I saw in the kick starter campaign you mentioning no auction house. Is this just at first or is the plan to never have an auction house?
Is that in the campaign info or one of the comments?
"There will not be a traditional “global” auction house in OrbusVR. Rather, there will be market stalls available for rent in each major location. Players can get a permit to occupy these stalls and set up a shop to sell their wares (even when they’re not around). It will be up to you to acquire tradable items worth selling."
from https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rileydutton/orbusvr-virtual-reality-mmorpg
Johann, how do you feel about the absence of an auction house? You’re saying you hope there will be one down the line? What’s your thinking? 
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You’re question wasn’t directed at me, but I’ll drop my two pence in 
Right now, I’m not against the idea of not having an auction house because we haven’t yet seen what it’s like without one. Market stalls as well as direct player-to-player trading will increase social interactions which is one thing Riley seems to be trying to promote based on the section “socialization” in the link you suggested. An auction house might also make the market stall system unnecessary which at this stage would probably be unfair to people who have staked a claim on a Market stall. Even if (and we don’t know for certain) that the Orbus team is against a centralized auction house at the moment, the future is not the present, and a centralized auction house may be introduced in the future.
An advantage to having a central auction house is being able to find everything you need in one place. A disadvantage is having to go to that one place in order to sell/purchase anything (as we know, Orbus will require a lot of travelling around and while teleportation will exist, it won’t be cheap or an ability that can be spammed. In this situation, having decentralized shops (markets) that are more spread out and much closer to the player will be more advantageous to explorers as they’d most likely have less distance to travel to get to a stall.
After launch, if it turns out that the market stall system isn’t as effective or working as initially hoped, I, personally, wouldn’t be against the eventual introduction of an auction system. I will be waiting until after launch and after I’ve had a chance to play the game.
Has anyone played any MMOs where an auction house was later introduced? If so, if so, perhaps they could tell us about there experiences before and afterward, and also what were the reasons behind the introduction of the auction house.
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I have played games where they had stalls and it was a pain to go to each stall to view the wares. It was extremely time consuming as well. I’m not sure the stalls make it more sociable b/c the merchant stalls are there whether you are online or not. Also, someone is not going to sit in their stall for 24 hours. If they did that, they probably wouldn’t have anything in it, since they would need to kill monsters to get loot. People typically post in a global marketing channel what they are selling.
The more I thought about it last night, in VR it might be easier than I thought to find the goods you are looking for since you’d most likely just be able to look at someones stall and see what they have available instead of clicking on everything. So if all the stalls are in one place, maybe you could just walk down the street and look to see what people have to offer instead of going up to the stall and click through it. I’m excited and curious what the Orbus team is planning for this feature.
Right now the plan is not to have a global auction house like, say, WoW, where you just go to one spot and can buy anything and everything from the whole world in a single click. The reason behind this is that a) we want to encourage more social interaction than that, and b) we want to provide a world where the price of goods can actually fluctuate between different regions.
So the current plan is to have a ‘market area’ in several major cities in the game, so that each zone (other than the WIlds of course) has at least one market area. Then Merchants get permits to occupy the stalls in that area. So if you want to buy, for example, a healing potion, you would need to go to a market area, and find a Merchant selling that potion. Hopefully you eventually develop relationships with some of the Merchants so that you know who has what and where to get the best prices and all of that.
Of course other players who are online can also hang out in those Markets to hawk their own wares just by trading, the Market Stall just allows you to have a place where you can always have your goods for sale all the time even if you’re not online or standing right there.
I have thought about adding in a “product finder”, though. So basically you could search a Market Board and it would tell you “Merchant stall in this area has what you’re looking for at this price”. That way you don’t have to go stall-to-stall just trying to find what you want. Of course the downside to that is that it gives “perfect price knowledge” to everyone which might cut down on the price variations.
So we’ll probably start with just the stall system, and then we’ll see how it goes. We can always add additional finding capabilities on top of it in the future if needed. The main point, though, is that there just won’t be any sort of “search it all then click once and instantly get it in the mail” type of global auction house.
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This has been done before, it was actually done this way first, before auction houses existed.
Everquest (1999) - @ East Commons Tunnel
http://www.wolfsheadonline.com/project-1999-classic-everquest-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/
Everquest (2001) - The Shadows of Luclin - The Bazaar
http://almarsguides.com/eq/general/bazaar.cfm
https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/how-does-the-bazaar-work.1491/
Came here to mention EQ. I think that the trading system was better in a lot of ways than the conventional aution house, and I would love to see a similar system to that.
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Runescape was like this too before they added the Grand Exhange (auction house). Honestly, it was pretty awful having to sit around for hours typing out “Selling steel bars 500 ea -------username”, but the stall system should aleviate that.
The other thing that happened (and still does tbh) Is players picked an area, Falador Park in this case, as the trading hub. That hub naturally fragmented into sections, like ores and metals in the north east, armour in the south, weapons in the east, ect. I could see something like that possibly happening in some form depending on how the stalls work. You may get some mix of stalls that sell random stuff, but it may come out that if you want potions, go to this town. Enchants, this other town, ect.
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For those that never played, here is a description of East Commons Tunnel in EQ.
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My earlier comment on not knowing what a game would be like without auction houses was in reference to Orbus. The implication being that we shouldn’t criticise or complain about the current concept yet because everything is new and we don’t entirely know how it’ll all mash together. It may turn out in practice that central auction houses are better, even in VR. I for one am intrigued by the proposals of the new system and would at least like to try it out before anything gets scrapped.
Thanks for those links. I’ve only ever played WoW and runescape unfortunately, but the AH in wow was already there when I started hence my question.
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By its nature, VR encourages us to play the game instead of the metagame. Some non-VR gamers insist that as long as VR “requires people to wear that thing on their faces,” it will never catch on – but I think they’ve got it backwards. Because it commands our total attention, because it deprives us of our keyboards and our mice and our secondary screens, precisely because it surrounds and consumes us, VR gives us back something the internet has taken away: the opportunity to lose ourselves in an experience, to be content with having imperfect information, to accept suboptimal routines in exchange for authentic, unpredictable experience. What we will make of this opportunity? Will we embrace it, or will we struggle to deny it?
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That’s a really great way to describe it. Several times I’ve been amazed at the innovative ideas Riley has had with bringing the game to life. I think there will be a a few concessions that we as players will need to make because we have gotten lazy. It will probably annoy me at times not having all the information immediately accessible to me all the time, but that will be me being a lazy baby.
I was cracking up a few weeks ago when I just imagined a whole bunch of people shouting what they are selling in the market place instead of being able to spam a chat box and it made me really excited. It might end up being a lot like how the market places would be in real life.
Really looking forward to it being handled this way. And with this size of player base I’m sure some easier form of setting up trades will happen on the discord or something without ruining the immersion in the game.
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I don’t like the idea of not having an auction house, more honestly I loathe it. I like the idea of having both market place and Auction house. What is being described sounds an awful lot like the wards of FF:XIV 1.0 . Some of the most frustrating hours of my entire experience with all the MMOs I’ve ever played.
At least add the “product finder” so I can get what I need and get back to doing my thing, what ever that is at the moment. Omitting price info is fine as well.
Edit: What would be better is letting us search with price info, but locking that player from selling that item. Though I guess players could team up to game that system easily enough.
FF:XIV 1.0, each city had market wards, you could hire 1 retainer and place it in one ward. If you wanted to get some new gear or mats you had to go to a ward (there where many, broken into item types, but you could sell anything in any ward) There was no search function so you had to run around checking retainers until you found what you wanted, which was almost always way over priced. It could take a long time to find say a new sword or lance, that was fairly priced.
It plain sucked. The beginning of this video shows it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5SQdyGAyC8 In general don’t do anything FF:XIV 1.0 did, lol.
I agree FFXIV 1.0 was probably the worst mmo I have ever played.
I have to disagree with you here though, until we see what it is like. Gear is going to be soul bound, so the primary items in each market will probably be materials probably from that region. Which I don’t think will be a big issue to look at a couple stalls or talk to someone nearby and buy it. I don’t think the game will be be like standard MMOs in a lot of ways you might not immediately think of. Also I don’t think our complete convenience in every category is something the devs should really care about. Embrace the world.
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I’m not saying the system is doomed already, but I just don’t want to have to aimlessly click on stalls hoping to find the item. So some kind of search function is needed. It doesn’t have to show prices. Just showing me which stalls to look in would prob be enough.
It likely does have to be menu driven though. It would be great if every stall could have a table with wares placed on them, I could just visually scan for what I need/want. That isn’t realistic though, I think that would cause a lot of server stress. Also 50 people trying to look at tables and your just going to see people and no tables, lol.
I don’t craft, I’ve never liked it. I suppose that could change but I don’t expect it to. So unless all gear is a drop, quest reward or purchased from an npc. I’m going to need to buy it from crafters. I expect to work for currency, I don’t want to work to spend it.
Convenience, ugh don’t get me started on that. I’m so tired of these newer MMOs and their hand holding. Fast travel everywhere, sprinting to level cap, meaningless death penalty. I miss the old days where the journey to level cap felt like you really worked for it.
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Yeah, a search function would be great and solve the problem. I only have so much time to play, I’d prefer not spending most of my time finding the items I’m looking for. I’d rather be killing mobs and doing other fun stuff in the game. I do remember final Fantasy, their merchant system was rough.
I think your concerns about server stress for having all of a player’s items on every stall are valid. That doesn’t sound very realistic to me either and having to fight through 50 people that are all trying to look at the same table would be quite the nuisance. The good news about the population concern is that there are only going to be 100 people/shard and I think it would be very unlikely that half of the people in the same instance you are would all be trying to stare at the same table you are. Hopefully that helps relieve some of your concern.
I feel like, from what I’ve read here, that we seem to be assuming that anyone who wants a merchant stall will be able to purchase and run one at any point. That also seems a little unrealistic to me for pretty much the same reason as having all of your items on display at every stall would be. Plus, you could end up having an entire instanced area that is just merchant stalls as far as the eye can see. That would feel very unrealistic to me and I’m hoping it isn’t how this plays out.
I would expect to see a middle ground between these two things. Maybe a market district within a city only has 20 merchant stalls available to rent and if they’re all available when you attempt to purchase one you’ll have to wait until one frees up. I’m under the impression these will be a luxury, not a necessity. So, if you know that you are only ever going to have a maximum of 20 stalls rented out at any one time you are able to figure out how many items can be displayed on each stall without overburdening the server. Let’s say each stall is only able to display 5 items at a time. Now you know that the most the server ever has to handle are 100 unique items on display at once and that doesn’t sound quite so unrealistic.
Maybe you end up having different tiers of market stall to pick between as well. One stall can display up to 10 items at a time, while another can only display 4 and they are priced accordingly. Maybe there is a menu associated with each stall (I really hope not) and the display items are only meant to showcase the types of items available once you “step inside.”
Personally, I’m against menus. If there is a way to work around making me navigate through a menu I’m all for it, even if it is inconvenient. I’m here to be immersed in an experience and feel like I actually exist within the world we’re sharing. The fastest way to break that immersion, to me, is by introducing a menu that I have to scroll through.
Just some speculation from my end. I’d really prefer to see an interactive market place that I have to physically move through. Just scrolling through a menu takes all the fun out of it in my opinion.
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They are at 100 a shard now, the goal is 200. You are right though even at 200 a quarter of the shard isn’t likely to be shopping at the same time.
It is also true we don’t know how many stalls will be available. A smaller number than what we are use to seeing in an MMO is a real possibility. Though that creates an advantage for players lucky enough to get a stall. I would think they’ll find a way everyone or mostly everyone could have one. It does seem like that is the only way to make coin with out standing around trying to sell stuff.
I don’t like menus either, what if the menu took the form of say a chalk board. High enough over the stall that we could see it from a crowd, with whatever wares on offer listed on it.
Edit: I don’t want to come off like I’m complaining or down on the concept. I like, all of us here just want this game to be the best it can be. For us and to draw more people to the game and VR in general.
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