Petition against the Auction House approach. -- (Dev) Replied

Auction House.....No
Auction Board that lists locations of player Vendors with items for sale....YES

This would then give the location that a player would have to travel to to pick up the item they desired at said price.

Bazaars....should be all interactive player participation as the vendor during the scheduled day/event. You buy a permit to sell during the Bazaar 1 per playeraccount (cannot hold more than one at a time to eliminate block buying monopoly.
(Guilds on the other hand could coordinate control of a bazaar date if so motivated ehhe)

Players would set up shop at a location booth (having access to bank vault (supplies) and crafting station (selected for booth) and showcase (not vendor) but could be items made for sale thru player.
Would be interesting to have 2 or 3 players who decide to be same "kind" of vendor....PRICE WARS!!!

 

I don't see how they can even consider an AH. LB already said how much he wants there to be real value to property. Why pay for a house in the city when I can live out in the woods and have my vendors do just as well? It just wouldn't make sense.

 

I am

FOR:
Local Bazaars located in each city/town/village for those without houses.
House vendors in city/town/villages.
<i>POSSIBLY</i> something like a "bulletin board" in each C/T/V that is searchable for what is available and even what is desired, listed by the local vendor's name. Still have to GO to that vendor to purchase/sell.

AGAINST:
A global anything - listing system, AH, purchase remotely, etc.
All NPC vendors selling/purchasing things at the same prices. Need to have waxing/waning supply &amp; demand locally.


Hopefully these kinds of ideas would encourage travel betweens areas, and a true commerce system would develop where you can buy low and sell high, whether it be to NPC or PC's.

 

Many, many, many great points. Thanks everyone! This thread will serve as a treasure trove of great ideas and opinions. Keep em? coming.

First off, THERE WILL NOT BE A SINGULAR GLOBAL AUCTION HOUSE. This has never been in the plans. Like many of you pointed out, a global auction house really kills a lot of socialization in the game. For some games this makes sense but it does not for us.

We are BIG in favor of creating regional markets. There is however a need for some type of indexing system that summarizes what is available regionally to prevent you from having to scour every single vendor. Specifics of this are still being flushed out but the basic idea is that there will be a regional marketplace that lists all the available goods. If you buy from the marketplace you pay a market fee. If you buy the item from their vendor then there is no market fee. EQ2 implements a similar system.

We have discussed a separate commodities market that would allow players to buy/sell crafting commodities. Fees would not exist in this case since you bring the commodities to the market. This would also allow non-house owners to participate in the commodities market. I do like the idea of a classified ad system where players can advertise their goods in more of role-playing context.

 

Huzzah! No Global Auction House! Cheers to you *B*

 

+ 1 to dev reply

 

Auction House: Not no but, H*** No...
Vendor Bazaar: I can deal with that.
House Vendors with limited item sales: No
House Vendors with limited item sales that match the amount of items able to put in bank or hold on person: Yes
Weekly PlayerCharacter Auctions: will happen, no matter what. there will always be someone spamming in the market that they have something for sale.

NPC Market should be driven by how many items are available. If they have too many of one item, that item goes cheaper, vise versa if they don't have many of a certain item that item gets more expensive. There needs to be an organic movement of the market in NPCs for it to be engaging and to keep crafters busy traveling the lands finding NPCs that need certain items due to their low stocks. However! this should be limited to a per-character basis. so that the same amount of items will not be the same for each person, for instance, i walk up to the npc vendor and find he is low on cardboard boxes, another player may look at the same vendor and his version would be low on a different item. This makes it interesting, and keeps the vendor from being completely stocked to capacity and keeps from preventing any new players the ability to make some cash from those vendors.

i hope i conveyed that appropriately.

 

+1 for dev-Reply too. It seems like a very good compromise.

Regarding the "cheaper if you pick it up from the vendor" option: Please be careful about balancing that fee. Setting it sufficiently high makes an option to reserve items before going to the vendor unnecessary <b>and allows higher-priced items to retain some appeal.</b>

Consider this scenario: I am looking for some ore. On the local market the lowest price available fluctuates between 100 and 110, i.e. assuming a 20% "direct-buy" fee between 120 and 132 effectively.

For ore, where there is no variation in quality, direct-buy will only sell the cheapest offer available*, i.e. items 111 and above will not be sold this way. Buying them directly from the vendor will still save some money though while at the same time I don't run the risk of running to the vendor just to find out that someone did an instant-buy while I was moving. The cheaper the item I chose, the more likely I'll be to lose out on the buy giving slightly overpriced items a certain appeal.

If the fee was just 5%, the effective lowest price available for instant-buy would vary from 105 to 116. Thus there would be no price range, where I save money by buying at the vendor AND can be sure not to have someone instant-buy while I'm on the move. Hence the incentive to walk to the vendor would be singificantly reduced. Setting the fee to 50% would have the opposite effect.

Note that I itentionally assumed both fees and price fluctuations to be somewhat higher / faster than I'd expect them to be in the actual game for the sake of making the point.

------------------------------

<i>* May vary depending on whether items are offered in fixed size stacks or whether players can offer all their ore in a single stack but buyers can buy any amount below the maximum. In WoW when you needed to buy 400 pieces for leveling a trade skill single ore pieces are unattractive, while when you need just 2 a 20-pieces-stack is unattractive.</i>

 

Great thoughts @DavenRock and @Yael. Thanks!

 

I would pay cash for a commodities market to avoid lot-size mismatch, among a mountain of other things. In fact, if there is one in the game, I basically <i>am</i> paying cash for a commodities market...even though if Portalarium put one in, they wouldn't necessarily get more money from me. Wrap your head around that one, heh.

This might sound a little trite, but the experience I have buying or selling things in an MMO-type game usually ends up being a spoiler for the rest of the game. The whole interface and experience of buying/selling is basically a telling microcosm of the entire game.

Diablo/Torchlight/Path of Exile, you see a whole crowd of worthless items that are either ridiculously priced or dirt cheap, but you're only interested in the one that you don't ever see. In WoW, you need to look up what items you want from a catalog...it's easy to search through because there's only one set of items you'll ever actually want for anything but cosmetic reasons, so throughout the whole game you already know what your goal is, you just need to work for about 3 months to get there. Was I talking about the game or the shops/AH in those games just now?

I can go on with many other examples. Since SotA is going to be different, I just hope that the vendor directory and item bazaar won't be a <abbr title="Charlie-Foxtrot">disorderly mess</abbr>. Many other game auction houses I've seen recently don't even approach the usability of the standard and now roughly decade-old WoW AH interface, which I would objectively rate as inadequate. The elegance of the solution would need to approach the elegance of the quest system to get around the fact that it's effectively a step back in terms of accessibility from having everything on a searchable, global database. Everyone else seems to want to give UO a pass, but I've seen and experienced how tedious vendors can get and I don't look at that game as being the shining golden example of what a trade interface should be. If I wanted to experience that again, I would just take my fiance to a shoe store in a neighborhood where we're likely to get mugged.

 

To start a declaration of self interest, my title to the left is there for a reason

I made another thread a while ago about the bazaars because the way I see it even if they take a percentage of your value its still better to see through them than at your house. After all why don't people in the real world sell through there house for the most part and instead sell through massive stores like Big W, access, marketing, connivance for the buyer and all these things apply in game as well. Most people aren't going to go house to house to buy a sword, they are going to go to a bazaar where there are 100 different swords and buy the one that is cheapest and best for them. Also if they want to buy a few items then not only can they better pick the right one for them more easily from a bazaar but they can pick multiple items from different people (say sword, armor, food etc)


This massively devalues the vendors and houses. A blacksmith player might be the absolute best in game and so its worth going to his house for that sword but a chef who just makes food which is always going to be the same quality no matter where you buy it from?


Even a steep tax on stuff from a bazaar I don't think will fix this because even if you have a free vendor and have to pay a steep tax to sell from the bazaar the exposure, marketing and convenience is still going to make bazaars the better choice. I don't know how you fix that, how you make buying from vendors the preferred choice long term (even if initially vendors are the more popular because people are exploring that's unlikely to last long term)


One benefit I WOULD like for vendors is a regional or global marketing system, so as you give your stuff to your vendor to sell it shows up on a global marketing system where people who want to buy things can look at and see the price, the quality and where it is. NOT buy it but it advertises that you have this item for sale. Make it searchable by item, by price, by person, so you can see "oh he has a sword I would like to buy, what other items does he have?". Having this for vendors but NOT bazaars would go some way to balance the advantage bazaars have

 

Wouldn't an elegant solution to the problem of devaluing house vendors is to have items 'picked up' from the location rather then everything at one place and dropped in your inventory automatically?

So you go the the bazaar, compare all the available items, buy the one you deem the most suitable and pay the bazaar. Then you hop along to the house and collect your item. For those that don't own houses perhaps you could take the docket to the bank where it is stored or something like that.

One issue might be that players would pay more to get to a closer house. Although hiding the players location may nip that problem in the bud. As long as the market areas arenlt so large that it would become tedious to make the trips.

 

Maybe something like StarWars Galaxies: below a very low price you can buy in the AH, for every item higher than that the AH only lists the name and adress of the vendor.

 

that's not going to work either because the homeless still need to be able to sell gear they make

 

well if they want to sell there wears then they need to get a home to be able to sell them in just like in UO

 

I would rather scour every single vendor.
It means you can find cheaper prices.

Unless you just died and came out of the dungeon and need some regs to either recall or go back in and get your body.
Then the you ripped off.

 

Matheryn you have obviously missed a few things. Not everyone will have houses in this game, this is not UO, there will be a hard cap on the numbers of houses. This shouldn't be a game killer for people

 

I really like what B said about indexing of items being sold on vendors. In real life most towns have something like this.

For example years ago when I went to Tijuana there were some guys that looked like gang-bangers but they knew where everything was such as drug stores or places of interest. They asked us what we were looking for and for a small fee they escorted us to a place that sold it.

****Maybe the in-game front end for the index mechanism could be a type of person who escorts you to what you need.*****

That's probably how it was done in ages past I'd assume. Some savvy people (probably gangsters) who got kickbacks from local establishments would help travelers locate the services, or goods they needed for a price.

 

It would be cool if it was conversation based too. So they could cry out or come up to you and ask if you needed anything. Then you can reply I'm looking for "armor", or even more specifically I'm looking for "coal helms".

I added the quotes to show what it would key in on, but if it were conversation based that would totally kickass. It would take a little more time than buying it instantly at the marketplace, but it is more realistic and more RPG-like.

 

Also this can possibly get more business for the vendor. If a guy just buys something in the marketplace they might not buy more than they were looking for, but if they visit the vendor that is selling what they wanted they might spot a Wand or some goodies that they would not have otherwise purchased.