Greyhawk, you're one major assumption about vendors running a scripted program is not what Segev is talking about. If that were true we could most likely have marketerring NPC vendors at release. Segev's concept is based on heuristic AI - one that is taught based on observation, given a range of needs / wants / likes. / dislikes if you will and then operating autonomously after. The dev side we can alter those specific behavioral parameters as needed but its not about scripting.

This allows the vendors to react and act to changes in the market. They can also be used as a way to remove currency from the game world if we want by giving them an active currency wallet and a bankable amount once the bankable amount is filled for a given period of time it can be wiped requiring the vendor to refill it again. And its expected that players will make runs on the market, the vendors actively participating can actually help even out those fluctuations. Vendors can have a sale stock and a back log of inventory that is not seen by players. Then when the vendor runs low the possibility of missions becoming available to players with proper incentives can encourage players to run them and help the vendors restock. And all this is something post launch.

The market itself is intended to be active at launch and there is a reason we haven't gotten into the entire player economy yet. Doing would require details on a number of related topics that are either in the design stages or designed but not observed in prototype yet. The focus right now is on getting all the city designed, avatar creator designed, and all the fun punchy flashy parts working as intended. Everything is done in stages.

Greyhawk wrote:

As an example, Segev mentions having NPC vendors participate in the market and using that participation as a form of arbitrage preventing or lessening the impact of rapidly oscillating movements in the prices of individual items.
I'm not convinced this will work because NPCs are not genuinely autonomous actors in the market. They only do what they are programmed to do. The way Segev describes it, their inventory and liquid cash would be finite quantities. If inventory in a particular item fell, they would go into the market to purchase that item (behind the scenes of course, running as a server-based script no doubt). So what happens when the vendor runs out of both money and inventory? Players, unlike NPC vendors, are autonomous actors. They can go from vendor to vendor comparing inventories to learn what is or is not in demand. Using that knowledge they can wait for a vendor's supply to fall, then dump stockpiles of that item on the vendor, draining the vendor's cash reserve. If the item in question is readily available in the market, then the vendor cannot sell the excess supply they now have in order to replenish their cash reserve. Spreading this out over say, three dozen vendors, makes it more difficult for players to track, but not impossible. Many players know how to use a spreadsheet to track the market and look for weaknesses they can exploit. It only takes as many players as vendors to completely overwhelm the vendor system. What happens then will depend on how well the server-side vendor participation script handles exceptions.
Even if there are a couple of hundred vendors, one large supergroup with market-savvy officers would be enough to completely nullify any impact of the vendors because no matter how sophisticated the vendor participation script is, people will still be smarter. For a working example of this spend some time in Lineage II. Their auction system benefits no one except a small clique of guild leaders and castle owners. Prices for necessary items that are not available at vendors are insane, and prices for the components are equally insane because it can take months to acquire those materials unless you have a full clan all hunting the same monsters at the same time.

I see. Forgive me, I am no expert on economy, not even close, but it does look to me that outfoxing the NPC vendors is an additional step anyone who would try to dominate the market would have to take. Would that not make it harder to do so? Especially if you consider some of the precautions mentioned by Foradain and Tannim222.

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The CoH market used a double-blind bid system.

I did cut out a lot here, to keep the post from getting overly long.
The system had it's merits, but I felt it had a lot of flaws too. If you had two accounts or a friend willing to help you, it was very easy to manipulate the scarce information it provided to others. Sell an item five times to yourself and all the history is overwritten. That was somewhat unsettling to me, to be honest.
But I guess it was for entirely different reasons that I found the auction house to be massively overpriced and unfair, and that was the inflation of INF. As far as I understood it most of the older players were already multi- billionaires as it came out.

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Part of my concern about the ingame market in CoT is the little information that has been revealed has been more along the lines of "we're not it like SoAndSo" rather than, "our market is based on SuchAndSuch assumptions and will function according to SuchAndSuch principles." Until more concrete information has been released I suspect I will continue to doubt the market will work well. I have played in only half a dozen or so games with an active market because markets are almost never included in Alpha/Beta testing phases (which is a major mistake in my opinion). Of those markets I have participated in, only the CoH market worked in a way I would consider fair and equitable. Sellers always received either their asking price or something higher while buyers always had a choice of gathering materials on their own or paying whatever price the sellers were asking.

True, how can you trust a system that you do not know? Until we know more, there is always the possibility that it will turn out bad. However, there is also a chance that it will turn out really good. Or that errors will be fixed swiftly.

And thank you for explaining in such great detail.

*cough* In particular, my personal area of expertise is Computational Intelligence algorithms. A combination of swarm intelligence, genetic algorithms, and possibly neural networks would be my ideal toolbox for designing a learning, adaptive market-playing A.I. system. Each vendor as an agent, with their decisions about what to buy and how much (or what to sell and how much at what price) in competition with each other and the players to find the optimal routes to profit (thus, again, serving the purpose of providing arbitrage). Actually, thinking about it, Swarm Intelligence would be particularly advantageous, here: the information about the behavior of the human agents would help inform the optimal behaviors even more strongly without requiring more particles in the swarm on the artificial side.

If I have my way, there will be a lot of transparency on the transaction histories and other information related to the market.

Segev wrote:

If I have my way, there will be a lot of transparency on the transaction histories and other information related to the market.

I really, really hope you get your way. Because if you can't mine the data and write a Ph.D. dissertation on the economy's performance, what good is it?

Again I vote of a NPC Auction house agent you can hire. This Agent can be tied to the AI system as well just you set the desire parameters. For those that don't want to play the market. Here some basic ideas I have for it.

You go to the agent and request an item. Lets say a Rare Enhancement. The Agent AI then checks the range of prices that item ran on the Auction house. Subtract the odd very low sell (we seen those when someone sells something for just one gold/Inf/cred, maybe same for ultra high spikes). Then says "From my records that item sold for a reasonable low price of $4000 and the highest at $500000. I believe I can get it for (calculated mid range price) with a small fee for me of course. So how much are you willing to pay for this item" Then the AI would try to buy said item at the amount of gold you offered. At the end of a set time period say a week. You get the choice of ending the auction run (you don't get the fee back), change the offered amount of money the AI auctioneer has to use, or just continue with the original amount.

Like I said not everyone likes playing the market. Or have the time to figure out the market fluctuations for best chances. If there was an AI doing this already why not be able to have it work for the players as well. With a Fee (money sink) of course.

RottenLuck wrote:

Again I vote of a NPC Auction house agent you can hire. This Agent can be tied to the AI system as well just you set the desire parameters. For those that don't want to play the market. Here some basic ideas I have for it.
You go to the agent and request an item. Lets say a Rare Enhancement. The Agent AI then checks the range of prices that item ran on the Auction house. Subtract the odd very low sell (we seen those when someone sells something for just one gold/Inf/cred, maybe same for ultra high spikes). Then says "From my records that item sold for a reasonable low price of $4000 and the highest at $500000. I believe I can get it for (calculated mid range price) with a small fee for me of course. So how much are you willing to pay for this item" Then the AI would try to buy said item at the amount of gold you offered. At the end of a set time period say a week. You get the choice of ending the auction run (you don't get the fee back), change the offered amount of money the AI auctioneer has to use, or just continue with the original amount.
Like I said not everyone likes playing the market. Or have the time to figure out the market fluctuations for best chances. If there was an AI doing this already why not be able to have it work for the players as well. With a Fee (money sink) of course.

In the old game, CoX, the NPCs that handed out missions also had a "buy/sell Enhancements" functions, but that didn't interact directly with the free market at all after the Auction House rolled out later. In the system Segev is talking about, those NPCs (or other NPCs maybe) would buy/sell stuff on the auction house all the time and would also be willing to buy/sell by trading directly with the players that click on them, I would assume. So just walking up to an NPC and clicking out it might allow you to just use the "Buy It Now" button in that sense, no mess, no fuss, but with the NPC in question making some IGC on the arbitrage action of buying that item at a lower price than they're charging you for it, like any retail store owner would. The other part of that idea was that that NPC who trade in something could give players missions to generate more of that item when supply runs out/low. The best part of this, from an economic perspective is that the NPC isn't stupidly paying 5,000 IGC for something that routinely trades for like 500, and the devs can go in and simply delete some of the NPCs saved IGC which ultimately reduces supply of that and acts against inflation of IGC.