Put on your speculation caps

Currently, I have 2 crafted IOs, around lvl 25, both somewhat desirable recipes (Miracle Heal/End/Rech and a PBAoE Acc/Dam, I think) that I put up on sale redside for a reasonable price (under the last 5). They haven't moved in over a month. That would happen w/a sleep or snipe IO or recipe blue-side, but not w/IOs like that, I don't think. I'm hanging on to some mildly useful recipes, also in the low 20s that I'd like to sell for small amounts (well below 1M) to ppl who can use them, but not at the expense of tying up a slot for a month (hardly "reasonable" by anyone's standards, I think), so they'll likely get vendored/trashed. Seems a shame, but considering I can turn a minimum of a few hundred K per slot per day (and that's w/o even trying, really), there's no way I'm going to waste a slot on slow moving item (which, I'm not even trying to make money on, but figured someone could use them).

I wonder how many toons in the 20s there are red-side being actively played. Seems like a level range that gets passed by fairly quickly, and I think folks are waiting on I17 and beyond to really roll much new (I'd guess of the Dual Pistols rolled many more were blue-side). At least for recipes in the 30s there's more of an exemp demand for them - not so sure about 20s.

Tokyo said

Haven't read the entire thread yet, but I wanted to get this written up while I'm thinking of it on my own, instead of after things I've read from others so that I can properly claim that most of it is my own thoughts.

Now to start, I don't know the devs or how they fix things well enough to truly speculate on what they will/would do. Nor do I know the technical side to know what is feasible with a reasonable amount of programming, which may very well be a major limitation in this entire endeavor for their side. But what I would do in their place is as follows.


#1 - Overhaul the interface. This is probably the biggest thing on my list. I want to make it as easy as possible for people to both sell and buy items. The current interface needs a lot of work. This would contain a lot of small improvements:

Item price history would be expanded to last 20 items. Furthermore it'd also show a calculated average sale price for the item over the last 30 days. No more wondering how much something tends to be worth, for those who don't keep a close eye on the market and record/remember everything.

Allow for bidding on a range of enhancement/recipe levels. I may not necessarily want a level 48 enhancement specifically. Maybe I just want that enhancement somewhere between 40 and 50 and it doesn't matter exactly which level. This way I can set a bid on any of that enhancement in that level range. Right now I would have to bid on 10 individual enhancements to do this, have to have enough cash on hand to do that, and it presents the danger that I might wind up accidentally buying more than I want.

Get rid of posting/bid limits. At the same time, remove the ability for those slots to be used as storage. Anything put in there must be being sold, and anything you win gets automatically sent to your character and dropped into inventory, or into an overflow that drops into your inventory the moment you clear some space.

Correlated with the bid limit removal, but also to drive prices down and encourage faster sales, make the listing fee recurring. Every 24 or 48 hours or somewhere along those lines, the fee you paid to list the item is re-charged. Optional - if you don't want the item relisted, you can select it not to be, and it gets sent right back to you. If you don't have enough money to pay the relisting fee, it gets sent back. This prevents those infinite slots from being used as storage without paying a fee for that storage.

Make the interface considerably more scalable, and with more options, allowing people to see the calculated average price without clicking on each individual item, allowing more items to be on-screen simultaneously if the user expands the interface UI, and so on. Generally speaking, make it easier to get things done quickly.

Item price history increase and calculated average being available encourages market participation from those who would otherwise be hesitant or disinclined to participate since they lack this information.

Bidding on ranges of items makes market participation buyer side considerably easier, since it is rarely necessary to have an enhancement of a particular level - somewhere 'around' that level tends to be more commonly needed. Ranges make it easier to buy something around where you want, thus making it easier to sell.

Posting/bid limit removal, along with the simplification of the interface, makes those less-worthwhile recipes and salvage worth putting up for sale, since it doesn't prevent the sale of other, more valuable items. Simultaneously, recurring posting fees discourage posting items at far-above-average prices and simply waiting for someone desperate enough to purchase.

Recurring fees would also produce a small drain on money in the economy, thus helping to combat inflation and keeping prices steadier.

General UI improvement would reduce the difficulty and time required to post or buy items. Encourages more market participation.

Buyers would have an option on each bid they place that allows them to bid on cross-faction items or not. If they are choosing to bid on them, there's an additional 'smuggling fee' charged by the market interface (if the item they purchase is cross-faction - they may get lucky and get one from their own side first). Note that this fee would not be part of the bid, but in addition to it. Thus bidding 1 million on something will result in a normal 1 million transaction for the seller, but the buyer will pay an additional percentage over and above their bid in order to cover the smuggling fee.

A limited merging of the markets with additional smuggling fees will make it easier to find rare items when they're needed, and easier to sell items since the potential market increases significantly. Again, this should encourage market participation.

The smuggling fees would again reduce the money supply in circulation, thus combating inflation and assisting in stabilizing prices.

The market will auto-bid on all items at current vendor prices, setting an absolute price floor for all items. If you want something to sell instantly, put it up for less than current vendor price, you'll get that price or higher, if someone is bidding on it.

The process of selling an item to an NPC vendor would place it in the same market pool - the only difference would be that by vendor-selling, the seller does not have the opportunity for anyone to pay a higher than vendor price.

Destroying an item will also place it in this same market pool, with no payment to the character destroying it.

Any items auto-purchased by the market in the above manner, or sold to vendors, will be immediately relisted for considerably higher prices. The price could easily be determined through the aforementioned 30-day average purchase price. Start there and then discount it by somewhere around 15 to 20%.

If it doesn't sell within 48 hours, it gets discounted by another 15 to 20% until it hits minimum price, which would be double vendor price (the price the market paid).

Any item that gets to an excessive number of stored items in the market pool (say, 100, or 1000) starts being destroyed automatically at any number beyond the limit. Optionally, if possible, this could also trigger a global reduction in the drop rate of that sort of item, since if it is not being exchanged at all, it is clearly too common at the moment.

Auto-bidding on items, along with the removal of vendors or players destroying items and thus removing them from the economy will increase supply of all items, driving prices down.

Relisting items increases available supply, by reducing artificial reductions in supply, thus reducing prices.

All 'profit' made by the market results in removal of money from the economy, creating a considerable counter to inflation.

Since this obeys supply and demand, and creates nothing that was not supplied by players, it does not create further market imbalance. It may, however, reveal drop rate imbalances and such, allowing them to be fixed directly.

Well the smartest and simplest way to make people happier with the market would be to show the top 5 asks and offers for items. So you can be pretty certain that won't happen.

Another thing that other MMOs have done with good success is to allow people to specialize in particular aspects of production. That won't happen here either as our loot is divided into total crap and acceptable,

Another sane possibility would be to revamp the costs of items in terms of rare materials and crafting costs so it wasn't such a no brainer on deciding on what was worth having in your build and what wasn't.

Another possibility would be the introduction of new sets that allow you to take a different approach to building up your character rather than the common routes to uber. Given we just had the botz nerf I wouldnt hold my breath on that one

I think you need to ask what you want to fix.

Say you think Market PvP is too tilted against the casual player. My suggestion: a much larger history (view the last 300 sales, say, scrollable window) along with some statistics. List # of bidders/sellers, not just bids/items for sale. List min/max/avg/std dev for the last 300 sales or such.

Say you think think some rare items are too expensive for the average player. Make them drop more. Or put something that lets you pay X influence to transmute one item into another. (Pay 2m influence, transmute any pool A recipe into another random pool A recipe?)

Too much influence in the game? Create some sinks. Expensive vanity costumes, even a vanity powerset (ie, new models for mm henchmen, etc). Sell transfers or extra character slots for in-game influence; or sell useful temp powers (extra charges of a teleport-to-mission power; or even a teleport-your-whole-team-to-mission power; how sweet would that be?)

I think the only thing definitively "broken" about the system as it is, is the influence cap; the fact that some things can't be sold on-market for their real value is broken.