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Stores as markets

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Lin Chiao Feng
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Joined: 11/02/2013 - 09:27
Stores as markets

One thing that bothered me as a CoX player (and also in other games) was that there was this big dividing line between vendors and the auction house. Vendors would have a list of things they would sell, fixed prices, and might buy your trash, while the auction house operated as a completely independent oversimplification of a commodity market or consignment house.

To this day I see no reason for these to be different things. You only need a few things to merge the concepts into a proper store model:

1) Stores are restricted in categories and rarities of items they'll buy and sell. Tech stores sell tech items, magic stores magic items, both only offer rarities up to "rare", whatever.

2) Auction houses filter toward the rarer stuff (i.e. they might not even list commons) but have little or no category limit.

3) For items the devs want to guarantee availability on, stores have a fixed price at which they will sell these items. The store appears like any other seller, and has effectively infinite inventory.

4) For items the devs want to use as "vendor trash", i.e. guarantee a certain rate of conversion to credits, the store shows up as a buyer with a fixed price. Like any player, the store can be both buyer and seller for a given type of item. Obviously not at the exact same price.

5) Implementation-wise, it's really all one big store on the back end. If one tech shop is selling a turnip twaddler for 100 credits, so are all the other tech shops.

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For the record, I'm a big fan of how the old 8-bit game M.U.L.E. handled its commodities markets. For those unfamiliar with that game, each player would show up in a vertical "lane" on the screen. Each would stat at either the top (if a seller) or bottom (if a buyer) of the screen, in an "end zone" the folks on the opposite side couldn't enter (thus you could not be forced to buy or sell).

The players could then move up and down, with their vertical position indicating their offering price. Once two players' prices met (i.e. they were aligned horizontally), commodities would be sold from one to the other until one of them moved away or the seller ran dry.

In addition to this, the store would have a price set at the bottom of the field where it would buy the commodity, and if the store had any in stock, it would also appear at the top of the field with its selling price. This would set a floor and ceiling on the price.

Unless the store was dry, in which case there was no upper bound and buyers could run all the way to the top and keep going to crank the price way up in the hopes a seller would come down out of the end zone and sell them something.

See it in action in this video starting at the 2:43 mark: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWqTYKgGx54

Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...

Gangrel
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Eve Online and their market

Eve Online and their market system is like this.

You can easily tell what is sold by an NPC because thier "sell orders" have a duaration of 364 days, the maximum player limit is 90 days (if i remember correctly). Also, up until a few years ago, NPC's even had *buy orders* up on the market so that they would buy specific items at a set price.

CCP have over the years slowly removed the NPC buy orders, and only certain items are generally available initially from NPC's (that doesn't stop players from reselling the items later on though).

It is not unheard of... but considering that some people view the Eve Online market as "playing with spreadsheets", I can see the presentation of the information being a sticking factor as to how it would be accepted by the player base.

Quote:

1) I reject your reality.... and substitute my own
2) Not to be used when upset... will void warranty
3) Stoke me a clipper i will be back for dinner
4) I have seen more intelligence from an NPC AI in TR beta, than from most MMO players.

Lin Chiao Feng
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Joined: 11/02/2013 - 09:27
I'd like to not see a good

I'd like to not see a good idea die because "EVE uses it." As for what the player sees, I'd recommend a simple setup like Star Trek Online uses for its dilithium market: for a given item, show the current highest offer to buy and lowest offer to sell. Optionally have an "info" screen available for an item that shows the lowest five selling prices and the total number of items offered for sale at each price, and the highest five buying prices and their totals.

I have no problem with people playing the market. They'll probably do that anyway. What I want to do is set up something where a player can sell or buy and feel they are getting at least close to a fair price, and to make it easy so they don't have to spend lots of time in the market if they don't want to.

Using CoH as an example, say I had a bunch of damage SOs that I got as drops but didn't want. I can go to the appropriate store, put them up for sale, see what they're going for on the market, and click a button for immediate sale (sell them to the folks with the highest buy orders) or put a higher price on them and let them sit.

Say I was respecting and needed a huge pile of SOs. I could go to the store and see what was available for sale. If I need them now, I hit the button to buy from the lowest sellers. If I want to wait for a lower price, I can put in a buy order.

Either way, I don't have to camp the bloody store or pay an arbitrary store price and wonder if I could have gotten them for less. Less drama, more time spent elsewhere in the game, more people actually in the market.

Has anyone seen my mind? It was right here...