Important System Improvements in Going Rogue
By
Adar_ICT,
Posted on: 2010-06-22 09:55 in Developers' Corner
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List common salvage for 1b apiece, then. You might find that despite you setting that price, nobody wants to pay it.
| well that not right, who puts in up in the market listes it for whatever they want. |
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I tend to agree with the concept of "making items more readily available without having to use the Auction House / Market"|
Originally Posted by PhoenixKnight_NA
well that not right, who puts in up in the market lists it for whatever they want.
i think the only way for the devs to make sure the markets dont get overily priced is to lower the merit vendors prices. byt 5%-10% nothing to outrageous. i know i might get flack about this but i wanted to give ps my thoughts and concerns. |
I've got a post floating around that is hugely un-popular with many players because I state flat out that the solution to the Auction House / Market does not have to involve the Auction House / Market: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...82&postcount=1
- A solution to the rising inflation of Auction House goods must be equally available to all players on a consistent basis. Solutions based on luck of the drops or time played are inherently unfair to the casual player or may only have 4 hours a week to spend in the game, or for regular players who might run into problems with work scheduling or other outside issues.
- A solution to the rising inflation must be neutral to all alignments. Devising a solution that only benefits one alignment will do nothing but anger a significant amount of the player base.
- A solution to the rising inflation cost should be non-farmable, or have decreasing values in farm environments. A system should encourage players to... play the game... and not simply "work the system" for maximum benefit.
- A solution must keep in mind that the vast majority of the game needs to be balanced against Single Origin builds, not tweaked IO builds.
- A solution does not need to encourage players to participate in the Auction House System
Presuming the developers were to agree with these guidelines, yes, lowering average merit costs would indeed help players put their avatars into an IO state without having to grind or farm certain contents on a repeating basis.
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I don't think you've got your causal relationships straight there, saist.
| I've got a post floating around that is hugely un-popular with many players because I state flat out that the solution to the Auction House / Market does not have to involve the Auction House / Market: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...82&postcount=1 |
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The main issue with that suggestion is that its ultimately no better than the much simpler, much easier to implement solution of just sell everything in fixed price stores. Inflation gone by definition. Influence farming neutralized by definition, because without inflation there's nothing to spend it on. It actually eliminates beating around the bush and tackles the core fundamental premise of the suggestion: make the auction house redundant.|
Originally Posted by je_saist
I tend to agree with the concept of "making items more readily available without having to use the Auction House / Market"
I've got a post floating around that is hugely un-popular with many players because I state flat out that the solution to the Auction House / Market does not have to involve the Auction House / Market: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...82&postcount=1 |
Its a very predictable solution, because we've seen it before: its exactly what the game was like before the auction houses and the invention system were created in I9.
All you have to sacrifice is the player run economy. And if you think that the dev-run economy will be a place of plenty, you're ignoring that pesky game-balance thing everyone thinks can be hand-waved away. In spite of the *best* items costing sometimes astronomical amounts of inf, the one thing that the I9 system did accomplish was to provide an avenue for influence to flow rapidly from high level characters to low level ones in a manner that made influence constraints on low level outfitting neutralizable via gameplay options.
The phrase "via gameplay options" is key. Provide a way to gameplay your way out of constraints, and you're still making a game. Give it away automatically for zero effort, and you're a monkey with a keyboard banging randomly and hoping the players like the pretty serifs.
I'm actually quite amazed, given how much I'm accused of unnecessary verbosity, the massive number of words expended on extremely complex ways of saying "the way to eliminate the problem of people complaining about not having enough stuff is to just give them more stuff."
In any case, marginalizing the auction houses seems to me to be an act of game design cowardice. If the devs were to do that, I would basically tell them that if they don't feel the auction houses are a valid economic system, they should just eliminate it. It only works if the game design encourages participation. Explicitly putting in encouraging ways to bypass it is saying you don't want players to use it, but you don't have the guts to pull the plug on it. And when I say "I would basically tell them" what I mean is that *is* what I'm telling them. You work to fix it, or you dump it. Period.
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A solution to a problem, by definition, has to solve that problem. Implementing a solution to a problem which does not solve that problem by definition is not a solution to that problem. What you're really saying is "you can fix the market without involving the market in a fix" which is a load of crap (and, incidentally, is why that thread is full of fail).|
Originally Posted by je_saist
I've got a post floating around that is hugely un-popular with many players because I state flat out that the solution to the Auction House / Market does not have to involve the Auction House / Market: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...82&postcount=1
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Making things more available off the market doesn't solve the problem with the market, it simply shifts focus away from the market - and as Arcana puts it, why even bother having a market if you're going to encourage players to bypass it entirely?
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| A solution to the rising inflation of Auction House goods must be equally available to all players on a consistent basis. Solutions based on luck of the drops or time played are inherently unfair to the casual player or may only have 4 hours a week to spend in the game, or for regular players who might run into problems with work scheduling or other outside issues. |
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| A solution to the rising inflation must be neutral to all alignments. Devising a solution that only benefits one alignment will do nothing but anger a significant amount of the player base. |
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| A solution to the rising inflation cost should be non-farmable, or have decreasing values in farm environments. A system should encourage players to... play the game... and not simply "work the system" for maximum benefit. |
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| A solution must keep in mind that the vast majority of the game needs to be balanced against Single Origin builds, not tweaked IO builds. |
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| A solution does not need to encourage players to participate in the Auction House System |
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| Presuming the developers were to agree with these guidelines, yes, lowering average merit costs would indeed help players put their avatars into an IO state without having to grind or farm certain contents on a repeating basis. |
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No, the seller doesn't set the price. The seller sets the price they are willing to accept, the buyer sets the price they are willing to pay. If the price the buyer sets is higher than the lowest price listed they get a sale at THEIR price. Many many players list items at their vendor prices (ie 250 inf for common salvage, 1000 inf for uncommon etc) or even for only 1 inf. I do this regularly and still get items selling for 10,000 regularly.
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Originally Posted by PhoenixKnight_NA
well that not right, who puts in up in the market listes it for whatever they want.
i think the only way for the devs to make sure the markets dont get overily priced is to lower the merit vendors prices. byt 5%-10% nothing to outragous. i know i might get flack about this but i wanted to give ps my thoughts and conserns. |
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You're using a different definition of "price". When people discussing this topic talk about "the price" they're talking about something akin to the average price in the last 5, or over the course of the day or week. (Those of us who use the market a lot can readily keep a sense of the long-term trends on an item beyond the last five sales history.)|
Originally Posted by PhoenixKnight_NA
well that not right, who puts in up in the market listes it for whatever they want.
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If you go list a Doctored Wounds: Heal/Recharge for 100M inf, you've certainly set your sale price, but you're very, very unlikely to set "the price" people see in the last five sales history. That price is strongly affected by what people have paid before.
When I see people who think that sellers control that price, I feel pretty sure that I'm reading the posts of people who don't actually sell stuff on the market very often, or who never try to push the price envelope when they do. I sell a lot of stuff, and I typically try to get my sales near the top end of "the price". Many, many times I have come in too high, and had "the price" drop, leaving me stuck with items for sale for one or more weeks without movement.
In fact, experienced market sellers know that this can result from listing your item at "the price". If something is selling for 10M inf, and you list yours for 10M inf, you can often expect your sale to sit unfulfilled for days or even weeks, even if the item keeps selling for 10M inf. Why? Because other sellers are undercutting your list price. They expect people to buy the item at or near 10M inf, and they price their sales somewhere below that, but near enough to it to not be swept up by bargain seekers or flippers.
The price that experienced sellers list at is governed by what buyers are doing. If buyers keep paying more and more for something, savvy sellers will keep raising the price. If buyers lose interest and stop paying as much for something, or buy it much less often at high prices, savvy sellers reduce their list price.
Blue
American Steele: 50 BS/Inv
Nightfall: 50 DDD
Sable Slayer: 50 DM/Rgn
Fortune's Shadow: 50 Dark/Psi
WinterStrike: 47 Ice/Dev
Quantum Well: 43 Inv/EM
Twilit Destiny: 43 MA/DA
Red
Shadowslip: 50 DDC
Final Rest: 50 MA/Rgn
Abyssal Frost: 50 Ice/Dark
Golden Ember: 50 SM/FA
IMO I would suggest the following QoL changes:
Items (Salvage, Enhancements, Recipies, etc.) should if...
1. Sold to a vendor or deleted be moved to the market at vendor (store) price with 0 Inf to the deleting player.
2. Full let any additional 'Drops' automatically 'drop' to the market (Store Price) with 0 Inf to the player with the full type slot.
These 2 changes would IMO generate a massive boost in market supply and act as an Inf sink.
ATM if you have say a full recipe inventory @lvl 50 you may miss a purple recipe drop which is lost to the game forever...
With the above QoL changes this lost purple recipe would go on the market as an Inf sink at the store price,
thereby lowering the Inf in circulation and 'theroretically' the market price for that item.
Nuff Said...
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Not an inf sink. It actually creates more inf. |
Originally Posted by Coolio
IMO I would suggest the following QoL changes:
Items (Salvage, Enhancements, Recipies, etc.) should if... 1. Sold to a vendor or deleted be moved to the market at vendor (store)price with 0 inf to the deleting player. (Inf sink) |
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| 2. Full let any additional 'Drops' automatically 'drop' to the market (Store Price) with 0 inf to the player with the full type slot. |
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| These 2 changes would IMO generate a massive boost in market supply and act as an Inf sink. |
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| ATM if you have say a full recipe inventory @lvl 50 you may miss a purple recipe drop which is lost to the game forever... |
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| With the above QoL changes this lost purple recipe would go on the market as an inf sink at the store price, thereby lowering the inf in circulation and 'theroretically' the market price for that item. |
If you delete enough stuff at vendors you will get so called Recycling badges, and if you get all of them you get an accolade which lets you delete your stuff yourself without going to a vendor. It will still cost the same amount of Inf to delete them, however.
THAT is an inf sink, and a great motivator for people to use the market.
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It's not a bad idea as such... but... If all salvage deleted or sold or not claimed as a drop ended up on the market then there would be a glut of common salvage. It wouldn't be worth selling anything on the market as the buyers would know the prices from the vendor.
I could maybe get behind this if it was ONLY stuff vendored. Means you can sell it off if you don't need it and pick it up again cheap later. I would give a markup to the vendor though. Given how greedy they are I would add 100% so common salvage would go for 500. It's still worth putting it to market as you should get more than the 250 and supply and demand are still in effect. This would also be more effective as an inf sink than if the prices were the same.
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Fredrik, just saw your post. It would act as an inf sink, and the inf a player spends on the market to purchase a item would be destroeyed if it wasn't a player listed one. However, if the price payed is the vendored price it won't be an inf sink. For lost drops and deleted items it would be though.
Maybe there could be a limit for the amout of vendor supplied items at any one time. So only 100 items up from the vendor. Then the dross would be deleted, items would be there if you needed them for commons.
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Why would you delete them? Wouldn't you just sell it?
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Originally Posted by FredrikSvanberg
Nothing you've mentioned here has been an "inf sink". Maybe if people had to pay a fine for dumping their garbage on vendors you would have a point. Let's do that instead. Make it impossible to delete salvage and recipes. Only vendors can delete them for you but you must pay 250 inf for common salvage, 1000 for uncommon and 5000 for rare to make them take your stuff. Same with recipes. If you use the market however, it's virtually free: only a 10% fee!
If you delete enough stuff at vendors you will get so called Recycling badges, and if you get all of them you get an accolade which lets you delete your stuff yourself without going to a vendor. It will still cost the same amount of Inf to delete them, however. THAT is an inf sink, and a great motivator for people to use the market. |
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Usually yes, but if you level up mid tf/sf, it's a pita to get to a vendor.|
Originally Posted by Diggis
Why would you delete them? Wouldn't you just sell it?
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And by dropping items to the market (say up to a limit depending on the item) it would also cause the prices to drop to a more reasonable level, as well as having those market items acting as inf sinks...
IMO this would be the same as seeding items onto the market but using the existing lost drops, vendor sales and deletions as the source rather than a fixed amount of each item after every maintenance.
There are a few games where this seeding happens after a set time/mainenence and all players do is buy the limited seed items up and resell high, my QoL suggestion would act as an item seed source 24/7 allowing for a finite number of items at a reduced cost across the whole combined market... NA, EU, Blue and Red sides.
Think about it, there is no way a finite number of seed items will match all the purchase orders across the game, It would mean however that there would be a fair chance to buy the item below the maximum, if it drops to the market.
Nuff Said...
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Creator of: Coolio's Tech Beacon Replacements
AE arc 402506, 'The Rise and Demise or Otherwise of Tekna Logik...'.
Sorry Coolio, that question wasn't aimed at you, it was the post below yours that I quoted saying having the only vendors allowing you to delete items. If you're at a vendors.. just sell it.
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That's how you get ants!
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Originally Posted by Shadow Ravenwolf
...and cupcakes and brownies will fall from the sky.
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It was a sarcastic suggestion to show how you make a real inf sink, instead of what he suggested. The idea would be that instead of letting people sell their garbage to the vendors, they would have to pay the vendors to take it away. That would actually destroy Inf instead of creating more of it, like what Coolio suggested. I was making fun of his suggestion and making a (bad, supposedly humorous) suggestion of my own.
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Originally Posted by Diggis
Sorry Coolio, that question wasn't aimed at you, it was the post below yours that I quoted saying having the only vendors allowing you to delete items. If you're at a vendors.. just sell it.
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Except Coolio' suggestion was an INF sink, as I pointed out. It would need a vendor markup, but any stuff deleted or lost to full storage that appeared on the market would be sold to a player and their inf would be taken and given to the sink.
Seeding the market is indeed an inf sink.
Seeding the market with vendor trash is a dumb inf sink, since it only increases supply of things that already have too much supply, drives down their price even further, and therefore doesn't sink much inf.
@SPTrashcan
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I'd given up posting on the forums because it was absorbing too much of my time, plus I haven't been playing much (due to waiting for GR plus personal reasons), but I had to break my silence on this issue to say the following sentence:
Merging the markets is one of the best decisions Paragon Studios has ever made!
As a marketeer I will probably suffer, because the villain market was easy to manipulate for profit (and I needed to make extreme profits to be able to afford the price of purples/uniques on redside) and the merged market is unlikely to be so easy to work (as it will have higher traffic than the current hero market) - but as a player I hated the lack of availability of low/mid level recipes on the villain market as it made levelling up a less pleasant experience. This should improve the gameplay experience villain-side immeasurably.
This is a great day! Thanks War Witch, and your team, for considering the players' requests for a market merge over the years and for eventually being able to put the time aside in your schedule to implement it.
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1: This is only true to the extent that everyone trashes the same stuff. If the same items are trash to everybody and the same items are gold to everybody, that indicates an issue with the diversity of drops. Granted, you are correct to some extent, but I think there would be a lot of valuable items that otherwise would be deleted mid-TF (or more importantly not drop at all due to full slots) that should end up on the market. I don't think that most players keep an empty slot and when it fills during a big battle, call a timeout to go actually evaluate it. Marketeers probably do, but the average player?|
Originally Posted by SpittingTrashcan
Seeding the market is indeed an inf sink.
Seeding the market with vendor trash is a dumb inf sink, since it only increases supply of things that already have too much supply, drives down their price even further, and therefore doesn't sink much inf. |
2: My idea was that these things would drop to the market at a random price for no listing fee, but would take up a marketeering slot (if all slots are full, or if the item was previously 'randomly marketed' they could go onto the market 'anonymously' or actually be deleted). When you actually get to go to the market later, you can reorganize that stuff and delete it then if you like. You may get back to the market to find the stuff you would have deleted has already sold for a little inf: win-win!
I don't think inf sinks are the issue. Sure, people have too much inf, but if they have more inf than they should, why aren't they spending it on those expensive items (Merits is one answer, but then if they got what they wanted, they aren't in these threads complaining...or are they)?
Supply is the issue. Sure there are things that sit on the market because no one wants to pay the prices, but (I'm told) the bigger issue is things you can't get any any price because they've already sold. Get stuff onto the market that would otherwise have just been deleted/never dropped, and people will spend the inf on the items.
Sure, there are trash items that would sit on the market forever at ridiculous prices, but who cares? Certainly not the non-marketeers that aren't bothering to clear those slots out. Since those items would never sell at those prices, no one would ever even know they were there.
Sure, there are trash items for which the price would be driven even lower, but I fail to see how that is a bad thing if they are truly trash items.
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Actually I think making set IOs 10-25 "tier 1", 26-40 "tier 2", and 41-50 "tier 3" (to correspond with salvage) would be a big help...|
Originally Posted by macskull
These are improvements that could (and should) be made on top of a merger, but aren't a substitute for one. Before we knew anything about GR, I'd say that making IOs level-independent would go a long way in helping the redside market, but in light of the ability to switch sides a merged market means people will no longer feel pressure to move to blueside simply because the market is better. There's been quite a bit of that sort of sentiment since side-switching was announced and a market merger was ruled out, but now we know that won't be the case.
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Well, to me at least. Because I can count the occasions when I've actually wanted an IO of a specific level on one hand. I would like to be able to place a bid on "any recipe I can use", but doing that in practical terms means spending a lot of money and potentially winding up with things I don't need.
I'm fine with basic IOs having set levels, because I can buy them in unlimited quantity, but the same can't be said for a lot of set IOs. I can't set and wait on a bid for a recipe or crafted enhancement the same way I can for a piece of salvage. The salvage can't be substituted, but there are a dozen other recipes/enhancements which would be of indistinguishably equivalent utility.
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I was replying to a discussion as to whether seeding is an inf sink. The answer is yes. And overabundance of influence is most definitely an issue, but it's not the one being addressed.|
Originally Posted by Kitsune9tails
I don't think inf sinks are the issue.
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| Supply is the issue. Sure there are things that sit on the market because no one wants to pay the prices, but (I'm told) the bigger issue is things you can't get any any price because they've already sold. Get stuff onto the market that would otherwise have just been deleted/never dropped, and people will spend the inf on the items. |
In short: the problem is not with items not reaching the market, but with items not being generated in the first place.
@SPTrashcan
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Ah, I had indeed missed this point about things that only come from the Merit system.
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Originally Posted by SpittingTrashcan
The severest shortages are in recipes that can only be generated by merits or gold rolls. In short: the problem is not with items not reaching the market, but with items not being generated in the first place.
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So, combining this with the previous idea, whenever somebody buys a recipe for X merits, X/20 random merit rolls are dumped on the market as a bid sink?
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Originally Posted by SpittingTrashcan
The severest shortages are in recipes that can only be generated by merits or gold rolls. The reason why the supply is low is because, whereas before merits were instated they would show up as random rolls and be sold off, with merits the option for direct purchase means that fewer random rolls are being made and fewer recipes are being generated, both in general and in the specific categories where the shortage is most severe.
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The tricky bit would be determining what price the system should list the recipe at.
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Originally Posted by GlaziusF
So, combining this with the previous idea, whenever somebody buys a recipe for X merits, X/20 random merit rolls are dumped on the market as a bid sink?
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@SPTrashcan
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i think the only way for the devs to make sure the markets dont get overily priced is to lower the merit vendors prices. byt 5%-10% nothing to outragous. i know i might get flack about this but i wanted to give ps my thoughts and conserns.