If you don't like Auction House

Vandril · May 2014

Arsvita wrote: »

@vandrillordepreub18;
No. If you read it and many of the prior posts through you should see that I am trying to cover the relevance of much more than a couple of posts.

Ah, alright. No, I did read every post in this thread, but the way you organized it made it seem to me like you were replying to my post. No harm done. Just a simple misunderstanding.

I may be against adding your every-day MMO global Auction House to ESO, but the goldseller argument IS totally shenanigans. Off the top of my head, there are only two real arguments you could actually have against auction houses being implemented: unhealthy changes in price and the economy due to huge shifts in supply without an equivalent shift in demand all the while gold sources and gain amounts stay exactly the same, which is my argument, and that those who enjoy selling products manually and essentially roleplaying a merchant are less able to do so - they would feel "forced" to use the AH, due to so-called "gamer's nature" - people do not like the feeling of knowing that they are being deliberately inefficient, a feeling that manually selling when a much-easier-to-use set-and-forget AH is already in-game.

Goldsellers abusing the markets, price-flipping abuse on the markets, actually having competition to contend with when selling, etc. are NOT good arguments against an auction house system, though. Those are preferences. Selfish ones at that.

More than anything, I just want to avoid adding a system to the game that will only result in a harsh oversupply of everything craft-related. Currently, the supply of crafted items in this game is mainly limited by how many people are unwilling to put the effort into actually selling them. Most MMOs use rare materials to artificially induce scarcity, but this one does not, excepting very special cases like legendary and epic refine materials. So, while most MMOs still have their limiting production factor if you add a global AH, this one would simply have its markets flooded with each variation of every item constantly, causing a very harsh oversupply and completely ruining any potential for profit, with possible exceptions for consumables from alchemy, provisioning, and enchanting.

I don't know if any of you have ever played an MMO with a grossly oversupplied market, but NOTHING is worth any real amount of gold in those. It's impossible to make real profit by selling anything, and the main and sole method of making good amounts of gold to pay for things like, say, repair costs and other gold sinks becomes questing, farming gold drops, and farming drops to vendor. This situation feels terrible. No one likes farming just to vendor ***, but it becomes a necessity to afford the necessary gold sinks in the game, in that situation!

I would love the availability and huge pool of potential buyers that a global AH would bring to the table, but DEFINITELY NOT at that cost! You see what I'm worried about?

Nazon_Katts · May 2014

Maybe just assign an AH to each AvA campaign? Thought player limit in campaigns was about 2k , so we'd end up with a similar size we have now. You could allow only one 'home campaign AH' per account.

Mh, now if size, reach, max sell slots, etc was dependent on how many keeps your faction holds, this could pick up what they were trying to achieve with keep stores and add an incentive to claim and defend keeps.

Arsvita · May 2014

@Vandril

This I understand.

Had fun with some of the people, and gold sellers, using some market type add-ons.
Would post a piece of coal continuously, multiple times, and then drop the price and watch them buy them up.

But I think they have found a way of getting around that now, most likely limiting types and names.

I just know that they are out there.
I do not want to help them in any way.
I would get much pleasure from the mini, and petty, game of causing them discomfort.
The gold sellers are not the only market disasters we must face, no matter where the market is located.

Hope wish you Happy Hunting and that you Have Fun.

p.s. I have asked Zeni to mark up the gold / bot / farmers for targeting so that we can kill them.

Dyvim · May 2014

Vandril wrote: »

...
@Dyvim - All your points are true in real economy. It will not, however, apply to this game economy. There is far too much supply for there to be the proper amount of demand to satisfy, because each person will only need one piece of a particular piece of gear, while this gear piece can and will be made and posted for sale by at least a handful of people PER person who's interested in buying it. Mark my words, this will drive prices down for every non-consumable item in the game, all the while the gold acquisition from questing and the like will stay the same, causing a sort of reverse-inflation via. oversupply.

In short, the only thing saving this economy now IS the unwillingness of many people to take the effort to sell. Solve this problem (which, I figure, is impossible to do while still making sales easy), though, and your market board-style AH, where you still must travel to the seller and trade, has my support.

You assertion that "each person will only need one piece of a particular piece of gear" is nonsensical. Are you familiar with deconning in the game? Each piece of gear is also, really, just a non-stackable container of crafting mats and crafting xp, waiting to be deconned...so no, each piece of gear will have PLENTY of demand for it, from the adventurers who need a given item, and the crafters who are looking for many, many of any given item to decon.

But again, this is why you want a large market with as many buyers and sellers as possible...it stabilizes and rationalizes the supply/demand/price curves.

Vandril · May 2014

Arsvita wrote: »

@Vandril
p.s. I have asked Zeni to mark up the gold / bot / farmers for targeting so that we can kill them.

This...is a wonderful idea!

Nazon_Katts wrote: »

Maybe just assign an AH to each AvA campaign? Thought player limit in campaigns was about 2k , so we'd end up with a similar size we have now. You could allow only one 'home campaign AH' per account.

Mh, now if size, reach, max sell slots, etc was dependent on how many keeps your faction holds, this could pick up what they were trying to achieve with keep stores and add an incentive to claim and defend keeps.

Oh! I never thought about tying them to campaigns! You're just a bundle of clever ideas this weekend, aren't you?

This might work. If you have items posted on the campaign AH, they return to you automatically via mail if you switch campaigns. The number of items you can have posted on an individual level should be based on how many keeps your faction owns. If you have max items posted and you lose keeps, I figure your items can just stay up, probably (since having them return so often seems annoying). Due to the ~2,000 player per faction per campaign limit, this shouldn't have any terrible effect on the shift of supply - at least not to a catastrophic level. Just implement the same fee (or maybe 30% instead of 25% as a balancing measure) as the guild stores and we're golden!

The only problem I foresee is that different characters can be in different campaigns on the same account, can't they? I'm not sure how that could be handled well.