Please use a deposit-based listing fee instead of standard listing fee

Sebas613

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.

Warth

I wholeheartedly disagree.

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:

• It reduces constant undercutting and other idiotic market behaviors.
• It creates a bigger degree of price stability.
• It rewards those, that actually spend the time understanding the market, prices and products.
• It effectively prevents people from listing everything they find without looking at the market beforehand.
• It embodies the very risk vs. reward concept that's at the very center of the AoC Design Philosophy.
• It encourages people to use alternative selling channels rather than relying on the most convenient one.
• AoC provides ample opportunity to sell items outside of the market place (Stalls, Community Knit P2P Trading through Bulletin Boards and Personal Shops) Listing Fees are used to counterbalance the reduced up-front cost and the convenience of market places as seen in the following table: https://de.ashesofcreation.wiki/Economy#Buying_and_selling

If you want to avoid Listing Fees, there are plenty of viable options. That's the entire premise of P2P-Trading System.