Important System Improvements in Going Rogue

I am curious where you can find official canon on Wentworth's.
I've never read anything about it.

Could anyone provide any arcs or links?
Thanks!

It's Neither it April 1st, nor is it snowing outside.

I'm not at all worried about what the market will do post-merger. In fact, if the prices skyrocket I'll be happy, as most of my characters sell a lot more than they buy. With my salvage and recipes my philosophy has been that if I don't want it, I'll put it on the market so that someone who does can have it.

As for the super secret RP reasons for the merger, who says it's entirely sinister. It seems to me that the Black Market would be a great way to keep tabs on all the super-powered denizens of the Rogue Isles without their knowledge.

I am anxiously looking forward to GR for the ridiculous profits it will bring me. Even more so with a merged market.

Demand, meet Supply.

I am back home now and late in finding out this news, so I will just go ahead and post my reaction. Hint: I am very happy rite nao!

GREAT HORNY TOADS!!!! This is great news on sooo many levels! I really could not be happier.

Just a reminder to any villain that teams with one of Venture's heroes in a Co-Op zone...ever...he does not want your dirty, dirty wakie or purple or small red or a Rez, or a Buff, or anything from your evil little hands...his heroes are above such things.

Didi I mention how happy I am with this???

First, OMG, glee. I was very much not expecting this. I'm guessing that either the shadow of the ongoing development started to outweigh the technical challenges of the market merge the devs mentioned at Cons, or they found a way to mitigate the merge challenges.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rylas The problem with this argument is that it fails to take so much into account. Fewer produced goods on the BM come from a lower amount of villains being played than heroes. And one reason for that could be that the market is a deterrent. Then there's the fact that with GR's release, side-switching will be going on, and over time (probably not that long of a period either) production among Hero AT's and Villain AT's could end up leveling out. Also, does this argument take into account recipes/enhancements/salvage produced from the player base as a whole, or does it just look at what's on WW and what's on the BM? Among all players, the productivity stays the same. The only difference now is that you don't have a divider to cloud your observations.

This is really important. Market participation has its own positive feedback loop. If not a lot of people are participating, this is a disincentive to those who might otherwise be willing to. Merging the markets may increase the percentage of villain players who regularly use the markets to list goods for sale.

I do still consider it likely that heroes may experience higher prices and villains lower ones. However, I'd like to point out that other game changes before now have had absolutely transformative impact on prices. The introduction of merits, the creation of the AE (and the long period of exploits), I16's difficulty sliders, even influx of new players on major issue releases - all of these have had drastic affects on prices in various (sometimes large) segments of the market. I'm honestly not sure we're going to be able to discern the difference here, especially not as new changes continue to come into play.

Edit: I should also add the general reminder that wholesale market price shifts are largely irrelevant to players who actually sell goods on the market for monetary gain. When prices go up, so do your market earnings.

Things should become more affordable now on villains other than low level salvage.

I was very excited for GR to come out to get my brute to 1k badges. Now I'm looking forward to the merged market as well. Unfortunately we have to wait a little longer than expected. But, for a merged market I'm ok with that.


Prices will rise blueside and drop redside is my prediction but it won't be uniform. Salvage prices will rise redside while recipe prices will drop for example. And in particular pet damage recipes will spike in price blueside as MMs are able to access them.

This is one of the best about-faces I've ever seen in an MMO and it restores alot of the faith I had in the dev team after the 1+ yr long AE debacle we've had.

I went and brewed a pot of coffee just so I could spew it all over my screen.

I seriously expected an intermediate step first, like unrestricted gleemail alone, to allow some resources to flow back redside. Still, I'm glad you did both at once. Allowing rich heroes to gift poorer villain alts should negate any problems that arise from redside being so resource-poor.

Awesome news.

That ensures that our villains stay where they are. Yay!

The markets have three problems. First, there are far too many markets to have a healthy level of liquidity in more than a small minority of the markets in existence. With tens of thousands of markets and 80,000+ subscribers, this amounts to nothing more than stating the obvious. The solution to this problem is also obvious, given that the number of subs is unlikely to increase 100-fold.

Second, transparency is key to making markets strongly efficient, and providing only the "last five prices" will never be a good solution. The current limits on information provided lead to very high profits for those who stay regularly connected to the markets because they understand price movements far better than those who don't--essentially, some version of technical trading works, in the COX-verse, because historical information is only available to those who gather and remember it. Those who don't spend a lot of time at the markets end up operating at a strong disadvantage when trying to set their bid and ask prices. This leads to fairness issues, which irritates some players and drives them away from participating in the markets, and it lowers overall volume and liquidity. This is on the devs, though, as players can be counted on to do what is in their best interests and designing a system based on any other premise isn't going to work.

Third, the transaction system for the markets currently encourages players to spend a large percentage of their time at the markets handling low value items, which lowers their motivation to participate. More generally, players incur high hassle costs as the price of their involvement in the markets, which has depressed trading volume. Reducing the hassle costs of participating, and giving players ways of quickly putting low value items onto the markets (or into item sinks), so they can focus most of their attention on higher value items, would help players feel like their time at the markets is producing more "value" and they'd be more likely to want to participate. Ergo, participation would rise.

If these three problems were addressed, then both Wentworths and the Black Market would be functioning better than fine. And, a market merger solves none of these problems.

Of all the arguments presented to justify a merger, Arcannaville's arguments are the only ones that have any level of resonance to me. Wave it all way, and pretend that even those things that happen in plain sight while at the markets aren't actually happening at all.

Any RP way of presenting this is full of obvious holes. Its unthematic. Its doubly ironic that this change is being made when the game is being repositioned as being about moral choice, as moral choice on the items side of the game is essentially being written out of the game. It runs the risk of turning COX into a water cooler joke among those involved in the comic-verse. It runs the risk of having some percentage of players log on their heroes, not feel heroic after they finish supplying their and other villains, and decide they'd rather play other games instead.

And, at the end of the day, a market merger doesn't even solve the three underlying problems that have prevented the markets from functioning well.

Excellent news. I'm very, very pleased. Thank you.