Proposal to improve market stall data modeling, automation, and awesomeness

Only thing is that people would have to schedule their play time to make that auction event. That would suck from a scheduling standpoint, esp with a global game.

Could be an all day event @Hexno, and if it happened weekly in game it wouldn’t be a super big deal if you missed it since your inventory would be with your character (assuming proper data modeling changes).

Most of the “complex” stuff is behind the scenes. The average player would only see the simple side though:

  • go to a stall, attempt to put an item up far sale and either be ok with the fee or think hmm, i think i’ll find a less “crowded” stall where its cheaper
  • go to a stall, press the search interface for that stall and look for your desired item (or go through its listing)
  • go to an auctioneer, use the search interface, find the most favorable deal among all stalls and get the specific stall location and number of your item

:wink:

Yea, but a searchable auction house similar to WoW would be way more convenient than bidding through a NPC event. :frowning:

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Agreed, but if they want to be different then I am trying to at least bring forward ideas that would fit their vision and better meet the needs of the players.

I think from both a development and usability perspective a Bazaar is a lot easier to use and manage, but I also know they want a more quaint and person driven market experience too.

@OndeTv on your notes, yes, but I am concerned with offering highly complex solutions from a development perspective because they are much harder to implement. Ideally we can offer the Development Team constructive solutions that are both easy to implement, and use.

I see where your thoughts are heading, but it really isn’t very complex on the back end. It is just a series of lists which is already in the game. Then theres temporarily fetching lists, combining them and sorting on them which is also very standard. And, adding some attributes to those lists or list items (item id, location, stall number) for that part.

The fee logic is extremely basic in itself, and could probably be done in less than 30 lines of code.

Overall the logic in the system is comparable to normal database operations. I would wager that the largest work load would be on a well working UI for the searches and adding the npcs/auctioneers.

Yeah, and that is why I lean toward a simple supply and demand based price model.

I am not sure why though, as the general game itself is vastly more complex than my proposal (heck, just handling controller input is more complex) :wink:

I like to suggest very simple solutions so you don’t have much of an excuse not to do them if they represent a significant improvement to user experience, but I also welcome more complex changes as long as they are likewise positive.

Do what Marvel did for the movies! Listen to the overwhelming support of your fans!

The simplest solutions often operate on the existing ruleset though. While that isn’t a bad thing, it rarely changes inherently bad rulesets though :smiley:

That being said, i generally agree with you. Anything in a (alpha, beta, early access) game setting that creates value within the existing system is usually a plus, at least short term.

This is exactly why I keep bringing auction house up, it would make it so people can easily buy and sell stuff so everyone can benefit from it rather than a select few

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All i care about is random NPCs running around and barking dogs

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Well your easy to please ;).

So you want more lively ambience, but even as a long time merchant you have to agree the non automated approach just isn’t sustainable as the server populations grow right?

well my post was just for fun but here is a serious response :sweat_smile::

yes there should be a scalable way for everyone to get involved in trading.

the problem is hard to ascertain right now as i dont know how many people bid on stalls. If there are 30-40 players bidding on stalls then indeed there may be a need for an automated solution as not to cause a bottleneck on managing that…

but then with the request of other ways to trade like an auction system, my advice to the development team would be to just keep it fun and interactive but not overly time consuming.

The amount of people bidding for stalls isn’t necessarily representative of the amount of people wanting to sell items :wink:

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Like @OndeTv implied, the utilization of the current system is limited to those aware of it (from strictly out of game sources and experience), willing to use a Google form to bid, and generally sitting on a lot of resources.

I would use a different system if it existed, I often have things I would like to sell, but the system as it stands does not make it accessible to more then a very select few.

Even if the same system were in place automation and separating user inventory from a particular stalls data model would be simple and great starting points.

The stall system is horrible, in the top 3 I’ve ever seen. Possibly the worst, I am struggling to think of something worse right now. I hope the devs are aware of it.

As the economy expands(examples: dyes, pets, legendary shards, pvp additions requiring use of potions, pve additions requiring use of potions), the economy problem will inflate alongside it and may warrant some game changes. They have to rush to finish sprints so this problem is too large for them to change until they make it a sprint.

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I was trying to be a little more gentle in my phrasing, but fundamentally yes.

That is why I was hoping to hear something from a dev on their plans since the current system has shown it doesn’t scale well at all.

Hopefully there aren’t too many emotions around the way it is now so we can move on to something better that still keeps the spirit of it while being more awesome.

So you are saying that the google-sheets-on-forum is an inaccurate way of getting a sample size of interest from those who want to trade? You are probably right.

A symptom of this is probably the orbus trading website that was created.

The orbus trade website was a good attempt at trying to make trading more scalable and visible for everyone but just like google-sheet-from-website has the problem of scalable serendipity.

Like any marketplace there are sellers and buyers. Right now the focus has been put on the seller experience but selling is an ‘in-game-currency paid for service’. This would be the equivalent of charging 10 or so companies monthly fees to list their goods. Right now the model matches a real life model such as Amazon which does not allow for the casual seller to feel involved. Seller provide the stock to the stall and pay a monthly fee for retaining membership.

Generally a classifieds marketplace model is more suited to enable a much larger player base to feel involved. The classifieds model is what you see in your newspapers or to give you a digital app experience example; ‘letgo’, ‘craigslist’, ‘olx’, ‘shpock’, ‘wechat’ (different brands depending on your country) and mimicks open marketplace models. This enables even the most casual traders access to a market as a buyer or seller.

if the problem is ease-of-accessibility and scalability, I think a model like this may solve it. (Note that; I manage the building of large scaled digital marketplaces for a living for the last 5 years so my perspective on this is possibly biased)