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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server 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!!
2
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.
A big part of "playing the economy game" is realising when you've done what's an efficient use of your time, and choosing to be done with it for the day, instead of continuing to chase profits any way you can. 80-20-rule. Don't spend 80% of your time doing things that only contribute to 20% of your satisfaction; you're playing the system wrong.
If the prospect of someone else doing the boring stuff you don't want to do making more profits than you is intolerable to you, that's not something the devs can fix.
You're encouraged to engage in alternatives.
If you need gear, trade for your items with gold or other services. This is what an economy is supposed to do. Make you weigh where to use your time and resources, where to employ your skills and interests best.
The only reason this isn't obvious to you is that you're too used to games that reward you for wanting to do it all just so you can say you did it all, so you treat Ashes the same way in spite of the obvious intentional roadblocks.
Themepark auctionhouse economies are for ADHD kids. Storefronts are for grown-up ADHD kids with properly adjusted medication.
Independent from each other, It will be node-vassal based.
The idea of running around to storefronts to acquire what you want is incredibly annoying and inefficient. It is also a significant impediment to people who see trading items and materials as a gameplay loop in itself.
IRL do you like to run around to a bunch of different physical stores to try and buy stuff, or do you like to use a single, virtual portal (the internet) to remotely shop all available options?
Please implement a global AH. If your purchased items are in the node where you're located, you can take possession immediately (in-store pick-up, so to speak). If your purchased items are in a different node, perhaps the AH can offer a menu of choices for delivery services that are listed by player caravan operators.
This would be far more enjoyable for players. It would also enable a better buy/sell trading gameplay loop, as well as enable a more robust player-driven caravan delivery service pvp gameplay loop.
Global auction houses carry their own set of hazards, Electronn … one those hazards being price fixing.
If you’re really into the economy as a gameplay loop, then it’s baffling why you even support the idea.
Unless you weren’t aware that convenience and optimizing your sales revenue are two different things?
Regardless, if the Auction House is important to you, then simply choose an Economic node for your citizenship when the game launches. Economic nodes will each have their own AH.
QoL on top of player stalls sounds like something both realistic and interesting. No current MMO really goes in on simulating the actual bazaar experience of having to really check carefully and find a truly good deal from what's available, and I think that's a shame.
After all, isn't this the risk versus reward game?
No.
In every way. Every word of this is incorrect.
Storefronts are (arguably) for people that want to engage in the economy as a major part of their gameplay. Even then, they force people in to running around performing menial tasks more than actually engaging in the economy. They are, when actually dissected, literally nothing more than a time sink for players wanting to participate in the economy as a major part of their gameplay.
Marketplace/auction systems are for people that do not want to engage in the economy as a major part of their gameplay. They exist to simply provide a function - one that is key to MMORPG function. That is the key point here, storefronts simply do not fulfil the function we are talking about as well as a market or auction house.
For these people, storefronts are literally a barrier to achieving what they want to get out of the economy.
Intrepid know this, which is why the game will have a proper marketplace in the future. This fact isn't up for debate, it is happening.
Entitled convenience goblin demanding perfect rewards. It's like an infection among MMO players.
And then in games where you get your perfect convenience, you spend 10 hours a day anyway, just to keep up with all the other degens' status quo for wealth and xp progression anyway. You're asking the devs to reduce the resistance of the treadmill, instead of making your own choice about when you've exercised enough.
So what did the convenience do for you?
I'll tell you what it destroys for players with a personality further down.
Supply differences that give people something to think about and pay attention to in order to figure out how they want to use their time efficiently. Where to sell your products, how to package them in order to meet buyers where they are. Which other merchants to talk to, which products to focus on in order to benefit from your location.
They also exist to make you think twice about spending your time on market manipulation and middle-man trading, because it requires that much more time and effort, so you're encouraged only to do it when it really feels worth the time for you.
If you choose to chase perfect prices anyway despite it not feeling worth your time, because you're so addicted to profits that you have to find them where they don't exist, that's not the game's problem. That doesn't make market stall hunting the purpose of storefronts.
A player can wind up spending their whole day doing the same thing in the marketplace as they would in storefronts, there's just less walking - yet another way in which marketplaces only make you interact with the world less than storefronts.
If you want a game that makes you interact with the game less, have you tried "no game"?
If you need to trade really badly, you'll find a way to do it without a marketplace. If it feels tedious to do it, you don't need to trade that badly, and you'd only be doing it in other games because it's convenient or you're trying to hypermaximise profit on every little spec of dust you've collected.
Marketplaces are the same thing, except the API is hidden as a native game function.
Economies in games with marketplaces/auctionhouses are functionally indistinct from games with NPC buyers that pay the going player-market rate for everything.
The outcome is exactly the same. You dump all your reasonably valuable loot into it, you get currency out. Any thought put into figuring out a supply chain, how to buy wholesale, which players or regions or guilds to sell to would be completely pointless and therefore should not happen except maybe as a political tool - never for any economic merit.
Zero interaction. Why do you want players to be discouraged from treating each other as anything but NPCs?
Define "actually engaging in the economy."
Apparently in your mind trading with specific players/guilds person-to-person, and thinking about which regions to sell your valuables in (and, yes, travelling to make it happen) doesn't qualify. So what is it?
Is it farming items to dump into the economy until you're white in the face? So you want the game to make you spend less time chasing opportunities to sell your stuff at 110% market rate, so you can go back to farming more stuff to dump into the world? Have you considered just accepting the price you're given? Or maybe not continuing to farm stuff and expecting perfect prices for it, **if you don't even care enough to find the right place to sell it?**
Or is it sitting at the marketplace and hitting refresh in order to adjust your prices?
(Or, in a slightly more mentally well-adjusted form: Checking back with the marketplace a few times a day to adjust your prices? You might think that's a lot better, but both of them are equally soul-less non-interactive player-as-NPC transactions.)
Is that "engaging in the economy"? Where is this economy engagement found, what does it look like, and why does it need to be instant - whose gameplay benefits, and how?
I have no issue with expensive-to-build marketplaces/auctionhouses at node centres that demand expensive base transaction costs and expensive percental transaction costs (the mandatory costs could go to the node, so it wouldn't sting too much.)
Such marketplaces exist mainly to sell rare valuable and specialised items you can't find a buyer for in person.
I have hopes that the transaction costs will be high.
My hope is founded on the fact that resources are inconvenient to stack and difficult to transport in Ashes. Stacking resources in the marketplace would limit the effectiveness of that system, so I hope Steven understands that high base cost and high scaling transaction fees are important to make the existence of storefronts continue to be meaningful.
If "what you want" out of the economy is maximal reward for minimal effort compared to other players:
- In a marketplace system you can get maximal reward for minimal time&effort compared to other players.
- In a storefront system, you can get maximal reward for minimal time&effort compared to other players. You just have to accept that there might be some players who choose to dump in a lot more time and get slightly higher reward per time spent than you. If you can't tolerate that, get your control disorder treated; at least now you know.
Everyone can thrive in a regional economy MMO. You just have to use your time and resources in a way that aligns with your values.
A marketplace economy MMO takes that decision out of your hands and in return gives you soulless buttons to click without ever thinking about another player. You wanting that isn't because it's better, it's because it rubs your instant gratification sensors the right way. You're stuck in expectations formed from 20 years of systems optimising for hyperconvenience; break the cycle.
TL;DR: If players don't feel entitled to perfect prices, regional market stalls aren't very different from a market place, and they introduce more incentive for market-makers to engage in real player interaction (with guilds and individuals) to get their products sold in wholesale deals and guarantee stable prices for both sides.
If players do feel entitled to perfect prices, marketplaces won't save them from wasting all day chasing profits either.
And if you're convinced that you *like* chasing profits, storefronts are a more engaging way to do it than marketplaces. If you don't like it, it's up to you to prioritise your enjoyment with your entitlement to perfect prices.
The regional supply difference Intrepid want will be maintained via regional markets/auction houses. There is no need at all to have store fronts as a mechanic in order to maintain regional supply differences.
The rest of your post is equally incorrect, and doesn't warrant any more time than what I have put in to this post.
You are, in every respect, factually incorrect here - and that has led you to maintain an opinion that makes no sense when viewed from a perspective with at least some of the facts correctly understood.
Could be worse - like the player stalls in ESO that require you to check each one in each city. Not sure if that’s changed but it was a pita.
Stalls right now are like L2 trade system.
I don't know why u compare it with TESO.
There were not player Stalls in TESO, it was guild Stalls. A number limited on each city so at the end u did go solo to the 2-3 "big markets".
I think here will happen the same, it will trend to concentrate in a few places and we will have thousands of people in the Bazar shouting and scammming each other.
So hot
Much like the name "Tank," I’m pretty sure the guy investing $45 million to make his dream a reality doesn’t particularly care if you prefer auction houses.
To provide some context for where I think Steven is coming from:
That is Giran from Lineage 2.
I know everyone thinks Ashes of Creation is inspired by ArcheAge, but as I understand it, much of the team behind ArcheAge originally came from Lineage 2. They seem to have left some of the magic of Lineage 2 behind to "modernize" their new project.
One example of that magic is the market system.
I’m pretty sure what we have now is a placeholder for a more organized version of the Lineage 2 system:
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Player_stalls
The current placeholder also has a search function that works very well. It makes things way easier than they were in Lineage 2—almost too easy to find good deals.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
Ok. Appreciate the correction. Player or guild, the point was decentralized v. centralized markets. Decentralized is fine as long as it’s easy on both sides of the trade.
I think complex for the sake of complex at the cost of fun is just silly.
I'm also not sure why you are phrasing it as "where Steven is coming from".
The current store fronts are not the eventual limit of how to buy and sell in Ashes. We know the game is set to have player stalls, personal shops, and auction houses.
Yes, this is true.
One of the things they wanted to do in Archeage was make the games economy much more interesting. Farming, packs tp run, the way crafting worked etc. This was second only to EVE in terms of an MMORPG economy.
One of the key aspects of that was not just in implementing a marketplace to facilitate trade, but also in setting that market up to function cross server, so as to expand the pool of both buyers and sellers.
Ashes is indeed pulling things from both L2 and Archeage. However, the main thing this game is pulling from Archeage is that games economy.
The marketplace in Archeage was key to that game economy functioning. Steven knows this, that is why the game will have similar function in it's auction house system.
We get it... You don't like Lineage 2...
It is a real shame that the game you have spent years of your life on the forums for has a Lineage 2 fanboy as it's creative director.
It seems very clear to me that he wants to bring the magic of looking for deals in Giran to Ashes.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
I'm sure he does.
However, since an auction and/or market is going to be present in Ashes, those storefronts are only going to be used when a given portion of a server is in a situation where it doesn't have a better market. People will use them only because the better system the game offers isn't currently available to them.
People are going to resent it.
Sounds magic to me...
Auction houses will be limited to economic nodes. If there are other economic nodes within a linked network, you’ll be able to place remote bids. However, you’ll still need to manually travel to the location where the item is sold to retrieve it—anything else would be game-breaking.
The other three node types will feature the magic of the stall system.
I don’t think most players will resent this system. At worst, it might be an acquired taste that many modern MMORPG players haven’t experienced. It may seem frustrating at first, but it’s actually a well-loved system.
For example, FFXI had both a true auction house system and player stalls. Both were used extensively, even in the game’s largest towns. Most people can’t resist browsing player stalls for deals, which adds to the game’s charm.
The main issue with player shops in games like Lineage 2 and FFXI was that your character had to remain physically present in one place to attract traffic. Ashes of Creation solves this problem by eliminating the need for characters to stay in one spot when in towns.
This is my personal feedback, shared to help the game thrive in its niche.
When listing on an auction house, the materials you are selling (so, harvested goods, processed goods etc) are automatically put in the warehouse of the node you list them in. When a purchaser buys these materials, that is where they pick them up from.
Thus, if you are purchasing many different materials, or a lot of any one given material, you would only ever consider doing this at one of these auction houses, as that means you only have one location to pick up from - the warehouse of the node you are shopping from (you may have to filter out products listed from vassal nodes).
Anyone purchasing materials that fall in to this catagory will only ever want to buy from an auction house/market. The time required to acquire the same materials if you have to go to each individual stall to pick them up would take up too much of your time.
On the other hand, when it comes to items other than those that are subject to the games caravan/stupid inventory system, the items you purchase are just mailed to you.
Yeah, but people also love WoW's LFG system, despite how bad it is for the game.
The problem with a market system like this is that the product type for it dosen't exist.
A large central marketplace or auction house is what you want when the game generates the item, and the player is just selling it. Purely transactional, there is no customization, no nothing. You list an item that is the same as everyone elses version of that item that they have listed, and a buyer comes in and picks which of that identicle item they wish to buy.
Most MMORPG's only have this type of item, and so should only have this type of economic system.
Then you have purely bespoke items - or mostly bespoke items. Items that the person creating the item can customize to a large degree, and where players will want their own customization on them. Ashes will have some of these items (in theory) with crafting. Since these items are often made specifically for the player that is buying them, this kind of item needs a commission/escrow system, which the game will also have.
Then you have a middle ground. Items that are somewhat customised, but not for each buyer. This would be like an Etsy shop, or going to a farmers market - the probuct is unique to the seller, but each version of that product from the seller is the same (ie, not bespoke).
This is the kind of product that would make sense to sell in a player stall or personal shop, but it is a type of item that (as far as we know) doesn't exist in Ashes. Examples that could fit in to this are things like items with player uploaded images (flags, canvases etc), or consumables that players can earn exclusive rights to (either temporarily or permanantly).
These are things where the product is inherently linked to the seller, and so going to that sellers shop to get that specific thing makes sense. It doesn't make sense to go to a players shop to buy [generic_helm_104], and it doesn't make sense for a player with a shop to list an item for sale that has bespoke stats.
Forcing players to use sub-optimal systems for no real gain, but for a significant loss (that screenshot above is a detriment to any game, not a positive) absolutely will generate resentment.
Ashes has the items and systems for the large central maarketplace to make sense, and for the commission/escrow system to make sense, yet it doesn't have the items for the play stall or store front to make sense. This means most players will look at the whole system as being little more than punishment for not having a nearby economic node of sufficient level to have a better marketplace. People aren't going to look at it as "adding charm" to the game, because the player stalls (when they are implemented) will just be staffed by NPC's anyway, and people will likely switch from personal shops to player stalls when they realize that they are subject to PvP while staffing their personal shop.
Stage 4 is when you can build it.