If this has already been answered, then my apologies, however, I searched for broker and found nothing.
Is there going to be an in-game broker system where players can buy and sell from each other?
I would love to see that again. Also, to allow the ability to list not just items to be sold for goods, but to be able to select items for trade. For example, if I had tons of iron but I needed rubies for some reason, I could list 100 iron for 10 rubies, etc... Having a "Trade" functionality to a broker system would be amazing.
Luniss said:If this has already been answered, then my apologies, however, I searched for broker and found nothing.
Is there going to be an in-game broker system where players can buy and sell from each other?
I would love to see that again. Also, to allow the ability to list not just items to be sold for goods, but to be able to select items for trade. For example, if I had tons of iron but I needed rubies for some reason, I could list 100 iron for 10 rubies, etc... Having a "Trade" functionality to a broker system would be amazing.
The short answer is yes.... Sort of.
The longer answer is that players will always be able to meet up and sell things to each other.... But they've said that there will be an in-game market as well, where you can park your player and they can become a vendor to sell the items that you have for sale. We just don't know what that looks like yet.
Kalok said:The short answer is yes.... Sort of.
The longer answer is that players will always be able to meet up and sell things to each other.... But they've said that there will be an in-game market as well, where you can park your player and they can become a vendor to sell the items that you have for sale. We just don't know what that looks like yet.
That would be awesome to have some kind of market where your players were effectively still in the world. The only downside to that, in my mind, would be not being able to have your items listed while you were still playing. Seems like you'd want to "hire" a broker to sell your stuff, at the cost of a small fee or percentage, so that you could go about other things. Either way, I'm interested to see how it turns out. I hope, though, that it doesn't turn out to be 100 people standing around an auctioneer and you have to find the guy in the middle of the crowd to search for things.
I liked the way EQ2 handled it. They had a broker system that you could access from brokers in your town or guild hall. You paid a specific percentage of the sale to the broker for his trouble. If you wanted to buy stuff from the opposing faction, you had to pay a much higher percentage and use a black market "fence".
Luniss said:I liked the way EQ2 handled it. They had a broker system that you could access from brokers in your town or guild hall. You paid a specific percentage of the sale to the broker for his trouble. If you wanted to buy stuff from the opposing faction, you had to pay a much higher percentage and use a black market "fence".
Don't forget the option to sell from your house/apartment as well. You could set up a merchant box and people could visit your house and buy direct from your box to avoid paying broker fees.
@Sicario - That's right! I forgot about that. Those Veteran crates were great for that. One thing it didn't have though was a trade option like I mentioned. I don't know of any MMO's that have a trade option that allows you to specify what you're willing to trade your item for. (If it exists, I'm just not privy to it) It would be kind of neat to see them pioneer something like that. I don't know how you'd work the fee system into that since no coin would change hands, but it's an idea that sounds worth vetting out to me. I know that all economies need money sinks.
DAOC had a similar set up regarding sales from housing. I like the idea of having a vendor at my house and putting things on it that are useful to others, and could make some extra income for me.
Sicario said:Don't forget the option to sell from your house/apartment as well. You could set up a merchant box and people could visit your house and buy direct from your box to avoid paying broker fees.
Player housing has been often discussed and I wouldn't claim that the issue has been irreversibly decided. But... the last position I remember hearing from VR was that they were not planning to have individually owned, player housing in Pantheon. Not that it couldn't happen someday, in a later expansion... Just no plans at present.
If there has been a recent statement changing that and I missed it, I'm sure someone will come along and clarify :)
Jothany said:Sicario said:Don't forget the option to sell from your house/apartment as well. You could set up a merchant box and people could visit your house and buy direct from your box to avoid paying broker fees.
Player housing has been often discussed and I wouldn't claim that the issue has been irreversibly decided. But... the last position I remember hearing from VR was that they were not planning to have individually owned, player housing in Pantheon. Not that it couldn't happen someday, in a later expansion... Just no plans at present.
If there has been a recent statement changing that and I missed it, I'm sure someone will come along and clarify :)
That's not exactly what they said....
What tiey said was that there wasn't going to be player owned housing *ON RELEASE*, but that it was something that they were exploring and would like to have in the game eventually. That's been their stance since at least 2016.
We'll be able to talk more about the game's economic systems as we get further along on the path to launch, but here are some general statements :)
1) We will have tools to allow players to sell items while offline (and potentially more). We want to implement these in a way that preserves the concepts of meaningful travel and social connections in the world. Again, this is something that we'll be able to talk about more as we get closer to launch.
2) Our itemization is being set up so that there will be more factors that buyers care about than just level and price. This in turn means that there will be a wider variety of things that you can effectively buy and sell than you might be used to in other games.
3) Our stance on housing is as has been stated. If we're going to do it, we want to really do the system justice and make it really fun and engaging for players. That's a pretty significant investment in terms of both art and programming, so this is something we will look at as a post-launch activity.
Pretty sure the stance is more that it is a big "if we can find out how to make it work." Which I really don't see a way to do. They do not want instanced housing and otherwise don't want cosmetic housing either, so if they can come up with some way to have non-instanced housing that impacts gameplay in a meaningful way then they will maybe give that a shot. Otherwise what they did have planned at some point were things like player run outposts, which weren't exactly housing.
Nephele said:We'll be able to talk more about the game's economic systems as we get further along on the path to launch, but here are some general statements :)
1) We will have tools to allow players to sell items while offline (and potentially more). We want to implement these in a way that preserves the concepts of meaningful travel and social connections in the world. Again, this is something that we'll be able to talk about more as we get closer to launch.
2) Our itemization is being set up so that there will be more factors that buyers care about than just level and price. This in turn means that there will be a wider variety of things that you can effectively buy and sell than you might be used to in other games.
3) Our stance on housing is as has been stated. If we're going to do it, we want to really do the system justice and make it really fun and engaging for players. That's a pretty significant investment in terms of both art and programming, so this is something we will look at as a post-launch activity.
Thanks for the update and your comments Neph :)
philo said:There will be an auction house of some sort. They have discussed it being localized, likely by town or continent, not world wide.
There is a game called Shroud of the Avatar, in the game you can only buy from individual shops. Like in EQ2, you go to the sellers home and buy directly. However, unlike EQ2 there is no main broker to tell you where the homes and sellers are located. And, you don’t have the option to pay a broker fee to avoid going to the home. You literally have to walk from home to home, city to city to even see items for sale. It takes hours and hours to shop. It would take days and weeks to visit every shop, 1 for every player, and there are thousands. It’s the worst and most annoying system I’ve seen implemented.
Think back to the EQ1 days, there was no broker, but there was a centrally located place to buy and sell. The tunnel. While, it wasn’t an officially sponsored location, it was very well known and it became an easy way to buy and sell goods. Before the tunnel was adopted, people just ran around shouting and hoped people heard them.
I for one think we need a universal broker with steep fees to encourage travel, or perhaps don't let people buy at all, maybe force the person to travel once the find the item they want. But there must be a way to at least see everything for sale without spending hours and days walking around aimlessly.
If you guys haven't checked it out, there was a Stream they did with Cohh called: Making of a City where they walked him through a lot of the Art and Design in the creation of Thronefast. If you jump ahead to timestamp 20:03 you will see them showing off the Marketplace, which is still in Greybox, but they show off the Art they are working on and you can see the layout of the Stalls in the city. It's a very huge Market with a large number of stalls, and it's very likely that this would not only be for NPC vendors, but could be a place where Player owned Vendors/Brokers might be set up similar to how the Bazaar worked in EQ1. And from what VR has said over the years about localizing player selling, we can guess that these huge Marketplaces will likely be found in every single major city and even could potentially be found in other places in the world.
Nephele said:We'll be able to talk more about the game's economic systems as we get further along on the path to launch, but here are some general statements :)
1) We will have tools to allow players to sell items while offline (and potentially more). We want to implement these in a way that preserves the concepts of meaningful travel and social connections in the world. Again, this is something that we'll be able to talk about more as we get closer to launch.
2) Our itemization is being set up so that there will be more factors that buyers care about than just level and price. This in turn means that there will be a wider variety of things that you can effectively buy and sell than you might be used to in other games.
3) Our stance on housing is as has been stated. If we're going to do it, we want to really do the system justice and make it really fun and engaging for players. That's a pretty significant investment in terms of both art and programming, so this is something we will look at as a post-launch activity.
Great to have a VR icon next to your name, Nephele! Good answers with intriguing implications! You tease! Love it hehe.
Nephele said:Our itemization is being set up so that there will be more factors that buyers care about than just level and price. This in turn means that there will be a wider variety of things that you can effectively buy and sell than you might be used to in other games.
I thought gear wasn't going to have levels in Pantheon. Did that change?
Gottbeard said:Nephele said:Our itemization is being set up so that there will be more factors that buyers care about than just level and price. This in turn means that there will be a wider variety of things that you can effectively buy and sell than you might be used to in other games.
I thought gear wasn't going to have levels in Pantheon. Did that change?
Poor word choice on my part. What I should have said is that our itemization is being set up around meaningful choices. The equipment that you decide to use may be different from what someone else decides to use even if you are the same level and class, and that is a good thing for the economy and the game in general.
Nephele said:2) Our itemization is being set up so that there will be more factors that buyers care about than just level and price. This in turn means that there will be a wider variety of things that you can effectively buy and sell than you might be used to in other games.
Can you clarify this please?
I'm guessing by "more factors" you meant time/distance because AHs will be localized and you might be willing to pay a bit more instead of traveling across the world?
Or was there more to it?
How will there be " a wider variety of things that you can effectively buy and sell than you might be used to in other games."?
Is Pantheon doing something different than other games that has never been talked about? You don't just mean less items will be no drop than normal do you?
philo said:Can you clarify this please?
I'm guessing by "more factors" you meant time/distance because AHs will be localized and you might be willing to pay a bit more instead of traveling across the world?
Or was there more to it?
How will there be " a wider variety of things that you can effectively buy and sell than you might be used to in other games."?
Is Pantheon doing something different than other games that has never been talked about? You don't just mean less items will be no drop than normal do you?
See directly above :) But I can give a little more detail here.
In most current MMOs, players generally only care about the "item level" - because the majority of equipment has stats that are tailored for your class and that scale linearly with that item level. So the choice between, say, an ilvl 100 breastplate and an ilvl 110 breastplate isn't really a choice - you'll always take the higher ilvl.
In these games, any choices you make in terms of equipment typically come down to secondary stat allocations - things like critical hit rate or class-specific mitigation or effectiveness bonuses. So at the most, you might have two different sets that you're looking at for any given level, and the level of choice you have is really just about which set (or which pieces of which set) that you want to go with.
So, how is Pantheon different from that?
For starters, we don't really have item level in the way that other games do it. That's not to say that we don't create items with different level ranges in mind, but the scaling isn't really linear. In our itemization it is entirely possible to have a heavy bronze breastplate that provides just as much AC as a steel breastplate - the catch being that the steel one is probably lighter and has more in the way of potential stat modifiers than the bronze one does.
The other thing that's different in Pantheon is that you're going to care about a lot more stat-wise than you do in those other games. So for example you might find a steel breastplate with stamina and strength on it, or you might find one with strength and dexterity. Or dexterity and constitution. Or wisdom and stamina. Or maybe it only has strength, but it's a bigger bonus. Or maybe it has a small stamina bonus but additional resist values? Which one is the right breastplate for you? Well that really depends on you and the other character choices you're making - like which abilities you're using most often, or on what your other gear pieces do or don't provide you.
From an economic perspective, the nice thing about buyers having that much in the way of meaningful choices is that it allows sellers more ways in which to compete. For example, maybe you're selling those breastplates with strength and dexterity. But someone else is selling the breastplates with wisdom and stamina. Both types of breastplates are (potentially) equally viable, which means that both of you can operate as sellers and your buyers get the benefit of being able to shop around and find the right item for them. It changes the overall supply/demand model from one where you have these big monolithic categories (steel breastplates) and feast/famine price wars within those categories because they are the only things that people will buy, to one where you have a lot of micro-categories (str/dex breastplates) and sellers have an opportunity to differentiate their wares and still offer something that people will purchase. This is not the only factor involved, but it's an important aspect of building a viable and sustainable game economy for Pantheon.
Hope that helps explain my comment. Obviously, for this to all work we have to make sure that those choices really are meaningful for players, but that is the route we are trying to take as far as items go. More viable choices, more freedom, and less homogeneity in terms of gear.
So for example you might find a steel breastplate with stamina and strength on it, or you might find one with strength and dexterity. Or dexterity and constitution. Or wisdom and stamina. Or maybe it only has strength, but it's a bigger bonus. Or maybe it has a small stamina bonus but additional resist values?
When the steel breastplate drops will these stats be randomly generated?
Or will the str and sta version drop from named mob X and the dex and con version drop from named mob Y?
philo said:So for example you might find a steel breastplate with stamina and strength on it, or you might find one with strength and dexterity. Or dexterity and constitution. Or wisdom and stamina. Or maybe it only has strength, but it's a bigger bonus. Or maybe it has a small stamina bonus but additional resist values?
When the steel breastplate drops will these stats be randomly generated?
Or will the str and sta version drop from named mob X and the dex and con version drop from named mob Y?
More of the latter, when it comes to loot. We're not doing random stat generation. So if you really want that specific str/sta breastplate, you'll be able to go hunt for it specifically.
Just so that we don't tangent into a farming conversation, please note that I highlighted the word specific there. We could, if we wanted, have several different str/sta breastplates with different artwork, different variations in terms of stat amounts, or different additional stats on them as well, all coming from different areas of the world. And that's not even counting the crafted options. Now, maybe that one from named mob X looks *really* amazing and everyone wants it if they can get it just for the look. That's totally cool, and I would expect it to be in high demand. But it won't be the only option :)