Segev wrote:

That makes a bit more sense, now that you lay out the way you plan for the subscriptions to have varying discount levels. Doing it by length-of-time subscribing might work. (I was trying to figure out why you'd have multiple subscription levels when all they did was give increasing discounts.)

Okay, good. I was wondering what the stumbling block to comprehension was, and as usual it was an incomplete reception of a concept or an idea. The discount by length of time model is functionally a Loyalty Reward.

Segev wrote:

I assume that the subscriptions under your model would ALSO have perks just for being subscribed, such as (to use an example from CoV) subscriber-only archetypes like Mastermind.

You're free to assume that, of course, but I would bring your attention to the point that the Discounts Model I've been advocating for is completely agnostic on this particular issue. Special perks for subscribers COULD be done, but there's no particular reason (other than Good Business Sense™) that says they HAVE TO be done.

Now, if you're asking me if I think that subscribers ought to get "special benefits" not available to non-subscribers ... I would say that there would be some things which could be done by Missing Worlds Media in this direction which do not amount to a Pay To Play enforcement. Limiting Archetypes (as mentioned, Masterminds) ... I'd recommend against such limitations [i]in principle[/i]. As a specific example, I offer the [url=http://paragonwiki.com/w/images//b/b2/DVD_Edition_Cape.jpg]Cape of the Four Winds[/url] ...
[img]http://paragonwiki.com/w/images//b/b2/DVD_Edition_Cape.jpg[/img]
... which was an exclusive unlock for buying the DVD Edition of City of Heroes. And by exclusive, it was *EXCLUSIVE* ... meaning even [b]YEARS[/b] later after there were no more DVD copies of the game to be had/sold, Paragon Studios wouldn't make this particular cape available for purchase with Paragon Points.

My thoughts in this area run more towards time shifting and staged releases, so that *everyone* eventually gets everything ... but the Subscribers get "first crack" at everything before it becomes available to everyone, because the subscribers have (literally) pre-paid for everything. So if Missing Worlds Media comes up with a new powerset and decides to "sell" it through the cash shop (like Paragon Studios did for Staff Melee, Street Justice, Beam Rifle, etc. etc.), that new powerset would be "purchasable" by subscribers only for a time (weeks? months?) before becoming generally available to everyone. Same deal with new costume parts ... or access to the Beta Testing server for future releases ... and so on and so forth. There are a wide variety of "things" in a game like City of Heroes (which City of Titans aspires to be) where being able to get early access to New Stuff™ could be a valuable enough commodity as to warrant a subscription, and feel like you're getting your money's worth for it.

The important thing is that anything that is Subscribers Only will have an expiration date on that status, such that it will eventually be available to everyone. So I have no problem with a Subscribers Only implementation so long as that is a TEMPORARY state, rather than a permanent one. Clear?

Segev wrote:

The fungibility of a Star, however, is important to the structure I'm hoping to instill whereby players can spend real money to buy in-game useful items that help subsidize the truely free-to-players' ability to access paywall-locked content (costume pieces, convenience items, quality of life items, vanity base items, possibly special mission or early-access to missions or on-demand access to rotating missions...still not entirely sure what would be locked behind a paywall and we're fiddling with ideas; other than "no pay to win" items back there, at least).

The first and foremost concern I have for that sort of economic flow is ... how easy it might be (or become) for either a single Player (or more likely, a group of Players) to capture and manipulate the market to serve their own interests and ends. Specifically, I'm talking about "flow control" of how quickly (and easily) capital can flow through the market, because if there's no limit you're basically BEGGING for someone to resurrect the [b]Ebil Marketeers[/b] and the Professional Gold Farmers (since there will be only one server).

The other thing you need to watch out for is the cautionary tale of what I consider [b]Diablo Economtricks[/b], where you wound up with the Stone of Jordan becoming the "currency" Players valued in Diablo II (for a while, until the cheaters duped their way to outrageous inflation), and then in Diablo III where the Real Money Auction House functionally ruined the game. Fortunately, City of Titans, like City of Heroes before it, isn't intended to be a heavily "gear mods" driven game (unlike Diablo II and III, which are heavily gear dependent) ... but that doesn't necessarily mean that Gold Farmers won't be trying to set up shop in City of Titans. The only way to keep such riff-raff from overrunning everything is to ensure that the foundational fundamentals of the market include enough Capital Controls to make "mass production farming" of the game either unsustainable or not effectively profitable over time.

The way that you're talking about your Stars system here, Segev, has me very concerned in that it seems (so far at least) that the structures you're talking about would aid and abet Gold Farmers, rather than discourage them. Granted, nothing has been "built" yet, but I do worry that if you make everything "too easy" you run the risk of market capture by speculators, hustlers and swindlers.

Segev wrote:

This is a lot of brainstorming on my part, here. As ever, it's subject to a lot of change. You're watching me "think out loud" here, bouncing off some of your ideas and toying with problem-solving. There are no new official announcements at all in this.

Oh, that's completely understood! This is the time to Peer Review ideas and structures, to poke holes in them while they're still on paper so they aren't easy to subvert and manipulate once people start actually USING these systems.

Segev wrote:

Am I missing something about gold farmers that would make this attractive to them?

My concerns lay in the direction of market manipulation and "capture" such that a gold farming "group" might be able to horde enough of the game's (multiple?) currencies so as to be able to potentially dictate supply. Kind of like DeBeers and diamonds, where controlling the supply allows you to set the prices for commodities ... which then makes possible all kinds of profiteering (including the predatory real money variety).

Essentially my concern is a matter of exploits and what I suppose might be construed as racketeering (after a fashion, I guess). What you're saying makes sense, Segev ... but I'm not seeing anything which suggests that your currency model does anything intrinsic to discourage or "fight" gold farming tactics and methods, and therefore carries the potential to facilitate yet another vector by which (exploitative) gold farming activities can become profitable (or worse, thrive).

Doesn't the selling of sub time, help curb this? Someone buys a 15 dollar One Month Game Sub Time, then can sell it on the market for however much they want, and whoever uses the item gets 30 days of game time.

In order to corner a market, you have to [i]control[/i] the source of supply. The items I am envisioning being on the market are things players either craft themselves or pick up from "drops." (or mission rewards)

Let's say we have a single player, Scrooge McDuck, who has somehow managed to accumulate more than half the extant in-game currency in the game.

He decides he wants to corner the market on Number One Dimes (NODs), which are a popular, but somewhat rare, item.

So, to do this, he offers far, far more than the NOD's current market value for every NOD on the market. Every NOD on the AH is snapped up by him. He then turns around and offers his NODs for even more than he bought them for. Fewer people can afford them, so they become harder to get, and he's sitting on a stockpile that's huge. If he sells enough of them, he'll break even while still having some left to sell (now for profit).

The market value floor is now what he offers to buy them. So any time Huey, Dewie, or Lewie find an NOD in the game, they can sell it for at minimum what Scrooge is offering.

But this is the AH: if people are buying NOD's at Scrooge's sell price, they will pick up anything that Huey, Dewie, or Lewie puts up for anything below that (somewhere between Scrooge's "buy" and "sell" prices). If Huey realizes that the "market value" right now is Scrooge's sell price (because that's what everybody else is buying at, since he cornered the market), Huey might well sell at taht price or just under, helping keep the artificial price up. But Scrooge [i]has[/i] to sell at a rate that keeps up with his buying, or he's bleeding money to maintain his locked-down inventory.

Huey, Dewie, and Lewie are still out there winning the occasional NOD. And Scrooge isn't buying Huey's at the price he bought everything else; he's buying them at his sell price or just below if he's buying Huey's at all.

He might still snap up Dewie's, but only if nobody is bidding higher than his "buy" price but under his "sell" price.

Ultimately, this falls apart because he [i]doesn't[/i] control the supply, and he'll have to lower his prices to something enough people can afford to recoup his outlay on the massive purchase. And, tomorrow, more NODs go up for sale by other people who harvested them from the game.

Scrooge has inconvenienced people, but it should self-correct. If Scrooge is [i]lucky[/i] and he read the market exactly right, he'll manage to sell enough NODs at a massively inflated price to recoup what he spent on the ones he hasn't sold yet. But he doesn't have infinite in-game currency, and if he keeps buying them as they come in and can't sell them fast enough to restore his liquid funds, he can't keep this up. And if demand were high enough to support the amounts he wants to charge, then the prices for NODs would already have been up there. As prices rise, the number of people willing to buy falls. So he has fewer and fewer customers the higher he has to raise the price on NODs.

Now, maybe he's counting on some people who pay2win to be so desperate for it NOW NOW NOW that they'll shell out real money to buy Stars to buy in-game currency with from other players (maybe even himself), and then use that bought currency to buy the inflated NODs. But even that's short-term, and will ultimately leave him with less in-game currency than he started with, either because he sold for less than he bought, or because he has an inventory he can't move for the prices at which he bought it.

And, if he's counting on this short-term to convert his in-game currency into Stars, he'd be better off just selling the in-game currency for Stars directly. He's hoping people will be so desperate that they'll buy NODs at his inflated price before more supply comes in from the other players. Again: even if he does snap up the new supply at his inflated buy price, he's accumulating NODs faster than he can sell them for the prices he needs to sell them to turn a profit.

DeBeers can control the diamond supply because they own practically every diamond mine in the world. They don't have to "buy up" others' supply at prices unsupported by the scarcity of what is available to anybody but them. Put another way: if you don't count the diamonds they have, the supply really is scarce enough to support the prices they sell for right now. And with the exception of that hoard, there isn't a constant influx at a lower level of scarcity (i.e. a more abundant supply).

For Scrooge in our hypothetical situation to manage this, he'd need to somehow keep anybody but himself from harvesting NODs in the game.

Now, Minotaur's given scenarios I hadn't been able to conceive, so I'm open to counter-examples. But this one doesn't seem like it could be sustainable long enough to do anything harmful.

My limited experience and less-limited study of most of these so-called "free" markets that have suffered due to "free flow" of currency is that they're usually not really free, and there is usually active theft going on somewhere, with nobody enforcing property laws. Which are one of the few kinds of laws that free market supporters tend to endorse.

Risk of political discussion aside, however, what I would expect is that markets in-game would self-correct fairly quickly - on the order of a day or, at a stretch, a week - unless the NODs were so rare that there wasn't a genuine "Steady state equilibrium" that would be reached with them coming in and flowing out at related paces.

Part of combating highly short-term market manipulation would, in fact, be to give lengthy - maybe a month? - histories on average, high, low, and median prices for goods over the course of hours and days. Users can check the going rate on their item of choice, see that it's grotesquely inflated all of a sudden, and decide to wait it out on the principle that these things usually level off.

I admit to perhaps a dearth of imagination, here, but I'm having trouble picturing how one might manipulate the market when the commodities you are trying to control to drive up the price just keep coming in (and at an increasing rate, as those who do choose to farm for in-game income will start specifically hunting for them). Can you aid me by giving a step-by-step example of the kind of manipulation you're expecting to see? Everything I can think of results in losing money for the person trying to do it, because he can't offload his inventory at the price he bought it for when it just keeps coming in from "outside."

jag40 wrote:

Well there are a lot of things in COX AH that didn't self correct. Because one thing that is forgotten about, is that in many cases the artificially high price became the "normal" price.
Common items that are easily obtained, yeah it's harder to control supply. But with rarer items where it's like winning lottery to get some, then it's pretty simple especially when an item is not gained often in relative terms. AKA like purps in COX and some red IOs. At first things will be normal price, and buying. Then someone with plenty of cash buys up the supply. Now, They probably list one or two at a time at what ever price they want. Eventually someone will gain some and put it on the market. Now the Scrooge usually simply buy up the lower priced items as much as he can and with rare or very rare items it isn't hard to do. Then inflate the price and relist it.

Okay. I follow you up to here, but disagree with your assessment. If Mr. McDuck can list his stockpiled rare items - even just one or two at a time - for $largesum, and they get bought, then that [i]is[/i] the market price for them.

If Mr. McDuck had [i]not[/i] bought up the whole supply when he "started" his "control the market" scheme, then those "normal priced" items would vanish quickly and the market would have none of this super-rare item. There is no "normal" price for things in something like this player-to-player market; there is only what the market will bear.

If Scrooge realized that the market would bear far higher than these items were going for, then his snapping up the whole of the supply was still buying under the market value.

Now, when Huey finds that "lottery"-level item that Scrooge is hoarding to control the market, he wisely examines the market to see what this item is selling for, and puts his up at right around that price. Maybe a touch lower, if he wants to make sure his sells quickly. Scrooge buys it up, and maintains his monopoly.

But then he relists it at his "inflated" price.

You talk about him putting only one or two up at a time and listing them for vastly inflated prices. How long does he wait for them to be bought? How much inventory is he sitting on? How often do his limited releases get bought compared to how often the super-rare item is dropped and sold on the AH by those who find it?

The reason I don't think this is a problem is quite simply that, if Scrooge is not going to lose money, he has to sell approximately one of these super-rare items for every one that drops in the game world. If he releases them more slowly than that, he spends more money buying them up from others than he earns selling them. In the process, he builds up an inventory of these items, but that inventory isn't helping him any. He will not be able to sell that inventory off faster than prices would drop if he stopped buying up the finds of others.

If, on the other hand, he IS managing to sell about 1:1 (or maybe 1:0.99, since he's probably got a profit built into his sell price), then that means that there are enough people who have enough money to keep buying at that rate who want the item. If Scrooge had not raised the price for everybody else to buy that item by becoming the sole supplier, the demand for that super-rare item on the market would be higher, because there would be more people who could afford it at its "going rate." But when more people can afford it at its "going rate," it will disappear and there won't be [i]any[/i] available until more people find it and put it up for sale. At that point, those who want it the most will bid even higher for it, hoping to snap it up before somebody else who is only bidding at what looked like the "going rate."

This will push the price up, until it reaches a point where only as many people want it at the price it's offered as there are items coming on the market to replace those they buy.

jag40 wrote:

If it's at the price they listed it for or near they probably wont buy it because with the items scrooge bought prior at a now relative very low price, he will still make much more than what he bought them for even if he decide to undercut the now new standard price he created.

Scrooge only makes a profit if he sells for more than he bought them for.

So, let's say the "going rate" before Scrooge started buying up the supply was 100gp per item (it is super-rare after all). He buys them all for 250gp each, to make sure he wins all the bids for even somewhat overpriced sales.

Then, he turns around and sells them for 1000gp each. He needs to sell 1 of them at that rate for every four he bought just to break even.

Huey, realizing that the price for these things has jumped, finds one and sells it for 900gp. Scrooge has three options: he can buy it at 900, he can ignore it, or he can lower his price to, say, 800 in order to undercut Huey.

But there's a third collection of people involved. Donald, Webby, Mrs. Beakly, and many others all would like this rare item, but have not had the luck to find one. How badly these others want it determines how much they'll pay for it. Will they shell out 1000 gp for it? How many of them will? Will enough shell out 1000gp that Scrooge can keep selling them at least as often as he buys them from Huey, who keeps gathering them and trying to sell at 900?

If Scrooge neither cuts his prices nor buys Huey's item, then Huey will take one of Scrooge's potential customers. Scrooge will sell one fewer than he otherwise would. If there is still enough demand that Scrooge can keep selling his afterwards at a pace he finds comfortable, that works. But that means that he is selling faster than Huey (and others like him) are bringing in new supply, so that means demand is high enough that, at Huey's prices, supply would vanish.

And, when supply vanishes, people start making higher bids if they want to make sure they win it.

If Scrooge chooses not to buy from Huey and lowers his sell price to 750 to undercut him, Scrooge is making less profit. But he might sell more of them. He needs to sell 1 for every 3 he bought to break even, now. But Huey still wants to sell his; he may well lower his price again. And thus they will undercut each other until Huey is selling them as fast as he can bring them in and Scrooge is maintaining a constant pace.

Either way, the thing that really controls how much they sell for is how much demand there is versus the [i]ongoing[/i] supply that comes from drops.

I think, what we're seeing when it looks like Scrooge is manipulating the market, is really evidence that there is a surplus of these items and that these items are [i]under-[/i]priced at the 100gp "going rate." If 100 gp really is reflective of their value based on the supply-drop-rate from gameplay, then Scrooge could create artificial scarcity for only a short time - a few hours, maybe a day, depending on rarity of the item's drop - before prices would settle at a rate that gets the new ones selling as fast as they come in. Too few people would want them at Scrooge's price to bother buying them, so Scrooge would not sell as fast as they come in from drops.

jag40 wrote:

Now what happened is that when people go and list, they see the inflated price, and that is the what they list it for maybe a bit lower but usually way higher than the past normal price. Then Scrooge, still sitting on a big stockhold, may either slowly sell his items at the now inflated and now "normal" price and make a killing or he may dump at the new price and then and make it back all at once. Making great profits and usually exiting the market or moving on to something else in a temporary sense of cornering the market.

This doesn't quite work, though. Unless [i]enough[/i] people are willing to buy at the "inflated" price for Scrooge to sell everything he bought up, he will be left with inventory and won't sell enough of them to regain what he spent. And, as you noted, if he tries to sell them over time, the price will drop back down to what it should be and he'll lose money overall.

Only if demand is actually high enough to support whatever "inflated" price he lists at will he make a killing. If that is the case, then all he did was realize that it was UNDERPRICED before, and take advantage of it. That's the only way things reach a "new normal" as long as it is the game world - not players - who control the drop rate of items.

jag40 wrote:

The main question is how long and the lasting effects. True that one person probably wont be able to corner the market forever but at the same time usually they have cornered it to affect the price and buying ability of other players much longer than they cornered the market with the prices rarely ever going back to true normal.

I think the problem here is one of perception. There is no "true normal." There is only supply and demand. If the demand is high enough to support a "new normal" that seems inflated compared to the old, it would have gotten there anyway, because the "old normal" would have resulted in shortages as people bought them all up and it was impossible to find them on the market for sale. That would lead to people putting out buy orders at higher and higher values, trying to make sure they got the next one to come up before anybody else could. This would happen until the number of people willing and able to make the "going rate" buy offers was equal to the number of items coming in from drops (or at least is close thereto).

jag40 wrote:

Thus causing great inflation, especially if rewards from playing the game do not keep up pace and still on the scale of when prices were normal and or was balanced around prior to the inflation.

Again, I am not sure how you're defining "normal." The only way we get this "normal" that is lower than the "new" price is if there was an abnormal glut [i]or[/i] the market was usually bare of the item.

Remember: there is no magic number that says something is "normal." Not unless we have a vendor who sells the item and can just produce it on demand for the fixed vendor rate we, as devs, set for it. (This, then, sets a CEILING on what it will go for on the market, since anybody who wants one will buy it from a vendor rather than pay more than the vendor offers. Typically, anyway.) But for items available only through drops or through crafting, the AH price has no "normal" that is not established by market forces.

jag40 wrote:

Another thing that prevents normalization is sometime game mechanics not showing history. ... If there is a deep well into the past history of price, then people can easily see what was the true actual normal price and spot inflated cornered market, temporary or not, items and can post at the normal price hindering the one that cornered the market.

Agreed. It will be easier to make rational judgments of "true value" of an item if you can see how it's trends have gone. (Recalling that "true value" is "what others are willing to pay for it.")

jag40 wrote:

And how long one corner the market do not lessen the effect of someone cornering the market. Rarer the item, longer it will take to "normalize" if ever.

It will take longer, but still should be reflective of true value without going longer than a week or so. The thing is, the items that are so rare that it would take a long time for them to re-normalize are also the items that would [i]naturally[/i] be very expensive, anyway. They would be the items that it's all but impossible to [i]find[/i] on the AH marketplace, because the going rate would be such that it goes out almost as fast as it comes in. Only if something created a glut of them would the price drop and not make them vanish entirely until the next one is dropped.

So it's hard for Scrooge to "buy up" the supply when there isn't a supply to buy up. If it's just a vanishingly small supply, he'll buy up the handful, and can raise prices temporarily, but if he raises them too much, he won't sell all he's bought up. If he CAN sell all he's bought up, he's not inflated the price; he's recognized that it was underpriced. Because as long as new ones coming in sell off the shelves quickly, it's at or below it's "true" value. If the "new" price is where it normalizes, that means Scrooge just found a price closer to its "true" value and showed everybody else who gets the item how much they CAN get for it.

jag40 wrote:

Common items, it probably will normalize fairly quickly because then people probably come across the drops enough and plenty more for sell. With rare items, they may not drop but for a lucky few, low supply, easy to corner, very long time if not years if ever to normalize.

Again, those vanishingly rare items will normalize by virtue of demand. If they're vanishing off the shelves at the "inflated" price, that is the real value of it. It might even still be underpriced. If people are unable to sell them at that price, they'll eventually lower the price until they can sell it. And that will normalize it fairly quickly.

Please, feel free to point out flaws in my reasoning. I know it's not "nice" to say that the prices were likely too low if somebody plays Scrooge's game and winds up making the price higher than it was before, but I think it [i]happens[/i] not because the system is broken, but because the perception of the price being as low as it was before was a perception of undervaluing the item.

In practice, if an item is vanishingly hard to come by because it sells off the shelves as soon as it's found (and it's found so very rarely), Scrooge might corner the market temporarily simply by being the guy to FIND one, and decide to sell it for 10x what the last sale went for. If he manages to sell at that rate, somebody else will look at that and see that [i]people bought the item for that amount[/i]. And they may well try to sell at that rate, too. And if that sells...well, we're seeing now the other side of how prices rise. Buyers and sellers both can do it in a blind auction, when the buyer puts up "ludicrously" higher than the "going rate" for an item that simply can't be found in order to snap up the next one to show up, or a seller recognizes that there are no others for sale and so he might be able to sell his for more.

Summing up: I don't think the person cornering the market can make a profit unless what he's done is recognize an item that is going for less than people will pay for it, and thus decreases demand to match supply by buying up the cheap ones to sell for what they really will go for.

jag40 wrote:

While AH gave a spot, it created a void of haves and have nots. With new players or players that didn't have a deep inf pocket find themselves even more left behind than before. While those that have and loved the market found themselves in heaven. But what about the rest of the players? Are only marketeers the only player that are important? From the start, there should be places to spend some inf. places with desirable stuff not bullcrap off to the side crap while AH again get the golden first class treatment catering. That is another way to control inflation. The game should not focus on Market. Market can be a side thing, but for all the fear of other groups having control over game from pay to win to farmers to gold farmers, why is it that marketeers are allowed to have control over the rate inf inflation of currency while other player groups having a smidge of any control is unthinkable?

I still think you're missing the mark, here. The marketeers didn't control inflation rates. They merely exploited them.

The game focus isn't the market, but the market is crucial to having an in-game economy that is meaningful. And it is likely key to our monetization scheme being feasible, and certainly is key to my hopes to make this game allow free-to-players to access everything...with enough effort.

But what would it take, to your mind, to make "places with desirable stuff [to buy without going to other players] not bullcrap off to the side crap while AH again get the golden first class treatment catering?" This could be valuable advice for me to hear, to gauge what should and should not be vendor-available. (Recalling, again, that CoH's problem is that many vendor-sold items contribute to inflation when the vendor's price becomes a price ceiling. And the stuff that is "bullcrap off to the side" might have been [i]defined[/i] by the fact that spending in-game currency in flat amounts - which became trivial to the marketeers - just create new ones.)

Segev, I'm going to toss you some homework to look at before Lin Chiao Feng shows up to give you this recommendation.

[url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.u.l.e.]M.U.L.E.[/url]

Yes, a game that is now more than 30 years old has some very important lessons that could be learned with regards to how to balance the economics of a game like City of Titans. There's even an [url=http://www.planetmule.com/]online version[/url] of the game that you can play in order to see a lot of the principles and concepts in action. I do believe that the experience will be well worth the investment of your time.

So many walls of text...

I have not read any of them but formatting your posts would help me see each point you're making. Yes line breaks help but it's still daunting.

I read Sergev's intent and do generally support what he intends to do.

- -

I want to add to the "game economy" debate to say that I do think the PLAYER exchange is self correcting and rather quickly so. I do wish that the GAME exchange had the ability to correct itself.. If selling things back to the game vendor I don't want to receive pennies on the dollar.

Effectively, the various problems such as "price gouging" and other methods for artificially inflating prices require that you have a genuine monopoly. You must - absolutely must - control the supply. Because this is a game, and the "costs" of entry into the market are "go out and get items as drops from enemies," there really isn't a way to pull it off for [i]any[/i] length of time, unless what you're really doing is noticing that items are selling for far less than people will pay for them.

So yeah, focusing on making sure there is plenty of constant currency-sinking will help significantly. Ideally, the currency sinks will be fun things people want to buy with in-game currency. I also think we can probably make a lot of things that were "weird, new currencies" in CoH just use in-game currency. I would like to keep us to just two currencies in this game: in-game currency, and Stars. In-game currency is sunk through just about anything you can buy in-game, from vendor items to base rent to ... well, anything that isn't "behind the pay wall" that you can buy with some mechanism. I'd even like to see it, instead of "tickets," as the primary reward behind player-made content. (I am open to being persuaded otherwise, though.)

Stars, of course, are sunk at the c-store and in microsubscriptions and anywhere you want something behind the "pay wall."

Both are usable on the AH. ...actually, that would be another way to differentiate multiple AHs - maybe there's one that does business only in in-game currency, and another that does business only in Stars.

Redlynne wrote:

This is demonstrably false ... both in the real world and within game economies.

(...)

As for the point that market manipulations cannot be successful for ANY length of time is also demonstrably false, since all that is really necessary is a manipulation that is successful for a short enough span of time ... with short term turn arounds that stay one step ahead of the market corrective forces that you (Segev) are adequate to combat the problem.
Being able to move and manipulate a market does not require absolute control over supplies, merely a significant ENOUGH portion of them. City of Heroes, with its piss-poor Last 5 Transactions reporting, was simplicity itself to manipulate for short term gain. Yes, the market "corrected" itself, but only after people not a part of the Ebil Marketeering Scheme™ either got burned or inconvenienced (sometimes severely). There's a reason why this was (and still is) considered Market PvP. How LONG the scheme would remain effective for depended on the flow rate of the supplies, but in some ways that wasn't the point of such manipulations. Short term gain was the name of the game. Get in, get out, end with more currency than you started with. The very structure of the auction house in City of Heroes aided, abetted and facilitated such moves, creating and in some ways supporting the long term inflationary pressures you've cited.

Again, long-term inflationary effects would only happen if there was an ever-increasing, inflation-causing supply of currency.

That said, however, you're right that market manipulation requires only a "sufficient" portion of the supply. But for it to turn a profit short-term, you [i]must[/i] be able to not only scarf up most of the supply (such that the rest "dries up" naturally), but THEN must be able to turn it all around. You need to have something in demand enough that, even at a slower rate-of-sale than before when prices were lower, there are enough buyers to buy you out of enough stock to make a profit BEFORE more supply shows up.

So we're talking relatively slow-rate-of-arrival things, here.

Redlynne wrote:

The way to fight market manipulators is to "arm" both buyers and sellers with information, making it harder to market manipulators to successfully scam other people in either the high or low price point directions. Better information and reporting of what's on the market at any given time, and the prices for those items, makes it harder for price gouging to occur. Blind bidding and auctioning like City of Heroes had is probably the WORST system imaginable (and definitely the worst out of all the game I played). It's a lot harder for market manipulators to be successful when there's plenty of "disinfecting sunlight" shining on the market, making there moves more obvious and transparent to other Players.

This is really solid information and advice, and is helpful. I agree: more information is better. An informed clientele is key to a healthy economy.
Segev wrote:
I would like to keep us to just two currencies in this game: in-game currency, and Stars.
Laudable, Segev, but I think you might want to PLAN for having Stars and more.
Specifically, I'm wondering if the old INF based system of City of Heroes could be "divided" into the Alignment Axes that City of Titans will be using ... Law, Integrity and Violence. In practice, this would mean that you'd functionally wind up with 6 "INF based" currency types ... Low/High Law, Low/High Integrity, Low/High Violence ... and what you get awarded in your Mission Rewards and your Drops depends on where your character is on the respective axis of alignment. People who are in the (exact) middle of an alignment axis get an even split of both currencies on that axis.
This then comes into play for buying and selling of items, either to other Players or to NPC vendors. Some vendors will only deal in Low Law INF, because they're running a black market. Some vendors will only deal in High Integrity INF, because they're reputable and they want to keep that reputation. Some vendors are "halvesies" and will require equal amounts of Low and High INF on one (or more) alignment axes.
The interesting thing that this would do, effectively, is a sort of Market Sorting for where Players would go to buy, sell and trade their commodities, wares, items and drops. You'd have a concurrency of markets, and through diversification make it more difficult for market manipulations to be sustained over the very long haul. You could also set up multiple auction houses, with slightly different "rules" for each and put them in different neighborhoods around the city. The way things will tend to fall out is that the Heroes will gravitate towards "their" vendors and services, while the Villains will gravitate towards "their" vendors and services in different parts of the city. Furthermore, different characters will accumulate "wealth" in different ways, which can further help differentiate characters across the spectrum of gameplay (leading to replay value for "economic" reasons).
And that's before you even start thinking in terms of using Supergroups as a way to pool alignment keyed INF together across multiple characters and accounts, or making Costume and Base Editing one of many possible sinks for alignment keyed INF (rather than using Prestige).[/quote]
This is...interesting...though I see a flavor-problem:

Let's say the "violence" currency is "Fear." Joe Heroic is as negative as he can get on the "violence" rating, because he exerts force only in proportion to and as absolutly necessary against various threats. He finds, in the course of his Heroism, a super-rare "Flight Gel" that increases flying speed.

Joe Heroic doesn't fly, so he puts it up on the AH. Sam Sinistrous, perpetrator of left-hand themed crimes, is extremely violent, and thus accumulates lots of "Fear" when he does his missions. He goes to the AH and sees this stuff that will make his Far-Left Flyer even faster, and decides to buy it.

Now, Joe Heroic has Fear to spend. This doesn't make a lot of sense.

Or, if Joe didn't put it up for sale for Fear, Sam just can't buy it. But Joe's player may have wanted Fear to go shopping on the Violence AH. It seems odd that Joe would have to go sell to villains to buy cool stuff from their AH.

This seems like ti would segregate role players, and would have only an odd effect of distorted markets as those who care less about RP and more about gameplay visit the markets to get different currencies.

It's still an interesting idea, but I'm having conceptual trouble with how it would "look" and how what it theoretically represents would actually be reflected in actual gameplay.

I think "price caps" are, generally, a bad idea. If people are willing to beggar themselves from "maximum wallet" to nothing for one item, that's what the item is worth (actually, it's probably LESS than that item is worth). This does mean, however, that there are one or more problems; I suspect the biggest one in CoH was simply inflation, which we've discussed at length in this thread.

Now, if we go with a variable wallet size based on increasingly expensive-to-"rent" base and other items, this could be a problem for some players and not one for others. But as long as it costs more and more to increase your wallet size, this will, itself, serve to combat inflation by sinking currency from the wealthiest individuals directly.

That said, perhaps if we do go for multiple AHs with differing rules, some might have price caps...it's a way to experiment with what works and what doesn't, at the very least.

jag40 wrote:

And what I mean by catering to market people. Is by having that be the only source and "easy" way to get items, whether players put the itemes on there or not, while outside the market there is no other "easy" way to buy items. Sure everything maybe cannot be straight down the middle equal, but there should be some sort of attempt.
And ever thought why the "normal" playstyle is what get items on the market? Of course thaty is how itmes get on the market because there is no other equal way to sell or buy items.

I'm afraid I don't follow you, here. The market is not "catered to" by having items drop exclusively from missions/defeating enemies.

Vendors DID buy stuff off of you for INF in CoH. Just often not as much as you could sell it for on the AH.

The market just gave you a SECOND choice of where to go to get an item. You could go out and play the "old fashioned way," or you could go to the market and buy it from somebody who HAD played "the old fashioned way" to get it and decided to sell it to you.

What it [i]seems[/i] you're suggesting is that everything that can drop in a mission, etc., should also be sold at a fixed price at a vendor. This actively caters AGAINST the "normal" play style: why go seek these rare items when you can just street sweep until you can afford it at the vendor? (And before you say that you can just street sweep to afford it at the AH, remember that you're complaining that the prices at the AH are "too high." So all your gripes about that apply to the vendors' wares, unless they're grossly under-priced.)

jag40 wrote:

Now that point would be extremely valid and good abservation if there were other ways, real competetion. But when there isn't, like the AC example. There is no other choice and thus one can raise prices to what ever they want to without anything to compare it to. Which is it's hard to say if the price was "fair" or actually not price gouging because people bought it.

There is no competition because nobody else did it, or because too few others did it. If the one person hadn't done it, there wouldn't BE the A/Cs for people to buy at ANY price. It [i]is[/i] "fair" because people bought it. The supply was extremely limited.

Even if 10 other people had A/C units to sell, the sheer demand was much higher than their supply could meet at anything below the prices they were charging. If anything, seeing the killing Mr. A/C was making, others might copy him in hopes of making a similar amount...and thus increase the supply to the beleaguered region.

jag40 wrote:

When what kind of hinders that logic is that there was no other choice. If there was other ways to get AC outside the high price people, then would those people buy the high priced AC? Maybe, maybe not, but cant say because what other choice.

If there are "non-high-priced" ways to get them, of COURSE people will buy them from those sources first. A thing's value is both what somebody will pay for it and what somebody will sell it for.

But you know what happens when somebody else offers them cheaper? Either he sells out and there's still loads of demand (which his competitors take advantage of to sell their high-priced wares), or he undercuts his competition and they have to lower their prices or be stuck with unsold inventory.

Why didn't anybody provide cheaper ones? They didn't want to spend the time and money on building the inventory and bringing it in. It was not worth what he was selling those for to them to do that labor and make that investment. He WAS the lowest-price source because HE was the one who was willing to do it for that amount. If others just hadn't thought of it, they probably would have moved in to compete when they saw it working...if he had been allowed to do it.

jag40 wrote:

But ok so he runs out. In game, though a vendor with items can solve that running out problem. Granted one may not be able to sell on the market if they buy it from a vendor.

At which point you destroy the entire concept behind "rare" items. This fundamentally breaks the entire "item drop" aspect of game play.

The AH has competition internally between everybody selling the items, and externally with the fact that you can go out and win the drop yourself if you play long enough and grind for it. The expense and difficulty of getting certain things from the AH is a direct result of the rarity of the item dropping. Any vendor's fixed price would be hard-pressed to match exactly what the AH prices are. If it's too high, then it may as well not be there. If it's too low, then it contributes to the "I have nothing to spend my currency on" problem by keeping higher-wealth people from, well, having anything they can buy.

jag40 wrote:

Look, basically, having ONLY AH market as the only option is not the ONLY way. Supply is an issue then get a vendor where supply isn't an issue. Inflation, then make items sold from vendors not tradable on the AH. Those issues would be solved while supplying other players outside marketeers another option. That is why I said it catering to marketeers. It's like marketeers fun play is the only option that is feasible or allowed. That is text book catering to one set of players. Like I asked, what about the other players outside the market? You said the game did not and CoT will not revolve around playing or using the market. So then, if that is true then why not other equally effective options and why should AH be the only option? To me it looks like the fear of true competition and fear of revealing that many players only did market because there was no equal effective choice. Unlike real life, in game it's easier to change stuff.
The main point is with the catering thing, give the other group of players non-market people a choice and somewhere equal in quality to the market. Or else, yes it's catering to the marketer player base. It doesn't have to be well one side gets all the attention or no one do and every be miserable. That is not the definition of fair. Simply put as much effort that goes into pleasing and easing the game play of marketeers into the game play and ease of game play into the other player groups. Because is it fair other player groups get charged the same box and subscription fee, but marketer people get the good stuff and other players get nothing simply because they no enjoy the market thing as much?
Why do people use the market? Is it because that many people find it fun and enjoyable? Maybe. Or maybe it's simply because it's the only option.

So far, the only suggestion I'm seeing out of this is "have vendors also sell stuff."

That really isn't an option. It doesn't "cater to" non-marketeers to do that; it devalues the play style that is the most "normal" to an MMO: that of the guy who goes out and adventures and does missions to get the stuff he wants.

There will, I hope, be items that are available from crafting, from drops, AND from vendors. There will also, I hope, be items that are exclusively available from drops (even drops from specific monsters or missions), and other items exclusively available from crafting. I don't know if there will be vendor-exclusive items; if our faction system does tie strongly to vendor access, there might be vendors who only sell to those in good with their faction or something.

Note that all three of these sources are valid places to get things to put on the AH. Vendors are perhaps a poor choice for most, since anybody can go and buy the stuff for the same price you did, but it's an option. Maybe you can sell it at less of a loss than you'd take selling it back to a vendor.

This isn't catering to the AH. This is simply allowing players a place to interact and trade for what they want.

The perception that these things "cater" to the AH ignores the source of the items. In order to "solve" the problem described, it would require fundamentally breaking the entire economy of the game.

jag40 wrote:

The cost money to play thing is cool idea, if it's a effective way to get drops without having to play the market if one chooses to.
Also so is that different auction house thing, but again still catering to people who is interested in the market in the first place. Again, remember the players that do not simply want to deal with being a marketer to get by in the game without the option being either play the market or in that idea's case, play the markets or else face a bunch of hurdles and traps and slogging. That do not seem like a fair choice and is catering to one part of the player base without thinking about the other parts of the player base.

See, if they don't want to play the market, and they don't want to play the game itself, why are they here? What do they want?

Should they simply be able to walk in, drop $1000, and buy a max-level character with all the gear they want?

I sound facetious here, but I'm genuinely not sure where you draw the line. You describe the process of getting things through any means other than "from a vendor" or "from the AH" as "a bunch of hurdles and traps and slogging." The AH exists (in part) to let those who enjoy one aspect of the game play for that aspect, and sell the surplus results of their focus on one area, and use the proceeds from those sales to purchase the stuff they need to enjoy the game without having to play the parts they don't like.

If every aspect of the game is a hurdle, trap, slog, or the AH, and you don't like any of those four things...maybe you should find another game to play.

Note: I am not trying to be snobbish or dismissive, here. I am just wondering...what about the game DO you enjoy? This isn't "City of Vendors." It's "City of Titans." It's a game about being super-powered and using those powers to do cool stuff. If you view that primary gameplay focus as a hurdle, trap, or slog, then what do you want to be doing?

The AH is "catered to" only peripherally by the things you say cater to it. Everything you seem to suggest is catering to it is more directly catering to players of a different stripe, who would be harmed by its destruction in the crusade to not "cater to" marketeers.

I dunno. Maybe I'm repeating myself. But I get feeling that one of us is missing something fundamental, here.

Segev wrote:

This is...interesting...though I see a flavor-problem:
Let's say the "violence" currency is "Fear." Joe Heroic is as negative as he can get on the "violence" rating, because he exerts force only in proportion to and as absolutly necessary against various threats. He finds, in the course of his Heroism, a super-rare "Flight Gel" that increases flying speed.
Joe Heroic doesn't fly, so he puts it up on the AH. Sam Sinistrous, perpetrator of left-hand themed crimes, is extremely violent, and thus accumulates lots of "Fear" when he does his missions. He goes to the AH and sees this stuff that will make his Far-Left Flyer even faster, and decides to buy it.
Now, Joe Heroic has Fear to spend. This doesn't make a lot of sense.

Correct, that doesn't make a lot of sense ... assuming that Joe Heroic listed this item on the Violence AH and specifying he wanted to be paid in "Fear" rather than in "Calm" (like a "hero" ought to be paid). In that case, it's Joe Heroic's fault for going to the wrong market and listing his price for the item in the wrong currency (ie. a currency he isn't going to have much use for).

My point is that this item wouldn't necessarily have to be sold on ONLY the Violence exchange, and Joe Heroic didn't necessarily have to set his selling price for it to be in a currency he has little use for. Instead, he could have listed the item on a different exchange and for a different currency ... one that Joe Heroic could have found useful, rather than useless (to him personally). Sam Sinistrous therefore could have paid in "Fear" or in any of the other 4 currencies for the item if it had been listed on the other exchanges.

Segev wrote:

Or, if Joe didn't put it up for sale for Fear, Sam just can't buy it. But Joe's player may have wanted Fear to go shopping on the Violence AH. It seems odd that Joe would have to go sell to villains to buy cool stuff from their AH.

If Sam Sinistrous doesn't buy Joe Heroic's item, then someone else will (assuming it's priced "reasonably" to begin with), since there are more than two Players in the game world. As for the point of the Hero going to the Villains market to buy and sell stuff from Villains ... how is doing that *NOT* appropriate, when you've got Heroes AND Villains all living in the same city, playing on the same maps? City of Heroes segregated the zones by alignments, due to a limitation in the fundamentals of the game engine, with the co-op zones being a LATE development.

Or to put it another way, I'd rather not have just ONE vendor serving the ENTIRE CITY because all other vendors are [url=http://paragonwiki.com/w/images//thumb/9/91/Cooke%27s_Electronics.jpg/800px-Cooke%27s_Electronics.jpg]functionally redundant[/url] due to the fact that the city is just one big zone.

[img]http://paragonwiki.com/w/images//thumb/9/91/Cooke%27s_Electronics.jpg/800px-Cooke%27s_Electronics.jpg[/img]

Segev wrote:

This seems like ti would segregate role players, and would have only an odd effect of distorted markets as those who care less about RP and more about gameplay visit the markets to get different currencies.
It's still an interesting idea, but I'm having conceptual trouble with how it would "look" and how what it theoretically represents would actually be reflected in actual gameplay.

The "advantage" that I can think of is that while it might be possible to manipulate 1 or possibly even 2 markets to personal advantage for short term exploits, I'm thinking it would be harder to do so for 3. This brings in the three-legged stool structural arrangement in which transfers from "non-aligned" markets can be used to counter market manipulations in an exchange that is under attack. It's basically a way to NOT put all your eggs into one basket ... while still allowing the eggs to be moved around between the baskets, making them more resilient and resistant to both supply AND demand shocks. It's a structural decision that relies on the notion that Diversity Is Strength and is one that would reward altoholics who accumulate a [i]variety of currencies[/i] rather than just a single kind. That strength in diversity then encourages Players to play more than "just Heroes" or "just Villains" ... even if their individual characters are as polar optimized towards the heroic and villainous ends of the spectrum as possible.

The way it would "look" in actual gameplay could be something as simple as dividing the city up into areas of influence. For purposes of brute force simplicity of illustration:
[list][*]High Law neighborhoods tend to be towards the north end of town, where police protection is strongest.
[*]Low Law neighborhoods tend to be towards the south end of town, where lawlessness tends to be the norm.
[*]High Violence neighborhoods with gang warfare in the streets tend to be on west side of the city.
[*]Low Violence neighborhoods with peaceful streets tend to be on the east side of the city.
[*]High Integrity locations tend to be found at street level, among the "decent folk" in the mom & pop storefronts.
[*]Low Integrity locations tend to be found at high altitudes in the penthouses and skyscrapers of the city ... or underground in "secret" lairs.[/list]
Basically, a 3D cubic formulation of ye ancient Lawful Good to Chaotic Evil going on.

So if you wanted to go to a Low Law, High Violence, High Integrity "place" in the city, you'd want to go to the southwest corner of town at street level. You'd probably find a cozy little "italian" restaurant there run by an old Sicilian family who has ... connections. Whether those connections mean an NPC vendor or an auction house ... that's up to the Content Team deciding what they want to put there.

If you wanted to go to the offices of a Corporate Raider, you'd want High Law, Low Violence and Low Integrity. That would mean going to a northeastern neighborhood and taking a ride up in an elevator to the top floors.

Basically, you could use this sort of thing as a sort of ... guideline ... for what types of NPC vendors and markets ought to be placed where ... and that's assuming you don't combine the vendors and the markets together, such that you can either "sell" to the NPC right there as a vendor, or "list" your item(s) on an exchange run by the same NPC, or "buy" item(s) off an exchange run by that same NPC. So ideally you'd have 27 different exchanges and NPC vendors/markets ... but just like an unsolved Sudoku puzzle, there's no need to have "all" of them so long as the six currencies get covered somehow. So ... minimum 2 exchanges, with the option for there to be up to 27(!), and the expectation that there will probably only be up to 6 at game launch if using this system.

Hope that's helpful.

I say we basically use the same formula CoH used in regards to influence/infamy, drops, tickets, etc. and just give more "Last transactions" spots for the AH. This is beginning to sound WAY too complicated and the best advice I've ever been given is, "Keep it simple, stupid."

i don't know how popular this idea would be. It does assume we have fairly sophisticated data mining on the AH. We could adjust drop rates on the items that are getting out of whack. Not that I am saying how to judge that, except maybe to look at the relative sale values of things in the AH. But if we can respond to a (perceived) shortage by increasing the supply...

Just my $0.02.

Felix

jag40 wrote:

No, I never said that everything nor implying everything besides the vendor idea is catering to the marketeers. So that is not my logic. You got it wrong and or simply misunderstanding. And you keep overlooking, think I said it about three times now and a few times in the pats vendor post.

Okay, let me then try to explain where I see your logic being "anything not sold from a vendor is catering to the market." And I do apologize for having trouble understanding you; I have a very hard time parsing your sentences for some reason.

Items are created in one of three ways:

1) Mission/combat drops
2) Bought at vendors
3) Crafted by players

Since the market is where players take stuff they acquire from one of these methods, but don't want, and since the market is NOT where things are created, I cannot fathom how we are "catering to the market" by these methods except that this is where stuff comes from. You've repeatedly talked about how the market is "the only" place to get stuff, which makes it a monopoly. But you overlook that the market isn't monolithic. Every person on it is competing with everybody else who wants to buy or sell the same item.

But, okay. Let me try to take you point by point and see if I can understand where you're coming from.

jag40 wrote:

My idea entails items being sold from the vendor not being tradable on the AH. Meaning there is no buying from the vendor and running back to the AH market with it.

I don't see what this would accomplish.

Are you suggesting [i]everything[/i] in the game should be buyable from a vendor, but the "trade-off" is that they can't sell it on the market?

If so, this devalues methods 1 and 3 of creating items - why go out and adventure if you can just street sweep until you have the currency to buy from the vendor?

Possible answer: "Because it's so expensive at the vendor. Besides, isn't that how the market makes things, anyway?"

The counter to that is that inflation means that the vendor's price will eventually be miniscule compared to the player-driven price based on the legitimate rarity of the item. Vendors become the cheapest and easiest place to get them. "Well, change vendor prices!" I hear somebody suggest. But that doesn't work, either: either we are accused of monkeying around for no reason, or we're tying it to the market in order to find the "true" price for it. At best, that's going to effectively "cater to the marketeers," as far as I can tell. At worst, it will be easily manipulated so marketeers would control the vendor prices.

Assuming we don't monkey with vendor prices under this model, the market gets stifled when its prices exceed those of vendors. It puts a price control on the market value, and the items just become not worth the effort to hunt at all. Just grind for the currency. Even if you can't sell vendor items on the market, it doesn't change that you can get the same thing at a vendor cheaper than on the market.

It kills options, rather than opening them up.

jag40 wrote:

And if I didn't say anything that means I'm not saying anything. Thus your statement of me saying anything by my logic is catering to the marketeers is not. Because if you want to go that route, it could be said that any other player besides marketeers you don't give a crap about and are not part of the equation and thus should not bother playing the game at all as they are not considered part of the COX community. So how about we do not delve in the it's either black or white statements or rather you think this so you must think this about everything logic.

I'm sorry, but I have to try to read between the lines to even begin to parse what you're saying, because I'm either utterly misparsing your comments, or you seem to be starting from an assumption that the market creates things ex nihilo.

There is no way in which the market can be focused on and tell other players to screw off. The market is [i]not a complete game[/i] by itself. It is utterly, completely dependent on people who play the main MMO-style game and get drops, and on crafters. Without them, there [i]is[/i] no market.

jag40 wrote:

I'm trying to figure out the shades of gray here. I'm talking about equality. Maybe the point isn't getting through and it's keep being missed. Probably my fault on that.

"Equality," like "fairness," is a funny word. People often use it to mean, "I deserve special treatment because I am not getting equal results to what I perceive others getting."

Equality of outcomes can never be guaranteed, otherwise we'd have the guy who just logged in once in the last year for 20 min. have the same results as the guy who's played for 10 hours a week every week for the last year have the same results as the guy who plays 20 hours every weekend except holidays. And surely you can see how that's not feasible.

jag40 wrote:

So lets try to approach it this way.
Lets start by seeing what the market is.

Okay.

jag40 wrote:

It's a place one could go to buy items, placed there by other players, as an option instead of "playing part of the game they do not like", also a way to amass a great amount of in-game currency way faster than farming if, as quoted by many market players "if one learned how to play it." Thus anything in the game that can be dropped, from playing the game can go on the market and sold for influence

With you so far...

jag40 wrote:

IN ONE LOCATION, by bidding usually. Ease of access, just about anyone can access it, look up the items for sale, and buy it, from DOs to the very rare items. And as you also said it's a tool for player interaction. Now feel free t add stuff about the market I missed.

"In one location" seems, if I'm predicting and post-parsing your later comments about lack-of-competition right, to mean "with no competition," to you.

I disagree. "The market" is not this monolithic entity that has all power and control for itself with a unified goal and plan to screw everybody else. "The market" is a collection of many individual players, all competing with each other for items or to sell items. There is absolutely competition here.

jag40 wrote:

Now, what other tool, dev created, is available that do that too or in some other equal manner that is available to the other players that may not enjoy the market game or without having it tied to the market. Nothing.

Short of creating a "pay to win" part of the c-store, I don't see what we could do, here.

The point of having the market serve this purpose is to not devalue any part of the game. Instead, if you don't like an aspect of the game but want the goods therefrom, you can specialize in the parts you like and take the surplus to the market to sell to those who don't like the parts you do. They, meanwhile, bring the surplus from their "over-focus" on the parts of the game they like and sell them to you at the market, enabling you to get the stuff without having to play that part of the game.

It is critical that these things be balanced out by the "work" that goes in to creating them. A "vendor" or "c-store" option to just buy those things would be ludicrously hard to balance currency/Stars-vs-real-value-of-goods. It is critical to building a sense of community that all these things that are designed for a player to play every part of should still require [i]player activity[/i] to generate. Not merely "player money" (whether generated by spending real money or generated by generic currency-earning activities).

This means that the transfer mechanism of items that are not created by the player who ultimately uses them engaging in the play style that generate them MUST transfer them from a player who DOES engage in that play style. We can't simply say, "oh, that play style isn't necessary for anybody to do, so screw those who do it because they aren't needed by anybody else."

At best, doing so would segregate the game world into a bunch of disparate, separate mini-games that don't mean anything.

jag40 wrote:

Alright. That is what I'm trying to figure out. How to give the other players a tool, dev created, also to buy items, where everything in the game can be sold and bought? There have been many ideas, but you keep shooting them down any thing that isn't tied to the market.

I'm shooting down anything that says "nobody actually has to play this part of the game for you to be able to ignore that part of the game." Any solution that says that severs the balance of the game's interactivity. It destroys the "massively multiplayer" part of "MMORPG." And it can seriously damage the "RP" and "G" parts, as well, because the simulated-by-NPC behavior will never be as robust and interesting as the actual RP choices and gaming decisions made by real people.

jag40 wrote:

Vendors, a game store where one could convert in game currency to buy items they need.

Devalues doing anything but grinding for currency, AND kills the market, thus robbing people of the ability to choose to play on it at all.

jag40 wrote:

Ability to buy items with cash.

Pay to win of the worst sort.

jag40 wrote:

Increase of drop rates with the trade off being non-tradable on the market.

"Wait, so this item is already rare to the point that I can't find it, but if my buddy finds an extra one, now he can't give it to me?" Players won't see this as "increased drop rate in exchange for not being able to trade it," they'll see it as "it's even RARER to find ones that you can trade."

jag40 wrote:

guaranteed rewards for completing certain things and etc.

I've already suggested this sort of thing. Specifically, I want to use the vendors as quest-givers: when they run out of inventory on an item their CI algorithm says they want due to its profitability, or their heuristics say they want due to it being one of their specialty items, they start handing out Missions to players that reward with that item AND increase the vendor's supply thereof.

jag40 wrote:

Price cap on how much items can be sold,

I have, indeed, shot this idea down. Multiple times. It is a terrible idea as a blanket thing. Maybe if we have multiple AHs, it could be something one or more of them do, though.

jag40 wrote:

More control on supply and demand, adjusting rewards to keep up with inflation that the AH market creates.

The AH/market never creates inflation. Thinking that it does is actually what caused a lot of games to have had truly bad results from their efforts to combat inflation's effects. Inflation is the result of the supply of currency increasing disproportionately with the supply of "goods" and services.

The only way to combat inflation is through greater currency sinks. I'm hoping some of our vendors-play-the-market CI algorithm will enable us to have vendors siphon up marketplace currency. When NPC vendors control it, we can quietly delete it from the system without anybody complaining. The other thing I hope to do has been mentioned a bit in this thread: create many more places people can have ongoing sinking of their in-game currency.

jag40 wrote:

All shot down and or given a spin that it must be tied to the AH market by you.

Having it "shot down" doesn't mean I'm not listening. It means I see problems with it. Problems you've not addressed.

I've explained why the market is so crucial, and why it needs to not be excluded nor harmed. But I'll try again: The market is where we actually see the true value of items and currency in the game. Any medium of player-to-player exchange will, ultimately, be lumped in as "the market," even if we have multiple AHs, allow players to open their own vendor stalls, and create ways for players to trade "off the books" of any other medium of exchange (such as "mailing" gifts to each other). This is all "the market."

And we can't have it excluded without destroying the "massive multiplayer" aspect of the game and risking devaluing parts of the game that ARE excluded from it - whether by being forbidden from entering it or from having the goods and services those parts of the game generate be replaced by non-player-controlled sources.

jag40 wrote:

So what are you ideas, that have nothing to do with the AH market not tied to it, not depended on it or anything, that is equally as efficient and effective for the other type of players?

Limited to none, given that the market is just players interacting with each other to trade goods.

Though there is at least one answer: Somebody who plays every aspect of the game to get everything they want without going to the market...can. They absolutely can. They will have to play the game to get the drops they want. They will have to go to the missions and areas that have what they want, whether this is "the part of the game they like" or not. They will have to craft, and hunt for craftable bits, and build their base to be able to craft (or pay out the nose for access to craft stations of the sort the need).

But a player who truly exploits everything about the game [i]except[/i] the market need never go to it. As can players who are content without things produced by certain aspects of the game, though what they're content without may limit their enjoyment of the parts of the game they DO like, depending.

jag40 wrote:

I mean the other players are deserving of equal treatment as the marketeers, right? Marketeers have the market. Now how about something for the others?

Here is your mistake. You seem to think the market is the central part of the game, and there have to be alternatives. What you're missing is that [i]the market is the alternative to other parts of the game[/i]. It IS the second choice. It IS the option to avoid something else you don't like.

Every single thing you can get on the market, you can get somewhere else. If you don't like the market, go do that other activity. Often, there will be several choices of activity, as something might be craftable AND drop from certain missions, or a vendor might sell it or give out a mission if he is out of stock. Going to the market is what you do if you don't like any of the other means of getting what you want, or if you really do like the market.

It is NOT the first and primary source of ANYTHING.

Even Stars are something you can go to the market to buy...but you can get them from buying them directly with real money, or you can even participate in sponsored activities that give small amounts as rewards (assuming we manage to pull that aspect of things off).

jag40 wrote:

Because if other players are not deserving of equal treatment and access to equal stuff, dev made, as the marketer people, then there might be a reason for it, and wouldn't mind a reason.

The reason is that there already are "dev-made" "equal" ways to get stuff.

The difficulty of getting something amounts to part of its scarcity. If it's hard to get, fewer will succeed in it. If it's a rarer drop, it will take more tries to get it. All of this is possibly cited as part of the reason to skip the effort and go buy it on the market. But the converse of this is that these items are more expensive on the market because they're harder to come by, and people want to skip the effort more, so they'll offer more currency or Stars for it, which raises its price.

But everything on the market? It was gotten by somebody who went out and did the gameplay activities needed to create it. So the "equal" way of getting that stuff is to go out and do that gameplay activity. The price on the market is reflective of what you and the person selling it can agree the effort they put into acquiring it is worth. It [i]is[/i] the way to equalize the efforts you put in to earning your currency compared to the efforts he put in to earning the item. If you want an "equal" way that isn't part of the market, go play that part of the game and get it for yourself.

jag40 wrote:

Because while you are focused on only the vendor idea, out of all that I have suggested through the post (odd), you're missing the bigger picture about equality the meaning of creating a game for the community by the community. That community is not only marketer people.

The community is everybody who plays the game. The market is a key point of interaction, and the place where they can trade their various efforts with each other so they can focus on the parts of the game they like.

If the market - the alternative to doing other parts of the game - is so repugnant, they can go and do those other parts of the game. That is actually the "first" method of getting items. The market is secondary.

jag40 wrote:

There are more than that out there. And the AH market is not some flawless infallible mechanism of trade and economy. It has many flaws, many flaws you attribute to other ideas, the AH market had them created them and in some cases had them worse than some of the ideas you dismiss.

Oh, nobody's denying that the AH as CoH implemented it has flaws. One thing I have taken away here is that we should seroiusly consider mechanisms other than "blind auction" and should have much longer histories on item prices.

jag40 wrote:

So I'm trying to figure out how to cater to as many as possible, not only to marketeers, and no not everything done for marketeers is overly catering to them. Although you never did explain who that stuff for the market and about the market have been offered in an equally manner to non market people.

I am truly not sure what you're saying here, but my best guess is that you're asking me to explain how people who don't play the market can have "equal access" to things that are on the market.

The answer is one I've given earlier in this post, at the least, but I'll repeat it here for you: Because everything on the market is created by some other aspect of gameplay (crafting, mission-performance, foe-defeating, etc.), anybody can get anything without touching the market. They just have to go and play those other parts of the game. The market is there so they don't have to if they don't want to. But they still have to give something that those who did it feel is worth their efforts. That's the nature of player-to-player trade.

If they really, really don't want anything to do with it and only want stuff from the market but find the market too expensive, they can always try buying Stars and using those, either to buy enough in-game currency from those who have it, or to directly buy the goods from other players. I am not saying you should or have to pay to win, but it IS an option, and critically, it's an option that, if taken, rewards people who have played to win at least as much as it does the payer.

jag40 wrote:

But maybe later. While maybe helping to bring in more income and keeping the economy in check from super inflation. And in real life economic, super and hyper inflation is usually not a good sign of healthy economy and should not be one to aim to recreate if one is trying to emulate a real life healthy economy.

No, it's a sign that far, far too much currency is being generated. Usually it's done by a government to try to hide that they're bankrupt. In the case of MMOs, it happens because in-game currency is simply generated when players do activities that win "currency" as a drop. (i.e. almost anything traditional to MMOs)

The solution to this is currency sinks. We need a lot of them.

jag40 wrote:

So, I made many suggestions, that do not involve the AH market. Each may have their ups and downs, and whether you believe it or not, so did the AH market. Yet if the market is allowed but the others are not allowed even though they may have issues, but the market get a free pas, then that IS catering to marketeers. Again, that doesn't mean I'm saying, EVERYTHING cater to marketeers.

Nobody said the market gets a free pass. We're examining it closely in this very thread, trying to identify the problems various implementations have had in various games so we can design a more robust one.

jag40 wrote:

Or if marketeers are not being catered to, and it's all equal and fair, then maybe there is a mechanism, that have the same quality of the market and ease, you are building for the others, non market people, that is not tied to the market in one way or another that you wish to share?

Did so several times in this post already. Nutshell: Go play the game and get the stuff you want from the same place those who put it on the market got it.

If we come up with other methods, cool, but they have to not devalue that FIRST option of playing the game for the stuff. The market, recall, is a SECOND option.

I'm gonna be honest here and just say that I did not even attempt to read most of the last few posts, because simply they were TOO HUGE and used a lot of really big words. Hurts Hulk's head. Seriously I think some of these ideas are way too complex and convoluted. Let's just dial it back a bit and keep it simple. That's one of the things that CoH really did right. Made things simple. I like simple. Simple is good. Simple is wise. Let's stick with simple. I don't want to have to go back to college and re-take Calculus, Business 101, Economics, and Statistics to figure out how to play this game. Seriously.

The way store purchases were moderated in COX was locking them to account. I could see a similar defense placed on certain star purchases serving in COT; restricting at least some of the purchases from entry to the market. That would keep certain classes of rare drops pegged to Standard Play.

Resplendent Terminus wrote:

The way store purchases were moderated in COX was locking them to account. I could see a similar defense placed on certain star purchases serving in COT; restricting at least some of the purchases from entry to the market. That would keep certain classes of rare drops pegged to Standard Play.

If I have my druthers, there won't be "rare items" that you can obtain in play which can be bought at the c-store. If you are using Stars to buy such "rare items," you're doing it on the market, and those Stars are going to a player who obtained said "rare items" before he could put them up for sale. Whether he got the drops, crafted them, or was given them as a gift, the use of Stars did not [i]create[/i] the item in the same way that buying the item at the c-store would. And we're not allowing that to happen precisely so that c-store purchases don't distort the rarity of in-game-useful (as opposed to cosmetic or QoL) items. That is, items which effect game mechanics, such as CoH's enhancements.

Yeah, my general design paradigm is that, if it's something you use to make your character more effective in a game-mechanical sense, it should be earned in play and not bought in the c-store. If it's something related to customization, vanity, or (possibly, in an exception to the game mechanics thing) certain classifications, it should be in the c-store. Quality-of-Life items are a bit harder to quantify as c-store or in-game, and would likely really depend on whether it's something 4th-wall-breaking or not. It doesn't make much sense, for instance, for extra character slots to be "purchased" in game.

However. My goal is that, if you wish to, you can still spend real money to buy Stars, the c-store currency, and then go spend those Stars for those in-game useful items (e.g. "stashes of purples"). You just can't do so in the c-store. You take those Stars and go buy them in the market from players who are selling them. Or you buy in-game currency in the market, and use THAT to do so.

Segev wrote:

Yeah, my general design paradigm is that, if it's something you use to make your character more effective in a game-mechanical sense, it should be earned in play and not bought in the c-store. If it's something related to customization, vanity, or (possibly, in an exception to the game mechanics thing) certain classifications, it should be in the c-store. Quality-of-Life items are a bit harder to quantify as c-store or in-game, and would likely really depend on whether it's something 4th-wall-breaking or not. It doesn't make much sense, for instance, for extra character slots to be "purchased" in game.
However. My goal is that, if you wish to, you can still spend real money to buy Stars, the c-store currency, and then go spend those Stars for those in-game useful items (e.g. "stashes of purples"). You just can't do so in the c-store. You take those Stars and go buy them in the market from players who are selling them. Or you buy in-game currency in the market, and use THAT to do so.

Sounds like an excellent plan. And, as you say, that usage of Stars ensures that [I]someone[/I] has earned everything bought that way, so it's not flat out pay to win -- more like when you xfer inf from one of your characters to another.

The problem I see with some items is :
It costs a neglible amount to list them but the listing sets an expectation.
The listing is, more often than not in my mind, not a real sale but a way to RMT by buying an item to hide the origin of that money
Why else is there a million star item on the market when I've got 100 stars or the equivalent across all my toons.

I'd almost be tempted to not have "those purple rares" be in-game at the start.
NOTHING kills a game for me more than day / week 1 ultra rare items. Effectively $100. Available now along with the gold seller to let you buy it.
As there is (let's face it) no bloody point whatsoever in this thing in week 1.. why not leave it for the expansion?

Not getting you with the last bit tho.
RMT traders are pretty trustworthy. Millions of RMT trades into games with currency exchanges show that players will happily choose them over the developers. With pre-paid credit cards now there's not even really any risk. So if egpal offers me either 1 million gold or 100 stars for 1/10th of what the game will offer me, why aren't I using RMT?

I'll add.. I'm not interested in in-game currency. Except that it gets me that rare purple.
You could put that rare purple in the shop for $1.99 and I'd buy it there.
I'd be tempted to have it in the shop and not the game.. you want it, you pay cash for it. Clearly that will offend a bunch of people but I can live with that.

Well, part of the reason RMT rates for in-game currency will get more currency-per-dollar is in-game inflation. When you have a currency that is spontaneously generated for certain farmable activities, you'll see that currency generate faster than it's destroyed (by spending it on vendors and other things that remove it from circulation permanently).

This would be true of Stars-to-currency rates, as well, I would expect.

I suppose if you really are trying to make a real-world living at it, it would be more incentive to actively farm for currency and then sell for less than anybody who is "merely" playing for Stars would be willing to sell. But still, something seems off to me, here.

Is it simply a matter of having too few people who are not selling for real dollars who offer large chunks of in-game change?

CoH got round the 4BN shinies (I sold 4 of the PvP 3% defs for that) with enhancement converters. That reduced all the purples and PvP IOs to much more reasonable prices. I think it's quite important to design lots of desirable shinies (or methods for converting), while limiting how many any one character can use so that there isn't one "must have 5" item for all builds. The value of inf to RMTs seemed to drop after that.

I've seen a few calls for "play long enough and you get it", especially in reference to lockbox type drops. That rare (may not be worth anything.. it's just rare) doodah will fall after 20 lockboxes, not just 5/100.

I don't see that really as viable. If you choose to spend money on keys then that's who you are / what you do. Just like a PvPer PvP's. It's meant to be random.
Sure you disappoint a bunch of peoplebut that is what it is.

I've always felt that earning that rare drop (farming the ITF, farming LRSF.. whatever it is..) makes it worthwhile.
HAVING SAID THAT.. if it's also on the store.. I do not have a problem with that.

I won't say it killed CoX, but it is something I would like to avoid. (I won't make any comments at this time on what did kill CoX; I think that's not a useful conversation to have here or now.) I think more good comes of having that "purple rare" be won in-game and sold on the AH for whatever it goes for there, in Stars or in currency.

Now, why would you be tempted to buy it if it was available as a generated-when-you-pay-for-it-in-the-shop item, but not if it was available on the market as something for which another player is charging Stars? Or, if it's from a player or retail vendor (who somehow got it from the market or other players) selling it for in-game currency, why would you be less tempted to buy in-game currency with Stars in order to get it than you would be to buy it with Stars from the c-store?

GH wrote:

Why not?
Every game I've played I've spent money on the developer provided store.
I believe (rightly or wrongly) it's supporting the game. Sometimes it's a cash call, sometimes that limited offer you just have to have or a discounted price that just makes sense. Sometimes it's just picking what to choose your stipend on and topping up with real cash if you're short.
I'm not suspicious of that store.

Okay, I can sort-of see it up to this point.

I'm not trying to argue with you here, but this next part seems to be rooted in some posstible misconceptions. I invite you to correct me if my reply seems not to address what you were really saying, however.

GH wrote:

So I've bought a bunch of stars or got them from a stipend or something. I can spend those on the store. I can also give them to a player.
Why would I? They represent real cash and I don't give that away either.

Okay, still with you, sort-of, except that you are getting something for your "real cash" value in Stars: you're getting whatever item he put up for sale on the market. Perhaps you would never buy from the c-store an item that is a "pay 2 win" item, perhaps you would. But this mechanism is designed for the "pay 2 win" crowd to be able to do so, without flooding the game with c-store generated stuff that is hard to earn in-game.

GH wrote:

[Spending Stars on things other players put on the market is] not going to support the game (pay the developers)

Here, I have to disagree with you.

You've [i]already[/i] paid the developers by the time you have those Stars. You've paid real money for them, and MWM now has that money. We're grateful for your business! If you want to spend them in the c-store, you may do so and with our thanks. But if you choose to spend them on something another player is selling, it is no skin off our nose. We've already gotten the money for the Stars, no matter what you choose to do with them after that point.

GH wrote:

I strongly suspect it's making its way to the RMT coffers which I absolutely refuse to support.

Could you elaborate on how this would happen? Are you imagining that RMTs would collect Stars and then sell them for real money? Recall that MWM has already obtained real money for those Stars, when they were bought by you (or when you paid for your subscription and thus got the stipend). And anybody else who wants to spend real money to get Stars can simply buy them directly from MWM. So the RMTs would have to sell Stars for less than MWM is selling them, [i]and MWM still is making money off of this[/i] because the Stars didn't exist before somebody paid for them.

GH wrote:

I wouldn't buy in-game items from Ebay. Ebay (to me) is just a player who is choosing to sell outside the game.

That would be true. MWM wouldn't make much - if any - money off of such a sale, because nobody is buying Stars to facilitate the process. MWM makes its money from selling Stars, which can be used to buy things from the c-store. If you're buying AH items with Stars, those Stars were still paid for. If you're buying eBay items with real money, MWM doesn't see anything realized from that.

GH wrote:

I might save those stars even if I can buy a purple or three from the store with them. I'd choose to spend cash on those purples.

The mechanism for "spending cash" would be to buy Stars, then go to the c-store with those Stars.

GH wrote:

Why? Dunno.. who knows what those stars might end up being worth, saving them up may seem sensible for a future purchase when I'm poorer.

I am sure some fluctuation in value on the in-game market will occur in Stars. But unless MWM finds they need to change their prices for Stars for some reason, Stars will be worth specified dollar amounts in that MWM will sell Stars directly. As an example which may bear no resemblance to what the numbers might be when we actually finally start selling things, a Star might be worth roughly one cent, with the smallest package we sell being *500 for $5.00. (Possibly with "bonus Stars" if you buy larger packages, as incentives to bulk purchase.)

But the value of Stars in terms of real money will be a known quantity because MWM sells the Stars for specified prices.

GH wrote:

I don't have a problem spending my money on a game. But it goes to the game, not the players.

My point is that, the moment you buy Stars, your money has gone to the game. Whether you spend the Stars on the AH (giving them to other players) or in the c-store, MWM has already seen the profit from them.

Perhaps the miscommunication is that you think Stars are a currency dropped in-game? They aren't: they're the c-store currency. They're our equivalent of "Riot Points" or "Zen." And if you wind up with a Star from any source, [i]somebody[/i] - whether you or some other person who traded it to you (or who traded it to the guy who traded it to you, etc. etc.) - paid money for it, and MWM got that money.

Now, I'm not going to fault you for not wanting to spend Stars on the player-to-player market; my concern is that your reasons for doing so seem to be rooted in a misconception of what's going on, and I didn't want you to deny yourself part of the potential use of your contribution to supporting MWM.

To reitterate: no Star will ever be created unless somebody spends real money on it. Once you have purchased a Star, it doesn't matter whether you spend it in the c-store, on the market, or sit on it forever; MWM has gotten paid for it, and you have supported the game by buying it.

I've realised, of course, what I need to do which is stop reading and posting on the free to play forums as this is probably where I disagree with most of what is being said.
IMHO this should be a pretty empty place as we've all subbed and supported the kickstarter but instead it seems to be where everyone wants to figure out how little they can pay compared to how much they get in concessions, even get paid to play.

If this is the route we're going down as a game and this becomes the most desirable route then I'll see how much my sub gets devalued by the time we go live.
I must say I hate the f2p route that NW went down, I'd be so much happier there (and still play) if you could sub. I'm so much happier in CO with my sub.
I'm a bit iffy with GW2, I might have to go back see if I can still play it at some point or at least decide what I'm doing with account there. It has rl and in-game cash sat on it, be a shame to waste it.
I was hoping that CoT would be backing it's subscribers making the sub not only my personal choice but also everyone else's but if it's not, no point flogging a dead horse. Unless you could sub and get extra dead horses.

GH wrote:

I've realised, of course, what I need to do which is stop reading and posting on the free to play forums as this is probably where I disagree with most of what is being said.
IMHO this should be a pretty empty place as we've all subbed and supported the kickstarter but instead it seems to be where everyone wants to figure out how little they can pay compared to how much they get in concessions, even get paid to play.
If this is the route we're going down as a game and this becomes the most desirable route then I'll see how much my sub gets devalued by the time we go live.
I must say I hate the f2p route that NW went down, I'd be so much happier there (and still play) if you could sub. I'm so much happier in CO with my sub.
I'm a bit iffy with GW2, I might have to go back see if I can still play it at some point or at least decide what I'm doing with account there. It has rl and in-game cash sat on it, be a shame to waste it.
I was hoping that CoT would be backing it's subscribers making the sub not only my personal choice but also everyone else's but if it's not, no point flogging a dead horse. Unless you could sub and get extra dead horses.

I agree! I'd much rather just have it set up as 15/month sub, pay it, get regular updates. You know, like CoH was, which everyone likes to bring up as the spiritual successor, for almost it's own time.

Going cash shop right away seems to just say "We're not going to be good enough with just the sub model". At the same time, I'd hate to be sub only, and then never see an update because the game isn't making enough (which we have no idea what enough is that will warrant constant updates).