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Yes availabilty outside the market.
So the challenge is to figure out how to increase availability without adversely affecting the rarity. The market is of course one way to increase availability, but we're looking for non-market methods.
In CoX there were a couple of ways that were used to increase the availability of the rarer items, such as purchasing them from vendors using merits. The use of merits rather than influence was so that the devs could keep the items at the desired level of rarity, since they could control how frequently a player could acquire merits.
I can think of a couple of methods which may or may not work. They're worth discussing at any rate and I'll list the pros and cons that I can see for each.
1) A flat-fee re-seller NPC. This NPC would buy items from players for a set fee and then would re-sell those items at the same price plus a 10% market (similar to the listing fee in the market). So, if Cosmic Man finds a Blistering Heat very rare recipe and sells it to the re-seller for 1 million influence, the re-seller (and all re-sellers should have linked inventory, like the market does) would then have that recipe in its sales inventory for sale at 1,100,000 influence for whomever wants to buy it. If no one has sold a Blistering Heat recipe, then the NPC won't have it..
Pros:
Provides a stable place to purchase items with influence (or whatever the currency is called) with prices that are not subject to the fluctuations of the market.
Does not affect item rarity.
The prices cannot be manipulated by players
Cons:
Dependent on players selling items to the NPC.
Effectively splits the pool of available items between the market and the flat-fee store
People playing the market might buy items from the flat-fee store to sell on the market
2) Merit-purchasable items, but with influence being convertible to merits. There could be a set exchange rate for influence to be turned into merits, which could then be used to purchase rare items. There would need to be a time limit on the exchange, such as one of a given merit type every 20 hours, which would place the acquiring of merits at about the same rate that they could be earned via normal play.
Pros:
Increases availability of rare items
Can combine with existing purchasable methods so that the player can combine influence and merit rewards to purchase an item, rather than being restricted to one or the other
Cost of purchasing items cannot be affected by market forces
Cons:
Slower than purchasing from a store
Player needs to keep track of multiple currencies
Decreases rarity, although this can be fine-tuned by the devs setting the parameters needed to buy merits and the item prices.
Absolutely. As I said in the post, I was using 'drop rate' just there as a shorthand for 'all items entering the game economy whether through drops from kills or from any kind of stores'. I don't really have a good, snappy term for that.
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? - Robert Browning
Hmm, item creation? I suppose we could just call it 'supply'.
I thought about this one, too, but it basically has the same problem as a limited-restock store, which is that it's an absolute invitation to botting. Unless those stores have their prices fixed above market rates, they'll never have any stock.
I think the best way to scale this (assuming different types of merits, as in CoX) would be to alter the time between buying merits, rather than try to set prices for the different types. Prices would just have to be adjusted over time.. Of course, it's going to favour people who can make a lot of inf (farmers and marketeers) so not everyone will like it.
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? - Robert Browning
I always think of supply as being what goes into the market. 'Total supply', maybe?
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? - Robert Browning
I didn't think about botting, but that is another thing to consider. I did have the thought that one way to prevent people from buying out the stores and turning around to resell the items would be to make it so that any item purchased from the flat-fee store is bound to the character that purchased it. That'd prevent the selling of the item itself on the market, but it would only somewhat mitigate the practice on recipes, as the person could craft them and then sell the resultant IO.
Hmm, an algorithm that adjusts the price of merits up or down automatically depending numerous factors, including how many people are buying merits, what the current influence-generation rate is compared to historical averages, and so forth?
Those are definately some good steps in the right direction to equality if not arrival at the point of destination. Yeah, your right, as much flack as the idea is getting from marketeers they probably will be the first ones in line to buy from it to make a profit on the market. And depending on the set prices, might have to make it where it is not sellable on the market. Dont want inflation to get out of control...again. Number 1 is definately is close if not equal to the player controled market.
Number 2 isnt bad either and that system definately will come in handy if for some god forsaken reason crap hits the fan and have to go private server ot stand alone version. Player controled market nor the number option you offered wont work well in stand alone version and would leave players at the demise of drop rates. Unless of course with the stand alone version also comes with dev powers to increase and decrease drop rates at will. But also, depends on how many merits it would take. While not as close to equality as the first option, I can see the point in the cooldown to prevent marketeers from moseying on over with the billions they made on the market stocking up and reselling on the market again adding more to the inflation problem.
But I think number one is closer to equality. Of course players themselves will have to restock it just like the other market but they dont have to worry about fluctations or be at the mercy of what a few want to charge that day and come across a different price the next and so on. If there is a way to control reselling those items (which is probably recommended as either people will simply flip which isnt bad, or buy all the stuff up out of spite and move it over to the player controlled market to still and try to herd everyone over there. And vice versa.) on the market then the price probably should be average price of what it should actually cost based on rate of doing missions from level 1 to 50 kind of like TOs, DOs, and SOs were priced, but higher of course but on that scale. Now if it's possible to resell on market then price would have to be higher to make it not flipper gift drop. Nothing against flippers, but not a tool to make it dead simple to do so and creat inflation issue.
Although you listed this as a Con, I can see it (within reason, and with smart devs) as being a Pro...there are reasons why a game designer wants to allow players to have some control over supply, beyond pure drop rates.
For example, it grants the players more freedom in slotting and power selection, rather than accidentally discouraging certain builds that simply require multiples of a certain recipe. It allows greater leeway for the developers, reducing the need to accurately predict item popularity and limits the oversupply of "junk" that gets sold to vendors and contributes to inflation. Maybe there's a surge in creating scrappers/brutes this issue (thus dramatically increasing Kinetic Combat demand) and controllers/dominators in the next issue (making certain purple recipes popular). A player-generated supply that isn't locked into drop rates works nicely for such spikes. The same system helps for those times when there's a big shift toward fighting a new enemy faction that only drops salvage type A, yet the demand remains for type B.
The merit vendor NPCs, the ability to convert lesser merits + Inf into higher-grade merits, and the recipe converters all contributed to the above, in CoH. Tickets of course had a similar effect on salvage, and could be used to bust a temporary market shortage...I recall some people playing this mini-game as a counter to both natural and "PVP" market forces.
I suppose it could be argued that CoH devs were wrong to give players that control over rarity (and thus availability), but personally I found it to be beneficial overall - though unnecessarily complicated by the number of currencies, different merit NPCs/cooldowns, playstyle restrictions on how to earn those merits (esp Empyreans), and recipe levels. I used, and enjoyed, all options in CoH - the market, the NPC vendors, and the cash shop.
Some good points there, Scott. I suppose it would be a con if it were a uncontrolled decrease in rarity, but with it being manageable, it could be a Pro.
That would work, but it seems unfair on people who want to use the store rather than the market. They'd be stuck with second-class IOs that could never be resold to recoup inf.
ETA:
Actually, the more I think about this system, the less convinced I am by it.
As ever, the problem is how to set the store prices, although this time it's the price at which people sell to the market, rather than the buy price. In this model, the price at which you can buy an item doesn't matter, because only the price at which you sell determines where people will take their drops, and hence where the stock will be.
If the price to sell is generally better on the market, then most people will sell on the market even if they'd hypothetically like to buy in the store, because that's how self-interest works. I don't believe that many players are so market-phobic that they'd sell a rare recipe for 10 million at the store, if they could get 20 million at the market. The store will get very little stock. At this point, all you've done is waste time programming a feature that is never used.
If the price is better in the store, then most of the sales move to the store. At this point, because there is no blind bid system or variation in asked price, items where demand exceeds supply will become much harder to buy -- potentially, the most in demand will never be in stock. The only people who will be able to buy the rarest items will be people who are happy to cheat and bot for them, or people who sit in the store, refresh for restocks, and have a faster connection than the people who miss the sale. To me, that seems even less superheroic than flipping.
Of course, at this point the likely outcome is that the price on the market hikes, and supply of high-demand, high-rarity items moves back there. Overall, my prediction would be that market prices will move higher (because supply will still be lower, as long as some people are using the store), and the stores will be empty of valuable items, apart from optimistic bots hanging out and waiting for a sale to pop up.
I guess you could try to get round the empty shelves problem by using a system where the store automatically raises the price at which it sells items until demand reduces to a point where some of the item always remains in stock. At that point, you've pretty much reinvented the market, only instead of people complaining about evil marketeers, you have people complaining about an evil algorithm, and now no one can get a bargain by being patient. I question whether this is an improvement.
Somehow, there has to be a backend system that continually juggles the price at which the store buys items so that the market and store systems both get enough supply to function (lack of liquidity is a killer -- look at the old redside market). Even if this worked, I'd still be wary of hitting tipping points where 'everyone knows' that the store or the market is the best place to sell. I'd want to see a very clear explanation of that balancing mechanism, and have confidence in it, before I'd say this was workable.
Setting store prices -- it's hard.
Overall, it seems like an awkward, potentially highly problematic solution to the issue of a group of people not liking the market, but refusing to accept merit purchases as an alternative.
Heh. Rather you than me. I think it would be a LOT simpler to fix the time periods, and occasionally bump up the inf cost to reflect general inflation. The beauty of the fixed time system is that it can only affect total supply quite slowly. Even if there's something like the MM exploit that dumps billions into the economy, there's time to react because people can still only generate one merit per time period, even if there are suddenly more of them doing it.
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? - Robert Browning
Well, they could sell the IO after crafting it, but not the initial recipe. Or maybe slotting an IO removes all 'no resale' flags?
So, for example, every 2 months they'd re-evaluate and re-price?
Assuming tamer level 50 influence reward rates than CoH, the 10% market fee plus that fixed time system to trade inf-for-merits and inf-for-IO-converters should be the most powerful inf sinks, covering min/maxers and market users. Better yet, that control of inflation leads to further reduction in the frequency at which re-pricing is needed. Add to that a quick catch of exploits with a MARTy-like system, the popularity of alting (with its perpetual demand for items and lowered inf earnings), and some other interesting inf sinks to include the players who aren't quite as interested in IOs (base upgrade / costume change / vehicle upgrade fees), then CoT's economy should have a good chance at stability.
I do agree that some botting prevention must be considered if...I mean WHEN...CoT goes mainstream. I don't recall CoH having botting problems, but whether it was primarily due to our smaller number of players, or the game's natural resistance to it (instancing, control scheme, limits on macros, etc), I won't hazard a guess. The (tentative?) decision to set a purchase price for CoT should help here, in addition to making gold spammers hand over some cash in exchange for their account ban.
Something like that. Or, you could have a flag on Merit purchases that when they reach a certain level, triggers someone t go and take a look at the prices versus the general level of inflation. There were occasional events on CoX, like the MM AE explot, that dumped huge amounts of inf into the economy, and I think it would be a good idea to plan for the possibility of something like that happening again.
After sleeping on it, I definitely think buying Merits beats the inf shop recycling player drops idea hands down. That one looks like nothing but pain.
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? - Robert Browning
I can't see a player stocked NPC working because if there is a chance to grief it, it will get griefed.
It's not that I don't think it's a good idea, it's a great idea. You sell your stuff for a million. I buy it out and list it on the market for 12 million. So we're back to flipping but this time across markets unless the NPC takes your stuff and gives you account or toon bound credit (merits I suppose) instead of cash. That might work.
Bots - if you can't advertise it for sale.. you can't sell it. If you're not selling it, you're not going to spend time in that game. It's a definite incentive to spend time making a robust chat system. I'm told that removing the "follow" option stopped multi-boxing in WOW. After all the botting in GW2, it suddenly all stopped one day. It was like a ghost town in Orr.. so I'm guessing it's not that hard to detect behaviour and then remove offensive accounts.
If people won't pay enough to finance its creation, it is not worth creating.
/Segev
Store autobuyers seem to be quite tricky to detect.
Basically, to get items from an infrequently refreshing store, players need to sit in the store and wait for an item to pop up, and then they need to be fast enough to click the buy button (connection speed becomes a real factor, here). This is a time-consuming and pretty boring way of playing the game, but it's the only way to catch a restock. So people build autobuyers, which do exactly the same (sit in the store, waiting to buy) and it looks a lot like playing.
Worse, by being really boring and far, far more time-consuming that the CoX AH, the system is basically strongly pushing people into cheating, in order to actually be able to do what the system is supposed to let them do and buy stuff. Then, after making cheating the only viable way to get some items, you punish them by banning their accounts. Good way to retain players.
I guess it would be possible to get round this by having a bid system in which everyone who wants the item places a bid at the fixed price, and when it comes up the system assigns it randomly to one of the bidders. That has some obvious exploits, though, especially in a game as alt-friendly as CoT is planning to be. It's an incentive to create dozen of characters and sit them in stores. Yes, you can probably come up with ways to stop that, but this just makes the system messier, again. And how many multiple bids? No multiple bids for a single item? What if you're trying to get together a build and you want five lots of a set? Ugh.
Or! You could let people place bids at different prices, and whoever bids the most gets the item when it restocks. Now we're back to market 'PVP'.
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? - Robert Browning
This is a hijack, but perhaps an increased market fee for using the "remote market" pop-up instead of going to the physical market location? Like, instead of having it be a free Vet reward, make it a 15% fee remotely and a 10% fee in-store? Call it "shipping and handling."
Captain of Phoenix Rising
Cute! Although...hmm, I think that would need a different fee system than the CoX split between 5% listing and 5% collection of the completed sale. Otherwise it's going to get weird and complicated.
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? - Robert Browning
I could see a couple of NPCs with different mechanisms
- one could buy recipes/salvage for cash
- one could trade crafted items for merits, redeemable against higher level IOs
The cash vendor would also sell those items to other players, the crafted items would be removed from the game.
If people won't pay enough to finance its creation, it is not worth creating.
/Segev
How do you set the prices?
This is okay, as long as you're happy that genuinely cheap recipes and IOs will no longer exist on the market. Unless you can trade IOs one for one, you are overall reducing supply of less popular sets (by having them destroyed at the merit vendor), while simultaneously increasing demand. This will reduce the options for people to use really cheap sets and frankenslot, and despite claims that builds required 'billions' it was possible to significantly boost characters for a tiny percentage of that. That makes IOs much less accessible to the player base in general.
This was the main issue with the IO reroll mechanic that CoX introduced near the end. Yes, it reduced prices on the top end, but it did it at the expense of jacking up prices for all the cheaper 'types' of the valuable IOs.
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? - Robert Browning
I'm 100% for a design ("good" drop rates, "good" opportunities for drops) that produces a "good" supply. In short, higher rates and more opportunities than in CoX.
It has to be done right from the start though.
As we found with CoX, once the market has developed a full head of steam down the path of inflation, adjustments have minimal value and often unintended consequences.
Put a solid design out there. We'll test and data crunch it, while you data mine it. Mine and monitor carefully post-launch, and make any adjustments EARLY.
[img]https://i.imgur.com/26pBVBG.png[/img]
([i]Currently developing the Sapphire 7 Initiative[/i])
Hmmm, lots of good and interesting ideas here, but I wonder if all of these ideas are solving the same problem(s)?
Does someone feel confident enough to state exactly what problem their proposed solution will solve? I thought there was consensus that rare items should only drop infrequently, and would therefore be...well, rare.
Then we were going to make rare items more available by allowing alternative sources of supply. I hear this as making it rational for a player who gets a rare drop to sell it, because he has either the expectation that if he needs it again in the future, the market will be liquid enough enough to supply him, or because an alternative currency such as merits will give him insurance that he can get that rare item back if he really needs it.
I might be lost. Sorry, what problem(s) are we solving?
At least for me..
Trying to figure out an equal alternative (the same or near same ease of use, ease of buying ease of selling) to the market which adds availability to those that dont play market, yet without or minimizing the affect of rarity in the way of drops.
Yes, rare drops should be infrequently, although that is also mwv. As for many, infrenquently ened up being none while for others, 4-5 times in a single mission on the same team doing the same stuff. But I think that is differen topic different thread though. But is related because the market alone already increased availibity to those that may not otherwise had it drop now thinking about a way to extend that same availabilty to those that may not have enjoyed the market at all or the result of a player controled market.
A way to totall forgo market but in an equal manner aka not have to do a bunch of extra stuff just to forgo the market to get same result. Just as people in the market can enter buy and leave without much else to have to be done, another system for those that dont find market appealing can enter buy and leave without much else to be done.
And also a way where abuse can be minimized.
Full disclosure again, I marketeered like mad, but never exploited, griefed or monopolized supply. Simply, that part wasn't/isn't enjoyable for me. Still, I always recognized the fact that many players were constantly frustrated and disappointed by the market's supply. That was the problem I spent hours of brainstorming over 3-4 years trying to solve.
Like so...
1 – How about account-locked salvage converters AND enhancement converters as tools to assist with establishing a reasonable market. The source of acquisition for the converters would be Cox-like; “Titan card packs”, “Titan Points” (via VP subscriber status and/or real money), and some drop rate per arrest. This would allow each and every PC to have an impact on supply; particularly, the supply that they need to jazz-up their toons. This is pretty much a straight port from CoX IIRC.
One measure that may curb folks from buying up perceived valueless, lower-level enhancements in order to convert them to extremely, valuable lower-level enhancements; make lower-level "rolls" require more converters than high level ones. Of course, they are unrelated balance techniques/tools that could cover this concern as well.
2 - Balance the attribute magnitudes and set bonuses for within each “Set IO” category and make the set bonuses desirable. Don’t attach a recharge bonus to the 5th slot of an IO set, yet attach the endurance attribute to only one of the six IOs of that set. In such a case, that endurance attributed IO will always be in short supply and hoarded…especially, if the set is a higher endurance cost power-type like AoE.
3 – A way-out-of-the-box approach: Allow PCs below level 47 (referring to CoX’s design here) to earn ultra rare/purple recipes. Still, you could only use/slot them at level 50.
"Sub Level 47 purples" could be attached to the End of TF Reward Table. And if you ensure that each TF has its own achievement badge (a direct port from CoX) then those with that TF achievement badge would have no chance for a purple from that particular TF. This way, folk can still run/farm TFs for fun, for xp or to do them constantly with their SG buds; but there'd be no exploitation of purples.
Any purple recipe awarded to a player from the TF reward table automatically goes to that PC’s account vault. At any time, you could trade it, sell it, move it to your SG vault, or keep it stored in your own vault.
If you don't want "sub level 47s" being capable of earning level 50 loot then let's call it a “Dormant Reward” (“DR”) or something 1000x better lol that's in-line with CoT lore. Anyway, "DRs" would have the same conditions as above, but upon some event (little “e”) at level 50 (like seeing some senior official at the CoT Hall of Honor or something) you are able to “roll” each “DR” in your possession. The “DR” table itself would be short: a purple recipe, an entire set of one set IO (e.g., you’d get all six Obliteration recipes), enough converters for ten spins of the “random wheel”, and maybe a few other things. You’d be guaranteed a reward for the "DR" table for each “DR” in your possession.
[img]https://i.imgur.com/26pBVBG.png[/img]
([i]Currently developing the Sapphire 7 Initiative[/i])
Since the economic questions are so interrelated, I think we're forced to treat them holistically.
First, I'm starting from Issue 23 CoH as a basis for discussing what was good and what needed adjustment, in my opinion.
Pros:
- Rarity. There were distinct tiers of rarity, and although not all rares were equally rare or valued, that's normal in any economy. Some tweaking of "junk" drop rates (or some auto-delete options) and set bonus design (which was in the works) could have resolved the issues.
- Availability. While not perfect, I23 CoH did at least provide several ways to obtain nearly every item, if somewhat unequal in some cases. Availability was a serious problem for several issues after Inventions, until the TF merits and NPC vendors were added. That brought an end to the knashing of teeth for those unlucky enough to get Trap of the Hunter after a Shard TF, and restored all TF content to roughly equal popularity.
- The Market. Again, not perfect, but one of the more interesting markets among MMOs, for those who wanted to use it. It was one of the few significant anti-inflationary forces, and made crafting for others a viable option/mini-game. Improved price history and a consolidation of IO levels would have helped solve its shortcomings.
- Items. The Invention System offered a great deal of character customization and min-maxing potential, and not just at max level, thereby creating a sort of alternate leveling path. While it could have offered better tradeoffs in set bonuses instead of making some sets clear winners/losers, I would be hard-pressed to identify a better gear system in any MMO.
Cons:
- Inflation. For the last few years, level 50 Inf earning rates and earning rates in the AE were out of balance with item drop rates and inf sinks, leading to more inf chasing a random-drop-limited amount of goods. This was only partly mitigated by the (late) addition of NPC merit vendors and IO converters. Since AE tickets could never generate the most coveted items, any shift toward the AE playstyle (exploits, gold farmers, xp farming) contributed to market shortages on those items, and oversupply of what was already common. That's not to say that tickets had no redeeming qualities - after all, they were the best defense against salvage shortages.
- Currency complexity. While several currencies are probably necessary to regulate the supply of items purchaseable by players, CoH ended up with too many. Currencies also weren't consistently used for that (good) purpose...some created gaps in reward rates between playstyles or encouraging farming of a tiny part of the game's content. Farming is great when it's done for fun...but not when players feel railroaded into one bit of content by an exclusive reward with a low drop rate, or even worse - added untradeability that pushes alts through multiple snooze-inducing repeats of that content.
- Imbalance in rewards for group and solo play. This was most evident in Dark Astoria, but also was skewed against soloists who wanted regular merits to use to purchase recipes from the NPC vendors. Group-style play was favored more than necessary to obtain the "good stuff". Eliminating the TF/SF minimum group size and adjusting the Incarnate rewards could have brought this into balance. A small merit reward for every regular mission and/or a single random merit drop for any enemy would have helped casual play and provided a stepping-stone to draw more players into Inventions and the market.
- Item complexity. This was shifting in the right direction, with more enhancements being introduced in levelless form. Unfortunately it was mostly limited to RMT.
While this is hardly an exhaustive list, the moment I think of one aspect, the web of systems and action/reaction effects start to pop up around that aspect, and I feel compelled to address how it affects player enjoyment of a hundred other things in game. I also think there are many feasible but competing solutions to several of the problems, so those decisions may come down to server load and programming time, and how well they support any other systems that are indirectly influenced by the economy (Class/Spec/power design, combat, gearing up for PVP, PVE endgame(s), alting, custom mission creator...).
Since I only recently got back into CoT, I'm currently unaware of which dev(s) are working on the economy. I'm guessing it may be Warcabbit's/Segev's domain for now, in a very-early-planning-only mode. If anyone knows differently, or has heard of their intentions (general or specific) for economic systems, please point us to the right place. Thanks!
I just want to point this up, because I think it's an important thing about the CoX market that can drop out of sight in debate.
The CoX market *was* fun and interesting for people who wanted to play with it. For people who *didn't* wan't to have get into anything complex, it was also ridiculously easy to interact with and get rewards from with minimal time and knowledge.
Put all drop onto the market at 1 inf, use the proceeds to buy stuff at buy-it-now prices. Yes, this was an inefficient strategy, but it *worked*. People who hated the market could still use it with reasonable effect. Every incremental step up in complexity from the '1 inf' strategy reaped a better return, but '1 inf' was still perfectly viable -- someone demonstrated it very neatly with an Alignment Merit reward rolls experiment on the Market forum.
Now, I loved the market, but I fully appreciate that not everyone did. I wouldn't be happy with any replacement idea that didn't support players being able to use the market successfully with that kind of absolutely minimalist interaction.
Look at it this way, though: having clear winners and losers meant that there were cheap 'junk' sets around which let people use sets without needing much inf. Completely ignoring set bonuses, slotting sets was better than slotting SOs and common IOs, because. Frakenslotting was a fantastic technique for getting involved with the IO system.
Again, I think one of the big strength of the system was flexibility. It allowed people to interact with the IOs system at every level from slotting one KB IO, to filling a character with top-end sets, and supported those different levels of involvement well. Now, I'm not saying that debt reduction was anything other than a deeply crappy set bonus, or that having 5 Snipe sets wasn't overkill. I'm just saying, I think there's a place for sets that most people don't want, because some people do want them.
A shortage that, in turn, was frequently caused by AE in the first place. AE pushed up common and rare salvage prices, but it depressed rare salvage prices, often very significatly. I don't really know if that's a positive or negative, over all.
I agree there were way, way too many levels of IOs. I'm not sure I'd go for levelless, though. I think a little complexity is good, to keep the market more interesting. For example, with a little patience and market knowledge, there were some great bargains to be had in the 45-49 range for IOs -- I'd like to be able to keep little wrinkles and tricks like that in the market.
One thing I'd definitely want to avoid was the CoX problem of only being able to roll recipes with merits at the character's level. That destroyed supply at lower levels. I had a couple of characters locked at level 35 so I could roll recipes for myself there, but it would've been so much nicer to just be able to set the slider and roll.
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? - Robert Browning
When purchasing recipes from the merit vendors there was a slider, quite useful because often times I was buying a Karma KB protection for a low lever character with a 50 with an abundance of Merits.
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I never set anything on fire accidentally!
The Titan Legacy - Defender of the Inner Flame
That worked for direct purchases, but not for random rolls. For random rolls, the slider set the drop range within which the roll was made, but it always produced recipes at the level of the character rolling, or max recipe level if that was lower. Direct purchases was a really inefficient use of merits compared to rolls.
I would've loved to be able to roll out tons of level 33 recipes on my level 50s, but sadly, not possible.
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? - Robert Browning
I think I can agree (or compromise toward) all of those points.
Keeping a variety of sets common in both drop rate and set bonus quality is very important, especially if they are designed to provide modest bonuses that are diverse enough to make each different set attractive to a different build/playstyle. In my mind, that removes the "junk" label, and replaces it with "bargain".
While I like levelless enhancements due to my preferred playstyle, also providing 5-level recipe increments would be fine IMO...as long as the exemplaring rules are relaxed a bit so that all content, especially any low-level TF, remains attractive to IO'd players. Perhaps any leveled IO allows one more rare salvage and/or inf to be added to it, thereby making it levelless? Hmmm. The leveled IOs would be viable bargains for those who are willing to wait until higher level to slot them. I agree that we should preserve market tricks/wrinkles, as long as they can play nicely with CoT's system accessibility improvements.
I suspect that what I'm about to suggest will be very unpopular with some members of the community, but I think rare drop rates should be much higher (doubled? tripled?) for some team activities, compared to solo play. In particular, I think much higher drop rates should apply to teams that have one or more new players on them (I'm speaking of new accounts, not toons). One of the great things about COH was that experienced players routinely took in noobs (I was one -- joined the game in 2009, and COH was my first MMO) and taught them the ropes. This should be highly encouraged -- rewarded in fact. It is an important part of community building, and of restoring a key element of the world we are missing.
This means drop rarity would be intrinsically lower for a player that routinely solo's. The "supply-side" for such a player is disadvantaged.
I justify this because I think it is wrong to make key drops unavailable to solo players, but it is ok to make them less frequent. This strikes me as balanced. The solo player is not doing the "work" of building and sustaining the community by training noobs. And of course, a solo player who is smart is going to balance between the farming activities and the fun activities as he/she sees them, and then use the market to make things work out. So market liquidity for rare items becomes a very important value in the game.
Nope...everyone will scream...plus I think it's flat-out wrong. What this will do is encourage vets to take on new people for the wrong reasons. Everyone used to be in AP hollering for a Healer or a Rad. Now they'll be screaming 'I'm starting X arc in ten minutes and need a new guy.' ANYTHING that makes players feel they have to play a certain way to get a benefit is manipulation and it's wrong.
Soloists will ALSO raise Hell because they'll say that their play style is being punished. A solo player will have fewer drops anyway because they'll go through content slower. The teamed players will get more drops because they go through content faster. That should be reward enough to team IMHO.
As for the flat-fee store above: Also won't work because the Devs will have to set the price the vendor will pay. Once the players see that price they'll simply set their bids price above that to encourage players to sell stuff on the Market. If the markup is only 10%, everyone will buy from the store and flip it on the Market.
Personally I think that the easiest way to control the Market at first is brute force. When an item becomes too common on the Market the Devs should just delete some. If an item is too rare then simply 'Sell' it to the Market at a reasonable price. A few weeks of this and things should stabilize.
I honestly don't think that there can be any sort of Market stability planned until Beta and people actually play. I expect TONS of adjustments after that but until we get some sort of real input it's all just speculation.
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
if the developers *EVER* just delete stuff from the market without reimbursing the players, then the players *WILL* revolt.
How would you feel if you opened up your "selling" tab, to find stuff had just disappeared, and you didn't get anything for it.
Just because there was a lot of stuff on there, doesn't mean that it wasn't someone "hard work" to get it.
And if the developers are going to put things *into* the market, just because it isn't selling at their "preferred" rate (ie in terms of quantity, not price)... well then people will just not put stuff *into* the market, the developers will put it on there anyway.
Well done, you have now scared people from selling stuff on the market, in fear of having stuff destroyed by the developers, and people wont even *bother* selling it, because it will appear anyways.
How to destroy a market system... let the developers have their hands in it *directly*.
At least Eve Online keep their hands off *directly* with the market (not withstanding any exploits that people have done with it).
But if a player plays fair, and *still* gets punished just because there is a lot of stuff on the market, why should they use it?
Sorry...had a serious brain cramp there and forgot that EVERYTHING on the Market is put there by a player. I obviously had some sort of gestault mind thing that was telling me that the Market was tied into Vendor supply...or something.
Forgive me for being stoopid...and medicated...
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
Comicsluvr, I hear you about not "manipulating" game play. BUT, COH manipulated game play in many ways. For example, there was a bonus to having a team of eight rathar than a smaller one, and that bonus was not available to solo players. I'm actually proposing a less manipulative rule than that -- I propose simply to give some small reward for welcoming new players to a team environment. This benefits everyone, and is less "punishing" that COH was.
Also, consider how the rewards of some play styles (Hami Raids, Ship Raids, and some of the later Incarnate content) were superbly over-rewarded compared to solo play of almost any kind, except farming. There was no "golden age" without reward manipulation in COH. Quite the opposite.
The essential element of my proposal is that we look at the rewards, and apply them to things that make the game stronger by providing incentives to build and sustain a community, rather than incentivizing the latest content over the older content.
But other incentives could be substituted. I remain convinced that encouraging new players, teaching them, and allowing them to quickly feel "at home" in the game, as in feeling that they are "with friends" is strategically important to accomplish. I solo'd almost constantly for my first 4-5 months in the game. But a couple of vets helped me, and that's what converted me to a committed COH player. Whatever we can do to encourage that behavior is going to benefit us all.
I agree that the game was manipulative...all games are and to a degree have to be. Balance is impossible otherwise. However consider your examples. Yes, larger teams got a bonus but that was for ANY toon of ANY type. The same goes for any sort of large-scale event. As long as you were of a sufficient level, you got a bonus.
Your idea would be like rewarding Emp/Something Defenders because Emp/Something Defenders might be underplayed otherwise. You're recommending a bonus (other than say the Mentor badge) specifically to lead a specific class of player.
Make no mistake, I almost quit CoH early on because I had no guidance and no clue what was going on. A few players helped me, I did some research and played for 5 years. However I strongly feel that it HAS to be by choice, not promoted as a reward. I agree that we MUST help the new players if the game is to thrive. One of the things often touted about CoH was the great community. However I firmly believe that either the benefit to bringing along a new player will either be so small as to not be worth it or be so large that, as I mentioned above, some players (who often look for ANY angle and we know who they are...) will recruit new players just FOR the bonus.
I don't want new players to get mixed up in that sort of crowd in the first place. I want all of us involved in the project to resolve to help the new players along in any way we can. But it MUST be by choice or there is no way to tell if we're doing it to support the community or for the 10% xp bonus.
It's our DUTY to make sure this works. We need to make SURE that the tutorial is tight and informative, that the first few levels are challenging without being crushing. We need to test and retest and do it all over again until it's right.
I will follow the decision of the majority but it would take a lot to convince me that this is a good idea.
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
Comicsluvr, I see your points. But what I hear is not necessarily a refutation of the idea of promoting and rewarding help from Vets to New Players, but rather a deep concern that if the rewards are too high, this will have negative consequences.
Well, yes, it will have negative consequences if the rewards are too high.
This a balance issue, as you pointed out.
For example, if the "reward" to a vet for helping new players was a single badge (with no other incentives, or changes to drop rates or anything), earned at, say, 10 hours of joint play, this would be too small, in my opinion because vets would get the badge accidentally through normal play. On the other hand, a monthly badge, or some series of badges might also work...my point being that there are actually many ways for the game to reward good behavior, without being out of balance.
Another idea (with no balance issues at all, as far as I can see) would be for the devs to simply "call out" or name the player who logged the most hours helping newbies each month. Pure social benefits, A "Hall of Fame" or something.
You and I both benefited from the help of others. We will both try to return the favor in CoT. So rewards for the two of us are perhaps, unnecessary. But aligning rewards and goals is a good thing to do in any system, from game-playing to working our day-jobs.
What would you see as appropriate rewards for vets helping new players learn the ropes?
I like your social awards a lot. The people who care about such things will take note and those that don't care still won't care. I can actually see this as part of a mentoring program.
Say I log 50 hours in the game which qualifies me to no longer be considered 'new.' Now I can change my Player Status to reflect that I'm 'Experienced' or some other term for not new but not a vet. This will reflect in the Team Finder that I am Experienced AND willing to teach new players the ropes. I'll qualify for the 'Mentor' badge for taking newer players along for say 50 hours. I'll qualify for the Instructor badge for 100 hours with a newer player while flagged as Experienced. When I become a Vet I qualify for another badge.
This gives those willing to teach some small recognition without it being overpowered. It also enables those who want help to find those willing and even eager to help
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
I agree with your idea completely, although I would not have qualified for even "experienced" after 50 hours in COH...those caves. How I hated the caves...I was not good at controlling my character, and would find myself running into the wall, unable to turn around,and being slowly, inexorably beaten to death by a mob...Ahhhhh...flashback to the hospital...
And we won't even talk about the fact that I did not know that I needed a travel power until I was in the level 40 range...or how to get Shivans until about that point either.
Oh my, an entire comedy show could be made just showing clips of my early learning career. 50 hours? not for me. Maybe 300 or so...
But I like this expanding idea of some form of social rewards. Maybe the mods would know which helpful players were online at any moment? That could be useful...
can we get back on topic here?
Please... I have cookies
Ok...topic...um...Oh yeah, the Market. Must have one. Make it not break...and stuff.
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
Please don't change a thing about the Market from the way CoH designed it. Most of the people that complained about the market just really didn't want to take the time to learn how to use the market. I was one of those persons at first, I'll admit it. I finally got frustrated enough at it that I took the time to figure out how to use it and spend minimal time doing it. It really wasn't all that hard. Most of the time I sold all my components at 100 inf., any unwanted recipes that I didn't feel like crafting I sold for 10,000 inf., and then the ones I did craft and sell I usually took all 5 history bids and averaged them out and sold them for that amount. Yes there were a few times when I would do some quick ebil marketeering when I REALLY needed some inf to finish out an IO build for my toon, but for the most part just spending a few minutes every day, either in the morning or right before I signed off, I could craft and sell desired IO's and make a steady income of inf. to support all my toons.
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
Here's a summary of my position on marketeering.
Maybe I'm selfish, but I'd like to see playing the market made all but impossible. Gather, craft, sell, and buy to equip or gift is what I'd like to see. Make the market for everyone, not just a mini game for a few.
If you want to play a market sim, go find one somewhere else and leave my nice superhero sim alone.
And here's where we begin to see the problem. We have some who want an 80s comic-style world where the characters are everything and the Market is a footnote. We probably have more than a few ebil Marketeers in the mix too. I'm pretty flexible in that as long as new players tinkering with the Market the first few times are interested enough to stay (thus keeping more players in the game) I'm pretty easy.
However, we really need to be open-minded about this and try to think from the other person's viewpoint. There's a happy medium in there somewhere. We need to start by defining our terms so we're all on the same page.
What do you consider 'playing the Market?'
What aspects of the Market, as it was before, are Must-Haves for you.
What were things you liked but could live without if they were done differently?
What parts of the Market were terrible to you and should be done away with?
What parts did you dislike but would settle for improving instead of cutting out?
Once we're all talking the same language then we can try and find our happy place in the middle. We should ALL realize though that there WILL be a Market and it will NOT be exactly as it was. Now let's work together to figure this out.
To me 'playing the Market' means deliberately manipulating prices in your favor somehow. Whether it's buying up all the Purple Widgits and hoarding them for later resale at huge markups because you believe that the up-coming double XP weekend will drive the price up or whatever. I don't believe in some forms of this because, as I mentioned before, it might drive new players from the game. If Tom logs in and plays a few hours and suddenly gets a recipe drop for some new shiny thing and then can't craft it because the last component is being hoarded I think that's bad.
For me the Must-Haves were the little things like storage space, little awards for crafting stuff, recipe memorization and that occasional thrill when my new toon (who is strapped for cash) finds a Golden Ticket he can sell for a million bucks.
Things I could live without if done differently? The whole rest of the Market. The UI was clunky, the sales tracking was a joke and the lag was horrible. I WANT a Market but I want it done better.
As for what I hated I pretty much just listed them. Make the Market a quiet zone like the design rooms in the AE. And don't tell me that 'players might forget to turn their toggles back on' or crap like that. The Market should be in a stable area with no enemies nearby. If you can't remember how to run your character then maybe you should stop PLing.
Ok...I got us started. Now let's hash this out...
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
I could be wrong, but I think that some of the following could go a long way to fixing what we had. Well, maybe not fixing it but maybe make it better
1) No levels on enhancements or boosts. If they are needed add a min level where they can be slotted, but beyond that make all of them like the new ones that were being created.
2) Make common salvage common, sell it in store for a set price. uncommon and rare salvage only through drops, although another way similar to AE tickets for acquiring it would be fine, but this cannot be bought or sold to an NPC
3) No levels on salvage. Why should it be classified by low/mid/high at all. This would remove the problem of low level salvage being hard to acquire which is what caused the prices to be so high
4) Recipes. Mix up what is needed to craft. Just because a recipe is common does not mean in should only require common salvage to craft. And mix up what is used where more. Many of the most costly salvage on the market was because all the enhancements people really wanted all used the same salvage to create.
As far as the uncommon and rare stuff. They should be left alone. They are uncommon and rare for a reason, you have to work to get them. If they are expensive in the market that because they should be. I have no problem with learning how to use the market to get what I want or waiting for it to drop. I understand that rare means rare.
What do I consider playing the market? Buying to resell at a profit.
What don't I consider playing the market? Buying components and recipes to craft and sell, gift, or for personal use.
If it consists of reselling something you bought on the market for the express purpose of reselling it, you're playing the market.
I liked the double blind bidding, but would like to see more than the last 5 items listed in the history.
1) I think I agree with you here, Hube. Serious money sinks aren't really needed until the level cap.
2) I did like the AE ticket setup for acquiring salvage. I think disallowing sale to NPCs is a good idea. It limits "printing" money.
3) CoH had salvage acquired at specific levels to try to equalize the wealth because the market didn't come along until after several years of players earning ridiculous amounts of Inf on their 50s. That mechanic shouldn't even be a factor in CoTi because the market will be with us from the beginning.
4) Definitely mix up which salvage is used to craft popular recipes. Although with common salvage available from NPCs that becomes less of an issue.
And again, I don't mind Uncommon and Rare salvage being expensive, as long as it's not expensive because some jerk manipulated the market.
I still think that anything purchased from the market should be account bound until it is used in another recipe. Or POSSIBLY slotted into your character, depending on how easy it is to unslot something.
Commenting and adding below…
Yes. They should persist and the magnitude of the boosts should scale. Perhaps, if players would like to augment the effects of their boosts even further then the player should have the choice of covering those costs with all currency OR via crafting.
Sounds great to me. Anything “common” should be decoupled from the market, that is, should only have a store as the root source of supply.
So in this case, all “salvage” has an equal chance to drop across each and every level? I agree, if so. Was there an actual purpose to the three classifications to begin with? ...besides some reverse-engineered, convenient lore?
WRT recipes, I think that any recipe should need to be learned just ONCE. If I plan to slot all six Touch of Death IOs in each of my four melee attacks, I should only need to learn that entire set one time as I craft them to IOs for melee power #1. For those other 18 Touches of Death that I need for melee power #2, #3 and #4, I should only need to acquire the salvage (and pay some flat cost that scales with level so there’s a currency sink coupled to IO crafting).
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([i]Currently developing the Sapphire 7 Initiative[/i])
So, to an extent, just like WoW has their crafting where once you learn how to craft an item, you can use it from that point until the end of time.
And yes, I know that there are *some* crafting recipes that are only found via loot drops (but once again, they are the exception and not the norm).
Personally, I'd love to have some longer-term information available - and information based on elapsed time, rather than number of sales. The five sale window was just too small; you couldn't get any sense of long term trends without manually checking in over the course of days or weeks. I suspect even the OP's suggested 20 sale window wouldn't be notably better; something like luck charms fluctuates over the course of a day, with I-don't-know-how-many hundreds or thousands of sales involved.
Also, for the people going on about flipping being "evil" - I don't understand this. For me, flipping was what kept my characters in SOs; I could put in some orders for (for example) luck charms, re-sell them at higher prices - it used up my market slots & time, but it made sure luck charms would be available when higher-level characters decided they needed some now. And it made the market approacheable, in ways that it otherwise wouldn't have been; because (some) low level salvage was worth a fair bit of inf, I could actually get started. And sure, I wasn't going to be buying luck charms at buy-it-now prices off the inf I'd gotten from defeating enemies... but once I'd sold one luck charm, well, then I could afford it if I really wanted those wings crafted right now.
(Plus, of course, flipping luck charms really didn't make much profit in the grand scheme of things. Once I had inf to work with, there were better things to do with my market slots. But it was a really nice way to get started.)
I'd agree with others that the only really big problem with CoX's market design were the things where there just was no supply; all the mid-level IOs that you couldn't get. If I wanted, say, a level 34 whatsit IO... well, uh, that was likely to take a very long time to fill, if it ever did. But the right solution to this is to make it plausible to get that level 34 whatsit as a drop / reward roll / whatever, even for a level 50. Lots of ways to do that - let the merit vendors sell rolls at specific levels; allow exemping back to level X to give you exactly level X drops; merge the level ranges so that a level 3X IO will auto-scale to anywhere from 30 to 39; whatever.
Likewise, I don't see any reason to add a non-player source; if something gets overpriced, the players will run out, find it, and sell it. That's, you know, how a market works.
Phoenix Rising Token Minidragon
Also a market usually have set prices not auction. Imagine having to go to an auction for a gallon of milk. lol. As funny as it would be to see, it would get greatly tedious after a while.
Reason why people sold things at $1? Not usually because thye felt generous because they knew people will plug in what ever number just so happen to be the last 5 or so things and makea killer profit quick.
But as I said, it probably would be best that things bought from vendors of npc sort cannot be resold in the system I suggested as alternative to the market. That way, people, especially market people, end up just using it for their own personal gain and causing mroe inflation.
while the market works, also people keep dodging that usually there are various options per item in a true market. Not everyone have to go and partake in one store only to get everythign they need. There are hundreds of businesses hundreds of options, and no one way or forget about it way in the true market. Even with stock market there are about three at least main market trackers and hundreds of ways and stock brokers to get stock from. Each with it's own ups and downs, and ways of doing things.
The COX is not a good measure of how true market works as long as there it the sole thing, which is not how the market works or havent worked in that manner in almost 100 years. Thus saying COX market is how the real market work is kind of not correct all the way. If the point is to emulate a true market then there would not only the just the WW and tehre would be many places to buy items from. Competition basically, which leads to price control to compete, which keeps down inflation. When it's only one system one way, then basically using that system, the price can be what ever that system or those of that system decide the price will be regardless of true value.
If there was only one Computer maker, think the price of computers would be up or down? Depends on the person. If they wanted to increase profits they woudl simply raise the price and not worry about competition even if it's over priced by definition. They could charge 4,000 for the basic system. Now with other players in the true market selling it at $500 for basic, then they could go a bit lower or over but probably wouldnt be a good idea to go $4,000 if they wanted to make money like thye could otherwise if they were the only player in the computer industry.
Agreed.
I was a consumer of the market and a massive altoholic, I despised flippers. Why ? well they took away the "I'll place a low bid and wait for a couple of weeks" fun I had to equip my toons, once the flippers moved in, you just didn't get any bites. Btw, I'm not a market hater, I made hundreds of billions on the market buying recipes and selling the crafted enhancements.
Agreed, I did peg a toon at 33 to generate lvl 33s that were the max level you could use in siren's and sold well.
Generating a NPC source that sells at any reasonable price will ruin the market and be exploitable, generating a NPC source to deal with market failure/excess (selling alchemical silvers at 200K for example) would not stop those who enjoy the market making a buck, but curb the worst excesses.
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They still need money sinks though, gotta have some way to drain money out of the system and my previous suggestions are also based on the way CoH worked without having any idea how the new system would work.
If there are recipes and you do not have to buy them again after learning them, you should still need to pay to do the crafting fee. In the case of learning I don't think you should be able to memorize them after only creating one. There should be some minimum number of time that each needs to be done before learning it.
In the CoH crafting system, you had to do some number of enhancements of a type. anything that fell into the category of a hold was the same. If they go with a level-less boost system then you should need to make a given number of any single recipe to learn it. This would still increase the number you'd have to make to learn everything, would almost keep it at the same level that was required in CoH or even increase it. I don't see this as a bad thing. So for example if they want the ability to earn a portable crafting table like in CoH then the work required to earn it could stay the same while having boosts without levels would help the market.
I think that memorizing should still be limited to basic/common enhancements. None of any special sets should every be mobilizable.
Now you just have to come up with new money sinks to replace the need to upgrade boosts with every level. Either that or we just get less rewards of money since we don't need to spend as much on normal stuff. IOs where the largest expense in the game.
There are some other things that have also been talked about that will have a side effect on the market. Personal bases for example. Needing to spend your personal money to improve them and for upkeep is a money sink that CoH did not have and will effect the amount people have to play on the market.
Well, just throwing some more ideas out there trying to think of things that would improve the market and make it less of a way to take advantage of others without actually doing things like binding what you purchase from the market.
I still think those that manipulated prices for their own gain were the exception rather than the rule. I can say that I'm guilty of manipulating the market, but I never did so for my own interest or gain. I'd do things like flood the market with something that had a high price to bring it down or buy high and turn around and list them again for 1 until there was no demand. I'm sure that someone made a profit from it but it gave those that were bidding lower a change to get what they needed.
Like I said, just throwing random thoughts out there, I'm not an expert in economics.
its one of the disadvantages of being able to put up buy orders (eve speak coming through), in that all someone needs to do, is put in a larger order for just a bit more cash than you are willing to pay to screw you out of getting it.
Eve Online has a similar problem, although at least with *their* system, you can see all the "buying at X isk" prices, how much they want, and what range they are buying for, so you can adjust accordingly.
And are those that didnt enjoy or dont enjoy market Player on Player being kept in mind?
I get that there is not a desire to interfere with those that enjoy marketing. But what about those that dont find marketing enjoyable? Will a bone be tossed to them? Or will they end up out there flapping in the wind and should go find another game.
For the record- I dont despise the market and actually didnt mind it. Made a killing off of it personally (only way make enough to get rare stuff since I wadnt lucky enough to have them drop for me).
Lets try to decouple how crafting should work from how the market should work. I know that they are going to be dependent on each other, but whether boosts have levels to them or not or how common common salvage is are different debates from whether they should be sold on the market or not.
What did the market do right?
Double-blind bidding: I really feel this system helps to discourage a lot of negative behavior.
Access anywhere: I know this was a feature that came up later and as a vet reward, but it is so convenient, and make the market easier for everyone to use at any interest level. If the full remote access is too much, there is the way GW2 did it, you can sell and buy anywhere (including in missions), but you need to access an agent to claim your goods and/or gold.
What do I think the market needs?
Better tracking of sales: longer history, historic highs and lows, and last sale/posted dates. If we could get some of this information in graph format even better.
Ability to increase bids without resetting them: its no wonder so many people didn't want to "waste time" stepping their bids. You had to delete the old bid and place a new one. If I go a week without buying a do-dad for 500 cash, I want the ability to up the bid to 600 without clearing it.
Related to this, I want the ability to decrease my asking price without relisting it as well. There is no need to refund any part of the listing fee, I will take that hit, but having to relist and pay a second fee is annoying and really discourages the selling of fringe items.
Anything else?
I had no issues with the UI CoH's market had, I could use it, it seemed intuitive enough. I'm not saying it couldn't be better, but no issues. A feature that would have been nice to speed up shopping would have been a quick compare button so I could see the going rates for the recipe and crafted IO. There is nothing wrong with paying for convenience, but some of the differences between crafted and recipes were huge and I think with the compare option you can decided how much your convenience is worth.
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What if we listed more than just the price history? What if we listed the current highest and lowest price being asked? Make the whole thing transparent? The folks that are generous (or don't care) can still list their stuff for $10.00 and it'll get snapped up. When the cheapest stuff is gone the bottom price will creep up. When the bottom price is close to the top price then it matters less. As long as there are at least some players willing to throw their stuff away on the Market there will always be affordable stuff.
We could also try the (very artificial and heavy-handed) idea of simply limiting how many items can be bought and sold in a day. I used many of my Market slots to store things because my Base was full. Many 'Marketeers' kept their buy and sell orders rotating all the time. They thought of their stuff as simply stacks of Inf waiting to be sold or orders waiting to be filled. Buying/selling more gave you more Market slots. Crafting gave you more Market slots. A 50 could store several hundred pieces of stuff in Market slots and STILL have enough available to move inventory. Maybe there were too many slots? Maybe fix it so you can place either a bid or sell order on a single slot once a day only? That will cut way down on flipping.
Btw I always hated the Bind idea for items but that's just me.
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
Well, the Devs said it was intentional, because it gave lower-level characters a valuable resource the 50s would pay good money for. So in effect it was intended to transfer cash to newer characters. And on occasion it could be used for exactly that.
Whether that's the [i]best[/i] way of doing that is outside my ability to analyze.
Captain of Phoenix Rising
*looks over at Eve Online for their market system*
*looks over at some of the market addons that you can use for WoW*
Yep, both covered there (well, at least in a fashion for the WoW side)
I honestly DESPISED the market system used in CoH, simply because it didn't let me shop for items on sale, it made me BID for items that might not even be available at the price I was asking for. This turned the process of "bidding up until sale" just downright TEDIOUS and an even bigger time waster than traveling around zones. Best thing to do would be to simply display the list of items with the lowest buyout prices, click to highlight an item being offered, then click BUY on that item's price. Not BID ... BUY. If I need to BUY something right now, that's one thing ... but it's not the same as saying I want to BID on a price point that currently isn't being offered right now because it's below current market values.
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In order to do this, you need to remove the market completely. If there is any sort of buy/sell system between players that's automated as an auction, it WILL be subject to manipulation, there's no way to stop that.
At MOST, they could have vendors that will buy/sell anything, all that this will do is establish high/low prices that the items will trade somewhere between.
I'm not going to say I've read every word of every post in this thread, but I've gone through the vast majority of it (as well as several long threads on the COH forums and elsewhere over the years) and other than having vendors that will buy and sell EVERYTHING for the basic currency which then locks the high and low prices in stone, I have yet to read a single idea from people opposed to market manipulation that could possibly ever work.
EDIT: I would definitely say they need to have more than just the last 5 trades in history... you need like the last 100 easily accessible, along with at the least daily high/low information going back to the opening of the market.
Yeah I think a simple buy thing, kind of like how CO is, instead of the auction set up would be improvement for the market. It's easier for those that want to sell items at 1 inf, the target people hurting for money havea chance to actually see items for 1 inf and buy it instead of bidding millions only to find out much later that people placed items of that nature on sell for 1 inf.
So, you want to make the market more complicated to use for players who don't want to have to mess around with it?
The CoX market was INSANELY simple to use for people who weren't interested in it. List items for 1 inf, bid at 'buy-it-now' prices. That actually worked! I don't think any market system implemented should require people to engage at a deeper level than that in order to use it with reasonable effectiveness.
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? - Robert Browning
Unfortunately, the CoX system *didnt* tell you what the "buy it now" price was....
I dont see how having a set price in market instead of having to guess/bid how much the going rate is will complicate things.
What could be more simpler than going into the market, open up the stuff, boom the selling price is there, enter selling price for said item, and walk away with the item.
But while you find the COX more simple, actually I find the CO alot more simple. But then again what is simple to one perosn is complicated to another and vice versa. In CO no bidding or nothing or trying to guess who placed item on the market for low price. It's all right there. You can see someone placed item there for say 5 a couple of 8s and mostly 10s. got 7 on ya, you can buy the 5. Instead of having to place 7 on there and hope one day either someone listed it or finding out later you could have gotten it for 3 instead. To me that is more simple. To me. But not suggesting to replace it with the CO system.
I'm simply saying to ability to go into the market and see the actual set buy price would make things simpler instead of the auction set up.
For any item, it would be great if we could see historical trading prices all the way back to the current issue's deployment date.
Maybe that could be a "long time to earn" day-job perk or something.
In the meantime, we all could see the last 20 transactions right out the box.
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It won't complicate things, but it will skew the market.
Either the "Buy it NOW" price is set by the devs, thereby putting a price ceiling on that item, or it's set by the seller, thereby putting a price ceiling on that item until that particular one sells.
This would horribly skew the market and the latter would allow market manipulation.
yeah possibly but the market as is already allow for that manipulation anyways.
But overall leaving the market as is, is asking for the same manipulation, the same gold farmers, the gold sellers and the other stuff to go along with it as the old game. Ok, people don't want an option for people that don't want to play with the market and it seems like there is no desire to change it, nor the pvp stuff, nor the pve fight mechanics, nor the AT set up besides a few addition. So besides a graphical update, and a few extra features that probably would have been added eventually in COX anyways, what is making this game different than COX? I thought or was under the impression this game was the evolution and H&V was the strict like COX game? Or have things switched around?
In CO I didn't notice any much market manipulation and the price is set by the seller, In fact it's a bit more competitive or then again maybe the manipulation simply haven't caught on there yet or needed because global stuff usually isn't too expensive anyways overall and different game where the good desireable stuff is in lock boxes instead of straight mob drops. There isn't even gold sellers there. so that may be comparing apple to oranges in that regards.
I think that Star Trek Online has done a fairly good job of getting rid of the ... flaws ... that the CoH market had when it comes to the Dilithium Exchange in STO. You have alternate Buy and Sell tabs and they show you how many if the item (in this case, Dilithium or Zen, two of the game's currencies) are being bought or sold at which price point. This gives you a good feel for where the market "is" for either of these two currencies/commodities. You can see [i]how much[/i] of a commodity/currency is being offered at which price point, and with the click of a tab see what people are willing to pay for that same commodity/currency. When the two prices "match" the transfer is made automatically. The entire system is player activity driven, although the market is occasionally "disturbed" by supply and demand changes, such as when a new item is offered in the Zen Store, so a lot of people want to trade their Dilithium for Zen and the price of Zen goes up accordingly because of increased demand.
Part of what makes this work, however, is the fact that the market is "large enough" for these commodities and currencies that it becomes almost impossible for a single player to corner the market and impose monopoly pricing on everything to their own advantage. However, in a "balkanized" market like CoH had with hundreds and hundreds of things to bid, buy and sell, such outcomes become not only more possible but even likely in the face of scarcity, when demand far outstrips supply.
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Yes. More options for players to get what they want. I liked CoH's market and think it should carry forward. The bad part of City was a lack of options to get the rewards players really wanted.
"it's a long road to wisdom, but it's a short one to being ignored." The Lumineers
RMT gold farmers will likely have problems gaining entry due to CoT's up-front "box" purchase.
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Ah yes the box purchase thing should lock them out pretty well. Unless one company buys the box and create accounts from there but I don't think most will go through that type of trouble much unless it's an absolute gold mine for them.
That never stopped the ones in Final Fantasy 14, which has an upfront box price to play....
And that is a sure sign that there are enough people playing FF14, who buy gold from gold farmers, for it to offset the cost of the game.
Or maybe they're really bad at handling the offending parties.
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Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
From what I understood when this was discussed. Getting banned for being a gold seller will mean that they'll need to purchase again rather that using the same "box" to set up a new account. Could have read it wrong. It's our job as responsible players to report them and get them banned.
Bit of both I would say. The gold spam at the start was very bad, but it has improved (or at least it had when I was last in game), in terms of how much you see.
But with no trials available for the game, if your account gets banned, you ahve to buy another account. The same with Guild Wars 2 (time limited trials,and only for certain weekends, and right now there isn't one available).
So whilst you might never *see* them ingame, that doesn't meant that gold sellers are *not* working in the game, they might just well be more low key.
indeed.
One the report system has to work.
Two, the benefit for buying from a gold seller have to be minimized.
If one of those are "off", then gold sellers tend to flourish. If the report system is slow and a gold seller can rake in a few hundred dollars of transactions before the ticket people can get around to them, then buying another box is probably even less than sales tax in most states. But the strongest way to prevent gold sellers is usually through having a balanced, as much as possible economy based around what people can obtain through normal game play without luck playing a factor. If during normal average gameplay a player can obtain about 15-25 million from beginning level to last level ding, and in game 25 million may only buy a few pieces of materials and most other items are way out of reach or cost hundreds of millions each, then gold sellers will have a field day making up the difference. Which end up putting currency into circulation that otherwise wouldnt be there but neccesary, and add to inflation that becomes a growing problem as stuff get more expensive yet the game reward during normal play sit the same or is not adjusted for this inflation, basically favoring gold sellers.
But minimized those two things and gold sellers would be less desirable and people wouldnt hesitate to report them and when buying boxes outweighs the benefits of selling gold in thta game, the problem diminishes if not out right stop. Looking at most games, not all, but most games, that now have a gold seller issue, usually didnt begin with a gold seller problem and usually have one main thing in common.
F2P has a massive negative effect on games, the goldspam in Neverwinter is now so "1337" that I have no idea what they are actually trying to say, I just report them based on my inability to understand wtf is going on.
Selling in-game currency (without the neverwinter double currency conversion between ad and gold) like GW2 does might be a partial solution.
Being able to casually purple your warshade is not good game economy. There has to be some longevity, some reason to carry on playing and personally I do not think the CoX economy was as broken as you make out. If you make 25 millions from ping to ding and 1 super IO cost 25 million and you want 30 of them.. play more. Maybe play less if luck comes your way.. but then that isn't a bad thing. If you want the over 9000 toon when being 900 is good enough then you should fight for that. In-game.
If people won't pay enough to finance its creation, it is not worth creating.
/Segev
Too much grind is viewed as a bad thing in some circles. Although ya right though, a game like WoW for all it's grind, millions keep playing. Some been playing and still playing since the start. They have something to play for. A new person come in and they put in the same dues.
But when it's lop sided where lucky people or people that enjoy one aspect of the game can casually purple out their toon while those unlucky or don't find enjoyment in the funneled way and no other options, then people will stop playing because then they have nothing to play for because it's out of reach within their enjoyment and game growth is stunted or decrease. COX. And that is when it becomes a bad thing. And if the economy was good and there was plenty to work for, COX wouldn't had people leaving over the years and thus population decline.
But even with WoW as it's players grow up have families have less time and hours to put in, and although they have lot of players to chew through before they need to worry, and it's aging, how long ya think they can keep it up? And I think they figured it. WoW now is no where near as grindy as it was when it started out. Yes, there must always be something to play for but as people have less and less time per day to play, more and more things seem out of reach and more and more they stop aiming for it.
F2P I remember back when F2P was usually the sign of doom for an MMO. Now it's so common... it's normality. Not sure if it's good or bad. Some games grow tremendously after going F2P at least population wise like DCUO grew by 1,000 percent after f2p, LOTRO grew greatly in population and income after going f2p, But others go f2p and the needle barely moves, like COX.
I think the trouble with trying to balance or regulate an in-game market system is that there will always be unexpected consequences to attempting some sort of control. This is unless a huge amount of time and effort is put into making it very strict indeed and even then i suspect that it would not be a very player friendly experience.
It did seem to me that on the relatively low player based Union server that sometimes marketeers would artificially inflate the price of some salvage items. As someone who enjoyed the whole market/crafting system, this did annoy me now and again but i don't really see a way around it without causing a situation that could potentially be worse than the problem. Personally i sold almost everything for 100 inf (unless the item was generally cheaper) and did very well out of it - that's the blind bid system i suppose.
The greatest problem that i saw was in lower level drops. As someone mentioned above, a lot of people blitzed right through the first 30 or so levels in very short order and so the salvage and recipes that could only be obtained at this stage came at a premium at the AH and could easily be 'cornered' by someone with sufficient resources to push the price even higher.
The main issue, IMO, with the way GW sells gold is that the price isn't set by the players. Nor is it set by player supply and demand, other than the demand of NCSoft for more money.
I have no objection to players selling "Gold" within the game world, as long as the market is relatively open between the sellers and the buyers and the formula is relatively transparent.
The the way in which Eve Online sells their plex.
That price is set *entirely* by the playerbase, and if you so desired, you could gift the PLEX to a friend for nothing if you so desired.
I have vague memories of someone on some game.. they moved countries and closed their old account and asked for the devs to transfer the money to their new account.
They refused because it could be considered money laundering.
But I digress. Not having played it but only listened to my brother rave about it recently - Diablo 3 allows money/real money transfers and now that the game has bedded in, it's apparently inexpensive to buy billions of credits. However you then require many billions to buy the rare stuff. But still.. you can purchase tons of low level / common stuff cheaply from the sounds of it.
I'd like to think you could gift anything in-game but I guess that would allow gold sellers too much freedom, tedious not to be able to pool astral diamonds in Neverwinter in order to buy guild storage.
If people won't pay enough to finance its creation, it is not worth creating.
/Segev
Strangely enough, the Auction house (both gold and Real money versions) in Diablo 3 will be removed from the PC/Mac versions March 18th 2014.
[url=http://us.battle.net/d3/en/blog/10974978/]Battle.net link[/url]
Eeeee-yuhp. Diablo III's auction house experience wound up being a ... disaster.
Funny thing is, 2 years ago a co-worker of mine had been openly speculating about [i]quitting his job[/i] so as to play (and farm) Diablo III "full time" for real world cash as a way to make a living. Of course, that was BEFORE the game launched, but still ...
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Diablo III is shutting down both the Real Money Auction House, and the Gold Auction House, early next year. Overall, official sanctioned RMT has been horrible for the game. Blizzard wanted to support high prices in the RMAH (they get a cut of transactions), so they balanced the drop rate to make it impractical to find the gear required to progress during play. It had to be bought. This had a knock-on effect of removing the central lever-pressing play incentive of wondering if the next drop would be a good one -- it never was.
While it sounds good that the AHs were filled with a sea of bargain-basement priced loot, that meant it was possible to get 'good enough' gear for almost nothing, intensifying the problem of crappy-feeling loot drops and lack of incentive to play. The very best top-end gear remained expensive, helped by the wacky randomisation of drops which meant class-specific gear frequently had properties that were of no use to that class (something else Blizzard are hoping to fix). Because there was plenty of real money to be made in the top end of the market, the game itself and the AHs were, appropriately enough, botted to hell and back, and there was massive inflation. Gold prices crashed.
On top of that, there's been a lot of of 'rebalancing' of various classes. This is annoying enough when it invalidates gear that people have spent hours playing for. When people are shelling out significant amounts of real money on the RMAH for gear that's suddenly useless, it's a recipe for rage quitting.
Over all, it's been a mess. Trying to tune the game for the demands of RMAH profitability really hurt gameplay. I played briefly, then dropped it. I might take another look when the new loot system is released, but generally, it's put me off the Diablo series for the foreseeable future.
Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for? - Robert Browning
Well, here's the thing for me. And please don't read too harsh a tone into this.....I played City of Heroes because I wanted to be a super-hero, not a market analyst. I don't want to be forced into an artificial out-of-game mechanic to get full enjoyment of/access to the game I expect to pay a subscription fee for.
The fact that I don't have thirty hours a week to devote to a game should not limit my ability to reach the upper levels/rewards of that game at my own pace. In six years of playing CoX, I might have gotten 3 purple drops total. And I could NEVER afford to buy one. I had 5 level 50 characters and probably did 6 or so large raids. I remember sighing and wondering if I could ever get a single power fully slotted with IO's. (I never did.) I still enjoyed the game, but felt like I got more and more marginalized when I couldn't run at +5 dif like half the kids I tried to team with. I still kept playing, DGMW, But I found myself soloing more and more, making it even harder to get the drops, etc. So don't tell me "Oh, it wasn't required/wasn't designed to use that ..."
I'd rather not see a system, any system, that allows a player to get "rich" by manipulating a market to the point where a few can begin to "control" the market. If we must have an open market, can we at least keep supply balanced against demand? Lets not have "Rare" be nearly "Unique". If the only way to get a particular drop is to run a particualr mission, can we get a 50/50 chance of getting the bloody thing?
I'd like a simple, linear sort of market that doesn't require a degree in economics to get the benefit of. If it's that important to so many people, they should be developing a game called "City of Investors."
Don't take away my precious game time with stuff that's not related to playing the hero. Crafting I can kinda wrap my head around as part of being the hero. Shopping? Not so much.
that's really interesting about D3. A platform that players thought they could get behind, mined by the publisher for their own nefarious reasons and found to not actually benefit the publisher..
just goes to show.
If people won't pay enough to finance its creation, it is not worth creating.
/Segev
Righty. warbird time.
I played City of Heroes cos I liked it. Then it got a global market. And I didn't like it. Then it got MA. And I hated it. And I quit for a bit. Then I came back. Then MA exploits made me a ton of money on the AH. And rainbows and kittens ensued.
There is a certain reality in MMOs, you have to do some OOC stuff to make your character real. Superman was born with gifts, the rest of us have to play for x weeks to get close to those levels or the devs can't make any money. The stark reality is that a game needs box sales and subs and in-game purchases. The CoH market as was did not require a degree in economics, in fact the forums had guides on how to make bagzmillions. Just buy this when it costs this, sell it when goes to this higher price. Yep, buy low, sell high. Not exactly an economics degree.
The excuse that "I didn't want to play city of economic strategy" isn't valid, you didn't have to. In fact people I've spoken to since have said that it didn't affect their game at all, some people didn't even know there was a market in CoH, they just played the game as they always had.
To conclude.. if you played a crappy game... for whatever reason and I do not judge.. then we have a website at www.repeat-offenders.net.. you can sign up on our forums and when this game goes live we promise to give you one hell of an experience that you will not forget for all the right reasons. \m/
If people won't pay enough to finance its creation, it is not worth creating.
/Segev
There are guides to anything on forums. Even in the most grindiest games out there, there are guides of how to grind. That don't make it any more or less enjoyable. But just as the excuse of ""I didn't want to play city of economic strategy" isn't valid, neither is the excuse for the market of "Well it was optional" is valid.
Sure in game purchases may be needed or seemingly so be needed to make money for the game although I don't think none of those billions of influence had any effect on the game's income. In fact, COH made the most money prior to the market being implemented. Around the time the market was implemented, the income profit level continued to slide. The next time the profit would see a bump is when Incarnate system was introduced. Would the population and income continue to slide even without the market? Probably so. But it doesn't seem like the market was the savior of COX as it is sometimes seemingly referred to.
COX got along just fine before the market. And it's possible that it was actually a good addition, but at the same time though, whether playing the market is truly optional or gear is optional or what ever is optional or not, there shouldn't be one way, play the market and get the easy track to items and if one doesn't then "good luck". Whether or not there was guides, optional, or not. The fact is that some people simply did not enjoy the market and not always because they didn't know how to use the market. I'm sure many people here don't like to grind, but probably know how to grind. And no matter how many guides on grinding there is posted or whether or not it's optional gear or what, it wont be enjoyable and probably wish there was another way to get the gear they want, may or may not need, without having to grind 6 months to get one piece.
Plus seeing there doesn't seem to be a plan to give those that don't enjoy the market a discount on their subscription or to charge people that enjoy the market extra, then it would seem that it would only be fair that the paying customers get equal treatment in the ability to obtain gear in ways they find enjoyable and not be funneled into the market. Because the one thing that is optional that seemed to be overlooked is a person paying the subscription to finance the game at all, with their money going to a device they may not enjoy, in order to ensure the life of the game. The least that can happen to thank them for their contribution and subscription is throw them a bone and at least acknowledge them as paying customers. AKA, like some people wanted or wished NCSOFT treated their customers better and respected the money spent by the players. Instead of pro marketeers get the perks and catered to enjoyment and everyone else gets shafted. Unless that is the intended target of the game. Pro-marketeers. Anyone else do not apply.
I completely agree with you, if it's that hateful, vote with your wallet and don't play.
I've done that with many games.
If people won't pay enough to finance its creation, it is not worth creating.
/Segev
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