mogura

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Random interruption of a poorly planned transfer during a busy time of day? Not griefing. Part of the system.

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Prediction: There will be dozens of lowball sales of each level and type of TO and DO (yes, i know that's thousands) within the first three days of I9 going live. That means there will be hundreds of thousands of nearly worthless items, all waiting proactively to intercept an attempted Influence Transfer instead of reactively as everyone else has assumed.

While this may be acceptable as a deterrent it will be totally unacceptable from a performance standpoint. Managing this type of enormous (and i believe at least partially unexpected) database is, in all likelihood, going to be much more load on whatever server it resides upon than the devs are expecting. If it is to be available across all game servers, i believe that we can expect the insuing lag within the first week to be astronomical.

Please, devs, reconsider this method of consignment. You are about to open the equivalent of Pandora's Box. This attempt to prevent us from spending our own money could (and likely will, from what I've seen in the past) be extremely detrimental to the game.

As a contingency, or to validate my claims, please at least test this by specifically reproducing this "worst-case scenario" on the test server under a heavy load. Then multiply that load by the factor of it being accessed by all live servers simultaneously.

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If I was a dev, I'd do it this way:

As previously stated, you have a 'transaction inventory'. Each bid you make moves a 'ghost' of that item into your transaction inventory, along with any items that have failed to sell within the last 30 days. When your transaction inventory is full, you can make no more bids.

When the sales are processed, (every 24 hours?) the 'ghost' items become 'real', and failed bid vanish and free up space.

After all, if you can bid for more items than your transaction inventory, what happens if they all come through? You don't want items to vanish because your transaction inventory got overloaded.

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If something like this isn't done, then there's going to be a huge problem with lag as players flock to Wentworth's / Black Market and flood them with lowball bids on Training Enhancements hoping to make the Big Score. Not only will it be somewhere between hard and impossible to access the Consignment facility because of both spatial and network congestion, but even if we do, the database keeping track of these bids will be completely hosed with spammed bids. I've seen an unmoderated blind market on another MMORPG, and it was both nearly game-breaking and inevitably completely removed and rennovated.

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Player A1 puts up a Level 12 TO for 5,000,000 inf.

Player B1 puts up the same Level 12 TO for 1,000 inf.

Player A2 (trying to transfer funds) offers to buy that level 12 TO for 5,000,000 inf.

Since player B1 wants less, and is obviously trying to move his items faster, his "for sale" is processed first, so he ends up with 5,000,000 inf (minus fees).

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When I have gone to pawn shops, which is essentially (if only partially) what the Black Market and Wentworth's are, each item was clearly marked with its asking price. When I have gone to auction houses, my bids were placed in real-time, against real values. Any market that is double-blind, as this one is slated to be, is fundamentally designed as a forum for scams.

In fact, the only time I can recall facing a marketplace that was so heavily slated against its potential clients was a very shady used car lot. At this car lot, they wanted to talk about every aspect of my possible transaction (whether or not there would be a trade-in, financing or cash, etc.) except the actual price of the vehicle in question. For those who don't get what I'm saying, trade-ins and financing don't have any effect on the actual sale price of a vehicle. It didn't take a genius to know they were trying to rip me and all their other customers off as a matter of policy.

That seems to be exactly what this system is designed to do. Rip us off or be used by us to rip off other, more casual (or less discerning) players. I must say that I'm quite surprised, and a little dismayed. City of * has never struck me as the type of environment where the Devs would knowingly and actively encourage their players to prey upon each other as mercilessly as shady used car dealers.

I hope this is changed.