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That's one of the points behind Segev's idea of using NPC marketeers. They will help provide a means of smoothing out spikes (upward and downward) on the market.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
That depends on information, the same for selling. In the first few weeks of the market, I was buying level 50 common IO recipes, multiple stacks of 10 at a time for 1000 each and selling them to the shops at 100x that. That is where I made my first billions for IOing my characters.
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team and Forum Moderator[/color]
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While I know it won't thrill some people, one of the reasons I would like the vendors to have finite IGC and inventories and to play the market to help determine their buy and sell prices "retail"-side is to avoid having "AH-trash" sell for so little on the AH that an enterprising person can snap it up and take it to a vendor to manufacture more IGC by selling it at a fixed sell price.
Thinking about it a bit, vendors could also be the key for helping out the IGC-poor player who has a stupidly expensive drop he can't afford to list for its going rate. The vendors are playing the market; they may not offer what you could get on the market for the item, but they're probably in the right ballpark, and they won't charge you a listing fee.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
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That sounds good. How hard is it to write the NPC AI such that this would be possible though? I'm assuming the NPC vendors will have whatever bought/sold info at their fingertips that they need to make decisions, and I wounder if they'll have more of that than the players.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Ideally, vendors would not have MORE information than the players, but would probably unavoidably have better response times.
Personally, I would design it with some sort of neural network to make the decisions as to what to buy, what to sell, and for what prices. Inputs would be all the information regarding the vendor's own inventory, IGC reserves, and the market information to which every player has access. Outputs would be decisions of what offers to put up. Optimization function is likely to be an effort to maximize the derivative wrt time of the vendor's IGC reserve. How long the window on that derivative would need to be is a matter that would require experimentation.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
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The danger is that you can't have the NPC base their pricing schemes on whatever the character/account currently has on hand, because if you do then the incentive is on to create artificial scarcity of cash on that character so as to achieve the most favorable pricing. So you can't just look at whether a specific character is "rich" or "poor" and determine what sort of sympathy discount you're going to give them (if any).
Why?
Because as soon as sympathy discounting becomes a "thing" there are going to be alt account "middlemen" set up to act as Sympathy Discount Bait and the whole shell game begins anew.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
I love these style debates. Shows the human ingenuity and both sides.
I would think that if there is to be any discount pricing from NPCs to different players/characters it would be based on having completed missions for said NPC and probably nothing else.
The other thing that does concern me a little though is the fact that the NPCs might only trade in big-ticket items due to the desire to make more IGC. I'm not advocating that the NPCs should have to keep stock of worthless stuff around for no reason, and I'm CERTAINLY not sayign they ought to BUY said worthless stuff for anything above going rates, but the fact remains that it would be nice to be able to go get a widget for a recipe from an NPC. I'd hate for the game to be totally sold out of something just because none of the NPCs find it worth their time to trade in such.
Maybe it would be good to have an NPC somewhere, like in a used book store or swap meet that only trades in small-scale items, but tries to make IGC via high volume discounts on buys and sales at "retail" to players. Is that even possible?
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
One of the nice features of NPC vendors in CoX was they you could just dump unwanted, low-value stuff on them quickly. The fact that you got better prices from them than the open market was the exploitable part of that, but just having the ability to offload a bunch of random common/uncommon junk on a guy in like 10 seconds was way better than having to AH it all. The "fast food" transaction speed of that was desirable to have, even if the prices were not.
In order to facilitate that better, it would be nice to be able to flag specific items or stacks of items as "not for sale" so that when you do go to an NPC vendor to dump off unwanted junk, you don't end up accidentally selling the good stuff too. This way, you'd just mark your rare or whatever as "not for sale" then when you go to the NPC vendor you can click on "sell all items that are for sale now" and the NPC can offer you a price on the whole lot, which might be below what you'd get on the AH if you were willing to wait it out, but for the sake of quickness, you get less IGC right now without having to waste AH slots on minor junk.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
The other thing I wonder about NPC vendors playing the market is, will this basically be a bunch of different avatars in the City that all connect to the same basic buy/sell bot, or will there actually be NPCs competing against other NPCs in the AH market? I feel like it would probably end up being easier to do the former.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
The third option is to have NPC marketeers interested in different sections (items) on the market. Now each NPC marketeer is unique in its wants and not in competition with the other NPC marketeers. Kind of like going to a store where different people have their own specialty even if they all work in the same place.
[hr]I don't use a nerf bat, I have a magic crowbar!
- Combat Mechanic -
[color=#ff0000]Tech Team. [/color]
Alternatively, Tannim, is to "align" the NPC Marketeers with various NPC factions, such that if a PC wants to get the most favorable pricing they have to go to the NPC Vendor that most closely "aligns" with whatever the PC's reputation is.
A slightly more complex relationship than selling Tech Origin Enhancements at any of the Tech Vendor Shops. Same notion, just putting additional layers onto it.
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[i]Verbogeny is one of many pleasurettes afforded a creatific thinkerizer.[/i][/center]
I like the idea of having separate vendors for separate types of stuff. Not "a vendor for each salvage item" but maybe "a vendor for each level range" or if the items themselves aren't level-dependent (and I feel like it might be better if they're not) then you could have a vendor for "common" a vendor for "uncommon" and a vendor for "rare and very rare", etc.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Basing it on one character or another is needless complexity, makes the algorithm more difficult, and misses the point. The NPC sellers would be processes operating on their own completely disconnected from any particular login. In other words, completely server-side with no external player-client-facing interface.
While the NPC might be claimed to be the vendor you're interacting with, they'd really be separate entities. The vendor you see would just be a storefront, and anything you sold would be handed off to the independent process (and vice versa for purchases).
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
This would be completely realistic in the old CoH origin-based store setup. Tech vendors wouldn't bother with Science enhancements, for example.
[i]Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...[/i]
With the NPC idea. Why not have the AH have a manager. CoT devs set a price for all items, you give your item to the AH manager he sells it at the CoT determined rate and deposits the IGC in your account. It sells the item, no bloated price tags, keeps IGC low. Of course it does remove the player from the equation and the marketeers loose a mini game of sorts.
Example: Purple def IO is dev priced at 25K IGC max. AH manager will list at 25K for player unless player tells AH manager to post for less and the 25K is the max a player can request the manager to list it at. Also the devs could always do a IGC rate pass on items to adjust pricing for the player base if needed.
No cant please everyone. Human nature, nothing will be liked or hated by all. Also since the price is capped, using the AH as a de facto extra storage runs the risk of being bought out.
This would prevent items from finding their 'real value' on the market. Players would trade those purples Outside of the AH. 'Trade Spam' would be rife. If the game controls the price, then what's the difference between the AH and a Vendor?
Be Well!
Fireheart
I understand the desire to want to try to control the Market. Unfortunately, the more you do try to do that the more people will stop using it and just make up their own system. Again, think Stones of Jordan. For those really hard to find, ultra rare things people will value them more than you would like for them to be and therefor will price them accordingly. Personally, I'd rather see the Auction House be used for buying and selling instead of player to player trading, as the Auction House will at least hopefully take a cut from the profits and use it as some kind of IGC sink. People just really need to learn to adapt to the supply and demand of the items on the Market. I've said it before, it doesn't really take much to learn how to use the Market. Stop being afraid of it and start using it as just another tool.
I got chills! They're multiplyin'. And I'm losin' control. Cuz the power, I'm supplyin'. Why it's ELECTRIFYIN'!!
As a note, when I said the NPC would ideally consider IGC reserves in his pricing, I meant his OWN IGC reserves, not the players'. He's not going to offer enough IGC to beggar himself unless he has reason to believe he can almost immediately turn that around into a profit.
[color=#ff0000]Business Manager[/color]
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Right, because how would a NPC know how much IGC a PC has in their wallet?
Be Well!
Fireheart
From a role-play standpoint, the NPC could be sizing up the "mark" based on their reputation, clothing quality, etc. They'd charge Tony Stark more than, say, Peter Parker. This USED to be the way goods and services were sold everywhere as recently as the 1800s "wild west" America, by negotiation among individuals, i.e. haggling over prices. Price tags, uniform pricing, and the idea of treating every customer the same didn't arrive until very recently in human history.
From a computer code standpoint, I think it's definitely possible for the NPC to take the customer's total wealth into consideration, including all the IOs they have currently slotted, etc. That's info the game has to track in some way, so it would be available to the code that's driving the NPC's buy/sell bot functionality.
Edit: I'm still against DOING it, but I think it's possible in both the technical and immersion senses.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
*looks for +1 button...spams it until it breaks...searches for wrong tool to fix it*
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...
And taxes.
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