
And before I forget... extremely high prices on some items in the market? They could well be a way for influence/gold/credits whatever, to be transferred across to a player from gold farmers.
Do you not recall, or were you totally unaware of, the times when (e.g.) Silver was bought up by a consortium and relisted at ludicrous rates? I recall groups of people farming AE tickets to swap for Silver (or whatever the abused item was) and dump it on the market to bring the price back down.
This is one example of flippers en masse successfully attempting to manipulate the market. Individual flippers on certain items were just as bad, but didn't prompt a group response.
Regarding the price spike caused by an Inf transfer (pre-Glee mail), those were usually done on a common worthless item such as a Generic IO being listed for 100 mil.
Yeah I remember when that happened.
I know someone personally who did that type of thing with those common thorn thing. I think it was during that time the thorn pieces came into high demand because some IO got popular that required it. She bought up every single one and put them on sell for double the price in mass. For a few days, that is all she did, buy up any few thorns that made it through that she seen and buy it and sell it twice as much. And eventually, anyone else who listed also seemed to follow suit. After a while, the price of the common Thorn salvage piece doubled and rose even higher as people added on. Then she repeated process with other common cheap pieces and soon she had more influence than she knew what to do with. Then she moved onto some of the more rarer stuff. Buy them up and sell them double and set a new price standard. Some of those items re balanced before the end many of them never rebalanced.
I'm going to assume you meant Alchemical Silver. Alchemical Silver was a high-demand piece of salvage because it was used in popular IO recipes. It was also generally lower in supply than some salvage because of the relatively lower number of enemies dropping magical salvage in the mid-level range blueside. (Compare Iron (tech) and Masterwork Weapon (magic) - both used in Damage IOs, but Iron was significantly cheaper.) That's why the price was high, and why it was flipped.
Flipping doesn't produce inflation (constant price rises). Flipping will raise the price floor, lower the price ceiling, and improve liquidity.
More people lost inf trying to manipulate the market than ever made it. The blind auction system actively works against schemes like that over anything other than the short term, because undercutting by the constant fresh supply coming into the market will leave people stranded with over-priced supply. The fact that people could push the price of Alchemical Silver down by rolling tickets to pump supply into the market kind of illustrates the point, doesn't it? Ultimately, the price is controlled by supply and demand, not by the flippers.
Look at the market wipe when the markets were merged. All bids and sales were taken down, and all history was wiped. And yet, prices reestablished themselves at pretty much the same levels as before, mostly close the the larger blueside market.
ETA: Forgot something I meant to add. In a system like CoX, with the 10% AH tax, flipping helps to control inflation in a surprisingly significant way. Every time something passes through the auction house, 10% of the sale price is removed from the game. Gone, forever -- deleted, not just moved around. The AH was one of the biggest inf sinks in the game, and flipping made it more effective.
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? - Robert Browning
It seemed to be the only INF sink. Eventually even having 40 million inf meant poor when prior to the market, you was considered top level rich.
Yes, Alchemical Silver, that's it.
While I will agree that the 10% AH fee was an effective money sink, I still stand by my assertion that flipping causes inflation, at least in the AH.
I don't care if people lost money, or made money. That's their business. I care if the market gets manipulated. Which is why I am categorically opposed to allowing unregulated reselling of market items. If you want to buy something strictly to resell it at a higher price you are detracting from the community, not benefiting it. Therefore, it is my very strong opinion that flipping should be made expensive and inconvenient, if not downright impossible. I prefer the latter.
I also completely fail to see how flipping could possibly lower the price ceiling.
Let me quote the post above yours for a specific example. The price on one commodity may not be continually inflated, but when this happens to enough commodities the entire economy becomes inflationary.
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Once again, let me state that IMO the market should be a tool to improve a character for any player who wants to use it, not a PvP playground for 10% of the player base.
Yup.
but those ten percent probably wont like meddling with their power and will object under the guise of "well I did it, so anyone can do it they just have to learn how." reasoning.
It's not a question of learning how. I can learn how to drive nails with a screwdriver (or vice versa), but it's not what the tool is designed for.
Seriously, if they want to PvP they can do that. Just not in certain areas, the market being one of them.
Perhaps part of the issue is not whether there will be flipping (because I'm sure there will be) but how much and of what?
I'm more concerned that new players (the life-blood of any game with any sort of longevity) will be turned off by vets manipulating the Market is some way. I'm also concerned that they'll be turned off by a whole horde of dance emotes going at the same time but you can't please everyone.
I've chased this around for a few days now and I don't see a good solution except setting up the Market and letting it sort itself out with minor tweaks from the Devs. The biggest variable in any Market is the people and there's just no good way to predict what they'll do.
We can ask the dev team to put in all kinds of safeguards (that may or may not waste resources to create) that turn out to be Draconian, useless or unnecessary. I think that the hard decisions will have to be made during testing. Should we limit how many of an item can be bought and sold at a time? That would make cornering the Market tougher. Unless a person gets help. How about a hard minimum and maximum on pricing? No, that will just set the range the manipulators have to operate in.
I'm not an economist and to be honest even economists get it wrong half the time so they're no big help. I say we table this one unless we can come up with a better idea.
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
My thoughts exactly.
Yeah, during the testing phase is probably easier to see.
Say, didn't NWN or something have a huge player made market problem they had to fix In beta and or very soon after?
But another easier way I think, and have been suggested earlier is to make no item player economic exclusive. If it can be sold on the market it can also be found at an NPC. That way no group or single person can create artificial rareness by buying the entire supply for cheap and inflating the price when they put it on sell, or players be at the mercy of market manipulators and if the price is too high or some get too greedy, they can go to the npc and buy the same thing somewhere. Of course the convenience is that all items may be available at one spot on the market compared to having to visit different NPCs for different items. That way those that want to participate in the market to get what they want and need can. And those that don't, don't have to.
Of course there are some people that will stick to the "They should stop being lazy and learn to play the market." But many people that are rich in game I can guarantee they are not as rich outside the game? Then why not pay to win? Should they be forced to learn how to play the real life market in order to play? Why wont they stop being lazy and learn that. Ironically, most of them are not too keen on the idea of pay to win. They would lose power and control and would have to learn something they may not be good at and call it unfair but think it's absolutely fair when they hold the power in their favor. Basically to get items I don't think anyone should have to be at the mercy of a player made price market to get items they want. Choices.
I liked the market a lot, after a long period of hating it. Going from no inf to ridiculous amounts of it will do that I guess..
Something that hasn't been mentioned yet is storage, I ended up with multiple personal bases absolutely stuffed with salvage and enhancements. That's along side all the SG bases I was a member of, most if not all of them also stuffed with goodies. If there wasn't something available on the market or not at a price that I wanted to pay, I probably had 5 of them stored somewhere. That option is open to everyone, you're not forced to play the market / suffer because you don't.
If people won't pay enough to finance its creation, it is not worth creating.
/Segev
That is based on the assumption someone managed to get the drop and aquire that many. SO yeah, unless they get lucky and a member of a lot of SG bases like you that have that storage capability, yeah the market may be their only feasible way to get the item they need or want.
Either way, nothing should be at the mercy of if I want to make a purchase I have to go through a player ran market for any option, if the object cannot be purchased anywhere else then yeah it's is forced if one want to make a purchase if the only way to buy it is on the market.
Although I understand why some people want the market to be the only way. They cant rape people or change super absurd prices if there is some other place to buy it. If it isn't about taking people to the cleaner then they should have no issue with having other purchasing options because if they want to play the market they can while those that don't can purchase elsewhere. Instead of forcing everyone down one purchasing tunnel.
Because players get greedy, have no sense of moderation when inf and markets are concerned which spawns and attracts gold farmers, which with the high prices and no where else to go, entices people to use those gold farmer services, which creates a security hazard that can spread into real life consequences. And as long as players have monopoly and can charge crazy prices for items, gold farmers will be there and people will use those gold farmers just to keep up and have some way of getting items.
Have choices, the market will balance out, and people are not at the mercy of "Hey this guy wants to make a billion and nowhere to purchase it. Well got to buy billion inf or farm." Instead it should be "Billion for that? Well I can go get it over here for 100,000 inf."
*generally* speaking, if something is available in unlimited quantities from a vendor... then the Auction house will generally only have it available for less...
But that isn't to say that people WONT buy it for a higher price... unless of course *every* single vendor in the game has it available. If you have to travel for it, then people will pay for the convenience of it.
Players (in general) are lazy, and will pay for convenience, just so long as it isn't too inconvenient... as to how bad that can be? That is up to the person.
I have seen in Eve Online people pay 30-40% *more* than the lowest price in the area, because they didn't want to go one system over to pick it up...
The "corner the market" threat usually seemed manageable, especially since it seldom lasted long. Typically I'd just gin up some Architect tickets. In extreme cases, I'd play the game and next time I logged in, I'd find what I wanted back to a normal price. Meanwhile, if prices spiked ridiculously, I'd try to sell some of that item and ride the crest. So sometimes marketeers would force me to play the game instead of the market, and other times they'd force me to make money easily. Didn't seem like much of a penalty.
Captain of Phoenix Rising
After reading this thread I would have to say that the biggest thing that would alter the market would be to allow boosts (what they're going to call enhancements) to be unslotted rather than being tossed when replaced. More like upgrading what is their rather than replacement.
The second would be allowing them to be un-crafted, breaking them back down to their component parts. I would not include the "Recipe" or whatever it will be called in CoT in the uncrafting. Once the recipe is used it is permanently used up.
Adding an in-game cost to both of the above would be fair as well.
There were ways to get around this in CoH, for example you could respec a character the get them out.
I realize that this could take potential sales away from the planned store, but since I read that they want to eliminate any pay-to-win stuff then I wouldn't think this would be that big a problem.
Honestly, I liked the fact that the market had items on it for less than they could be sold to a vendor for. When I first started out this is how I financed my characters. Later when I had plenty I used to put these same items up on the market listed as low as I could to give others the same opportunity.
This could all be avoided if the economy were actually designed. Defeating opponents generates money pretty reliably, making out-of-control inflation an unavoidable consequence. Randomized drops guaranteed that most of the stuff you received was complete garbage. There are a few basic heuristics that could be introduced in order to ensure an actual economy of money and things.
For instance, slotting an enhancement would increase the random chance of a drop of that enhancement. Selling one out of existence decreases the chance that one would drop. This prevents the market from having two categories of stuff: worthless or too expensive. You could still regulate it such that some things dropped more often than others, but the items within a tier would drop comparable to how often people used them.
Income sinks should be coordinated with income generation. This means having a strong market of consumables -- things that you have to buy more of, like bullets or fuel. That's why the Eve Online economy works so well. There's a constant supply of people mining (creating resources) in order to fuel the supply of people who buy ships and get them destroyed. Creation and destruction is balanced.
The downside to this is that, should the consumables be combat-based, it skews combat advantages to those who can afford better gear. If consumables could be geared towards something else, or only provide a minor advantage (like with inspirations and temp powers), then it would offset that somewhat.
The biggest issue with the CoH economy is that, once you had your character fully spec'd out, all you had to do with your money was sit on it until that really rare enhancement either dropped or you had enough money in the bank to purchase it. With enhancement poppers, these items stopped being consumed after a while because they were too valuable to just discard. The only time the good enhancements were consumed was when someone just stopped playing.
A lot of people who played CoH would get all upset at the very thought that things you own might depreciate over time, but if the money is being created out of nothing, you absolutely need a way for money to be destroyed.
Mythological Beast
Triumverate, Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow (Infinity)
yeah it ended up being in game pay to win. Kind of ironic at how many are against normal pay to win.
But yeah part of controlling inflation is having things that money goes bye bye. The player market wasn't much of a sink. It was like a coffee straw being the drain to a swimming pool. Most of the money just got transferred to another player instead of like if it was purchased fro ma NPC it would have went out of the game.
The less there is sink for money, the more expensive things will be and then on the other end you'll have stuff that is completely worthless and the have nots that cant afford the good stuff.
I'm a big fan of money sinks.
However, what you are proposing would mean that an unusual or experimental build might end up being hideously expensive, whereas cookie cutter builds would be relatively inexpensive.
One of the things I deeply loved about CoH was the flexibility. I played from Ish 3 till they pulled the plug, so that's what, 7+ years? I saw a costume similar to one I'd made twice. With all the people doing IOs, I don't believe I ever saw two identical builds posted, even when people were attempting to achieve similar results.
My point being (and sorry if you already got it, I've been posting on boards where people are far more obtuse than most CoH players) that I would not like to see player creativity stifled by a control to attempt to keep the economy in check.
I have a couple of points:
Flipping reduces prices overall, and reduces inflation by consuming influence in a COH-style marketplace. The huge inflation we all saw in game was caused by large rewards for killing enemies, valuable drops, etc, being constantly added to the "money supply" in game while the number of players was not really rising. Flipping is good -- it should be encouraged up to a point, especially if there are badges involved. For some players, the market is a major part of the game's fun. No one here would seriously propose that solo play be dis-allowed, or PVP, or SG groups be forbidden even though they don't generally work to the benefit of newbies...all aspects of the game deliver minor problems for someone. The solution is to not allow the situation to become outlandish, as with players being able to corner the market on some components to the distress of other players.
That point is where serious price dislocations occur. The easiest answer for this is for the devs to "resupply" the market with missing or unusually high-priced items, spiking the flippers if they create large distortions.
It is my opinion that the devs in COH were doing this regularly. Part of my reason is that I was a guy who regularly crafted and sold items, on all my alts, buying the recipes and the goods in Wentworths and then reselling the crafted goods for a profit. Many times I would see something run out of supply, then, regular as clockwork exactly 30 of that item would come up for sale, one second apart. Then nothing for an hour, and then 30 more...repeat until supply was re-established. I can tell you, this was not natural market forces at work!
Also, I respectfully disagree with the point number 4 in the OP. I still recall when my two buddies and I, as new players, did not have enough money to buy SO's for all our slots, but we were playing a lot...and advancing too fast to keep up. Suddenly some level 50 paid me 1,000,000 influence for a clockwork winder in the marketplace. All three of us hooted out "WE'RE RICH!" and went right out and bought SO's for all three of our toons. It was one of our best moments in many years of play. And it only happened because a high level player, awash in influence, tossed us a perk. This should be encouraged, not discouraged.
Finally, on Justice server at least, if a player needed something such as a clockwork winder and the price had spiked, all one needed to do was ask in chat "anyone got a clockwork winder?" and at least one would arrive in the mail. It's a friendly sort of game. There are many, many ways to get around a temporary price spike, from using merit rewards, to low-ball bidding, to storing in your base, to just asking. Price spikes are simply not an issue that has to be suppressed by actions from the devs.
[/quote]
Sorry, I just assume that stuff drops when you kill mobs..
If you want to be a member of a lot of SGs just um join a few?
It has been a while but bases were free to build to a certain size and then incredibly cheap to maintain.
It's not about feasibility or access but convenience.
"Either way, nothing should be at the mercy of if I want to make a purchase I have to go through a player ran market for any option"
*shrug* as I say I ended up really liking the market and inventions.
If people won't pay enough to finance its creation, it is not worth creating.
/Segev
Oh yeah some people like the market and some don't.
The market is a way that I made a lot fo money. I had to. I wasn't blessed with good drops. So I had to buy everything and play the market. Now, do I consider playing the market fun and enjoyable? Hell no. It's boring as hell to me and kills the fun of the game.
But besides that, I'm not blind that it did create haves and have nots and pieces that were grossly inflated in price simply because there was no other place to buy it. Thus inflation kept happening and the money sink 10% was moot because then to keep up, many people turned to the gold farmers, which is more loot in the market that normally probably wouldn't be there, which left people that didn't turn or risk it with gold farmers and new or didn't have good drops out flapping. Unless they enjoyed playing the market.
Only market I like to play is the stock market personally. And the way many people feel about the in game market and how it's easy and people just have to learn is the way I feel about pay to win. I see no issue with it. If someone took the time to make real money and play the real life market then why should they not be allowed to buy the stuff they need with the money they worked hard for? But at the same time I can see as some people say create an unfair advantage because some people don't have the cash. What I don't get is how they call pay to win unfair when the process is the same but don't see where they must play the player controlled market to make a buck how unfair? If it's true that in game player market monopoly is fair, then so should pay to win be in the game. If people are rich in game but not in person, they have the market. But if they have money outside the game then it's fair that they should be able to spend real money on the stuff they want. And for those that have neither then they should be able to find the NPC to sell the items. If people put items up for a fair price, then they should have no issue with people paying for their items especially a little more for the convenience.
One of the problems that I felt CoX had was that the price of Enhancements out-paced the possible earnings from missions. Anyone remember having to horde Inf to buy SOs by the time they were available? I didn't have any Sugardaddy friends to fund me so I had to be frugal. A CC back then drew tons of players for a hundred grand prize. The Market opens and suddenly nobody has to worry about funding their toons ever again as far as normal Enhancements went. The drops from levels 1-10 would buy everything you needed to lvl 30ish.
I'm not saying that Market was Bad...I loved it. I'm not saying getting a drop worth a million by level 8-10 is bad either. I used to cheer when one of my lowbies got a great drop myself. However the game should NOT be designed where a character HAS to get outside help, or a lucky drop, to be able to afford to buy basic Enhancements IMHO. So the 1-million drop should be more 'Woo Hoo a million by lvl 10!' and less 'Woo Hoo I needed that cash SO bad to fund my other toon!'
Solo play should be the basic measurement by which potential income is based. Take the toon that will finish missions the slowest and take the longest time to defeat foes. Their 'income' from cash drops and vendoring should be used to determine how much it costs to buy non-consumables as the toon progresses IMHO. So if my Emp Defender (not the right terms I know...sorry) needs 100k to buy basic Enhancements for himself, then the typical amount he CAN earn from defeats, missions bonuses and vendoring typical drops by that level should be 100k. If he gets luckier drops, good on him. If he's a better player who can defeat foes or complete missions a little faster, also good on him. However I don't believe that ANY player should have to rely on charity or luck to pay for the minimum gear to play the game. Anything above that is gravy.
If the game is set up well, the Market will be a lot of fun and even a necessity for some. However it won't be the place where people feel they HAVE to sell stuff just to make end meet on their toons.
As for price spikes, they probably won't have to be regulated at all. Most markets are self-regulating in RL so there's no reason to assume that CoT's won't be as well. But wait...there are some important differences (the following works off of the CoH Market):
1) Items for sale are not perishable. Unlike RL, stuff in a game never gets stale or rots away. This eliminates one form of Loss.
2) There is a limited number of sources for anything. In RL if an area ran chronically short of bread, eventually someone would begin making more to fill the need. In the game Market, once all of the players are playing, getting drops, crafting and Marketing you don't have any other sources for stuff. If nobody decides to sell Bread for a week (for whatever reason), you won't see some outside source trying to move in to grab market share.
3) Nobody gets anything for free in the Market. In RL people can invest in things, buy stocks, earn interest on money and then spend the profits. In the game every centavo will have to be EARNED by someone doing something. If nobody is doing anything, no money flows.
4) None of this money is REAL and there is no real impact from spending it. In RL if you spent a month's pay on a shiny new ring instead of your mortgage you might be out on the street next month. Unless we need to pay cash for Base upkeep or something, your toon has no real expenditures for maintenance. You can spend him down to 1 buck, log off for a month, log back in and there he is...ready to go.
All of these things and more influence how the Market will work. Markets are made up of People and Things. Things are predictable...People less so. Our in-game Market will behave in unpredictable ways at times because some of the real-world forces from the real stock market will not apply.
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
"However I don't believe that ANY player should have to rely on charity or luck to pay for the minimum gear to play the game."
Yup to the entire statement but especially that quote.
Maybe I played a different game but the entry requirements to the market weren't that high and they were made easier and easier over time.
A market for in-game currency backed by a shop accepting rl cash should surely please everyone.
If people won't pay enough to finance its creation, it is not worth creating.
/Segev
The problem caused by flipping, no matter how much money it removed from circulation, is that it concentrates the money that's left into the hands of a few. Those few then inflate the price of whatever they choose to buy because they have money to burn.
Example:
The Pink Bunny puts in a lot of standing bids for 25 Inf on MaterialA. He then relists his purchases for 40 Inf. When he has enough Inf stockpiled he puts in standing bids for MaterialB for 80 Inf, and relists them for 125 Inf.
Pink Bunny loses interest in MaterialA, but the going market rate is now 40 Inf because that's what people thing is a normal price. Multiply this by 5,000 (a very conservative estimate) and you can see the damage to the economy.
Meanwhile, The Pink Bunny has gone along climbing up the ladder, leaving a trail of raised prices behind him, Now The Pink Bunny sees an item he wants for himself. Unfortunately, like most powerful items, it's popular and probably very hard to find. So bidding wars ensue between The Pink Bunny and the other 4,999 flippers, leaving anyone who isn't flipping in the dirt.
That's simply a problem with not enough money sinks. it has nothing to do with the market.
I categorically disagree, unless by "up to a point" you mean put a 180 day hold on any item bought from the market before it can be relisted.
Find some other way to award market badges. Or keep the number of items bought and/or sold low enough that people can get them without flipping.
I don't say this often, but those players should find a stock market simulation, or go play the stock market in RL. They are ruining that portion of the game for the rest of us.
When a new player can't craft for fun because some flipper has driven the prices of the materials the crafter needs up so high that the crafter can't make a small profit, or even break even, by selling the completed item the flipper has destroyed that facet of the game as well.
Solo play is actually playing the game, playing the core function of the game, and has zero impact on anyone but the solo player (other than the solo player being unavailable for teaming). The number of solo players is generally small in most MMOs, and if it isn't the devs have fouled up the design. CoH provided rewards for teaming, I sincerely hope that CoTi does the same.
PvP, you're always at a disadvantage at a lower level or before your build is done. That's a fact of life, if you don't like it, don't PvP. PvPers know this.
If SG groups require that someone be high enough level and require a team effort. OTOH, personal bases/hideouts have been proposed in CoH and in CoTi. They are a reality in some other supers games.
That works if there are zero items. But who determines what price point the devs restock at? And that's a bit more control than I want to see in the market.
Yes, some market controls are necessary to prevent inflation. Resupplying items when there are none might be one of them, although I'd rather see the drop tables altered if there is a chronic shortage of said items. I am opposed to manipulating the market by the devs or by the players.
Flipping needs to be difficult, very expensive, and the chance for actual reward from this behavior drastically reduced. Or it needs to be completely disallowed. I prefer the latter. Human greed will ensure that flipping is abused every time.
I never had a problem with the market.
But then again I was making millions on inf in as little as 15 minutes a day.
And for three easy payments of $9.95, I can tell you how!
[color=green]BIZZARO MEDIA FOLLOWER[/color]
[img]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/42230002/Memes/favicon.ico[/img]
One thing to remember...those flippers were also the ones who had gathered all of the influence together into one place so that when you put an IO or something up for a high price, you could get that price for it! (as long as it wasn't too extortionate).
They might not directly be responsible for the buying of the IO, but they at least *helped* to gather the influence together to make it work.
Oh, and if there is a limitation on "reselling stuff", that had better apply *directly* to the item itself, so even if you hand it off to another character, that character *cannot* resell it for the remaining time limit.
Col. Kemel, I can only say "opinions differ." But I am certain that you want the game to be fun, as do I. Let's see what the devs decide, and then we'll have as much enjoyment of the game as possible. :)
My problem with flipping is that it's essentially market manipulation, but it only had a meaningful effect on the particularly rare items. I had billions, and could drive the price up on anything any time I wanted to. Every now and then I'd purchase all of the Armor Plate I could get for under p250 and sell it to the game for a profit (a tiny one, but still). At one point I drove the price of it up to p2000 just because I was tired of seeing100,000 of them available for sale, but it was back down to under 250 in a week or so.
Not necessarily. It would keep the prices relatively stable over time and would discourage "flavor of the month" builds. If something dropped rarely, it was because nobody ever slotted one. You could theoretically have a minimum and maximum drop rate to prevent what you described.
The real danger would be hording, I think, and the possibility that someone would grief everyone by collecting a pile of something and drop it all at once. Manageable, but annoying.
Mythological Beast
Triumverate, Evil Geniuses for a Better Tomorrow (Infinity)
I know how it's done. I'm just opposed to it.
I would certainly hope that is the case. In fact, I don't really see any other way to do it.
Then we agree to disagree, except on the point that we both want to see a game that is fun.
[i]Raises glass in a toast[/i]
To the Devs, may their venture succeed beyond their, and our, wildest dreams!
Also I have some swampland in Florida to sell you.
[color=green]BIZZARO MEDIA FOLLOWER[/color]
[img]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/42230002/Memes/favicon.ico[/img]
I've been thinking of setting up a business selling snake oil, your swampland might be just the thing..
I honestly didn't mind flipping but I must admit I'm unaware if the markets were global or if the EU servers had their own in which case market experience might be differing here for EU/US players. The principle of flipping is abhorrent but the basic ways round it - kill mobs, store stuff against a rainy day, learn2market, vmerits, ae tickets, team up - seemed to work for me. I'd caveat that for solo players, if you insist on playing the game in this mode then you are going to gimp yourself. I'd also add that this is just my CoX experience, I've enjoyed markets a lot less in games I cared about / played a lot less.
If people won't pay enough to finance its creation, it is not worth creating.
/Segev
I would even go so far as to prevent items that have been bought off the market form being traded... because unless there is a way to *easily* tell that an item has a limit on when it can be resold... you might as well just bind it to you.
Account bound would be good enough, don't have to tie it to a single character. Problematic if the player has more than one account, but we can't fix everything.
Problematic because it means that you cannot do the "fly by shopping" to pick stuff up for friends, because it would be bound to you...
Expect a lot more people to turn around and say "get it for yourself"... they are not being selfish, they are just limited by the system.
There always ends up being ways round this such as you stick it in a storage bin and it removes the bound flag, you transmute it, it removes the bound flag, you add it to a pet it gets unbound, you use an unlock enhancement thingy.. unbound.. etc. etc
Actually adding account bound items to pets would then be another issue.
This may also cause an issue with SG costumes. Want a themed fairy SG? Well tough because the drop rate on wings is low and the AH price is high and I can't buy them for you as they'd be bound.
The market rarely ran out of stuff and when it did there were other ways to get them like ae tickets, vmerits. I vaguely remember someone running the first redside trial.. man I loved that trial, it was so cool, I digress..anyway running it repeatedly to restock lotg's. The game community balanced itself by and large. I'm not sure how much we're adding to the game by adding all these extra layers just to stop flipping.
If people won't pay enough to finance its creation, it is not worth creating.
/Segev
It seemed to my admittedly inexpert eye that the limitation that hurt me most in the market was not "flipping" or marketeering, but things that were not available at any price, either because they were ridiculously difficult to produce (PVP IOs) or ridiculously desirable (3% Defense IOs) and thus immediately snapped up when they did go into the market (in the latter case, I believe, an economist would argue that means they were [i]under[/i]-priced).
Captain of Phoenix Rising
That is what I was trying to point out, granted in a roundabout why, by showing that for a given solution, there will be knock on effects that affect people who do not use the market.
And if the market doesn't achieve its goal, the players will make their own unofficial one, especially if there are severe short comings with it.
As someone also playing EVE right now, I can clarify on this point easily since I did this very thing last night; "Time *IS* money". Make the cost be less than I feel my time/convenience is worth and I'll pay more for an item. I paid $125k on a 75k item last night. Why? Because it was RIGHT there in the station I was in, I absolutely needed it, and I didn't feel like hopping three systems over for it. $50k was not-quite chump change to me; it was a cost I was willing to accept for something that was reasonably-within an acceptable price range for me and WELL within the 'time' range I needed; "Right There, Right Now."
My play-time is worth money by the hour to me. Save me money by saving me time and I'll pay slightly-silly prices (in this case, an extra 66% mark-up) for an item, as long as it's within reason. Get too stupid and I'll grab my shuttle and jaunt on over to get the cheaper one..!
Also, just to toss it in, maybe consider if the market is empty of a specific search, make the recipe-vendors integrated into the market. "You wanted a level 25 Shield Breaker proc IO? There are none available, but you can ALSO buy it for 200 merits/2 AMerits!" Maybe make that an option ANYWAY, not just when the market is bare. I can't count how many people had no idea what those vendors did, and had never used them.
-liz
p.s. Whoever thought PvE raiders don't tweak for that very-last-single-percent of performance was incorrect; the difference between PvP and PvE tweaking is Intensity versus Endurance tweaking. PvP needs fast-cycling, heavy-hitting powers since people are QUICK. PvE raiders need to have endurance through the whole fight. PvP generally wins or dies or disengages long before they run out of end. It was a common problem with PvP-geared raiders; they did wonderful damage for like two minutes. In a ten-minute long Boss fight, though, that was bad...that was generally WAY more than enough time to decide things when facing a player, though!
I actually made quite a bit of cash in EVE doing something like that... although in my case it was "buy cheap in a market hub" and then "sell high in a low usage system"... you have to know the market, but if you are willing to take the time out of YOUR day to achieve this, then you can actually make quite a bit of cash doing it. Knowing the market though is *essential* to pull this off.
I hate to say this, but now you're just making stuff up.
Seriously, those may have been issues in some other game, but this game isn't using the source code from that game.
Sometimes coding details get overlooked and bits of code interact in weird ways that produced unpredicted, unexpected, and on occasion unnoticed results.
[color=green]BIZZARO MEDIA FOLLOWER[/color]
[img]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/42230002/Memes/favicon.ico[/img]
I'm not saying that happened in CoX but then we didn't have the same issues with bound items.
It was hilarious in GW2 for instance that all that effort was put into bound stuff and then transmuting it made it sellable.
Just saying that someone always finds some unexpected way. Pretty sure you can spend longer trying to fix something that isn't broken than it's worth.
I'd agree with a resale timer but when that bit of code breaks you could never pick up any loot, your SG bins could be full for weeks.. potential minefield, you'd have to discard or sell to a vendor to free up space.
If people won't pay enough to finance its creation, it is not worth creating.
/Segev
Fair enough.
Although I will still contend that allowing flipping IS broken.
Flipping might well be broken, but about the only way in which i can see it being resolved is by making every *single* item that goes onto the market place uniquely identifiable.
How would you easily tell the difference? Well, the most common thing that i have seen in the past to make items unique (especially when they have their own unique timers involved) is to make them non stackable...
I can forsee an inventory interface problem coming up soon.
You have to make it *easy* for the players to tell the difference between "different items" (even if the only difference is just "how much time left before i can sell it), without making the interface annoying for the user (or have them end up scrolling for 3 hours to find the *single* item that they *could* possibly sell (exaggeration i know, but its to prove a point).
The more annoying the interface/system is for the end user, the less likely they are going to use it.
So, whilst you might well suggest a possible solution to prevent flipping... think about *how* you are going to relay that information to the player, how they are going to easily be able to tell the difference between an item that they bought off the market for future useage, and one that has just dropped... How to make sure that they don't just go "off the market" to remove the annoyance factor of the market limitations.
If the market system is too annoying, then you can just end up with it not being used, and people coming up with their own unregulated version... one that the developers cannot regulate or keep an eye on.
Yeah.
I think the main problem with player ran market is the lack of regulation. Cant do much to stop unoffical ways aroudn the stuff but what is the point of a market in the first place if it's still going ot be unregulated as much as if someone sold it to someone else?
In COX, the market only provided a more easier tool for unregulated trade pricing especially with it being the sole effective way of buying items. Usually in any market game or not, monopolies usually dont bode well for the average buyer while 1% benefit greatly from it at the expense of the other 99%.
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