Auction house in the future?

#21

Good catch on the shard numbers.

I feel like having the mix of market stalls and people standing around pushing their own wares just makes things more fun and helps to further increase competition.

If you can figure out a creative way to introduce a menu without making it feel like a menu I’m cool with that, but I still feel I would prefer the physical interaction to any sort of menu system.

I, at least, don’t feel like you’re complaining or down on the concept. Discussing the what-ifs and speculating on how things will be done is a lot of fun. I’m just here to add my own viewpoint and try to offer suggestions that hadn’t been thrown out yet. I don’t want to come off as bashing your ideas or telling you your opinion is wrong. Just here for some light-hearted debate and speculation. :smiley:

#22

I think everything said here so far has been constructive, and we all seem aware that we’re mostly speculating. How many stalls will there be per zone? How expensive is it to get a permit, how long do they last? Exactly what kind of stuff do you buy and sell at a stall, anyway? (I’m under the impression that all gear is from a drop/quest reward/etc and that only crafting mats and consumables will be salable, but I could be wrong.)

Hey, what’s money even look like in this game? How much of it is floating around at any one time, and how useful would it be to have a whole pile of it? We don’t know the answers to any of these questions yet – which is totally fine – so we can’t draw too many conclusions about how things will work. It’s fun to think about it, though…

I am a little skeptical of the idea of a global item finder that omits pricing information, however; I don’t think people would be satisfied with that kind of half-tool for very long. What’s the value of knowing that some rare crafting material is available 5 zones away if, after making the long journey to reach the stall, you find out you’re unable or unwilling to pay the price for it? A thing like that seems guaranteed to generate complaints. :man_with_turban:

#23

I don’t want a global one, I don’t mind not finding it here “I’ll hop an airship over to the other city and look or ask a fellowship mate who happens to be there”. I just want to be able to search the marketplace I’m in. IE: FF:XI in the old days had Auction houses in the major cities that where not linked. If there are only 20 stalls in a marketplace, none of this really maters.

They don’t seem keen on price knowledge, I like it. It creates a buyer friendly market, but again what is or isn’t for sale could make that moot for me at least.

The chalk boards I didn’t really think of as menus just a visual representation of wares that would be lighter on the servers.

Edit: I just went back and looked at the crafting classes, which I didn’t really do before because I don’t really do it. Yeah it does look like all gear will be drop, reward or purchased from NPCs in some way. So there will be a lot less up for sale then I’m use to. I did enjoy fishing…shit I’m a crafter. lmao.

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#24

I wonder what items aside from crafting mats will be BoE. Riley mentioned there would be some items that would be BoE. I’m curious which items those will be. Hopefully there will be more of these than less.

#25

The goal isn’t to have people waste hours and hours just trying to find an item. Which is why I mentioned that we had already thought about the “Product Finder” and we’ll definitely add that in if it’s warranted.

I do think it’s worth realizing a few things when we have all of these discussions:

  1. The population of the entire server/game. This is a niche game in an already niche market. A good rule of thumb is that there will be at peak time around 10% of the total game’s population online. So even if we get 10,000 people who are playing this game on a regular basis (which I think is doable but is still a lot for a VR game), that would mean at peak time there would only be 1,000 people on the server spread across the whole world. So there’s not going to be 200 people all clamoring at one market stall at a time. And likewise, there aren’t going to be 300 merchants all hawking their wares or 10,000 people all listing items on the Auction house. If there were, this system wouldn’t work very well.

  2. As others have noted, there is not going to be like 10,000 different items in the game for sale. Most items in the game are soulbound. Gear is all soulbound. You’ll be selling and trading mostly things that are crafted items or ingredients for crafted items, along with some miscellaneous items. That’s not to say that buying/selling/trading won’t be vitally important to the game, as it will be – you’re not taking on the toughest bosses without those crafted potions or without an Artificer enhancing your armor! – but the raw number of items will just be much lower than say WoW.

Of course the game’s population will grow over time (hopefully!) and eventually we may end up having 2,000 or 3,000 or maybe someday even 100,000 concurrents at a time on a server…but let’s cross that bridge when we get to it. I’d rather design the game to be fun now with the population we’re likely to have at launch, and then expand it over time, then say “we can’t do this because 3 years from now there might be too many people for it to work!” The game will continue to grow and evolve just like VR will.

And I think that applies to a lot besides just this discussion. We we consider PvP, granting Surnames to people manually, not having an “Instant Dungeon Queue” system, and lots of other things we’re trying – a lot of that I think will work well because we will have a smaller, tight-knit community. We’re not going to have a WoW-sized population and we shouldn’t design the game like we will. Instead, I think we should try to do some exciting new things that MMOs have shied away from because they were designed as massive theme parks that had to cater to 100,000 people every day.

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#26

Im not of of those that usually post, nor one people that put money on kickstarters, but taking a look a most of Riley_D answers and post make me feel great about having put money on this project, I can see that team has his goals set up propely and will work for this game to be great.

ive seen soo many projects lost their focus when setting goals too high.

just had to post this,

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#27

This was the first kickstarter I have ever backed as well. I like the direction they are going.

#28

This is my first time backing a kickstarter as well. I love most every thing that is being done with the game so far. It has a real chance to bring back that old school MMO feeling I’ve been missing for soo long. It is doing a lot of things that remind me of FF:XI in the lv75 cap days.

The community in that game at that time, was great at least in my experience. I think that was a product of the lack of convenience, an unforgiving death penalty, not having an insta queue dungeon finder, and a long road to level cap. Was it harder to get things done? Sure, but that made people more respectful of other players.

#29

I think the stall idea should work fine. In most MMOs I have played usually people tend to vend certain items and setup shop in the same place. So finding items once you get used to shop locations is usually not an issue. I will say though if the shop deeds expire and people have to move locations this will add confusion so its something the devs will need to think about. Something that might make this more realistic and nicer would be a Merchant list in town. When I get a deed I can name my shop and add a description of the ware types I sell. Users then could go to a signboard that lists the shops and their descriptions, kinda like a mall directory. :slight_smile:

#30

This is the main point. For example, right now “Rec Room” is at 154 players 24h peak. So I would not expect more than 200 players for “Orbus VR”. With such a playerbase I don’t see much room for an economy based on currency exchange. People will rather organize themselves in groups / guilds and craft for each other, which is better for the game anyways.

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#31

My personal opinion is that I don’t mind auction houses per se. It’s after all an “institution” based somewhat in reality and makes sense in a virtual world too. What I particularly don’t like much is the artificial “QoL” services around it. For example chained auction houses where you can by an item from ANY AH regardless of where the seller actually put it up for sale. Another thing that bothers me is the mailing of items. If it is allowed there should be significant price tag for that service and even more important it should not be instant or even as in WoW within an hour. Possibly things transported to the customer could even come with a risk of getting lost / robbed but that is probably stretching it a bit.

All in all in my most personal opinion the items should be deposited to one place and then picked up from the same place if bought. The business transaction could be handled by a NPC or a PC it does not really matter even though I liked the social aspect of the Freeport tunnel back in the day.

I have total faith in the developers and hearing their stance in different issues makes me confident that his game will be awesome! Can’t wait for CBT!

Cheers!

#32

I like your train of thought! It would be really cool to have maybe a board setup where you can list what you’re selling and then have a big building/warehouse where it is stored and can be picked up. However I do think the standard marketplace “rent stalls” is a good first step in finding out what works. Nothing is set in stone and if the demand for stalls is too great or if 1 guild buys out the market, maybe something on a larger scale like that would be a good fit.

#33

Honestly it sounds good, and a lot like what Albion wanted. A completely player ran market sounds kinda scary and boring at first. Though when I was playing Albion it was so much fun! It opens up something to do while you wait on friends, its oddly relaxing, you can RP it if you like and with PVP it alows players to ge the thrill of hunting or guarding these people.
If items/materials are somewhat region locked then that makes it so much more enjoyable! You can get cravans, hunting parties, or sneak around solo an make big bucks offloading rare items in far regions!

Without them in game its so easy to just think about them as just a place to buy stuff. When they are finally in game its so much more, and a lot of fun.

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#34