Why player store/stall is better than Auction Houses (or the ESO model)

There is no denying that when you play an mmo with an Auction House, you basically belong in one of the two categories of players:

1) You are one of the players that wants to list a new batch of 99 iron ores. On auction house there are 20 listings of 99 iron ores. The prices range from 23g per Iron Ore to 19. Your best bet to sell your 99 iron ores is to price them for 18.

2) You made money earlier than most players in the server. You spend 2 minutes to go down to the auction house.
You notice that there are around 20 listings of batches of 99 iron ores going for 23-18g, around 20 listings of batches of 99 HP potions going for 35-32g each, around 20 listings of critical rate runes going for 400-350g each.
You buy all the iron ores and sell them for something like 25 to 23g each, you buy all the HP pots and sell them for something like 37 to 35g each, you buy all the critical rate runes and sell them for 430 to 420g each.
Flip the price, make profit, spend 0 effort in farming of producing anything. Any in a couple months time, this will be the market of each AoC server.

If you deny that this is how AH works in mmorpgs, then I wish I could describe you without the fear of being banned.

In my next post I will post an image of player shops from an older mmorpg, and try to explain why this model that AoC will head towards is better for the kind of mmo they want to be.

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Comments

George_Black

In this older mmorpg you see players sitting down and selling 1-4 items, or buying 1-4 items (those items can be batches of mats with limited or unlimited number of transactions, or solid items, like weapons, enchantments, armor, whatever. Whatever it is, your shop has 4 display options.)

The Purple shops sell items.
The Yellow shops buy items.
The Orange shops are crafters, that process mats for you at a cost.

If I am looking to buy or sell or craft a specific item, let's say the material COKES I will type /find cokes

The selling shops will turn from purple to green and the buying shops will turn from yellow to light blue and the orange will turn to red.
And so, I can easily go and check the shops that I am interested in. Some times I might be too late, and some other player has already gotten all the COKES from that players shop. I might try my luck in the next town, or sit down and create a buying shop "BTW COKES".

Now, L2 was an older mmorg. There are some disadvantages that in 2020 we dont want to deal with:
Having to lock your player in a shop mode, instead of playing.
The market being kinda empty because all the players rather play instead of buying/selling, meaning that if you want to find a better market you'd log in not during prime time, when people just afk their chars.

Next post ima talk about AoC and this kinda of model.

George_Black

In AoC players will have houses of stalls that can use to diplay, I guess, more than 4 items.
Your won't have to be there. Just setup and go.
In AoC they will be functions like carpentry which may play a role into creating your stall or house/shop.

It will be a nice immersive way to truly walk around and look around the town for COKES, possibly with a mechanism like /find, which could highlight the shops advertising board, so that you don't feel completely lost.

It most certainly won't allow the markets to become a place that you are either one of the two types of merchants, if AH was the way to go.

Personally:
1) I don't want to just compete on price, every time I look at the auction house, before I list my items.
2) I certainly don't want to end up (if I become rich in AoC like I was in eso) to completely ignore farming/crafting as a way to producing wealth, now that I can just flip prices in the auction house.

That is why I prefer the stall system, as opposed to AH. And that is why I will be doing my basic shopping (potions/food/drinks and what not) in an economy node, in which everybody lowers their prices due to AH competition, but I will never be a citizen of an economic node.

HiddenDaggerInn

I enjoyed traveling the world in Ultima looking at different house merchants for good prices, when you found 1 they had recal runes you could use to return.

Nixal

Star Wars Galaxies had an interesting approach with a global search but you still had to go to the player store

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smb9fhozrxY

Atama

Nixal wrote: »

Star Wars Galaxies had an interesting approach with a global search but you still had to go to the player store https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smb9fhozrxY

That model was pretty cool and would work well for a game like AoC.

SWG was a game where you’d show off who crafted your gear like a person would show off expensive labels in real life. That’s the kind of player economy and interaction I believe Intrepid is looking for.

Aptos

Agree 100%.

Auction houses streamline trading and make otherwise interesting content boring. They also open the way to terrible price manipulation. Unfortunately in most MMOs trading is an afterthought, especially when the developers are catering to casual players.

Runescape actually comes to mind as a good example of this, as they added an auction house style trading system years after the game initially released. You would normally see hundreds of people in the most populated worlds selling or buying items, there was no specific set price you could buy an item for. After the Grand Exchange released the only worlds that had these people selling items were the trading worlds. It fundamentally changed the economy of the game. It made it easier to buy items...but it was a souless system.

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