Oenwulf said: ... So why make things more complex than just having an auction house? Because it makes the buying and selling process much more engaging. Crafters need knowledge about the world to know where to source materials and where to sell them. It becomes a skill that needs to be developed, which will turn some people off, making crafters less ubiquitous. You won’t have a universal spot to just dump all of your junk, so you won’t see a constant build-up of items to drive down prices. ...
You made some good points there. I do believe there are quite a few threads that relate to auction houses or ingame economy.
From your point of view, the auction houses are a real ease of life feature compared to having to step out and sell your own goods yourself 'face to face'. Concerning the latter; I do think it could generate trade hubs, where players often set up shop next to each other in order to sell. If this would be norm rather than exception, it really becomes interesting.
Like you mentioned it can put people off from crafting but also trading in general. Which in turn could impact their motivation the game. We'll have to see what VR suggests, there is merit in regional economies. In what fashion.. the testing phases are the best ground to try those out. Fortune favours the bold (designer wise that is). So let's hope they have the guts to put their balls on the table even for this aspect of the game.
Good ideas. Many of them have been mentioned in other discussions, and there is plenty of support for most of them. Though putting your character on 'auto-sell' sounds like having your character playing the game while unattended, which VR has been pretty clearly against.
Brad's high-level vision for Pantheon considered much of what you suggest. The only real issues at this point are the contraints of time and funding.
Oenwulf said: [...]. Crafters need knowledge about the world to know where to source materials and where to sell them. It becomes a skill that needs to be developed, which will turn some people off, making crafters less ubiquitous. You won’t have a universal spot to just dump all of your junk, so you won’t see a constant build-up of items to drive down prices. Overall, I believe it would help create a living-world feel. Cooks could drive their shop-wagon out near the entrance to a dungeon and set up shop to sell their food buffs to a targeted market. The shops could even be craft-able items, creating more economic interaction. Adventurers coming back to town would check the work orders to see if they can sell their items for better than the vendor prices, or someone who doesn’t have time to group up could check the work orders and farm a low level area for some quick cash. I believe this could make crafting into a deeper and more engaging activity. If you made it this far, thanks for reading.
This is a close synergy with an idea I had about crafting that it be intuitive, Orr if there were lore hints, as in recipe books that hinted at recipe combines such as a blatant recipe for swamp rat steaks, and then the "color" sentence saying: goes well with bog juice. Then have the combination of swamp rat steaks and bog juice provide an unexpected but intuitively understood benefit, like swampwalk. Only discovered when in the swamp but only usefull as sustenence anywhere else. The recipe for Bog juice would be discovered or learned elsewhere (maybe brewing). In that way regions would have specific ingredients providing benefits for the region if combined correctly, additonally, those ingredients/Mats can be used in higher level recipes not particular to the region.
Oenwulf said: Kind of a lofty title, but bear with me. The goal would be to make crafting a major motivator in player activities. ...
With only a few thousand paying customers (players) per server, and time zones, it doesn't work out the way you might desire.
It's a good idea, but in practice, supplying every aspect of an entire economy can be work rather than fun, especially with the punitive and illogical mechanics that Pantheon has outlined so far, for crafting and harvesting.
I don't think having a player-driven economy, in any meaningful sense of the phrase, is actually a public design goal for this game. It requires mass growing/farming, mass harvesting, mass refinement, and mass production of end products. In all tiers, and for all races, and alignments (good, neutral, evil).
It may be a marketing term thrown around to attract the whales, but the details have either not been worked out, or not shared with the pledgers, or both.
The other big thing is.. a lot of paying customers simply don't LIKE crafting, regardless of how good you make it. :)
It's also worth noting that Project Gorgon recently (as in, the past year or two) tried much of what you suggest, and it failed catastrophically. To the point whereby what is in place now is a searchable bazaar, in practice, rather than it "makes the buying and selling process much more engaging". Ultimately, to a portion of the paying target demographic any non-combat loop has to be as engaging, rewarding, and efficent as the combat loop. Certainly, that's not true for all, but for some, it is. PG tried it, and no-one used it. It completely, utterly failed to meet any of the goals it was design and implemented to meet.
No-one would manually travel to and/or search hundreds of player vendor stalls. And who can blame them? It's tedious beyond words.
It's the latest in a long series of attempts to forcibly enable or permit arbitrage in a situation or scenario that entirely prevents arbitrage.
If you artificially (like Pathfinder Olnline) attempt to prevent arbitrage in-game, players simply bypass it by using instant communication out of game. Failed catastrophically there, too.
Shroud of the Avatar tried, in a big way, to do some of what you're describing. Did not work well, at all. Same deal, players simply would not play the arbitrage game, especially with teleportation being available.
The amount of development time and implementation effort has to be weighed against how many paying customers are going to participate. If it's not "fun", that number is less. When resources are limited, triage on public design goals is inevitable. As we've already seen, this is starting to happen with Pantheon.
The design of an economy that doesn't have inflation, doesn't require resets, doesn't use limited coin, doesn't allow everyone to be rich, prevents RMT, is fun, is challenging, is entirely player driven, and/or is rewarding? That is a significant design challenge, and it requires setting aside what players think they want, and instead making the hard choices about what is necessary. So far? Not in this game.
What you consider engaging, many consider a PITA. I fully support offering a player system as an option, for those that like that kinda thing. But, for the rest of us, forget it. There is a reason convenience stores exist; same with supermarkets. People are willing to pay a convenience fee, let them. It's a great coin drain.
Not to mention the chance to discover something new. How many people have walked into a store for something specific and walked out with something completely different? Brokers give people a chance to browse and discover. They also give people a chance to get themselves known through price, since quality in MMOs is pretty much a commodity.
Don't make me waste an hour searching through a bunch of price gougers to get a basic item. Barriers to purchase destroy an economy.
I don't want to spend 30 minutes looking for something which everyone is charging more than i can afford and then 45 minutes asking for someone to sell it at a reasonable price.
But I did like the EC tunnel a lot! So why not an Auction house where only basic consumables can be sold, or perhaps a crafter's market auction house where mats can be posted for sale, and anything else would be player to player?
https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/2594/death-to-the-auction-house
All forms of economy in Pantheon have been pretty well discussed and VR has already made the big decision.
They are going to have regional auction houses. Which means that there will be several auction houses that will not share with each other. I imagine this will lead to central evil and good auction houses which most people tend to use, unless VR decides to unbalance the regional auction houses in some other significant way besides location. Auction houses will not work inter-server as far as I know.
Pantheon is not going to have bazaars unless auction houses royally fail somehow, because leaving your character standing somewhere is not something VR seems to want.
Newspapers or signposts that you can advertise on may be being considered, I don't remember.
I don't think it's been officially mentioned, but with auction houses around I doubt we will have a screen we can pull up to be "matched" with people who want to buy or sell with us, like with what we will do with grouping in Pantheon.
Tunnel rats such as myself get to sit on the edge of our seat and wait to see if the auction houses will be easy or hard to use. Hopefully VR makes the regional auction houses pricey/item-limited/timeframe-limited enough that player driven, as opposed to npc driven, economy is a common thing.
Hope this helps, I'm honestly surprised this thread hasn't been closed yet. Do I get to argue with people who think it's fun to let robots fix their economy problems for them again?
Beefcake said:What you consider engaging, many consider a PITA. I fully support offering a player system as an option, for those that like that kinda thing. But, for the rest of us, forget it. There is a reason convenience stores exist; same with supermarkets. People are willing to pay a convenience fee, let them. It's a great coin drain.
Not to mention the chance to discover something new. How many people have walked into a store for something specific and walked out with something completely different? Brokers give people a chance to browse and discover. They also give people a chance to get themselves known through price, since quality in MMOs is pretty much a commodity.
Don't make me waste an hour searching through a bunch of price gougers to get a basic item. Barriers to purchase destroy an economy.
Auction houses are like convenience stores, like you said. They make buying and selling both easy and fast. All that other stuff you get just as well from p2p, newspapers, and bazaars.
If there are hours worth of price gougers to search through the economy has not yet been destroyed. I would also argue that the hours worth of price gougers will give you hours worth of opportunity to browse and discover something you didn't know you wanted to buy. Finally, the hours worth of price gougers probably get to know each other pretty well, over the hours that they get to spend price gouging with each other.