Goblin Squad Member
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Once upon a time, there was a game set in a science fiction universe where the economy was very important. Its name was not Eve.
In this game, players could, if they so chose, run a business. They could
designate a building as a shop
hire an NPC bot to stand in it
give the bot items to hold for sale
specify the prices at which those items would sell
customize the bot in a variety of ways
make use of advertising facilities to market the shop
decorate the shop any way they pleased
With this basic facility, emergent gameplay tied to the way that the crafting system worked resulted in players who chose to run shops being able to do things Ike build supply chains, manage regular inventory, develop regular customer bases, build marketing campaigns, and in general, play a lemonade stand writ large.
The upshot was that at peak, fully half the players in Star Wars Galaxies ran a shop.
Now, most of these players engaged in the system in a shallow way. Advanced versions of the capabilities cited above were unlocked based on RPG-style advancement. You had to choose to do a lot of merchant activity in order to get Merchant XP, in order to unlock more advanced advertising capabilities etc. But even a dabbler could run a small business.
Advanced players actually made the economy their entire game, working either solo or in highly organized guilds, managing oilfields worth of harvesters, factory towns worth of crafting stations, and whole malls.
The economy in something like World of Warcraft is very different in character. The peak populations on a shard in each game were comparable, though of course WoW achieved far far higher subscriber numbers in aggregate. But the peak of economic play in WoW is essentially basic arbitrage, timing the market.
There are several factors that make the functioning of the two economies radically different, of course.
in WoW all the best stuff is spawned as a result on combat. In SWG it was crafted by players.
in WoW nothing breaks; instead you outlevel it. In original SWG everything decayed.
in WoW a lot of the most valuable items aren’t actually items — they are buffs or skills in fancy dress. They aren’t transferable to other players. In SWG there was no “soul binding” and anything could be traded or gifted.
Fundamentally, though, the biggest difference has to do with the basic approach taken. You see, in Star Wars Galaxies we designed the economy to be a game, not a side effect. In particular, the merchant class was created to fulfill the fantasy of running your own business. It had features like decorating your shop because that is part of the fantasy of being a shopkeeper in a world such as that — to build up the equivalent of Watto’s junkyard, or a Trade Federation.
And this meant that above all, one feature could not exist: the auction house.
If you think of running a business as a game, then think about what you need in order to make it fun. Game grammar tells us that you are probably playing this as an asynchronous parallel game, meaning that you are measuring yourself against other players’ progress against the same opponent you fight. What’s the opponent? The vagaries of supply and demand as expressed by market price. The actions of other players have an indirect effect on this system.
Remember, a game provides statistically varied opposition within a common framework — if there is no variation, we call it a puzzle, not a game. Because of this, we invested a lot of effort into creating ever-varying economic situations in SWG.
Every resource in SWG was randomly generated off of master types. We defined “iron,” and gave it statistical ranges. Different kinds of iron would spawn with
different names, but they would all work as iron in any recipe that called for such. This meant that you might find a high-quality vein of iron, or a low quality one.
Even more, it might be high quality only for specific purposes.
Resource types were finite. You could literally mine out all the high quality iron there was. It would just be gone. A new iron might be spawned eventually (sometimes, very eventually!) but of course, it would be rolled up with different characteristics.
And in a different place. Resources were placed using freshly generated Perlin noise maps.
Crafters gambled with their resources, generating items of varying quality that were partially dependent on the resources and the recipe.
Crafters could lock in specific results as blueprints, but that forced a dependency on the specific finite resource that was used, meaning that blueprints naturally obsolesced.
All of this meant that a merchant could never rely having the best item, or the most desirable item (indeed, “most desirable” could exist on several axes, meaning that there were varying customer preferences in terms of what they liked in a blaster). Word spread through informal means as to the locations of rare ore deposits. People fought PvP battles over them. People hoarded minerals just
to sell them on the market once they had become rare. And of course, they organized sites like the now defunct SWGCraft.com, which monitored all of this fluctuating data and fed it back out in tidy feeds for other sites and even apps to consume, such as this one, which was widely used by hardcore business players much like a Bloomberg terminal is by someone who plays the market.
Then it all went away. You see, a key feature of the system was that the central NPC run shops were not permitted to interfere with this. Nor was the spawn system allowed to drop high quality items as loot. The result was that if you wanted the coolest weapon, you had to hunt through player-run shops like a mad antiquer on a summer drive. The result of the above systems, you see, was an economy where it was very very hard to see the gestalt of the trade economy. You really had to hunt to find out if you had found a bargain.
For someone who just wanted to frickin’ buy a blaster, it was very inconvenient.
In other words, we had local pricing in full effect. This meant that the individual merchant, who, remember, was there to fulfill the fantasy of running a small business, could get away with not being being great at it.
In the real world, we are rapidly approaching a perfect information economy. I can instantly look up the varying prices of something I want, determine the one with the lowest actual cost to me (price, shipping, time to arrival, physical location, quality, etc), and get exactly what I want. It is a world optimized for the buyer.
The experience for the seller, though, is not generally awesome, unless they happen to have the scale that drives victory in a winner takes all scenario. The big guys can essentially dictate prices by undercutting everyone. They dominate the visible market, and can drown out the smaller or more unique offerings. In this sort of world, the funky used bookstore with the awesome decor tends to die, and it doesn’t matter how much fun the shop owner had in coming up with said decor.
SWG eventually did put in a serverwide auction house, responding to WoW. It made life easier for the buyers. But it created a perfect information economy, and all that complexity and variation that was present in the market earlier fell away. Small shopkeepers were shut out of markets.
If that happens to you in a game, you don’t find another line of work. You quit.
So do auction houses suck? No, not if your game is about getting. It is a better experience for a gamer interesting in getting.
But the fantasy of running a shop, or being a business tycoon, is not just about the getting. It is about the having — of relationships, of an empire, of a well-oiled machine. It is about running things, not about working your way up a chain of gewgaws. The gewgaws are a way to keep score, but you play the game for the sake of the game.
SWG was not a game about getting. After all, everything you could get in the game eventually broke. It was about the having. Having your shops, your town, your supply chain, your loyal customers, your collectible Krayt dragon skull or poster or miniature plush Bantha like in the Christmas Special.
When the merchant changes went in to SWG, the merchants went out.
Getting is kind of addictive. For a mass market audience, it may well be the path to greater acceptance and higher profits. Me, I like funky bookstores; but I have to admit I usually buy from Amazon. It’s convenient.
The lesson here is that sometimes features that make things better for one player make them dramatically worse for another. Every time you make a design choice you are closing as many doors as you open. In particular, you should always say to yourself,
I’m adding this feature for player convenience. How many people live for the play that this inconvenience affords?
The small shopkeepers; the socializers who need the extra five minutes you have to spend waiting for a boat at the Everquest docks; the players who live to help, and can’t once every item is soul bound and every fight is group locked and they can’t even step in to save your life; the role player who cannot be who they wish to be because their dialogue is prewritten; the person proud of his knowledge of the dangerous mountains who is bypassed by a teleporter; the person who wants to be lost in the woods and cannot because there is a mini-map.
Every inconvenience is a challenge, and games are made of challenges. This means that every inconvenience in your design is potentially someone’s game.
~Raph Koster
I do remember auction vendors in major cities, but people generally only used them to dump trash quickly or sell buffs. I don't remember them being linked. I probably left before that.
I had my own vendors and shop and enjoyed working local price discrepancies. Getting to know my market and dominating an area was the best part about being a merchant.
You actually had to get off your butt and check out the competition. That meant exploring other regions and planets, learning new things about the game. The best shops were often grouped in "mini malls" or player cities. At times, I became my competition's best customer to have his or her high quality item in my shop. Ultimately, it was at times my class and profession...and with the exception of guildies, my primary raison d'etre in the game. Whatever it was, it definately was not a side effect.
WoW and EVE both made that unfun for me through their respective efficiency. You do not scout prices as a seller-You simply undercut your competition and/or rely on volume. Volume isn't fun. Variation is though. From a buyer's side, yes, you no longer need to do any homework. Am I wrong for liking that kind of homework?
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Goblin Squad Member
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While I can appreciate this from the Merchant's perspective, I can also see how this arrangement might present significant challenges to the other side of the equation, particularly in a more themepark arrangement. One thing i'd love to see out of this game is the broadest appeal across all types of players. If the only way to get the best gear for the pure consumer is to buy direct from a single player's shop, and the availability is variable, I imagine that could be pretty frustrating.
Like going to the real mall when I want a new doodad to improve my music listening, and the AwesomeStuff shop simply doesn't have the thing I am totally prepared to drop cash on. I don't know if I'm remotely typical, but I never go back to that shop for that item again. I go find it someplace else, and that type of retail experience is somewhat frustrating. If the success of my whole lifestyle depended on getting the best 2-handed sword I can find, and my pockets are bursting with gold and gems, but all anyone sells is on par with my Olde Reliable Chipped Chopper, I'm going to get impatient.
Without reading the whole post I'd just like to say that auction houses that don't make sense (like server wide) suck...
I have mixed feelings about it, dependent largely upon just how much functionality an auction relay is given. I enjoy going out to people's customized homes and browsing their vendors. That was a lot of fun in UO and SWG. I didn't always enjoy having to do so though. Most of my time spent browsing an auction relay in SWG was spent comparing stats on starfighter components, making notes, and determining which one(s) was uber enough to justify buying and RE'ing to put in my ship. I regularly found a few merchants that would consistently have better stuff for sale, but the process of going to numerous different houses across numerous planets, and possibly having to search numerous vendors at the house did make the shopping task a little more like real life work than I cared for.
I think I like the idea of a game supporting different forms of auction houses/auction relays. If you want to bring your goods to a town center AH and sell them, dropping them off with the automated vendor and letting the game have a go of it, I'm ok with that. I'd like to see it use a "double-blind" sort of auction system like City of Heroes, where both buyer and seller present their bids and the lowest selling bid is matched with the highest purchase order to make the sale. On the other hand, I like the idea of being able to set up a private vendor and sell directly at a set price. To use the public AH, you have to transport goods to the AH, then pay a consignment fee, then come collect money. Selling on a private vendor lets you set a price and tell buyers how much something costs ahead of time, and you only have to pay upkeep costs, and don't have to transport goods. I still like the idea of a marketing relay however, perhaps a portable inventory listing of private vendors you have visited in the past, where you can see what's for sale, and then go there to buy it, or perhaps pay extra to have it shipped to you.
From a functional standpoint, I do not like auction systems like DDO, where you place a bid, but you can be outbid anytime before the auction ends at a set (but not necessarily precisely known) time, like some half-assed ebay. It led to either having to bid far mor than an item was really worth to ensure victory, or to stand around in realtime rebidding until you hopefully won. Again, way too close to RL for my tastes. YVMV.
Ultimately however, I think a far more important aspect of the game's economy is the availability of wealth. When there is a potentially unlimited quantity of wealth available through environmental generation (or just having the government print more like in real life), it totally borks any potential stability for perceived value. In a Pathfinder setting, I would love to see the game have a set quantity of wealth available, mostly in the form of unmined precious metals and uncut gems, but also as a dynamic value in varying treasuries. None of this "everybody gets another 3d6 GP for completing a repeatable quest" thing that generates guaranteed inflation. Same goes for starting cash. Can't let people bypass it by giving starting characters 250gp that they can log in with, pass to a friend, then logout, delete, repeat.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I understand some people will open this thread and respond with a typical "TL;DR" and I could care less, this is for Ryan and the Dev team. I would highly recommend everyone read it but realize most won't.
Auction houses killed the crafter, if you read Raph Kosters blog above it gives insight into how and why. If you look at every MMO developed in the past 8 years with auction houses you will notice crafting is insignificant game feature and only a handful of elite gamers can benefit from auction houses.
If PFO really wants crafting to be a viable option of game play then please dont give in to convenience/auction house!!
"Every inconvenience is a challenge, and games are made of challenges. This means that every inconvenience in your design is potentially someone’s game".
~ Raph Koster
Auction houses invariably fall victim to the profiteers. They buy stuff cheap and resell it for large markups, and can end up driving players out because they can't afford those prices. If you had to go out and grind to buy something, but the profiteer only had to flip the product with no time invested in creation and little cost in the long run, the profiteer is a pirate. An economic privateer with no regard to the rest of the population.
Player owned and run stores do away with that for the most part. Privateers are likely too lazy to hit up every single player shop to corner the market. It's easy to do that when you have a one stop public shop that every area connects to.
I much preferred SWG's approach. Maybe some crafters charged a lot for something, but you knew THEY had made it, THEY had put in the effort to earn that skill and the effort to grab the things to build it. Not at all like what happens in games like LOTRO where the market can be stunted by people who just try to inflate things in value for no other purpose than profiteering. And not just that, but you could always GO there and request something that you see being resold on the public AH by some privateer, and totally avoid that crap. That is a true free market, and the players dictated how it evolved. An auction house is far to easy to control for a smaller group of players.
And privately run shops also allow for more RP and the creation of repeat business. People go back when they know they get good treatment, but I find using an AH can leave a bad taste in your mouth, that has nothing to do at all with the original creator of the product, which isn't very fair to them. They are being abused almost as much as the guy who ultimately pays 5 times what something is actually worth according to game time and gathering costs. It's just not a free market when you are actually a hostage and have no alternatives.
Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Point of order: SWG at launch had a broker system. It was inconvenient and limited, in that you had to go to the location where the seller put the item up for trade, and there was a fairly low maximum price. It was good for resellers of material (since they just put the materials up in smaller batches).
It also directly encouraged people to get their stuff into circulation, by providing most of the crafting advancement as people used your stuff, rather than providing it all at the point of crafting.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I really believe it's not either-or.
The way I envision it, there should be lots of shops where players can sell whatever they want at whatever price they set. Having a really good location for your shop should have benefits. Having information about your competitors should give you benefits.
There should be something like an auction house, that gives buyers easy access to the shops that are easily accessible (the ones that are paying a premium for the best locations). A lot of players should be content with that.
In addition, there should be a Knowledge(Markets) Skill, preferably localized for each market, that gives you information about the less-accessible shops in that market: what they have for sale and at what price. The higher your rank in the skill, the more out-of-the-way shops you have information on.
The merchant who is paying a premium for that nice location will want this skill to keep an eye on his competitors, and make sure he's not making it worthwhile for all his buyers to get that same skill.
I really think it needs to be localized by market to ensure it's not just one of those skills that everyone picks up.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Maybe include some of SWG's other features of the Merchant class, like being able to advertise, either through a special Trade chat channel (that was NOT open for just anyone to post in, though everyone could see it), or through placing NPC advertisers in the world; say, in a major city. I could see several opportunities for abuse or annoyances, but to me, that was a good way for SWG to cover its biggest drawback: Lack of global merchant visibility.
Maybe, instead, make a list of merchants available? Say, in each hex, you can get a list of who has a store in that hex, and where they are, with maybe a one-sentence description of their shop. That way, players only have to check that list to get some idea of who they'd want to visit first, or at all.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Maybe include some of SWG's other features of the Merchant class, like being able to advertise, either through a special Trade chat channel (that was NOT open for just anyone to post in, though everyone could see it), or through placing NPC advertisers in the world; say, in a major city. I could see several opportunities for abuse or annoyances, but to me, that was a good way for SWG to cover its biggest drawback: Lack of global merchant visibility.
Maybe, instead, make a list of merchants available? Say, in each hex, you can get a list of who has a store in that hex, and where they are, with maybe a one-sentence description of their shop. That way, players only have to check that list to get some idea of who they'd want to visit first, or at all.
^^ This is good!
I like the each hex idea and keep advertising local in some way.
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Goblin Squad Member
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"Every inconvenience is a challenge, and games are made of challenges. This means that every inconvenience in your design is potentially someone’s game".
~ Raph Koster
Oh wow...so true. You know how many times I could have used this ammo in earlier discussions?
I also fully agree with this concept, also for every inconvinience, there is a player who wants to do this inconvinient thing for a profit. There will almost certainly be players who love bargain hunting, and cut deals with the cheapest sellers of everything, and make regular trips all over the world as his only activity, and then resell them in one central location for a 10-25% markup. For people who also like the bargain hunting it is worth it for them to find the dealers, for ones who hate it, it is worth it to pay the markup.
For every task that is enjoyable to someone, there are people who will capitalize on it. It is only when a task is completely unentertaining to anyone, that it is an issue.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I really believe it's not either-or.
The way I envision it, there should be lots of shops where players can sell whatever they want at whatever price they set. Having a really good location for your shop should have benefits. Having information about your competitors should give you benefits.
There should be something like an auction house, that gives buyers easy access to the shops that are easily accessible (the ones that are paying a premium for the best locations). A lot of players should be content with that.
In addition, there should be a Knowledge(Markets) Skill, preferably localized for each market, that gives you information about the less-accessible shops in that market: what they have for sale and at what price. The higher your rank in the skill, the more out-of-the-way shops you have information on.
The merchant who is paying a premium for that nice location will want this skill to keep an eye on his competitors, and make sure he's not making it worthwhile for all his buyers to get that same skill.
I really think it needs to be localized by market to ensure it's not just one of those skills that everyone picks up.
Hmm, I was thinking something similar although it kind of morphed.
This really isn't very thought through, I just came up with this like a minute ago while reading the thread, specifically Nihimon's, but here goes:I was thinking that for each market there could be an information broker(or a number of them) that you pay a sum of money to get information about the local shops. The amount of information and "coverage" (or something) could depend on different factors. Like, say, location of the shop, amount and frequency of advertisement, things like quality of the items sold (I mean if a shop is known for selling "the best" or "really good" of anything, you usually tend to hear about them), how long it's been around, maybe even the decor could factor to some degree (could be fun that for people who like decorating their shops) et cetera, et ecetera.
I'm not saying all of these should be used, they're just things I think could be fairly reasonable. Maybe you could get different amounts of information depending on how much you pay the brokers.
Aaand a thought that just hit me while writing the last sentence is that the brokers could actually be player employed.
Well, I'm gonna stop right here before I get any more half-formed ideas and make this post even longer but basically the original idea that I had was that this could possible act as a system that gives some form of convenience to the buyer (for a price) without breaking immersion and without destroying the businesses of merchants by having a global AH.
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Goblin Squad Member
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+1
I hate auction houses!
When I started my MMO addiction full swing with DAoC the best items were crafted and the were no shops and no auction houses and crafting was a terrible chore so maxed crafters were few and far between.
You had to find and befriend one of them in prder to get the stuff. This was a game in the game and I loved it.
Taking 5 minutes to visit an auction house and click a button isn't.
Part of it is the notion that everything apart from actually killing an endboss should be easy and convenient (and even this). This notion actually takes much of the game out of the game when it cuts features that can be fun (of course it is ok to cut things that are tedious and boring like running to the NPC merchant every 10 minutes to sell sell-loot).
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Goblin Squad Member
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Pardon the rambley nature of this, my coffee hasn't really broken the lack of sleep yet.
I'd love to see a hybrid system that can double as an anti-inflation device as well. Perhaps merchants make the best gear, but there is also an Auction House system (I like one in each major city, and not linked), but the Auction Houses apply a significant bump to the buyer's side of the equation instead of the seller's. Reason for Auction Houses to have any sort of mark up is economic, but not for the sake of the AH which is of course completely automated. The real point is to delete wealth from the economy (tons of other ways this usually happens as well) as an anti-inflationary mechanic. Anyway, the point being the bargain hunters will be able to shop around at the various merchants, the merchants will be able to manage their shops and wares and still have a reason to exist in the face of Auction House convenience, and pure consumers with wealth to spare will have the instant access to the goods they want without the frustration of jumping through the consumer hoops they might face in the real world. Additional benefits might include a sort of price cap on any sellable product or commodity (this is actually good for the overall economy).
I think having the AH as a premium service with its own internal markup put to the buyer rather than the seller would accommodate all the angles without putting any one style of play at too much of a disadvantage.
the quote that one person's inconvenience can be another person's gameplay, while perfectly valid, also reveals itself as literally taking away from one person's enjoyment to apply towards another... this sort of zero sum of mechanics is what i'd hope to see removed from the economic aspects of PFO.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Auctions in general do have a place. If I have a rare, presumably valuable bauble, I'd want to get the best price for it. I can guess a price and either lose time or money my setting it to the wrong price. I can research some large number of shops, but there's no way to know if they have the bauble and if the price they have for the bauble is a price someone will actually pay. By putting it up for auction I can let the market decide what it's worth.
I fully understand how a widespread auction house can kill a market for crafters, but what if it was extremely localized? someone can set the price of an item in their shop to '100 gold or best offer' or 'best offer over 100 gold by next tuesday.' This coupled with a way to advertize/aggregate your auction would make a pretty useful system.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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I wonder if it's even possible to have the kind of system I described above co-exist with a system where a global market exists so that players can see Buy and Sell orders and try to transport goods for profit.
You can see all the buy and sell orders that the other party has made visible at your location. Presumably, it will be more cost-effective to advertise large transactions than small ones.
Although I would like to see a literal auction house, where individual items and/or lots of commodities are bought and sold by bid instead of at a constant price.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@DeciusBrutus, the Buy and Sell orders are almost certainly going to be globally accessible, so that players can see where they wan't to go to buy 100 widgets for 50 coins and where they need to go to sell those 100 widgets for 100 coins.
I can't find a post where Ryan has stated outright that this is how it will work, but it's the way I remember it from Eve, and if I had to actually visit each local market to figure out what their Buy and Sell prices were, it would take me forever just to identify a single run I could make for profit.
Maybe there's some way that there can be "private" shops where players can sell crafted/looted goods, and then "global" markets where different sorts of commodities are traded. After all, I don't see there being any real likelihood in profiting by buying a Ring of Invisibility in one hex and then selling it in another.
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Goblin Squad Member
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@DeciusBrutus, the Buy and Sell orders are almost certainly going to be globally accessible, so that players can see where they wan't to go to buy 100 widgets for 50 coins and where they need to go to sell those 100 widgets for 100 coins.
I can't find a post where Ryan has stated outright that this is how it will work, but it's the way I remember it from Eve, and if I had to actually visit each local market to figure out what their Buy and Sell prices were, it would take me forever just to identify a single run I could make for profit.
Maybe there's some way that there can be "private" shops where players can sell crafted/looted goods, and then "global" markets where different sorts of commodities are traded. After all, I don't see there being any real likelihood in profiting by buying a Ring of Invisibility in one hex and then selling it in another.
if there is a global market info-dump perhaps a Bulletin Board of Commerce, but regional (3 NPC settlements) Auction House (premium as I've described) It seems to me that would be a decent way to accommodate the long distance trader, yes/no? It even would seem to accommodate the merchant shops, as individual traders could still work peer-to-peer deals if that's their preference.
For any concerns about immersion; Perhaps there's an NPC faction that uses a Sending like spell to update the BBCom board every few minutes. These could be the same NPCs that manage and own the Auction Houses, or the local government (those Marshals don't pay for themselves).
And yes, I'm totally geeking out on the Premium Auctions as a method of glueing everyone's desires together.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If the 3 NPC settlements had auction houses, I'd hope that player settlements could also construct auction houses, if only to expedite trading among settlement members. Maybe auction houses are public and clearing houses are private, dunno.
I do like the idea of auction houses being unlinked, and certainly not connected to a magical mail system. I also like the idea of the internal mark-up, to make individual tradesmen competitive.
I like the idea of player operated local auction houses. It's not much different in execution from the "mall" concept as it played out in SWG, and gives multiple crafters within a player settlement a more convenient method by which to sell their goods, while also providing a marketing benefit to the settlement as a whole.
The OP has posted the very reason I quit SWG back in the day, before playing EVE or any other MMO.
They trashed the word of mouth crafting system, and crafter junkies like myself quit, never looking back.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Auction houses? I am all for player run auction houses. As some here have mentioned, we want the highest prices for our shiny baubles. Please allow us to "give them" to reputable player merchants who in turn can take them to the busiest locations and hawk/auction them off. Then of course, please allow them to give me back the agreed upon percentage of their profit. Obviously it is in their best interests to keep their positive reputations.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Auction houses? I am all for player run auction houses. As some here have mentioned, we want the highest prices for our shiny baubles. Please allow us to "give them" to reputable player merchants who in turn can take them to the busiest locations and hawk/auction them off. Then of course, please allow them to give me back the agreed upon percentage of their profit. Obviously it is in their best interests to keep their positive reputations.
Also opening the door for scam artists, who only care about their positive reputations until they can make a large score. Of course, if there are a large number of fraudsters, a spotless reputation becomes even more valuable... leading to character assassination contracts. Photoshopping screenshots just became a high-stakes game!
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Goblin Squad Member
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I had a couple of ideas to run by the assembly on this matter. *Ahem*
To truly get the best of both worlds on this matter between whether buyers or sellers profit most from an exchange of goods is really very difficult and I believe I have a couple of compromises that might work in various ways.
The first method is one that is very much used in today's modern market and would benefit both buyers and sellers: Customer Ratings. A localized branch of the merchant's guild run by NPCs who store the information for every shop within a town in different categories (weapons, armor, consumables, trade, etc.)would be the hub for the system.
Buyers tag their stores under each category that applies to their wares, and their information (including description provided by the seller as well as respective location) is placed in a list provided by the merchant's guild representative in that category. The more customers like your store, the higher your shop will be on this list. It would behoove you, then, as a seller of goods to make an attractive vista for your customers as well as providing quality goods at an affordable price, because after all...the customers are your livelihood!
Sellers go to the merchant's guild building (perhaps built and run by a faction of player characters who can provide information on local shops other than what is written) where they scroll through a list looking for weapons, armor, materials, or whatever they need at that time and make an informed decision about where they want to spend their gold based on customer reviews and rankings. The buyer makes their decision, jots down the location of this merchant and then walks over and purchases the item(s) in question.
In this model, the seller profits from being good at what he does by making good impressions on buyers, keeping up appearances in his decor, and generally making the buying experience a pleasant one for the consumer. The buyer benefits from the experiences of others who have gone to the shop before them, as well as a more streamlined purchasing method that doesn't have them running around town for 3 hours looking for a +1 sword, but still allows them to enjoy the full merchant social interaction.
Adding on to this system, that same merchant's guild would house a walk-in auction house where extremely rare and valuable materials (perhaps noted by some sort of item raking system built into items themselves) would be traded in real time via a market chat or silent auction where objects could be placed for people to bid on for a set amount of time (perhaps more time the more rare an item is) in order to ensure that the seller gets what he wants for it while the buyer is free to walk away or make an offer.
I tried to separate it out as much as possible for cohesion. What does the assembly think?
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Goblin Squad Member
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If there are 100 people at launch and 20 of them like shopping at my store and 50 of them preferred yours...yours is probably a better shop by sheer majority. If there were 10 shops and each of them got 10 regular customers that all liked that particular shop then the data is evenly distributed and everyone benefits regardless of wether or not the shop has a 5 star rating. The rating system is there to provide ease of use on both ends rather than be an end-all-beat-all solution. I'm sure someone much more clever than I could run with this idea.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I would like to see a localized Knowledge(Market) skill that let you analyze recent sales data, not only showing current Buy and Sell orders, but also recent historical data on actual sales. There's a world of difference between knowing that someone is offering Widget X at 100 gold, and knowing that a number of people have actually paid that much for it recently.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Oh man what a headache...I can see where that would be useful for a merchant, and would deter people from making their own shops if they weren't hardcore about it. I'd rather see something with the Appraise skill. You click a sword in a shop, you see the seller's price if you have low appraise, but as your skill increases you begin to see a small pool of data showing maybe the last 10 purchaces of said item both buyer and seller so that you can make an informed decision without traversing buildings.
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Goblin Squad Member
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How do you gain friends as a merchant? Be a better, more memorable merchant! If I have 10 friends that vote for me that's 10 friends and 10 "votes" but if I suck as a merchant I might only have 12 or 14 votes vs the good merchant who has 5 friend "votes" and 25 good customer votes. I see what you're saying, but in the end I think that hard work and good business ethics would win out.
Edit: A thought....would it make you feel better if there was no voting, and all that mattered was how much gold exchanged hands? ANY system dealing with an economy can be gamed by people who are willing to sit and break it imo.
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Goblin Squad Member
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Game shops are unlike real-world shops where the price of an item is generally static to start and will go down after some time. Someone could easily sell low-value items at a discount for a time, get some good reviews, then jack up prices. It'll take time for the market to react and the whole system would be pretty useless before long.
Oddly I'm reminded of Neopets. People that have their stores at the top of the list always had by far the worst prices. Items that sell for 10 coins would be set to 4500 buy these sellers.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I'm going to go with the "dumb user" assessment we use in UI and UX design. I go to a place where I think i can buy an upgrade sword over Ye Olde Rusted and Busted. I think the guild merchant's house is a place to go, so I go there. I'm presented with a list of items, hopefully searchable so I don't get frustrated looking through piles of chain and funny hats. I just want a new sword. On this list is a bunch of stars likely ranging from 1 -5 with most listings being either a 1 or a 5 star rating. I dont really know how this works, so I'm just going to look for price, because that's all i care about. Already I've been given more info than i'm interested in, which confuses and frustrates me a little. I search by price. I see Wily Willy's Sword Emporium is selling something I like at a good price, but his rating is only a 2. I again don't know what that means, but I think ok whatever i just want a freakin sword already. I see that now I am in a building where i thought i could buy something, but there's no button that says Purchase Now, only a listing and address for Wily Willy's. I'm in the Fort Riverwatch, because its filled with paladins and i feel safer. Wily Willy's is in Fort Inevitable, way to the south, and now in order to go do what I think is a simple purchase at a reasonable price, I need to hoof it across dangerous territory to a place filled with those icky Hellknights. I look at Ye Olde Rusted and Busted, and instantly decide its good enough. I think i know a blacksmith who can fix it up a little anyway. I leave the guild merchant hall, frustrated and irritated. I might even just in a fit of pique log out and go play Skyrim.
This is just the lowest common denominator assessment for a centralized listing area that doesn't actually serve the consumer in any way. Unfortunately, I don't see how the benefits past the trials of it, and that's before we get into the various ways ratings and such can be gamed by merchants with little to no ethical boundaries.
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Goblin Squad Member
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For what it's worth, I remain confident that a significant part of the game will be buying something of value in one market (hex), and selling it for a profit in another. I am also confident that you will be able to buy the item even if you're a long way away from it, and that you will be forced to travel to the hex where it is located in order to pick it up. I believe this will be accomplished via a global market browser.
This means there will be plenty of opportunities for new players to get confused when they realize they have to travel half-way across the world to go take possession of the item they just bought. I expect they'll adapt rapidly.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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I would like to see a localized Knowledge(Market) skill that let you analyze recent sales data, not only showing current Buy and Sell orders, but also recent historical data on actual sales. There's a world of difference between knowing that someone is offering Widget X at 100 gold, and knowing that a number of people have actually paid that much for it recently.
Profession (accountant)?
Knowledge (spreadsheets)?I approve.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I believe this will be accomplished via a global market browser.
This means there will be plenty of opportunities for new players to get confused when they realize they have to travel half-way across the world to go take possession of the item they just bought. I expect they'll adapt rapidly.
I hope that the interface of this global market browser would have an option to somehow flag merchants at different ranges, show the number of hexes to each merchant, and have other mechanisms to do an intelligent search.
Once there are 5 blacksmiths, 2 swordsmiths, and 6 pawnshops represented in a single hex, it will probably be enough bother just to sort through their offerings. I'll be happy to have a single hex browser, I think. I'll leave the global browser for the classed merchants.
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Goblin Squad Member
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I was just trying to show how some of the proposed systems might drive a wedge between creators/merchants and pure consumers. I would hope for a system that can accommodate both, rather than artificially structure a zero sum game of fun between the two.
I'll admit, I'm not much of a crafter or merchant type, but that's likely because I've not played a game where that feature is given enough care and attention. I would like to engage in it, but I also hope the systems of buying and selling are still accessible to a casual crafter, "full-time" consumer.
Why not try to make auction houses like what they are in real life? Like a way for non-traders to sell their stuff or rather unique items. Just set some fees and limits making it less profitable than running your own shop as a crafter/merchant. After all in real life you don't go to the nearest auction house to buy cookies or some floor tiles. I'm sure there are reasons for this.
While I realize it is easier to buy off a global auction house teleporting stuff right to your inventory, it's too much of a loss for the game world. And I won't die if I have to buy something at a higher-than-the-lowest-possible price just because I happen to need something it right now.
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Goblinworks Executive Founder
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Why not try to make auction houses like what they are in real life? Like a way for non-traders to sell their stuff or rather unique items. Just set some fees and limits making it less profitable than running your own shop as a crafter/merchant. After all in real life you don't go to the nearest auction house to buy cookies or some floor tiles. I'm sure there are reasons for this.
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Goblin Squad Member
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What really annoys me about auction houses is when my auctions expire and i have to lrelist them every couple days.
I liked EQ2's system. I list it, choose my price, and it stays there until it sells. I can change the price without relisting.
Also in EQ2 the buyer pays the broker fees unless they go directly to the sellers home.
Why not try to make auction houses like what they are in real life? Like a way for non-traders to sell their stuff or rather unique items. Just set some fees and limits making it less profitable than running your own shop as a crafter/merchant. After all in real life you don't go to the nearest auction house to buy cookies or some floor tiles. I'm sure there are reasons for this.Some people do
Ok, nowadays some people do, but it wasn't like this before, and there's still fuss about all these walmarts killing downtown shops, so large trade centers and online shopping are quite recent inventions and are out of place in fantasy settings. I'm not saying they can't exist there - one could even argue they should, seeing all the magic around. But it's the same as the castles problem: castles should be there, even though they can easily be disintegrated, pass wall'd teleported or flown over. IMO the shops should be there, and if global auction house kills them, it should go.
And some people really want to keep shops and actually have clients.
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Wow, the original post brings back some memories....
I had a huge medical supply business in SWG that had shops on every planet. I ran Itar's for like two years before I eventually grew tired of working more at it than I did at my real life job.
I had deals in place with 10-15 other people to place large harvesters using their characters and at anyone time, I would have 100-150 large harvesters gathering materials for my med supply business.
It was great fun the first few years though.
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Goblin Squad Member
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If people don't want to peddle their own goods they should work out a deal with a merchant or sell them to a pawn shop.
As far as auctions go. That is fine if people want to sell things that way. Get an auctioneer, and have one. A REAL auction.
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If people don't want to peddle their own goods they should work out a deal with a merchant or sell them to a pawn shop.
As far as auctions go. That is fine if people want to sell things that way. Get an auctioneer, and have one. A REAL auction.
I'm inclined to agree with Andius. The profitability of bargain hunting and the fun of shopping and trading goes down drastically when players are given the same type of localized economic tools usually reserved for large businesses (that expend huge amounts of cash on research) in the real world.
I understand why Eve's system is the way it is, it's in the future, in spaaaaccee, in an information society. Such a system would make zero sense in a world with at best steampunk types of tech.
Localized (to a town/settlement) pawn/consignment merchants that charge a high enough fee to make player run businesses more attractive appeal to me much more in a fantasy setting. No magic mail transporting goods, no profiteering on items 3 hexes over that you shouldn't logically even know existed if you've never been there.
To throw out something related but not necessarily in the exact same bucket I loved the trading in Uncharted Waters Online as much as I hated it in Eve Online. I explored and had a large notebook on what regions had regular demands for what goods. I regularly ferried goods through a long (4+ hours of realtime) and perilous route that would start in Denmark, sail to India, and finally end in Portugal after hitting some various ports along the way.
I carried specialized dyes and whatnot that were only available in the Scandinavian regions, combined them with fabrics from parts of the middle east and Africa, and made a handsome profit on textiles as I arrived in India. Once there of course I loaded up on spices which Europe ALWAYS wants. Sometimes the market on a particular thing would be crashed because some other trader beat me to meeting demand, but I could always warehouse the stuff until demand was back.
In Eve trading falls more along the lines of doing a ton of regional searches and running spreadsheet formulas to determine optimum profit per jump. Way way less fun than my free wheeling trader's notebook and adjusting plans on the fly based on the other traders I'm talking with in company chat passing on information about rates, market crashes, and privateers (players).
It was funny in Uncharted Waters, I started out wanting to be a pirate. However, I got so engaged in the trading system that the first month the game was out (yay sabbatical) I was one of the wealthiest merchants out there. I stopped playing only because my methods of playing were incompatible with my free time once work life resumed.
Things I accomplished before then:
1) Hired player pirates to harass my competition
2) Cornered the market on several goods and caused many ports in India to declare formal alliances with Portugal on account of my economic investments.
3) Sailed the best and fastest merchant ships money could buy in a fleet with some of the best armed escorts money and socialization could buy (players).
4) Helped England and our pirate and shipbuilder allies be #1 in certain ship classes and armaments through my heavy investments.