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To get the quickest updates regarding Alpha Two, connect your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Splinter Topic: Local vs Regional vs ServerWide (vs GameWide?) Markets
Azherae
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
In a game where crafting and the economy is supposed to be important, and access to items is supposed to be limited, do you have any specific opinions on how the Markets should work? Any experience from prior games would also help the discussion.
Ashes of Creation intends to start with primarily local markets, and require Nodes (and specific types of Nodes, too) to develop to the point where we get powerful regional markets.
Personally I've played games like this before, FF11 started with Markets being regional, and BDO was like this 'sorta', but as usual, I suggest not going too far into trying to understand things BDO did. It worked at the time. SW:TOR had very similar implementation for a while too, but theirs was also not quite 'quick explain' so I'll leave that to fans of that game.
As the FF11 playerbase matured and the game expanded, the Auction Houses were consolidated, because the specific form of travel and trade involved was no longer a positive game loop. Basically, it stopped being an adventure. As far as I know, this is the primary reason it was changed, since if it wasn't, then obviously those who 'seek convenience' gravitate toward one market.
Games with much more defined hubs can manage with just Player Stalls, as long as the area where people gather to sell things is easy to understand for newer players, but this is somewhat less convenient than an auction house and easier to abuse.
TL's upcoming method goes even further and makes the Auction House beyond 'server wide', incorporating all the (for example) US East Servers into one Auction House even though players cannot easily swap servers. Presumably this is to improve interaction between fans of the game within a geographical region, and to help spread out megaguilds due to their current guild-relationship implementation (which theoretically clamps guild relationships to aliances of about 4x70). But, on the other hand, they (maybe Amazon's 'fault') intend to lock AH participation to level 40 or higher.
ArcheAge's handling of this is similar to the 'usual' from later FF11 and BDO, but you need to have specific statuses/licenses to sell things.
Ashes of Creation has various economic reasons to limit either the availability of goods through Auction Houses, or availability of specific items from different POI in the open world (I'm not arguing against having both, I'm simply saying it's not necessary to have both with the currently known design). So, for a single question:
Would you prefer larger regional access to Auction Houses (like, a whole nation or two) and stricter itemization, or the opposite?
Ashes of Creation intends to start with primarily local markets, and require Nodes (and specific types of Nodes, too) to develop to the point where we get powerful regional markets.
Personally I've played games like this before, FF11 started with Markets being regional, and BDO was like this 'sorta', but as usual, I suggest not going too far into trying to understand things BDO did. It worked at the time. SW:TOR had very similar implementation for a while too, but theirs was also not quite 'quick explain' so I'll leave that to fans of that game.
As the FF11 playerbase matured and the game expanded, the Auction Houses were consolidated, because the specific form of travel and trade involved was no longer a positive game loop. Basically, it stopped being an adventure. As far as I know, this is the primary reason it was changed, since if it wasn't, then obviously those who 'seek convenience' gravitate toward one market.
Games with much more defined hubs can manage with just Player Stalls, as long as the area where people gather to sell things is easy to understand for newer players, but this is somewhat less convenient than an auction house and easier to abuse.
TL's upcoming method goes even further and makes the Auction House beyond 'server wide', incorporating all the (for example) US East Servers into one Auction House even though players cannot easily swap servers. Presumably this is to improve interaction between fans of the game within a geographical region, and to help spread out megaguilds due to their current guild-relationship implementation (which theoretically clamps guild relationships to aliances of about 4x70). But, on the other hand, they (maybe Amazon's 'fault') intend to lock AH participation to level 40 or higher.
ArcheAge's handling of this is similar to the 'usual' from later FF11 and BDO, but you need to have specific statuses/licenses to sell things.
Ashes of Creation has various economic reasons to limit either the availability of goods through Auction Houses, or availability of specific items from different POI in the open world (I'm not arguing against having both, I'm simply saying it's not necessary to have both with the currently known design). So, for a single question:
Would you prefer larger regional access to Auction Houses (like, a whole nation or two) and stricter itemization, or the opposite?
Sorry, my native language is Erlang.
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Comments
I think having larger trade areas or wider access might limit players' need to travel to other nodes or trade in different regions. This could discourage exploration of the map and undermine the caravan system, which could die out if there’s little need to move goods between nodes or destinations due to regional access being too convenient.
As for licensing, I’m not too concerned. If acquiring licenses is difficult, it could be a bit of a drag, but if it leads to rarer items increasing in value, that’s a financial bonus. So I’m on the fence about it.
It might also undermine gathering professions. If trade becomes too centralized in a single hub or if regional access is too easy, there’d be less need for players to travel or transport goods. This would not only reduce the demand for caravans but could also diminish the value and role of gathering professions. If resources can be easily moved or accessed across different areas, the need for local gatherers to supply regional markets might drop, which could hurt the overall economy and the importance of those professions.
The compromise of "you gotta build up nodes and they'll spread the market's influence in the vassal system" is something I'm ok with, cause even with all of my hardcore preferences making people run around every damn node just to see where they can sell their item would be a bit too much.
But I think the only "server-wide" thing should be linked to cross-kingdom node relations. So if there's a war between nodes (which would right now only include nodes of different vassal systems) - you shouldn't be able to see markets. But I do think that nodes should have mayor-driven relationships where you can share your stall/shop info, so that people can check that stuff easily.
And even with that mechanic, connecting nodes from across the server would, in theory, still be kinda hard. Though this will depend on how exactly we can build up node relations, so that's a separate convo.
Central systems unbalance the game population and make market manipulation too easy, along with removing aspects of rarity and scarcity from region to region (something claimed to be a focal point to facilitate node trade)
My opinion is that both sides (pro-regional and pro-global economy) have good arguments, and neither should be ignored:
- People who argue against local economies are correct that it feels outdated and like a pointless time-sink chore.
+ However, a regional economy introduces fun features.
+ Local player stalls are really fun features. The less automation behind it the better. You're just forced to only put items into your player stall that customers will actually be willing to shop around for.
+ A regional economy, if employed consistently throughout the game's design, can help reduce the hyperoptimisation mindset of players (if it's legitimately impossible to sell everything at the perfect price, players eventually learn just to accept being content with a decent price. See the next points for the "how.")
I think the secret to a local economy is to make auction-house fees so expensive that players wouldn't think about selling their trash there. If the only things that get traded in auction houses are items players actually use, because the fee is too expensive to bother paying it just to reach the buyer most willing to pay market rate for some random low-level crafting component (except for massive bulk purchases), then players never develop the culture of spending half a day running around the entire server realm browsing for mediocre consumables, just to get them at the perfect, most fairest available price. Leave it to the self-declared market-makers, and if you can't find what you want, ask in chat for a personal trade, or just be okay with not having that item that day.
This way, regardless of whether global auctionhouses exist, or whether global information is provided on trading websites and add-on-like software (with or without direct API access), not everything will be *found* on auctionhouses, and not all regional market inventories will be public knowledge, so either way players won't ever be spending half their game time traveling around for a few consumables/crafting resources.
(And either way, you will have to go around and browse the stalls if you want to find good offers, because those won't realistically be consistently available on online portals.)
And you'll have to be okay with mediocre offers, if you want something specific that's not generally worthwhile putting on the auction house; because the market stall slots won't typically be worthwhile for those types of resources.
Another side aspect of this is that not everyone should be encouraged to engage in the same busywork just to keep players busy.
Not every player should be encouraged to spend 5 hours a week to keep their 5 different artisan skills at the optimal progression pace.
The players who want to be crafters should be encouraged to spend their surplus gold on buying up the resources they need for their crafting XP. Same for processing.
It should be an investment to be good at a craft, and using up your resources efficiently should require so much additional investment that most players prefer just to pass their loose resources on to others on the market (at a mediocre price; high enough to justify the player stall slot, but cheap enough to justify buying for players who have to go around player stalls to find resources for their artisan skill.
The way you disincentivise that sort of mindless "everyone should do everything" mentality is by making professions prohibitively expensive, and require prohibitively many resources from various farming spots across the realm.
That way, it's completely clear to players that they have to *want* to put effort into a *specific* artisan class, if they want to progress in it. Rather than just making them think they have to passively progress at everything at the same time.
By extension, you need to normalise for non-experts of a profession to pay/trade with the profession's masters, in order to get the stuff they want to use. This should be common practice at level 15+.
And you make it common practice by actually making processed/crafted tools worth the effort, not just quest rewards.
At the same time, these items have to be rare enough that players cannot afford to have all the artisan skill advantages active all the time. Make players save them for particular purposes. High demand, low supply is ultimately the secret to this entire subject.
Yeah, essentially the way I would counteract this is to never make it this a worthwhile game loop norm in the first place. Make it something only those players do who genuinely don't want to do anything with their time besides being a merchant. Drastically limit the potential profitability of being a merchant, through high processing fees, and by making the resource sinks so drastic that there won't be a "rich" player in the first year or so. Any profits you make will go into the game's gold sinks, because buying up resources to concentrate and resell simply won't be a thing you can do for a substantial profit, and any profit you do make will have to be directly invested back into the game.
Make trading something that only makes sense for those who browse the local stores whenever they happen to travel to a different node. Not something anyone feels compelled to have to do actively.
This is how you actually achieve the intention of the "outdated" form of trading where convenience is restricted for a very specific purpose: Driving demand (and by extension the risk-versus-reward gameplay) without making every player obsess about owning everything, and trading everything at a perfect price. Because all the game's resources just end up getting used up by crafters levelling their skills, and no player has unlimited gold, because it gets sunk back into node progression and guild growth, and equipment accumulation. So average players don't have to get obsessed about the fear of being terminally out-capitalism'd exponentially by the merchants and no-lifers of the game.
Another thing that I think would help limit excessive profit margins would be completely disabling automated purchasing. Let stalls and auction houses only include offers, never purchase orders.
Make purchases of any kind completely dependent on manual transactions in the game. Of course online tools will be used to automate the trading negotiation. But that lack of convenience of small-scale transactions alone will still drastically reduce the monopoly created from a single dominant merchant gobbling up all the resources.
Leave it up to players to decide which resources they want to sell to NPCs, and which resources are worth talking to a person to, or using one of their guild market stall slots to sell.
Combine that with high resources costs and high gold sink costs, and you have a stable economy where people don't feel left behind when they browse the local markets instead of getting perfect prices at all times.
(My experience comes from Dark Swords with its highly valuable consumables and very rare item components, EVE with its fascinatingly competitive regional markets, TES:O with its obnoxious teleportation, and indirectly from Regnum - in the sense that there was barely any economy in Regnum, and gold was worthless in the game; but that honestly also taught me a lot about the advantages of not having every player obsess about prices all the time.)
Based on what you have provided me over the years, though, and my own research, L2's economy does not come close to what is required or optimal here. If you have more information about how player hubs worked in C3 specifically, I'd appreciate it.
This is a bit of a 'misunderstanding' possibly. The sort of player who 'runs around to get the cheapest price' likely either doesn't understand how pricing logistics work, or have a lot of time on their hands and will usually become a true trader, eventually. Those players probably still exist, there just aren't any non-sci-fi MMOs for them to play at the moment other than BDO and BDO is... a long story.
This is a question of market stability, and I haven't encountered games other than the ones I already play, where that's even a real concept, except ArcheAge, and ArcheAge isn't the same type of economy depth as FF11 or Ashes. Basically, in FF11, you wouldn't need to be able to 'see' the Markets, after a little while.
And of course, people will always create online repositories for information. "All Fantasy MMOs also have the Internet". That's not something one 'fights' because one doesn't have to, you just assume every economic actor has perfect information and continue from there. It doesn't meaningfully affect the design, as long as the system doesn't allow Buy Orders and the Econ Designer is savvy.
This will also come down to whether or not 'delivery' is magical and always safe or not. Right now, we don't actually know with certainty if the items a player buys on a distant Auction House will be delivered to their residence/current node/warehouse without any chance of disruption.
I really liked Ragnarok back in the day, the only thing you had outside someone shouting or a trade chat room was the merchant class. you actually had to spend skill points on your cart and then vending so being players were gated behind this not everyone had a merchant.
Merchant's would also get discount skills so NPCs would be cheaper. It was common for people to invest in potions and sell them outside leveling areas sense there was no fast travel people would pay for the convenience. I like a world where you have to work for things, it really adds to the games experience.
Me not want run 2h to trade. Me sad
Coming from a game where 'Auction House Trash' was genuinely not a concept for the first 4-6 years of gameplay, I can at least say that this isn't necessary. I would think that Intrepid is already squarely in the target demographic of 'people who don't need to be given 3-6 bits of random stuff for every mob they kill', so they can actually itemize accordingly if they wish to, without requiring high Auction House fees.
Not saying that they should, nor unfortunately for me even that I think they will, but they can, so I'd encourage those who don't like high Auction Fees to clarify it (personally I find them to mostly just discourage participation unnecessarily).
This one comes down to how many Auction House 'slots' each player gets, and whether or not Alts count as separate. A relatively big deal in the design, honestly, but I can't comment further on it because we don't know how the implementation will go.
I don't have a specific suggestion or preference yet, when it comes to Ashes, for this aspect. I need to see more of what they really want to happen here, and experience it both from the 'min-maxer' perspective, and my preferred 'no Liches, no Locusts'.
Here I will disagree because 'prohibitively expensive' almost invariably leads to some pretty negative outcomes in a guild-heavy game. Prohibitively slow on the other hand, is a little more directly effective, especially in Ashes of Creation where 'overharvesting' of basically anything leads to 'issues' within the World Manager.
This is relatively easy to reference older games for, though, all the good/strong Econ games already have lots of data and player experience based on tuning the item faucets, so I'm sure there will be many players with lots of input, when that time comes.
I don't personally believe this aspect of gameplay is controllable, and any measures beyond natural itemization that are placed into the game to control it will take us straight to EVE, and moreso the 'bad' parts of EVE. From my side, I'll continue to desperately hope that Intrepid's Econ person knows how to use the Caravan system to manage this, rather than anything else, but that would go directly counter to what you're saying, in a way.
But in another way, I guess I'm agreeing directly. Travel and Trade need to be an adventure game loop, or this is gonna fall apart right quick.
Mhh. Yeah. But also, most players are wayyy too concerned with their own convenience and success to have any useful input there. They genuinely don't know what they want, because what they think they want is too misguided by coping-mechanism concerns they adopted in games where they felt like the system was out to get them, because making progress was basically contingent upon making a profit, instead of just using the resources you happen to have.
If you want to make a local economy work to the benefit of the game's enjoyability, you have to dig way deeper than what players want. You have to make top-down decisions about how many resources should exist, and what they should have to be used for.
I think that's pretty much my point. Minimise the necessity for players to travel for the sake of trade, and instead just subtly reward players for remembering to trade when they're traveling anyways, but don't make the player have to remember so many different resources and optimise their profit margins so much that they feel like they're missing out when they just sell at their local market and don't get any use out of some of the resources sometimes.
I think you can control way more of that than you're willing to admit. Perhaps due to the risk of sounding naive? In my experience, way too many of these discussions devolve into economy majors waxing poetic about how "markets control themselves and if you try to do anything to control the behaviour of market agents, you're only ever going to make it worse."
They tend to forget that what they know about the economy applies in a world where the baseline will always be real predetermined needs. In an MMO, you can design the needs any way you like.
If you want players to care about local markets without hyper-obsessing about prices, you have to (1) give them products to trade that are important and rare enough to keep an eye out for, but (2) not give their competition so much money that whenever anything remotely worthwhile gets put on the market, the competition will be able to buy it all up and resell it for profit by principle. (Further regulated by processing fees.)
Both the competition's access to money, and the players' need for resources is fully controllable through the game's skill design (limited artisan classes per player; gold-intensive artisan class progression) and loot design (restricted resource distribution, restricted gold distribution, high gold sinks in node/guild/equipment development.)
If the merchants stubbornly try to raise their profit margins anyway, players who want to improve their artisan class skills will just spend more time actively farming their own resources, and fewer players will bother to level their class skills in the first place.
Don't get me wrong, merchant players won't like this. So there will definitely be loud complaints. But they will like that the game will live longer, because there will be less spite and stress in the rest of the community. And I'm sure in the end they'll get their profits, and there will be monopolies here and there. But the escalations will be slowed down enough that competition will have an equal share of the profits, and the wealth will be distributed more homogenously, and players won't be so stressed out chasing prices.
Bear in mind that I am the definition of that sort of person, except that I go even further and study MMO economies specifically.
Whether you put any stock in my understanding is up to you, but I'm saying that from the perspective of MMO economies specifically. If anyone would like an essay on precisely why I don't believe devs can control the specific concept of 'whether or not a player considers it a worthwhile investment to trade', I'll provide it, but for the sake of simplicity in this thread, for now, just know that I still disagree.
Particularly with this line, so that you know where we diverge:
In an MMO, you can design the needs any way you like.
My response to this is 'not a chance'. You can generally only add and remove them.
And my experience on this is that FFXI had literally every thing you said, and it still was not controllable, so I feel like I have many years of experience, including interactions that border on 'interviews' with other players, as to why this is so.
Also, just quickly (though I'll gladly take the essay if you ever feel like it):
Would your stance change to any extent, if I clarify that we'd account for the fact that we can't design the exact needs of all/any given player, but just the general tendency, while accepting that different personalities will veer drastically to the left and right of the mean?
Then we're at semantics, but we'd probably be agreeing.
So, briefly, what do you say about the player whose wish to undertake the crafting gameplay loop is itself so much more important to them than any profit that they will choose to consistently take actions that cause them to lose money or 'waste time' just so that they can have that feeling?
And note, I'm specifically talking about very mundane activities.
If 90% of players acted like that, yeah, merchants would have monopolies within the first 2 months.
But this excessive tendency I believe you can counteract in the average player by designing these class skills in a way that incentivises most players to spend their money and resources on other, more incentivised gold-sink investments, like node progression, guild progression, or itemisation (which also has an aggressive item sink mechanic in Ashes with the over-enchant system.)
My data from FF11 and BDO puts this percentage of players between 30 and 45%.
Both those games have a higher tolerance for this value than Ashes. Ashes, practically speaking, can only have 30% as their absolute upper bound of players willing to behave like this, given their world size.
I can find a few direct examples on FFXIAH if you need more than my anecdotal 'we had a problem literally getting people to stop selling things on Auction House for less than the price that an NPC would pay them for the item'. And I don't mean 'after you calculate the AH fees' either.
BDO similarly had an issue that I think I could theoretically still prove where they raised the price caps on some components for potions, yet did not raise the price of the potions, and the supply remained.
World chat confirmed for me multiple times that people will just go 'hey I log into this game to craft and I don't have another game to do it in and I like it here, so I will just burn the money so that I can continue to have that feeling of being part of this'.
People will 'accept Merchants underpaying them for their work just so they get something', your suggestion/method simply increases the burden on that player type. Now, maybe they shouldn't play this type of game, but I'd prefer that they were able to enjoy it, since I know they can't be 'controlled' by those specific incentive structures.
(note, high processing costs also tend to drive others who do not enjoy it out of the markets, and this results in the BDO Pain Point of basically 'lifeskill players being economically abused while also being reduced to precisely the demographic of player that accepts that abuse', and there was still enough of this behaviour for certain monopolists to continue doing their thing)
That said, I do agree. Players definitely don't make it easy to make the system work. They certainly have a tendency to pick fairly random incentive structures over being consistent rational agents...and they end up ruining their own long-term enjoyment of the experience in the process, when the economy inevitably breaks down because the countermeasures aren't effective enough to prevent people from slaving away towards their personal incentives, and funding their economic opponents in the process of making themselves poor...
Perhaps I need to tone down the confidence of my post. I shouldn't say I think you can guarantee a functional persistent low-frustration economy. But I think you can do much more than standard MMOs are wiling to do - often just because certain committal design decisions would look unusual to players and critics.
I do not, but this is a combination of bias and arrogance.
Even then, however, you asked how much of your position it makes me dismiss. Unfortunately, all of it, much like how the L2 players generally dismiss concerns about most aspects of corruption.
I've played games with extremely functional crafting and market interaction systems for years, and I (obviously biasedly) believe in my observations, for one reason more than any other.
The things I have observed to be true are frustrating to me. I don't want to have to think about how to solve 'players that undercut things just so they can feel like they're a shopkeeper', just as I don't want to have to think about players who log into a game that is clearly crafting/economy related and complain about having to interact with it.
But as you noted, players do this, and they do it enough to make me constantly annoyed at how much you have to 'babysit' them, even the ones that know this is what they are doing.
So the gap between our perspectives is that you say "I think we can just not worry about those players" and I say "I have been wishing I could just not worry about those players for decades".
Note also that we should be making BIG distinctions bewteen types of goods. They should not all be equally tradable at range. Raw and Processed materials should have the highest degree of localization, ideally all their movement being by players either carrying them or using the Caravan system to the location where the final crafting step occours. These goods are going to be in bulk and the person/s transporting them is looking to make bank for thouse good. So preserving the risk involved and the value-added effect of requiring transport is vital because it preserves the gameplay of the gatherer, processor and transporter. And even makes crafters think about where they will locate themselves to be access the best and cheapest materials.
On the other hand I am far more lenient towards the purchasers of finished goods to be able to 'shop' and then have 'mailed' those items from wider areas then their local node. For the individual player most purchases are out of need not greed and going to pick up that purchase from the location in was crafted is a disproportionate time investment given the typical small size of the purchase. Also with localized only purchases you have the difficulty of each node stocking the huge number of final craft items (with all their potential optional craft modifiers) that might be desired, a retailer trying to maintin all thouse stocks would be in for quite the headache, and while we should encourage them to TRY, I'm reluctant to force all other players to be dependent on them succeding.
So I would want to see a high mail fee for player purchases which move goods from their current node. The fees should depend on the number of 'steps' away the source and destination are in a vassal node chain, with each step being a multiplier that is cumulative. So if you are in a tier 3 node which is a vassal to a tier 4, vassaled to a tier 5 vassaled to a tier 6 and want goods currently sitting in the tier 6 node, thats 3 'jumps' each of which is going to impose a fee multiplictivly. The same fee works in the other direction if the tier 6 node citizen is trying to buy from the tier 3 node, but the citizen of the high tier node is able to search the vassal network under them, while the bottom node can only look 'up' through their patron chain, a node in the middle can search both it's vassals and up through patrons so the higher the node the better the shopping diversity. Their is also a time delay on delivery which scales with node distance and is computed vassal step by vassal step and items are picked up at a post office in the node, not delivered directly to player inventory. Lastly individual players can mail items using the same system but the sender must access the post office with the item in hand and the recipient needs to be a resident of a node to determine the destination and fee, no mail for murder hobos.
This fee should be something each node sets, aka their Tarriff rate on mailed goods, but their wold be a minimum level to this tarriff, I'm thinking atleast 10%, setting the tarriff above that would generate revenue to the node with each purchase, the minimum portion of the fee being a global gold sink. Merchants who bring in goods physically don't pay the tarrif, though they may have a different lesser fee assosiated with the unloading of caravans, use of warehouses etc if they use them. This will give local retailers potential to undercut the mail system with its high fees, if they price they items reasonably, stock what players want etc. Nodes at the lower tiers of development likely won't have any doing that which is why the players in them will likely be completly reliant on mail and are by design going to be paying the highest fees. That gives a high incentive to set up as a retailer as the customer base is likely small so they need more profit margin per sale.As nodes get higher tier the availability of local goods rises and the retailer gets lower profit margins, but they make it up in volume.
In my experience the effect of high information on prices is minimal in the games that are closest to Ashes when it comes to this.
This is because in those games, players are very attuned to the exact value of 'time spent actively trying to make money'.
BDO grind spots are literally described in terms of 'silver per hour' and FF11's first 8-ish years, I could probably tell you the exact value of 1 hour of serious playtime in each region, for each job/class give or take a week's fluctuation.
BDO lacks fast Travel almost completely, other than using your alts for certain things. FFXI has a little of it, but back then it was never truly 'fast'. To ride from Windurst to Bastok on mount is around 30m. A teleport to save you half the trouble was consistently 10-15% the value of an hour's playtime. However, FF11 did not generally have direct Global chat, only the equivalent of Guild chat, so I make no claims about that specific aspect.
Both games also have enough consistent throughput of items, that even certain rarer ones, while you may not know the availability at that moment, you generally knew the price, if you were even remotely 'used to' interacting with that item. The same happens in BDO. It's hard to explain if it doesn't make sense already, but people just kind of 'know' what things cost (I've asked others to make sure it isn't just me, they don't know as much as me, but they guess based on minor information and guess correctly, the sort of baseline information that you would also have if you were considering getting it yourself, such as 'where does it come from').
I'm not 100%, but at this time I'd have no reason to assume that any form of Global Chat in Ashes of Creation would meaningfully offset the markets, since the following are true:
No/minimal fast travel.
Capacity to lose materials in transit
Capacity to lose time in transit
Points of specialization in production in Nodes (e.g. can't get wool in the desert)
Generally slower leveling
Commitment to the importance of Artisanship
Commitment to limitations on Artisanship
With that said, though, there's always the hitch in this whole thing, the whole 'Caravan+Glint+Travel=PrintMoney'. I'd have much more concerns about the Global Chat's effect on Caravan running, but I would also expect that most of the time, Node Chat would be how that happens.
I can see a situation in which a Caravan needs to pass through 4 Nodes, and Global Chat from Node 1 means that it has no chance of getting through Node 3 or 4 safely. On the other hand, literally yelling in Global about it means you might get attackers and defenders, so who knows.
Point is, I don't think market flux is the thing you need to care about in a Global Chat situation.
Would make moving items to market nodes for merchants a thing, and for pvp players wanting to be bandits would find ideal spots to ambush, or setup a toll even if they wanted.
For a "global" market, might be neat if you could see things for sale in other regions, and buy them at increased price to account for it being so far away, but then you have to wait some numbers of days for the item to actually make it to your side of the world. I'm not exactly suggesting this because I want to see local markets be the norm, but I know how much a lot of people want global systems.
Also I think that the caravan system in itself is just a great base system from which to trigger world events - be it PvP or PvE.
Example: We already know that certain player activities can cause NPCs to attack our caravans and I think it would make sense that, if these NPCs are successful enough in attacking caravans, that could trigger a quest line of its own where we have to deal with this enriched NPCs. E.g. they could fortify the nearby POI they are coming from to attack caravans, turning it into a temporary open world dungeon full of elite mobs and in there they are creating a relic that can be stolen.. via caravan of course. If not stopped in time they then attack the biggest nearby Node, triggering a monster coin event. Something of that sort.
As for the main topic of markets: I think localizing the markets is a good idea, because having "perfect" information at all times about goods and services is boring to me. It also encourages more social gameplay to establish good relations with an artisan guild so you might get a discount on their goods if you give them information on certain gear prices in the area from which the other guild operates.
But what I've always seen in L2 is "each town/city has a small market with players selling local items (including tradeable quest items that you get in that town) and/or soulshot-related trade".
Soulshot-related trade included selling/buying of SS, crafting them at the player stall, selling/buying of direct mats that are involved in craft of those SS and sometimes (though mostly in lowbie areas) buying of full items that can be broken into mats that are used in crafting of SS.
This would then also be separated by grade, which was related to the lvl of mobs around the town/city. And full item purchases were based around the stuff that people could loot in those locations. In L2 town portals could TP you to certain spots around it and then if you used a TP scroll at those spots - it'd get you back to the same town, so if people knew "spot A is accessible from town A and you can loot item A there" - traders in town A would set up buy-stalls for item A.
Then on top of those local markets you'd have either 1 big market hub or maaaybe 2. In earlier days (C3 included from what I remember of it, though it's been almost 20 fucking years), that hub was usually a port TP from one of the big cities (Giran). That city was almost in the exact middle of the map and was a good TP-hopping if you were moving from one city to another for some reason. It was also the town that had the TP to one of the big dragons, which also led to people favoring it.
And Giran had a port near it and had a TP to it. And that port was filled with traders who'd sell/buy/craft alllll kinds of stuff. Quite often you'd be able to find nearly every craftable items in the game there.
In later updates a certain location was added into the TP lists of all towns, which then obviously led to this location being the main hub. This didn't remove the local markets, but on the feel/memory alone, I'd say that they became smaller due to this change. But this is definitely a very nebulous thought, cause all servers were different to some extent, so I might've just experienced the once that got the most influenced. I'd assume James would have a much better impression if this change influenced the game in its proper flow (cause while official servers grew from update to update, private ones were always locked into one update).
And as for the second potential location I mentioned above - that would usually just be the main biggest city. So, along with the port, Giran itself might have a huge market with all kinds of items (see this, but think x10 the amount of stalls)
This answers another part of my question in the parent thread. Instead of trying to thinkg about "how many people really access 3rd party info" the answer is simply "assume everyone does".
My current expectation is that there's 0 system-based delivery. You buy a thing (that is if we even CAN directly buy, instead of just seeing what the market has) and then you gotta go pick it up at the location you bought it.
Just this much though:
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.[9][4]
Purchases of anything other than materials and gatherables will be mailed to the purchaser.[9]
The second one is most important because this affects food, potions, some particular types of scrolls, maybe, at the moment.
Definitely implies that you could theoretically buy new gear from your Economic Village node without traveling all the way to your Metro, to me.
But it also refers to only 'integrated Auction houses' in those quotes, so back to ~shrug~.
EDIT: Also, in case anyone missed it, I realized I didn't provide context for that EITHER so here:
https://ashesofcreation.wiki/Economic_node_superpower
First section.
Well, it definitely does seems like even processed stuff will be mailed (unless all processed items are "materials"). I'll be real curious to see how exactly will the economy push people to trade in non-mailed things.
Caravans bring in large base costs and insane risk (supposedly/allegedly), so, unless building up nodes/freeholds requires gatherables from the entire world, I don't really see why people would risk the tranfser.
If I remember correctly the same happend in New World briefly after release. Auction houses were linked then. So, same fate.
The simple truth is, although regional markets can be fun and meaningful, they feel inconvenient (especially for the potential buyer) when it comes to price transparency and potenially can be time sinks.
If (only if) a player has the possibility to know the average market price of an item and has the option to travel to that location to advantage from the best possible price, then players will try to achieve that, so they will accept other costs (time -> opportunity costs). We experienced that entirely in New World due to regional markets.
Happend in New World (sticking to this example because its quite „fresh“) like this, which led to a „walking simulator“ game, because traveling was expensive at first. But there were other restrictions (ie. lack of storage, so materials were distributed in different towns, or dependencies to the level of the crafting station of the particular town, because gathering and crafting was/is a huge content in New World) as well.
Personally I‘m lazy in games, so I really appreciate global markets and global pricing. It provides some kind of psychological saftey that I‘m not wasting my ingame money to someone trying to get an advantage over lack of (price) knowledge. But, it will not be a deal breaker for me in Ashes, and tbh I expect that sooner or later the markets will start to get more global, perhaps outside of the game (external fan sites, database websites, …) if systems (nodes!) or developers are not supporting/changing it ingame.
Quite same for personal player stalls. Ive experienced them in another MMO, cant remember which, because I fully ignored them and will do so in Ashes. It takes to much time, to my understanding, that I run around screening all those player shops/stalls one after the other. I cleary prefer: Gooing to the one and only auction house, selling all my stuff by knowing the average market sell price (usually at the end of a playing session before logout) and buying my stuff by seeing and knowing the average market buy price. Thats comfortable, thats time efficient, thats fine.
If I cant get the information about these market prices for me personally an essential QoL feature is missing, an issue that global chat or external sites can solve a bit (depending on the community, because asking in global chat needs some mature guys being online to receive honest and reasonable answers/whispers).
(sorry for EN and typos, from mobile…)
I really think that Intrepid should block any mailing of gathered or processed materials. If Crafters can just buy materials from where ever they were it deeply undercut the Caravan system and also decrese the uniqueness of regional crafting output. An area with say for example a lot of copper should actually see a different mix of products get crafted because local materials are cheaper and the whole flavor of the item economy shifts to reflect that and has downhill effects into combat, for example people use more medium armor in an area because it's cheaper, while in another area they use more heavy armor because iron is more plentiful.
I don't think it would be vital to run caravans for this, because depending on certain implementations, solo players would travel to the place with the workspace and the abundant materials, while carrying the rare ones and trying to sneak their way through/in, whereas Caravaneers would probably make more money from Glint (I'm looking forward to seeing if Intrepid can design a schema where this isn't the case, but I won't hold my breath, that said, you could fill a caravan with what Glint-Commodities you have, and fill the rest with materials.)
If time has a clear cost, then the equations for travel-based pricing are easy. We might get 'undercutters' from the Caravaneer groups, but I'm sure the local syndicates will 'persuade' them not to do that.
And maybe that's exactly what Intrepid are going for with this design. Gatherers being the traveling kind of players, processers would be tied to big nodes and FHs, while crafters are loot-location-based dudes.
And if this is the case, then I sure hope mountains have iron/steel sources, cause I wanna be a weapon/armor crafter and I'm gonna need those!
Not entirely sure which specific information you seek, but will try to provide a somewhat generalized answer regarding the topic.
Regarding players main hubs in the early versions it was mainly dependent on the target buyers, because towns where mostly in the middle of specific level farming regions it usually dictated its market, usually D grade items and resources would mainly be sold in Gludin/Gludio/Dion, for C Grade a lil in Dion but mostly Heine/Giran/HuntersVillage so on and so forth, also keep in mind the restrictiviness of teleportation prices.
But throught the whole game there were 2 places which mostly outclassed the rest in terms of main player hubs for general items Giran and Aden for 4 different reasons: Wide range of level farming regions, Amazing repeatable quests, Things/services npc only in those towns provided and relatively lower price of common items sold by npcs.
But eventually one place outside of those became dominant and the main player trading hub, Monster Race Track, simply because it was accessible to teleport from any town for free.
Aren't we all sinners?
Maybe the one big difference (unless you just forgot to mention it) was the Giran port. Cause I've definitely seen several servers that used it as the main trade hub of the game (before MRT) and so if the official servers didn't have this then I'd consider it a private server special