Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Store Fronts are Awful
Rockyfour
Member, Alpha Two
Just your standard auction house please. No need to reinvent the wheel!!
1
Comments
You are mistaken. This is the wheel.
So yeah, no auction houses.
Auction Houses are a refined, manufactured wheel.
A store front system is actually fine for a game with a basic economy like Ashes currently has. Trading a few basic materials and some finished products is actually fine with a store front system. It is asking players to spend more time on tedium instead of having fun playing the game, but some developers know their games aren't actually all that fun.
However, store fronts will not be able to support the kind of economy Intrepid has planned for Ashes. You can't build a castle or node using store front mechanics. The idea of a game with Archeages economy working with a store front system is kind of amusing to think about - the auction house was moving millions of items a week, you can't do that with store fronts.
Memes aside I agree. Games like this need to be careful with the little annoyances that stack up. Having to run around the city to each players stall and manually searching their vendors is absurdly tedious and can really ruin player experience in a game.
Having a central trade market in each town should be the minimum, and these trader stalls should be connected to this market (as long as they are in that node''s Zone of Influence) for ease of search and price comparison. Players can manually go to a player stall or they can go to the market and purchase from there.
There is a system on the private server Everquest: The Heroes' Journey (maybe its in their retail version IDK) that is basically this and it works quite well.
So, instead of running up to each store, you can just run through the market and see if anyone has the item you want.
This would still let people try to scam buyers, which would require people to be careful with their purchases instead of just going "duhhhh, this item in the auction house is the cheapest so I just buy it".
Item availability of node stores should be a tradable good, just as commodities are.
- if you wanna go full hardcore they could require a caravan run
- but I think just having them as a piece of paper that you gotta carry to another node should be fine
- you get them from an npc that overlooks the node market
- you bring them to the same npc at another node
- the reward for doing this is similar to how caravan rewards are calculated
- the item itself is unreadable
- the info you get from the npc is simply presented as a list of items in a node market w/o prices or seller names
- economic nodes distribute this info within their node relation system automatically, and also pay more for any market info that you bring them, which makes them the info hubs for local trading
I'd love a system like thatWith Ashes storage system, this would work even worse here than in Archeage.
Sellers being able to transport materials to a central location and buyers being able to buy it all from that one location is a basic function that Ashes needs to function on a basic level - personal preferences aside.
And imo markets should be limited in size (depending on the node buildings of course), so you would only "run around a ton" if you were in something like an economic Metro.
I fully expect pvp to be turned off in nodes by the end of testing, so I see no damn reason not to let people send their stuff directly to storage. Hell, give us ability to pack crates right there on the spot, if not directly from the purchase. And those crates could go to the caravancery immediately as well.
I agree that there should be qol additions to the system. I simply disagree that they should come in the form of a centralized point of purchase/sale. I want to see market scammers in the game. I want people to pay attention to what they're buying and how much they're paying.
Lucky for both of you that Ashes will eventually have both player stalls and an auction house.
If you are a citizen of an Economic node, an Auction House will be a unique feature of the node … for the convenience of scanning all commodities across the node itself.
However, if you prefer capitalism, the player stalls are where you will find the best deals.
Maybe the OP isn’t aware the Economic node Auction House feature isn’t in Alpha 2 yet?
To me, in node storage should mean the resources in question can be in general storage, on the market, in the caravansary, or ready to be used for crafting within the node.
I don't see having to move materials between these things as being valuable gameplay.
However, I also don't see having to run between a few dozen different stalls to get those materials to be valuable gameplay, even if you don't need to transport the materials. That makes playing the economic game a series of self directed fetch quests, and thst really isn't compelling gameplay.
So, even without the need to transport materials within a node, an auction or market is still required, imo.