Just doing some more thinking out loud.
I understand why I have to pay a fee to post something for sale in the AH, but why does the house get a cut when I sell something?
So lets say I think that those stingy mob bosses runing the AH are a bunch of crooks taking a portion of my sale and useing it for lord knows what (cause it litteraly goes nowhere), and decide to sell/pawn my item of awesome powerness to my favorite NPC vendor. I broker a deal with them and they (the NPC) posts the item on the AH for me and the "house" cut goes to the vendor. After loyal partonage the vendor give me a discount on all items in the store.
So a PC can post an item on the AH for a smaller house cut, or they can post it on the AH through a vendor and pay a larger cut, but recieve a discount on items from that vendor.
Thoughts?
Well why shouldn't they? That's were the real money is. Frankly, I'd rather have it be free to list and just have them take 10% off the sale price instead of the half and half system from CoH. This added to the frustration of re-listing an item you marked too high. I wouldn't have minded so much if I could have got the listing price back if I de-list the item.
-----------------------------------------
I never set anything on fire accidentally!
The Titan Legacy - Defender of the Inner Flame
Is the discount permanent or only applicable while the item is listed on the AH? Does the discount apply as soon as the item is listed or only after it has sold? Does the discount vary depending on the value of the item that is listed or sold? Can the discount be obtained from every store or do the vendors get jealous and discontinue the discount if an item is listed with another vendor?
These are rhetorical questions, really, since this sounds like a rather pointless economy mini-game. Can't I just pretend my hero or villain cuts coupons out of the newspaper like everyone else?
- - - - -
[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
I guess I am just frustrated when I work for something that has value to me, to be taken away buy something that holds my reward as no value. Sure in the real world, I am giving the money to the upkeep of the establishment, but a game doesn't care about my two cents.
It's just a money sink since, in a game, you will typically earn money faster than you spend it (unless you try not to). This is no different from having to buy ammunition, pay for repairs or fast travel, or purchase enhancements. Unlike some of these, use of the AH is optional. Perhaps you are a little too high strung at the moment, if something like the auction house taking 5% or 10% of the sale value of an item is enough to frustrate you?
- - - - -
[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
It's one of several ways to decrease the gold supply to avoid inflation in the AH. RP-wise, it doesn't make much sense (and certainly not the roughly 10 cents on the dollar purchase price of "vendoring" things, which is about the same ratio of an illegal fencer from what I read.)
You're intended to plow through an entire army's worth of bad guys in a day -- if you brought 600 swords home to sell, you could just about retire from one day's bad-guy slaughter "in the real world".
So something has to give, and it's adding many ways to drain your gold, and not give you so much to begin with (a few pennies in a dead monster's pocket rather than $80 or $700, the 10% vendor rule, very few monsters drop even one piece of the equipment they're all obviously wearing, etc.)
Rename gold to inf and swords to enhancements, and there's your CoX.
__________________
[IMG]http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/ll38/Gnurl/a72b7fba-8da2-4ac8-8e18-0f8453f7d3ee_zpscc5b27b5.jpg[/IMG]
The very existence of the taunting tank irritates, for it requires idiotic AI that obeys the taunt.
In case anyone wants to make some comparisons to the price of doing business in art auctions:
- - - - -
[font=Pristina][size=18][b]Hail Beard![/b][/size][/font]
Support [url=http://cityoftitans.com/comment/52149#comment-52149]trap clowns[/url] for CoT!
The reason they had for making the posting of an item cost a percentage of the asking price (what was it, 5%?) was because they didn't want people just by default asking 2 billion for everything. If you charge people a fee proportional to their asking price, it causes them to re-evaluate what a fair asking price sounds like and you get more people giving better estimates of what they think something's worth, up front. If you think your purple recipe is worth 1 billion, you'd better be willing to wager 50million that you're right, because that's what you stand to lose when people start buying and selling that thing for 999million right under your nose. It was a way of punishing people for attempts at severe price gauging, essentially.
As for the question of "Why should some of MY influence go down the drain every time I sell something? This is just a fake, make-believe market after all, there is no Wentworth's, not really. They don't use the influence for anything." I'll go one step farther and ask this question "Why have things cost influence at all, or better yet, why even have a currency? You COULD just make everything free, it's just a computer program after all."
So to answer my question first and your original one second, I think the reason for having a currency system in the game is to reward players for playing the game in a way that let's you have new toys commensurate with your toon's level and with the amount/difficulty of content you've accomplished. It also gives people a framework in which they can trade things back and forth without having to barter. In real life, nobody would work if they didn't stand to gain something from it, and in CoX, you have to give people a reason to do the content you're written. It may seem strange to say "The HEROES need to GAIN something from all the GOOD they do for people." but it's an MMO. Players need rewards, and being able to trade them to each other adds to the fun.
As for the other question of "Why influence sinks?" I have to believe the reason for that is related to the fact that the game continues to create wealth. You defeat a badguy, you get influence, but that influence didn't really exist before, so, in effect, you're CREATING new influence. There's no "running out of badguys to defeat", the game keeps spawning more of them, so that system scales to infinity and as people defeat more and more badguys, more and more influence is created over time. If there are no "influence sinks" in the game, then every 1 influence, once created, always exists someplace. This means that over time, the value of 1 infl will go down as the amount of infl in the game goes up. There's a word for this: Inflation. So to curb the inflation rate in the game, and try to make the street value of 1 infl somewhat stable over time, they have to put in things that DESTROY infl.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Getting money "out of the game".
It's important to drop these drains everywhere appropriate in games to slow economy growth. Otherwise newer players may have trouble catching up when a common simple minor heal potion is priced at 1,000 currency when it should be at least 25.
It could also just be an incentive for players to interact with each other and trade items face-to-face.
It could also be a limiting factor. I can't imagine storing thousands of different items on a single NPC would be healthy.
Pretty much this. And if you want to have a look at "cash sinks" and rampant inflation: the cost of PLEX in Eve Online has *tripled* in the Eve Market from when I was playing it regularly to now. Just in 4 years, the price has gone up from 250million ISK to almost 750million ISK. CCP over the past few years have introduced more "ISK taps" into the game, and *NOT* increased the number of "ISK Sinks" into the game (nor made the current ones bigger/more expensive). This is because making ISK sinks *bigger* and more of a penalty does nothing but make it harder for the *newer* player in the game to do stuff, especially if the costs are ones that the player would normally meet.
Now saying that, Eve Online does *NOT* have an ISK cap (as far as I am aware, although due to the nature of the game, tying your ISK up in assests is a valid route, although you can just have 500billion ISK in liquid cash if you so desire)
Part of the Market was as an Inf sink. When the Market was launched the game had been live for a couple of years. The vets had nothing to spend their accumulated wealth on. I mean the top-end costume changes MIGHT run 100k and you could have at most 5 costume slots. A lvl 50 could pull down a couple of million in an hour's play so what was there to spend Inf on? Many of the big SGs held costume contests but at first the rewards were a million for the 1st place and so on. Again, you could earn that in an hour. So many veteran toons had BILLIONS of Inf just laying around.
In comes the Market and the flood begins. There was a listing fee of 5% with a minimum of like 50 Inf IIRC and then you lost 5% at the time of sale. The Market took 10% of every transaction and that took a lot of Inf from the system. Of course it also generated a lot more for those who knew how to buy and sell.
In short, the Market was DESIGNED to help move Inf around through the economy, all the while taking out a small portion to fight inflation.
I remember when Star Wars was cool...a long, long time ago...