The existing market place method has been around for long enough now that it is pretty evident there are some problems that need to be addressed. I wanted to open up the discussion and offer some ideas for potential solutions.
- Lack of automation means that the market system does not scale and places an undo burden on the development team.
I believe this leads to a lot more work than dev’s should have to do, and it is also one of the biggest reasons the stalls in other towns aren’t used given it would mean further complicating the already complex manual process that devs and players have to undertake.
I suggest a system that instead allows automated bidding for stalls and hands out tokens that can be used to grab a stall themselves. Even better would be a flat rate token purchase that allows individuals to get a stall but lasts only a week at a time instead of a month.
For now with low population that would work well, and an expired stall could have a “For Sale” icon above it to encourage people to grab them.
This would make it so that more people could enter the market easily and would help the game economy greatly by allowing marketplaces in the desert and rain-forest to be usable as well because there wouldn’t be a reason not to allow people to set up shop wherever they wanted.
- Data modeling markets as independent entities means it is possible for a person to be assigned to a stall and come into possession of all of the items that were in someone else’s store.
Marketplace data should instead be modeled as part of the character profile so that they can be freely switched from one stall to another without risk of losing all of their items.
If for some reason they don’t have a market anymore they should be able to go to a stall manager NPC or something similar to pull goods from their marketplace in the event they did not win a bid. This solution solves a bunch of issues around the transition time and moving people from one market to another by changing the way it is data modeled.
- There is no risk in putting a very high bid in the current system given that everyone pays the same price as the lowest winning bidder. This means that people with large amounts of dram will always be able to hold onto a stall by bidding very large amounts without ever actually risking very much dram.
If you absolutely need to have bidding, the bidding strategy needs to put some extra cost in place for people who want prime real estate. You shouldn’t be able to bid 400,000 dram and only pay 50k dram for the best spot. It should either be first come first serve like the token model above, or incur an actual risk to go for prime locations.
Now a model that has shown to work well at scale is a bazaar model. That would simply allow people to sell things at will incurring a tax rate on the items they sell. This model scales extremely well, and could be localized to give a similar feel to what is currently experienced.
Any of the changes I suggest above would have a dramatic positive impact on the games economy, and hopefully free up some of the impact to the development team and player community. I welcome any additional suggestions or discussion.
