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Please use a deposit-based listing fee instead of standard listing fee
Sebas613
Member
I saw on the wiki that there intends to be a listing fee for listing items on the marketplace. I would strongly recommend to swap this into a listing deposit: paid if it gets sold, returned if unsold.
Two examples: New World had a listing fee which would be lost if the item was unsold. This resulted in many players intentionally not listing items, especially more niche/rarer/more expensive ones, as there is a HUGE penalty in having it not be sold. This lowers the liquidity of the marketplaces, which is detrimental to the player base at large. Plus, it inevitably leads to people spamming regular chat channels with items they want to sell to avoid the listing fee. Anyone comparing the New World to Lost Ark global/area chats will notice the difference. Walls of text that people spam every minute which just forces people to block the player.
Lost Ark has a deposit system, which allows people to list their items without worry, but the deposit still prevents some degree of clutter (combined with a maximum number of listing). I find this to be much more comfortable as a player.
To prevent people from simply removing the listing and relisting it to undercut people continuously, the deposit would be lost if you cancel the listing prematurely.
Edit: Imagine being a player who drops a super rare item worth about 250k gold in a game, where you tend to make 2k gold per hour from regular activities. If a listing tax is set at 10%, that means you "pay" 25k every listing period that the item isn't sold. It simply felt super annoying when this happened, and the joy of getting that good drop just got lost along the way as it subsequently took 4 days to sell the item, and you lost 100k of the gold just to listing it.
Two examples: New World had a listing fee which would be lost if the item was unsold. This resulted in many players intentionally not listing items, especially more niche/rarer/more expensive ones, as there is a HUGE penalty in having it not be sold. This lowers the liquidity of the marketplaces, which is detrimental to the player base at large. Plus, it inevitably leads to people spamming regular chat channels with items they want to sell to avoid the listing fee. Anyone comparing the New World to Lost Ark global/area chats will notice the difference. Walls of text that people spam every minute which just forces people to block the player.
Lost Ark has a deposit system, which allows people to list their items without worry, but the deposit still prevents some degree of clutter (combined with a maximum number of listing). I find this to be much more comfortable as a player.
To prevent people from simply removing the listing and relisting it to undercut people continuously, the deposit would be lost if you cancel the listing prematurely.
Edit: Imagine being a player who drops a super rare item worth about 250k gold in a game, where you tend to make 2k gold per hour from regular activities. If a listing tax is set at 10%, that means you "pay" 25k every listing period that the item isn't sold. It simply felt super annoying when this happened, and the joy of getting that good drop just got lost along the way as it subsequently took 4 days to sell the item, and you lost 100k of the gold just to listing it.
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Comments
Non-Refundable Listing Fees serve important functions in market/economy driven MMOs next to the typical gold sink. Just to name a few of them:
If you want to avoid Listing Fees, there are plenty of viable options. That's the entire premise of P2P-Trading System.
And you could change these filters for each chat channel too.
On undercutting: it actually results in MORE undercutting, since you lose the listing fee if you don't sell your item. There is no way you could logically get less undercutting by having the fee be lost as soon as you place the order. In New World I would undercut every.single.time. In Lost ark, I may list it for a higher price if I believe its currently a little low, as I would not be penalized for it.
On more price stability: Lower degree of listings/more undercutting actually lowers price stability.
Using other channels such as the trade stalls could have the trade stalls end up with a lower tax rate than the auction house listing rate. Then you'd still see a use for it. And this reduction would still give some people a reason to use them over the deposit-based auction house.
A deposit system still would do that. It just doesnt make people auto-dismantle stuff they arent sure about coz they dont want to risk losing money. Listing fee just results in less liquidity in the market.
Fair, but people might still send chat spam in global regardless of it being a trade thing. Likely at lower interval speeds, but it still happens.
Some people may like that, some people don't. If you have to spend three weeks to sell a rare item in a supposedly popular server to get the price its actually worth, it gets tiring fast.
Personally, I liked trading in W2 Fally/Varrock in runescape way back before there was a centralized exchange there. But other people prefer other aspects of the game and dont want to spend a lot of time selling their loot. Deposit-based stuff being taxed at a reasonable rate would still incentivize other offered options, but just reduce frustrations with those who keep on listing something until it eventually gets sold, but lose a lot of the value of their loot to do so.
Well, i think ashes having person to person trading, involved social aspects, and pop up stalls mainly. I think "connections" are more likly to form. Its more likely you know your local guilds and may know who is interested in buying your stuff. As you said, a pay to list, can be a turn off. So again, i think this would, "assist" players making connections. Instead of just listing everything they dont want to eventually be sold with no effort.
Ill add to this, if you want to sell something with little to no effort, you shouldnt get a good deal. If you want to spend time finding the right buyer and such, you should get the benefit, of not spending the listing fee.
And as the final defense against such spam, GMs could enforce the "trade posts only for trade chat" rule, if there is a global chat after all. Or maybe there could be some simple chat bot that redirects any trade messages from global to trade.
In other words, there's definitely ways of avoiding trade spam. And as others said, there might be some other issues in your suggestion. Also, afaik Intrepid employed an economist to build out their economy system and trading might be included in that, so if the current design remains - it'd mean that a professional economist said "yeah, that's good design".
Now im thinking if there could be some automated stall chat function?
Like just when you enter an area around a player stall it pops a message to you about its inventory. Maybe even give it a cooldown so passing the same stall several times doesnt spam you
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1558361130?t=0h16m20s
I believe Marketplaces should have a listing fee and Auction Houses should have a selling fee, both fees proportional to the value of your listing. I feel like that makes sense and would encourage people to use Economic Nodes for trading.
In any case, I hope that Mayors from any type of Node can change the value of the Marketplace fees, from 0% to some outrageous value, and any changes to the fee do not affect pre-existing listings. This would be great for competition between Nodes and hopefully it won't be a perk exclusive to Economic Nodes.
I wonder if we'll be able to create buy offers for items which will automatically go through when someone lists said item for a value lesser than or equal to my buy offer, for both the Marketplace and the Auction House.
What I wanted to say was that many believe that the 'Invisible Hand of the Market' most efficiently sets prices to the maximum benefit of society. In other words, artificial limits on prices (low or high, buying or selling) makes things worse.
The market is most efficient if the game just lets everyone buy and sell as they like. If the price is too high, no one will buy, and the seller will eventually lower the price. If the buyer offers too low a price, no one will sell to them and they will have to offer more or go without.
I hope AoC allows this and does not artificially try to fix prices in any way.
Oho, there was good news on that front that I missed?
(Last time I checked they were still looking for Senior Economy Designer)
I'll add another reason why listing fees should be enabled ---> It's a valuable gold sink.
Without currency sinks in the game, you start getting inflation and prices start going sky-high. Even in Ashes ... where the Auction House is limited to certain nodes.
Side Note: Intrepid is still looking for the economy lead designer for Ashes (in their careers section). After combat, it might be the second toughest programming task in the game.
Programming is not the hard part, that's pretty easy to do. Designing it is the hard part, and given most people who think they understand Economics are Keynesians, we're probably doomed.
It's still a gold sink if its a fee-on-sale rather than up front. Just a less irritating one.
Also, one of the longest-running, stable game economies is RuneScape. The only items there that truly inflated were the items released in events in 2001 that were never again obtainable (discontinued items). But every "normal" item has had no issues with it. And guess what? There are 0 trading fees in the game.
I definitely agree that designing a game economy is not an easy feat. I'd again point to RuneScape as an example of an economy that works very well. And unlike many games, it has no transaction costs on trading.
In most modern economic theories, transaction costs on trades are seen as bad for economies and the flow of goods in general, so it seems counterintuitive that they would hamper it by having listing fees over sale fees.
This is the primary reason why games sometimes need this. Ashes, in particular, does benefit considerably from having disincentives for 'using the sale space as a bank'. Even if they limit it. And I'd definitely prefer 'looser limits on the number of items I can list' than 'not having to pay deposit-taxes', personally.
While I do agree that NW's market liquidity was problematic at times, I'd blame it on the 14 day listing limit. I'd rather remove that listing time limit and keep the listing tax that NW had. The listing tax penalized the undercutting wars and provided downward pressure on overpricing.
Lost Ark's system isn't bad either and also penalized relisting wars while enforcing a listing expiration time. Though I think it would be more fun if control of the listing tax was given to the governing party (allow the governing guild to input a formula for the tax code using variables such as asking price of item, etc.).
It's extremely hard, especially if you want to make a game with player based economy and have the crafted gear be the BiS gear (unlike RuneScape where BiS gear is RNG based). RuneScape was pretty well designed economy wise, but bots slowly but surely started ruining that game. And then...
Jagex had a great idea and recently added a tax to the Grand Exchange in OSRS. The reason why they did it is laughable if you ask me: combat inflation. And the gold from this tax is automatically used to buy expensive items and then delete them (they called this an Item Sink), keeping their supply low, prices up and also acting as a gold sink.
In other words, Jagex asked themselves "what's the best way to combat inflation". Effectively ban bots, gold sellers and other cheaters that artificially inflate the gold supply, a.k.a print money? NOPE. Let's instead add taxes to the GE and use that tax money to artificially remove items from the market.
That's going to work out very well, it works great IRL, it surely will work in a game too, right? /s
That's what I'm talking about, my man. But I have low hopes that their "Senior Economy Designer" will be minimally free minded, unless Steven is like us and also believes in these things.
oh my god, they actually did. lmfao. Cant believe they added a gold sink in the GE.
Also, the inflow of items, even from bots, used to combat inflation quite a bit. Supply from bots pushed gold prices down, since most ways bots made gold was by farming items rather than actual gold.
I can see why they'd want an item sink for rarer drops, as eventually everyone would have already had it causing the prices to go too low on them. But it is weird to say you want to combat inflation while causing higher prices for certain items.
Auction houses enable players to list items at the Economic node in which the auction house is located.[3]
A listing fee will be charged to list items in the auction house.[3]
Vassal nodes of the auction house node will be able to view items that are listed on that auction house, regardless of node type of the vassal node.[3]
This will be possible through an auctioneer emissary NPC in that node.[3]
Items cannot be listed in non-economic vassal nodes.[3]
Items listed are also visible in community boards (bulletin boards).[4]
Integrated auction houses allow players to purchase items directly from remote auction houses.[4]
Purchases of materials and gatherables will be automatically deposited within the listing node's local warehouse. Players will need to travel to that warehouse to retrieve them. Players wishing to move these items elsewhere will need to utilize the caravan system or other type of transportation.[5][3]
Purchases of anything other than materials and gatherables will be mailed to the purchaser.[5]
There may be a taxation difference between auction houses versus other player businesses.[3]
Data relating to auction houses, such as price history, volumes, average prices, may be available to players via a mayor-constructed service building in their node.[6]