Global Item Search

I bought my first vendor, now I realize that I need 1 hour to research prices to use my vendor.

I spent hours looking for items or less than a certain item too.

Global item search is a basic tool in any game that works with buying and selling items.

Plz dont let Sota die soon, just update game to players spent more hours in fun and less hours in bored search for itens, city by city, vendor by vendor.

 

It's been decided that in order for the economy to work, customers must not be able to find what they're looking for.

 

Greetings all.
Are we more interested in an economy that is easily manipulated or has the ability to target individuals or are we talking about a fair economy? Any market can be manipulated but without the pricing displayed in real time (24 hour delay maybe) for all to see it is so much easier for people to take advantage of price reductions or wholesale buying of an item to boost its price. When you add real time pricing and vendor owner info you add the ability for people to specifically target a seller they don't like. If I know what you are selling, where, and at what price I can undercut all your sales.

I am all for price list just do like the stock market and have them delayed by a set amount of time. Or use the forums to search for an item in past post to see what people were selling for up to a year earlier and make an educated guess. If you have a commission free vendor you can always reprice the item lower if it does not sell and not loose any money on commission.

 

I would like global vendor search also but I don’t think that will happen. So how about vendor search within towns if that can be done. Or show the locations of vendors in towns on the in town map. I would think a lot of people only go to the center of towns to shop, I think very few of us run to all the boundaries trying to find the other vendors. That way it would help the player vendors that are not in the center of towns.

 

My primary concern is playing a game where I can find what I'm looking for, without wading through 67 load screens.

In terms of fairness, that'd be accomplished by having transparent open information. What's unfair is the wildly inconsistent pricing. The idea that this would be used to target individuals is an oddly niche concern. The pricing overall would shift into a new normal.

... not that we have a functional economy, regional economy, or supply/demand/consumption coherence for any of it to make sense. So again, I'm back to "because I want to actually find the thing I'm looking for".

 

There are already a couple solutions in game to this already:

1. The major market cities (Crafter's Town, Britt Martt, Novia Market, Silverdale) are all lined up in a row by Brittany. By browsing these cities alone, you get a full pulse check on the player economy.
   1. Hidden gems are then available for the knowledge of people who enjoy the market and merchant gameplay and are willing to put in the time to explore and keep a personal price book.
2. In Game trader chat exists "/t" and anyone at anytime can simply type "PC (Price Check) [Insert Item Name here]" or "WTB (Want to Buy) [Insert Item Name Here]"
   1. Price checks are often representative of the people who have purchased the item recently, people who have the item to sell you will often come to you to sell you an item and respond to the WTB requests, and often mail is only a ~5 gold charge for the transaction.

 

Perfect!
There's a lot of item overpriced in this game, this is toxic to new players, i find a certain item for 3k in one vendor then 500igg in other vendor. This is total mess!
I know economy can be manipulated if we know all prices, but this scam or 6 hours to find a item is more toxic than manipulated market.
A auction house can broke market city, ok, no autcion house.
But a simple list of items, then make a option to this vendor is listed in global search. Player set vendor to listed then he upload to global item search, ok put a price to do this example: 1k for list or update.

Sota can be a better game, specially to newbies!

 

This type of feature is built in every MMO nowadays, I just don't understand why people do not want transparency. Maybe ripping off people is the best thing for older players but new player want full transparency.

Everyone struggles everyday looking for items to buy and what prices to sell stuff. You see the same handful of people advertising on the trade channel because they own the games market. New players should never have to beg or spam chat channels to obtain or sell any product.

A search system is indeed extremely needed.

 

I've given up on anyone ever visiting my town or buying anything from my vendor. I just sell the things I don't want to NPC merchants.

 

My 2 cents:

Global item search without disclosing prices is the way to go. You'll be told each and every vendor that has what you want, but you'll need to visit them to get the prices. This would make it way easier to get your cool items without tearing the merchant gameplay apart.

 

Another thread about Vendor search... the real player base who are against vendor search system is 2-5% - the reason they against - they don't want to compete, they want to sell hugely overpriced items to new players (They call it merchant gameplay lol), ALL new players want and need this system.
The only solution I could offer is spam Atos twitter 24x7 with it. Because we really need this system and the more advanced it would be (prices orders and etc) the better would be for the game.

 

Global Vendor Search
Round 841.....Fight!

 

Honestly, if they went this route, it would be a half measure at the very best and I'd question even bothering to take the time.
This is so easily gameable by simply listing things at prices nobody would ever pay to try and draw in traffic with no intention that they'd ever sell. It also doesn't really do much to help prospective shoppers to know that 18 people in this town have the item I want. They could all be search-bait, they could all be overpriced, and I'd still likely have to go door to door (or do a lot of round trips with the town crier for each individual lot that each of those people has) to try and find what I want. It basically isn't much better than now, short of limiting the number of different towns I'd have to visit to find the best price from "hundreds" down to "dozens." I'm still not going to bother.

The main drivers for needing a global search are pricing related issues. They'd be better off doing the opposite - showing the prices but not where to find it. You'd be in same position you are now having to search door to door, but at least you'd know if a price was fair, which would solve at least part of the problem. It makes about as much sense!

Seriously tho, other than the people who have been owning the market due to either investing $ to get "good spots" or through just honest hard work, advertising, building a brand and a customer base, a global transparent market is best thing for everyone. And I have every confidence that the people who have worked hard to build a brand can continue to thrive even with said transparency.

If we're going to do a half measure - then give us buy orders. Seriously. Full listings of all buy orders everywhere, with prices. And fix the quantity thing so you can sell partial stacks as you can with NPC vendors. That would solve the price check issue and the new folks getting swindled issues without denying people their right to try and price gouge on the sales side. Still seems like an awful lot of development effort for a partial solution, though, for a basic feature that nearly every game with tradeable commodities has adopted or had from the start, not 5+ years in.

 

You can always use the BMC Price Guide.
http://bmcguild.com/priceguide

The guild updates pricing every 3 months. BMC sends out scouts / buyers all thru out the year. Checking prices of vendors near and far.
They gather prices from low to high and return to the guild with the info for us to vote on prices the guild will sell at every quarter.

The next General Assembly is 03/07/2021 more info on the web page.

Hope this helps ya out a bit.

Laz

 

One possible approach to this, wouldn't actually be a global search, but a type of New Britannia Stock Exchange NPC. This NPC could then tell you (perhaps only one item at a time?) the current highest price, lowest price and then the average price for a specific item that has been sold. This could even be a gold sink per query.

This at least gives the player a basic price range to evaluate what they can then determine what is a decent price for a specific item, and then off you go to go find that...

 

I like it, except it would be completely out of whack due to people listing things on a vendor in a backwater for millions of gold to drive up average price. We saw it on the shroudoftheavatar.net pricing tool, which tracked actual sales from receipts, because people could just list something for a million gold, buy it with their alt, repeat, etc. (or I spose you could manipulate it the other way, by buying ores with your alt for 1 gold each to drive average prices down). Some games actually have a lot of market metric tools beyond just the buy/sell which track trends, high/low etc. and it adds a whole new dimension to merchant gameplay - similar to what the sota.net site did, but it was all integrated. Fantastic, really. But from where we are now, that's like asking for fancy features like reverse cameras and heated seats when you're still missing a steering wheel.

As an aside, one suggestion that I saw on like, "global market search thread number 242" was to centralize the public vendor network. If you list items on public vendor it is essentially a global market. You pay the tax on the sale, but the perk is it functions like a central market hub. It would create utilisation of an underutilised system (nobody bothers with public vendors at all) and add a cash sink. The only problem is it then makes other vendors practically worthless since from the prospective of a buyer, why would you look anywhere other than the central hub, unless you thought you could get it 'cheaper' from a personal shop? And even then, the time and load screens you'd spend would make it not worth bothering. If you follow the line of thinking, from the perspective of a customer/buyer's experience, you end up at full global search anyway. Its pretty hard to dispute that a global search is better in every way for people trying to spend their money or figure out what something's worth.

 

Yeah the Stock Exchange NPC would need to list the actual sold price of items and then display the highest, lowest and average price sold? While not perfect, it is at least something.

I also do like the idea of public vendors though. That’s also an interesting idea.

 

If someone is going to put high prices to not sell their stuff... it's not the system's fault. Also, experienced players would recognize this kind of behaviour and stop paying attention to the bad players.

Full priced global market will pretty much kill PoTs and move the game to a kind of Diablo 3 Auction House. That totally ruined the game as it was way too easy to get the mid-high level stuff at very low prices with almost no effort. Auction House style marketplace will make prices plummet to a bare minimum.
Now this is different than finding the item you want, but not at the lowest price possible with a couple of clicks.

 

A few things about this...

First, people keep bring up auction houses. That's not what's most are asking for.

Second, white citing market town investments as the reason to not have an item search, you're largely making the case against having market town investments - it can't be "too easy" to get mid-high level stuff with almost no effort (beyond boring the player to death with loading screens), which market towns are trying to do, by design.

People also keep talking about this topic as though it exists in a vacuum. Other games also have stat and/or item based restrictions on equipment, so you can't be a level 1 equipping the most powerful stuff in the game. We don't do that, which ruins the gameplay. We also don't have item consumption for equipment and decorations, which largely sabotages having any economy, making the prices rock-bottom. Also, since people can instantly zip around the world, there's no regional economies, or really any point to mounts.

My point is, we *can* have the best of both worlds of having a game where we're not losing players from inexhaustible loading screens, *and* its downsides are mitigated by other adjacent fixes to the game.

The entire system is messed up. All of it.

But worry not, we're working on custom loading screen backgrounds.