heheh, it usually went more like:
Seller: WTS ( item I want )
Me: How much for ( item I want )
Seller: Make me an offer.
...
At this point there are two possible outcomes, both of which are bad for me (the buyer). Get taken advantage of, or get no further response.
Yeah, not gonna happen. :) I have no time nor patience for these types of "Oh, look, I get to screw over ANOTHER player" interactions.
daemonios said:Wandidar said:A group of people that want to join together to attempt cornering the market will find a way to make that attempt regardless of whether or not there is an AH or a more organic market system in the game, no? I could be wrong.
Yes. That is what I've been saying, because one of the main arguments against an AH is that it creates market distortions, which is only a part of the story. So again, yes, if people are willing, they will find a way to try and corner the market. If that is not intended or desired, VR will have to implement mechanisms to deal with that: resale cooldowns, sales taxes, limited listings, etc.
I don't recall really seeing it back in EQ. For a number of reasons. Not the least of which was game population communication both inside and out of the game. For example, if you were looking to buy an FBSS, well... the average cost of that item could be found on sites dedicated to the game. It could also be found by price checking within your guild or even within the trade channel. There were known general price ranges for items... and if you were in the tunnel enough, you knew what those prices were.
The generally accepted cost of an item was the generally accepted cost of an item... period.
More though, the population in EQ could be very self correcting back in the day. If you got a reputaiton for being... undesirable... well, in EQ reputation mattered. You might find that your server stopped helping you, stopped buying stuff from you, stopped offereing you ports, etc... didn't always happen - but it COULD happen.
So while I agree with you that it COULD happen... I'm not convinced that, in such a group based game like Pantheon promises to be... that it WOULD happen. But that might just be me superimposing my memories of EQ onto Pantheon - and assuming that what happened there will happen in Pantheon.
vjek said:heheh, it usually went more like:
Seller: WTS ( item I want )
Me: How much for ( item I want )
Seller: Make me an offer.
...
At this point there are two possible outcomes, both of which are bad for me (the buyer). Get taken advantage of, or get no further response.
Yeah, not gonna happen. :) I have no time nor patience for these types of "Oh, look, I get to screw over ANOTHER player" interactions.
If you didnt get a reply then you didnt make an offer that the seller took seriously. It could be because he's trying to take advantage of people, or it could be that you werent familiar with the going rate for an item. If the item is readily available (there's a supply) then the price comes down. If the items is so rare then there's a demand that exceeds the supply the price goes up. Simple economics. An AH doesn solve this. It just makes the transaction machine-based and you don't have to shop around rather than player-based where you have to interact. The same guy isnt going to drop his price purely because it's easier to sell things to anyone, and certainly not because he feels like the AH is curbing his ability to take advantage of you. It in fact makes it easy for him to buy out any competitors who were selling for the "right" price, and repost them for whatever he hopes to screw people over with.
vjek said:At least with a searchable marketplace, I know what prices are too high. :)
How? Isnt it just as possible that when there's only 3 of an item on the market that one person bought them all and put them up on alts for roughly the same price across the board? There are people that do exactly this to maximize their profits fully relying on your unwillingness to be cognizant of fair market values. Worse, it's a mechanism regularly used by the secondary market to manipulate the economy to their advantage, with dozens of people doing nothing but monitoring and buying up goods for resale at higher prices.
Feyshtey said:vjek said:At least with a searchable marketplace, I know what prices are too high. :)
How? Isnt it just as possible that when there's only 3 of an item on the market that one person bought them all and put them up on alts for roughly the same price across the board? There are people that do exactly this to maximize their profits fully relying on your unwillingness to be cognizant of fair market values. Worse, it's a mechanism regularly used by the secondary market to manipulate the economy to their advantage, with dozens of people doing nothing but monitoring and buying up goods for resale at higher prices.
Agreed. The "machine" AH is more likely to drive prices up.
Wandidar said:Player A (macro): /OOC WTS Zarkon's Blade, 2500pp; Mystical Mightstone 5000pp. WTB Xaerron's Robes 8000pp
Player B: /Tell Player A I don't have 2500pp for the Zarkon's Blade, but would you take 500pp and a Brutal Glaive?
Player C: /Tell Player A I have Xaerron's Robes. How about 8500pp?
Player D: /Tell Player A Would you take 4500pp for the Mightstone?
Player A: /Tell Player B Sure thing! Meet me at T2! (meet and make the sale)
Player A: /Tell Player D How about we split the difference... 4750pp?
Player D: /Tell Player A No thanks... thanks anyway!
Player A: /Tell player C How about 8000pp plus a Brutal Glaive?
Player C: /Tell player A I guess, meet me at T1. (go to T1, pay for and get your robes)
Player A (macro): /OOC WTS Mystical Mightstone, 5000pp
This is much more commonly my experience with EC trade. It was wonderful to me. Often you could make up lack of plat with other items, find people who just didn't want to be there all day giving out solid discounts to the average price, or people deeply cutting prices to unload a full set of something. It was a very fluid and fun experience to me.
Honestly I found I was able to sell my wares much easier in general than I have in any AH based system. I imagine the reason for that is if I am online selling a more rare item like FBSS then there generally no one else also selling one at the time, every now an then one or two others. I only have to compete with those other players or no one at that moment which means I am much more likely to unload my FBSS as a whole regardless of +/- average price. With an AH I am in competition with potentially everyone who has the item, could be 30 players trying to passively sell it which leads to undercutting by a plat or two and you come back the next day to check on your auctions and only a few things sold but for the most part you have been undercut. Worse the more common the item is on the server to the point that you just can't move your items on the AH without deeply cutting your price.
Gnog said: The EC tunnel approach to buying and selling items makes me feel pressured to create a mule account that sits in the EC tunnel. To me, that is yet another big downside to the EC tunnel approach.
So dont. I've said it before, probably in this thread, but I rarely sat in EC tunnel but had no problems buying or selling goods.
Macro:
/Auc WTS X, Y and Z
/Auc WTB 12, 23, 34
/Auc Trades offers available and welcome.
I'd smack that every time I entered a new zone while traveling, and on occasion while leveling in a zone. It wasnt instant gratification, but it got the job done, and usually at a price favorable to me because the buyer/seller didn't want to hang in EC tunnel either. As long as I was aware what things were worth all parties got what they wanted. Worked great.
This is the lie when people say the choice is either being an AH or players are "forced" to sit in EC Tunnel or is equivelant. Option3 I've shown here is always there. It's just glossed over by people adamant that there has to be an AH.
Gnog said: Thanks, Feysh, I should have added that I prefer not to be that annoying guy who spams every zone with his WTS macros. It's a practice that would be burdensome if everyone did it. So that leaves either an EC mule or global chat spam in a /trade channel. Both of which are spam heavy and don't present information in as useful a way as an AH.
Hitting a macro once when you enter a zone is not spam.
Every game I've ever played has an auction channel you can close if you don't like to see that chat, the capability of moving that channel to a different window, or both. It's a non-factor.
The "useful" way that an AH presents information makes it ripe for abuse.
Liav said:letsdance said:In fairness, there isn't really any more thought involved in this than just undercutting another player you see trying to sell the same item in /auction. This happens all the time. At which point you just "mindlessly" spam Shift+Up+Enter until someone sends you a tell.dorotea said:"social" selling forces me to either spend far more time than they are worth or just dump themyes, that's a decision! good games are about hard decisions! and not just following the trampled path down to the AH to dump your items mindlessly 1 silver piece cheaper than whatever is currently the cheapest price.
the decision is not only HOW you sell, but IF you do it.
I just thought of something, and forgive me if someone said this already, I didn't read All 8+ pages of comments but this idea hit me and I want to throw it out there.
Have a global /auction channel you can join/leave whenever.
You /auction "item" 50 plat. Right click the name of whoevery says "I will buy" select 'trade' and do the transaction.
Just like EQ1 but will no limit on distance, [ i.e can trade from / to anywhere. ]
Limited to online only, No AH, No Bazarr, No clones or 'NPC Mode', No standing in a tunnel, best of both worlds.
( I say limited to online only because it's a fair trade off for making /trade so easy when online. )
I am not a fan of auction houses either. If you are going to have them I recommend making the auction fees insanely high....25% or higher fee per sale. Most games make the fee too small in the 5-10% range and that means most players will opt for the auction house. Who knows, maybe players would still favor the AH even with sky high rates? The last game I played with no AH was GuildWars1 and it really brought me back to the old EQ feel, it was a lot of fun. One day black dye was selling for 10k plat the next you'd find a guy buying for 25k.
Auction houses can be helpful in some aspects of crafting/economy and harmful in others. I read that there will be regional auction houses and that will make things a little more interesting I suppose. But the player interaction is eliminated and so is the haggling.
I saw someone bring up 3rd party auction websites and yes I used them in Path of Exile to buy/sell. However it is not nearly as convenient to do this as it is to have an in game system! The level of work involved increases dramatically and the players still have to meet up in game if the mail system doesn't exist or is very expensive and/or limited. If Pantheon makes the AH fees high and the mail delivery system non existant or limited/expensive I think there would be a lot more player interaction with trade.
Ziegfried said:Who knows, maybe players would still favor the AH even with sky high rates?yes they will. i guess at 40% you start considering if you really want to use the AH, altough it's often still better cash per time to use the AH and go hunting again. however, since VR is adding an AH, they won't make it unusable. that would be stupid, wouldn't it?
the only useful way i see is to put a maximum price on the AH trades. that way you can use them for trading common things and tradeskill items, but the rare and valuable items would have to be traded in person. of course, i'm sure such a limit would be lifted soon due to player complaints.
letsdance said:Ziegfried said:Who knows, maybe players would still favor the AH even with sky high rates?yes they will. i guess at 40% you start considering if you really want to use the AH, altough it's often still better cash per time to use the AH and go hunting again. however, since VR is adding an AH, they won't make it unusable. that would be stupid, wouldn't it?
It depends on what options they add outside of the AH. If it's strictly chat, then the AH will be the norm, even with the high tax. The problem with taxes is it doesn't discourage selling, it just inflates prices, especially with no other real option available.
I see several posts saying full-fledged AH, or EC Tunnel. There's a lot in-between that can encourage EC Tunnel socializing with some of the perks/convenience of an AH. This is where I expect it to go. Especially after Brad clarifying they want to encourage organic trade.
Archaen said:It depends on what options they add outside of the AH. If it's strictly chat, then the AH will be the norm, even with the high tax. The problem with taxes is it doesn't discourage selling, it just inflates prices, especially with no other real option available.
I see several posts saying full-fledged AH, or EC Tunnel. There's a lot in-between that can encourage EC Tunnel socializing with some of the perks/convenience of an AH. This is where I expect it to go. Especially after Brad clarifying they want to encourage organic trade.
I see what you mean about taxes inflating prices, but I don't think that's a fair description of how it plays out in the long term. If you want to get 10 gold for an item and the tax is 40%, then the buyer has to pay 14 gold instead of 10, which I believe is the "inflation" that you are describing. However, the much more important part of that equation is the 4 gold that gets removed from the economy permanently. Until the taxes become high enough that they discourage the trading of goods, they help in fighting economic inflation, which is not something that occurs in EC tunnel trading. Most other money sinks like paying for reagents/mats do not scale proportionally to the economy, so having a tax on traded goods can be very useful.
I hope you're right that they develop some limited regional AH system that has downsides (like taxes), such that it enables other forms of trading to occur. In previous threads I have been advocating for an AH with real downsides to prevent it from being the only real option for trading.
a money sink that exists from the start and scales proportionally with the economy is quite worthless in any case. assume that 40% of all cash gets removed by the money sink, you could as well reduce all loot values by 40% and have the same effect. it only makes sense if at some point you realize you have too much money in the economy and THEN introduce a money sink to get rid of some money. but i can't recall even hearing of any MMO that succeeded in that.
@letsdance: I don't believe you are correct. I'll argue my point with some simple examples to show the stability of a taxed vs. untaxed system.
Untaxed Case 1: There is almost no capital in the market. Looted/quested currency inputs steady money into the economy. Inflation occurs rapidly.
Taxed Case 1: There is almost no capital in the market. Looted/quested currency inputs steady money into the economy. Nobody has much money, so the value of goods is low and the tax removes negligible amounts from the economy. Inflation occurs rapidly.
Untaxed Case 2: There are huge sums of capital in the market. Looted/quested currency inputs steady money into the economy. Inflation continues to occur (relatively slowly compared to Case 1).
Taxed Case 2: There are huge sums of capital in the market. Looted/quested currency inputs steady money into the economy. Everyone has tons of cash, so the value of goods is huge and the tax removes significant amounts of money from the economy. Deflation occurs.
It's a balancing act between cash input, the capital in the market (assuming that translates to the value of goods), and the tax rate. There are many simplifications here, but I think the logic should suffice. I'm no economics major so there could be things I don't understand, but I do understand stability analysis.
letsdance said:a money sink that exists from the start and scales proportionally with the economy is quite worthless in any case. assume that 40% of all cash gets removed by the money sink, you could as well reduce all loot values by 40% and have the same effect. it only makes sense if at some point you realize you have too much money in the economy and THEN introduce a money sink to get rid of some money. but i can't recall even hearing of any MMO that succeeded in that.
How do you reduce values set by the player base? Supply and demand will set the value. Nobody got rich selling small bronze to vendors for 1pp.
@ainadak it seems you don't understand how percentage calculations work. if you remove a percentage of the total available money, the prices for player trades will simply be lower by the same percentage. no matter how high the sums of available money in the economy are. you could multiply everything (cash drops, vendor value of items) by 1,000 to have huge sums instead of low ones, but that would change nothing, except you had to to add a "k" to every price you type.
Krixus said:How do you reduce values set by the player base? Supply and demand will set the value. Nobody got rich selling small bronze to vendors for 1pp.the money that is available in the economy is the sum of cash drops and vendor value of cash items. values set by the player base are a direct consequence of the total availble money. if you get twice as much cash from a dungeon crawl you're going to pay twice as much for your desired item.
Ainadak said:I see what you mean about taxes inflating prices, but I don't think that's a fair description of how it plays out in the long term. If you want to get 10 gold for an item and the tax is 40%, then the buyer has to pay 14 gold instead of 10, which I believe is the "inflation" that you are describing. However, the much more important part of that equation is the 4 gold that gets removed from the economy permanently. Until the taxes become high enough that they discourage the trading of goods, they help in fighting economic inflation, which is not something that occurs in EC tunnel trading. Most other money sinks like paying for reagents/mats do not scale proportionally to the economy, so having a tax on traded goods can be very useful.
I hope you're right that they develop some limited regional AH system that has downsides (like taxes), such that it enables other forms of trading to occur. In previous threads I have been advocating for an AH with real downsides to prevent it from being the only real option for trading.
The buyer doesn't pay the tax. So in this case the seller pays the tax out of the final sale price, so the seller gets 6 gold when they list for 10. I think 40% is a little high personally, but I would be okay with something closer to 20% tax on the seller or 15% and 5% on the buyer.
The seller pays the tax because he is essentially paying the AH broker to handle his goods for him, saving him potentially massive amounts of time/effort.
@Iksar - There's literally no difference in who pays the tax. In the "seller pays the tax" case you bring up as an example the seller lists for 10 gold: seller gets 6 gold and buyer pays 10. In the "buyer pays the tax" the seller lists for 6 gold: seller gets 6 gold and buyer pays 10. No matter how you slice it taxes are money that the buyer loses and that the seller doesn't get, so splitting the tax between the seller and buyer doesn't actually have a unique impact.
@letsdance - Let's look at a simple equation. Net Growth = Input - Trade*tax. This assumes no other money sinks, which would only serve to muddy the argument. Input scales with player activity. Trade scales with market capital. Inflation stops when Trade*tax = Input. Lowering the input as you suggest helps reduce the growth, but if tax=0 then you need input=0 to balance out.
Could you clarify your disagreement if you still hold to it?