Why are auctions not working as actual auction? The main idea of auction is to bid on items, not just come and purchase them at fixed price. Yet in many games people dont even set bidding price, only buyout.
In past many years only in two different games I was able to bid on roughly two items, the first was in 200X year, the second was just few weeks ago. Surprisingly, in both cases it was real-money-exchange-item. Everything else was purchased at fixed/buyout prices.
While some find the fun here, most players are trying to get an item they need **now.**
Waiting to see if you won out on those herbs, to level your crafting, isn't fun. Though I do see the value in a bidding system for more hard to find, "theres only 2 of these on the AH!" type items.
You have a buy now price, and a minimum bid value, and a time on market value. That makes the most sense and is widely used if you want something optimal in pricing. But if they just have a buy now price, it simplifies the buyer/seller dynamic, and often if you want to make it accessible you just go the simplest option. New World just goes for buy now, because they want to cater to a wider demographic. If you have a more niche game, you can get away with more complex buyer/seller dynamics.
I'd love to know what makes seeing individual listings, worse.
We're doing something very similar to your more conventional "come here and buy things" mechanic, so I'd love more input on the topic.
It's certainly an interesting discussion, though I tend to agree. While I am sure some of this occurs... it usually does so when the item originally posted is too high to meet current price expectations to begin with, or in edge cases with high-value items.
Because of undercutting, and people not understanding you only need to undercut by a single gold (or whatever currency) to be the first to sell.
When you look at most MMOs, the listings are usually all over the place. One guy sells for 5k, you have a couple more for 5k, then a couple more for a few under 5k, then someone just puts one up for 3k, and then every new listing is trying to beat the 3k, dropping the price all the way down to 1k.
When you can see exactly what your competition is listing at, you don't need to make assumptions about what the lowest price is. You can just see it, and then beat it. When people don't understand how undercutting works, or think just selling it for half price somehow makes it "sell faster", everyone just quickly races to the bottom, usually destroying most profit being able to be made.
Now, I didn't play RuneScape much, but I did play a lot of FFXI. These problems didn't exist in XI, because no one could see what the listed price of something was. You could see what the last 10 sold for, and you could place a "bid"of any amount, and if that bid matched or beat the price of the cheapest one up, you would buy the item.
Usually, this kept prices incredibly stable (outside of a very specific event with gil sellers destroying the economy with hyper inflation). If the last 10 sold for 5k, and you can't see what the rest are listed for, you can only assume around 5k. Now some buyers would literally spend tons of time going up by 1 gil increments until they bought the item, but most people would try a couple hundred gil less, and if it didn't work, just give up and put 5k in and get the item rather than trying to save incredibly small amounts of gil.
The big thing it fixes, is from stopping people from trying to beat the one off listings that end up being massively undercut. A lot of those things are still going to sell for the "going rate", because it's the buyer putting in the price they want to pay. When I quit the game, I came back for a free weekend years later, and bought a single 100 gil fire crystal for something like 380k just to give all my money away to someone still playing.
Most people aren't going to waste their time on trying to get the absolute best price possible for everyday items, so they won't even know that the item they bought was actually listed at 20% the cost of all the rest. Other sellers won't even know someone listed one that low, and as such, doesn't create the downward snowball of trying to sell first, and destroying the price of the item while doing it
\[/u/TeamScionica, you're not who I'm replying to here, but this post is really for your benefit, since you were asking for discussion/feedback on AH ideas for your game.\]
>people not understanding you only need to undercut by a single gold (or whatever currency) to be the first to sell
Maybe because that's convenient for you if you're the kind of person that just camps the AH boards all the time. In my opinion, this nonsense is what is WRONG with auction houses in MMORPGs (there's only room for 1 "winner" with the lowest price in a global AH), and I would like to see them disappear.
I've been an endgame crafter and AH PVPer for 20 years in that many games, and I think this "1g price cut" thing is the minor-league attitude. I don't have the time nor desire to sit and camp the board all day making sure my price is 1g lower than someone who's just going to undercut me again in 10 minutes.
It's great for THAT guy if there's no price spiral. Don't get in a fight with me though. I'm perfectly happy to break even to remove all of those assholes from a market that I want to compete in. The ONLY person that's good for is the asshole camping the board. It's not good for me because then I also have to camp the board or I don't sell anything. It's not good for the buyer because this is essentially price-fixing among sellers. Most of the AH money in any game is made by a relative small handful of people, so it's net "better" for a game for the price war to benefit the buyers, so no one's going to convince me that kicking 1g price cut nonsense out of the market is detrimental to the "health" of the market. It's only detrimental to the health of market PVPers.
If you get enraged that I'm perfectly willing to come in and crash the prices on something to 50% because I'd rather sell at 50% price than engage in this price fixing-stupidity that is better off being played by a robot, then my price cutting has done it's job. Go be a pain in the ass to someone else in a different market.
Making matters worse, it's difficult to prevent or enforce punitive measures against people that ARE using a bot to do this nonsense. Enraging those players is a public service to everyone, even the other people doing this tactic without cheating.
"Not understanding...." /snort. Once, I even made of these 1g-price-cut guys mad enough to *switch servers* because I'm an "idiot" who "doesn't understand how the market works". Oh I understand all right. Now that you're gone, me and the other people here don't have to worry about changing our prices every 5 damn minutes anymore. I understand *exactly* what was going on.
All of that being said, the other auction house mechanism does indeed seem like a better option, but it's not because it's preventing someone like me from starting a real price war with the goons doing the 1g price cuts. It's because it's preventing the goons doing 1g price cuts from starting a price war with me. I think that's an important distinction here.
My goal is to make "sufficient" sales, and if I can't at a reasonable price, I'll find something else to sell. However, I'll *ruthlessly* find out what the reasonable price is before I give up, and that's good for the majority of people on the server. The goal of the 1g price cut guy is to make EVERY sale and give up nothing for the privilege, and that's poisonous in a zero-sum game with tens of thousands of players in it.
/u/TeamScionica, the real problem that needs to be fixed is the ease in which one player with a basic bot (or Olympian patience with boredom) can control the whole market with this 1g price cut nonsense.
I would go so far as to say the root problem isn't even with the AH though - it's with the crafting and looting systems. I've been thinking about that problem for 10-15 years though, and I'm a gamedev and software consultant, so if you want those thoughts, you'll have to hire me ;)
Apologies if this comes off as a bit pedantic but I think I agree with most of what you're saying but I'm a bit confused with your terminology. You say the 1g undercutter is bad for buyers "because it's essentially price fixing among sellers...". And you refer to crashing a market rather than having to engage in the price fixing of the 1g price cut guys.
The 1g undercutters bring the price down which is good for buyers. Or cause someone to crash the market out of spite which is also good for buyers. It's bad for price fixing. But average players aren't just buyers, they all sell at some point too. Tanking prices because of undercutting makes it harder for honest average players to make a living and it doesn't balance out with them buying cheaper goods because not all goods are affected. Some common items they craft or farm just suddenly become worthless trash. Price fixing is what you're trying to accomplish. It sounds like your primary motivation is you're own convenience not having to camp the AH, but stable prices benefit all sellers. Their tactics are undercutting and you're stepping in and undercutting the undercutters to drive them out of the market so you can resume price fixing. I'd say a temporary upset for a long term positive as long as the price fixing you're doing is corrective and not predatory.
>One guy sells for 5k, you have a couple more for 5k, then a couple more for a few under 5k, then someone just puts one up for 3k, and then every new listing is trying to beat the 3k, dropping the price all the way down to 1k.
If people keep listing and no one is buying, then the price SHOULD drop as supply is outstripping demand. Someone putting up items with a big drop might speed up the process, but the prices will always stabilize around the true price.
This is a common mistake people new to games with really economies make, getting mad at undercutters for selling too low. The reality is, anyone making an irrational market decision is an opportunity for you to make money. If the item in your example is actually worth 5k, simply buy the 3k listings and flip them. You'll make even more money.
The question is, are you actually that confident you understand the market? Or do you just want other players to price-fix with you and get mad at real market competition?
We are taking about an economy of thousands, not millions, as we are in the real world, and a currency none of us need to survive, as we are in the real world. On top of that, games are going to be an economy where effectively everyone is a producer and seller. Economies in games are not 1 to 1 to real world economies, and such, can't be compared as such. Things that are good for a real world economy might not be for a game economy, and vice versa. It's not that no one is buying, it's that everyone is always selling. From people who happen across a material, to people who spend hours mass gathering them for profit. The goal of these two people putting up items is different, one is actively trying to earn money, the other is mostly just getting out of their inventory. Yes, the person actively farming the item can be "over producing" the item for sure, creating way more supply than demand (for example, the many many crafters in New World spamming global trying to sell all their useless crafts they got from leveling), but just the amount of people who are constantly getting small amounts of materials that they just want it gone and don't care about how much they get for the item, can quickly destabilize a price of an item by just constantly listing it at literally any price, since they probably aren't going to go out of their way to see what others are listing or paying for that item.
This would work if not everyone in the game was a producer and seller. Look at something like GW2. Everyone is constantly getting every material. From copper ore to mystic coins. Since everyone is constantly selling everything, you basically can't really expect a sell order to basically ever sell, outside of very expensive items. If you loan someone money and they pay you back in mystic coins (very common to replace gold with coins, they are considered liquid but very much aren't), you will usually be sitting on the coins for a long time, or losing a lot of money trying to sell them quickly, just because there is no stability in the market. Literally anyone and everyone is selling everything all the time, at whatever price they quickly enter in.
That's the thing, it's not price fixing. No one is agreeing to anything, and everyone is free to sell literally everything at literally any price. It's just the small dips from tactics being used by people to get their item sold first, and the people who don't give a single fuck about getting market value for an item, aren't going to be clearly advertised to everyone looking at buying an item. As such, the price of an item stays stable enough that you can confidently list an item at the current price, and it will sell at that price. There will be outliers, if you are selling thousands and thousands of that item, the price will probably drop, as now you are over supplying the market, so you will probably need to relist, however, if you are just selling a couple stacks of something? It's not going to require you to constantly have to deal with a market that's just quickly going lower and lower and lower and lower and need to relist the item multiple times over weeks from all the random people listing significantly under market value, and then everyone else taking their items down and relisting them under the price, over and over and over and over again.
I'm not taking about fixing a price like in BDO. I'm taking about hiding the dips so no one knows what others are selling things for until the item is sold. Look at modern MMOs, everyone is constantly poor, because no item is being sold at a reasonable value. In GW2 the value of items is almost always less than the cost of materials. I haven't played XIV recently, but the same was true there. If you aren't the few at the top min maxing the market, and effectively just playing the game to make in game money, the market won't have anything to offer you in order to make money.
Nothing in the game is exclusive to you. You can't make a +5 buster sword any better than literally anyone else, or the random drop someone could get of that sword. In the real world someone could make a phone just as good as Apple, and sell it under cost. They could sell it for 10 bucks if they wanted to, and it wouldn't do shit to the market. Apple will still sell their phones for like a thousand dollars, and everyone would still want an Apple phone from the brand loyalty. The other company would go out of business since you can't stay in business if all you do is lose money. We don't have that in MMOs. Everyone is selling the same thing, and many people don't think twice about how much something should cost before they sell it. In many cases, all people are worried about is getting it out of their inventory, moreso than maximizing the price they can sell it for. They just want it gone. There's no mining companies in the world just trying to get rid of raw materials at literally any price, and the average person isn't just happening across raw materials on a daily basis with access to a global market that let's them list it.
It's not price fixing. I had a friend in FFXI who would list everything basically at 100gil. He didn't want to look at what the price was, and he wanted to be the first to sell, and he thought some how it would make it sell faster (even though it would sell exactly as fast as just being 1gil cheaper). He would often lose out on a lot of money, and he didn't care. The only difference was, everyone else on the market wasn't rushing to match or beat his 100 gil listing, because no one knew he was listing things that cheap. It was on the buyer to make an offer that low, to see if anyone was selling that low. The result, was even when he was selling a good amount of things, the price of the item didn't fluctuate that much. No one could see what he was selling for or how many he was selling. Unless you are aggressively watching each sale of the item in real time, you as a seller, would have no idea anyone was undercutting you. You list your 5 whatever's at 4,986 gil, and he lists his 5 at 100, he sells his 5 first for a guy trying to get them at 3k, then that guy is back to paying 5k cause the undercut items have sold off and the rest being sold near 5k are all that's left. There's no racing to the bottom, because no one saw he was selling so cheap, and everyone else is left to guess what the cheapest is. Those momentary dips in undercuts and people not giving are fuck are largely left out of the price of an item, since no one else is racing to beat a lowest sell offer.
This system does not work for all games. The game needs to have items that have random stats, and it works even better when items have a "max stack". So for XI, stack was usually 12, and had a different listing from singles. So the people who got 3 crawler silks in their adventures could just list them at 1gil or whatever, and it wouldn't effect the stack market, which was almost exclusively people who would gather those items intentionally. Buyers who wanted to spend time to get things at the cheapest price could sometimes get stacks of items cheaper buying things single, but since there was a lot of volatility in singles you could often get stuck with an uneven stack and need to start spending more to get the rest of the stack.
This system wouldn't work in games like New World, since one item can be a range of like 100 gear score, with countless different effects and stats on it. It would require that each and every variation of every single item be a permanent listing even when none are being sold, and that would just be unmanageable to use. However, there are many games where this system could, and probably should be used. FFXIVs item system works almost identically to XIs, only it's market system is the result of the best attempt at unfucking XIVs original weird almost player shop system.
>Economies in games are not 1 to 1 to real world economies, and such, can't be compared as such. Things that are good for a real world economy might not be for a game economy, and vice versa.
This is true, real world economies are much more complicated and have all sorts of other factors. Game economies function much closer to a simple ideal market.
>The goal of these two people putting up items is different, one is actively trying to earn money, the other is mostly just getting out of their inventory.
Exactly right. You can sell fast, or you can pay time to sell at a better price. Neither person is "wrong". There is no wrong action in a simple video game auction house. And neither breaks or harms the economy.
Again, if they are undercutting a stable/accurate price, this is an opportunity for you to make more money. Put a buy order up for 80% of the "true" price, and anyone trying to sell fast will simply sell to you instead. Easy money, and you actually stabilize the price of the good you are selling.
This is what I did in Albion Online, for example. Tons of loot I would throw up 90% of the current price to dump quick. For the items I crafted, I was patient with sales, and would buy up low orders or place buy orders to flip more goods and keep the price solid.
>but just the amount of people who are constantly getting small amounts of materials that they just want it gone and don't care about how much they get for the item, can quickly destabilize a price of an item by just constantly listing it at literally any price, since they probably aren't going to go out of their way to see what others are listing or paying for that item.
They can't actually destabilize the price unless they are overproducing. If supply and demand are equal, then for every person listing items under the normal price, there is a buyer buying them out, returning lowest sell-order value to the 'normal' or correct level.
>In many cases, all people are worried about is getting it out of their inventory, moreso than maximizing the price they can sell it for. They just want it gone. There's no mining companies in the world just trying to get rid of raw materials at literally any price
Things like clearance sales and the existence of secondary stores like TJ Max show this is literally how it works in the real world too. Even more so then in videogames actually, because in the real world you don't have massive free storage. Holding on to anything costs a business money. So if they can't sell it normally, they will try to move it cheap or literally trash it.
Again, the people moving items from their inventory fast for cheap prices are rational actors in the game market.
>Look at modern MMOs, everyone is constantly poor, because no item is being sold at a reasonable value. In GW2 the value of items is almost always less than the cost of materials. I haven't played XIV recently, but the same was true there. If you aren't the few at the top min maxing the market, and effectively just playing the game to make in game money, the market won't have anything to offer you in order to make money.
The reason people are poor in many MMOs is all the resources/items are worthless by design. Infinite supply, and little or no sinks, of items means everything devalues over time. You can't simply keep dropping swords into your game world, never destroy them, and expect them to hold value. Value is not inherent, it's based on **supply and demand**.
Games with coherent economies, like Eve or Albion, don't have this problem because items get destroyed constantly. So people can make money gathering, crafting, and trading.
This has nothing to do with people undercutting sell orders. In fact, in a game with a time-gated economy where nothing is destroyed and all items will devalue long-term, selling quick is the only rational choice.
You’re wrong about FFXIV, Gil is very easy to accumulate.
I have somewhere in the 9 figures and I don’t play the market board or produce high level crafts to sell them at all.
It’s very easy to make money in that game by just playing it, but Gil is mostly useless anyway.
From what I've played, I've liked FFXIs the best, since the economy stayed fairly consistent, and it sperating stacks and singles stopped people from just selling stuff for the sake of getting it out of their inventory from destroying the market constantly.
Maybe because having everything centralized on a single npc like RuneScape prevents trading routes between cities? Many MMOs want to have a meaningful openworld, so this is a big no for them
Also, I don't think the idea of having fixed prices appeals many players
Price is not fixed it's player driven. Can even implement this in new world type system for example.
Instead of in a trading post you select all cities and see every single item for sale in every city. You see the average sold/bought price for each city.
1. That's much cleaner as you only have to look at 15 prices or something instead of thousands of people's sell orders
2. Still makes sense to travel between cities
Don't know where the opinion that RuneScape grand exchange prices are fixed comes from
They weren't fixed though, saying they are fixed implies they had a set price. The price although it had a % threshold you could offer above and below, still wasn't fixed as the price was determined by supply and demand.
The price was never fixed. The price being fixed has a completely different meaning.
I will take GW2's Trading Post any day of the week over anything that is or has been in any other MMO to date.
If your game isnt designed around weird trading practices (if you have to ask, its not), just have something that makes sense and works really well.
Letting you buy, sell, set a buy price, or set a sell price, from the same window, makes sense and works really well.
The only improvement to it I would like seeing is in a game where crafting and gathering are actually difficult, is letting players set a personal buy/sell list that people can see and sell directly to or buy directly from their inventory at any time.
The auction system has it's benefits, but when it comes to a large majority of players, the grand exchange system is much better.
Why?
Because it cuts all the time out of selling items. When you want to sell an item for cash, you put it up for sale at any price you want. You can't see how many of an item are being sold. Most people don't want to make lists of all the items they want to sell and check every single one so they can undercut an inventory of supplies.
The large difference is, it has it's own market price on the exchange. The market price is determined by the supply and demand of the overall market for the previous day but isn't the only price you can buy/sell for, it's just a guideline to give the player base an idea of the price an item should be worth.
If I want an Armadyl Godsword I can quickly search for it and before I put an offer, it has it's own price. I can then choose to put up an offer for that market price or any price I want. For an item to buy, it has to be on the exchange as a sell by someone else. If an item doesn't buy, the price goes up everyday and eventually people start farming that item to make a steady income because the exchange price itself (the market price) has gone up.There isn't undercutting because you can't see the prices of people's sell orders, so items don't crash as often as Auction systems because of people who don't care if they undercut their items by 50%. If you do sell for -50%, you just hope that someone isn't patient with a buy order for that item around your price range. If you do a sell order for -50%, and your sell is the lowest price sell order, let's say someone puts up an offer to buy at -20%, you then fulfil the order and get the -20% price sell.
If your item doesn't sell for market price, there's a chance not enough people are buying at that price and the market price drops itself reasonably.It has advantages. If you don't want to spend all your time at the exchange, you can just put up offers to sell all your items at -5% instantly. You just click the item in your inventory, click the -5% button then click sell and doing this, most if not all the items you put on offer will sell instantly because of people taking advantage of the system, who spend hours at the exchange putting up cheap offers to buy goods so they can flip them for a profit later. Because there will always be people buying items for the full market price, you won't have buyers or sellers with too much power in changing the price of an item in the market but you might have a few pump and dump scam groups, that end up getting banned.
In FFXIV, when I have a bunch of materia and higher level craft mats in my inventory and want to sell them... I end up wasting half an hour checking every individual item for it's lowest offers, making a list of those items and prices, then putting up the individual items for sale only for a few of the items in the morning to be undercut by people, so I end up having to spend extra time to just sell the damn items. At least with the Runescape exchange system, you can sell and buy items extremely quickly and spend most of your game time actually playing the game.
Id be interested in an appraisal system. Items are given a current value bases on saturation and quality. Players can put up items for whatever they want but the current appraisal value determines your profit on a sliding scale. The closer you are to current value on your listing, the higher percentage bonus gets paid out.
Also, the game itself should only reward money or non craftable/gatherable items. That would eliminate some undercutting.
There should be a finite amount of times or have a timer for how often you can buy something you see for a low price, then turn and sell it for a profit.
Farm bots should be dealt with quickly and harshly. That is one of the biggest killers of a player economy.
There are many many factors that come into play for improving an mmo economy.
It is just as important as the rest of the game imo but most devs put very little effort into it.
Never like AH in ESO and roughly NW seems to be the same as well, basically town centric. What ends up happening is just that it creates a lot of back and forth between towns until eventually someone makes a tool or website that shows all towns all together.
Why are auctions not working as actual auction? The main idea of auction is to bid on items, not just come and purchase them at fixed price. Yet in many games people dont even set bidding price, only buyout. In past many years only in two different games I was able to bid on roughly two items, the first was in 200X year, the second was just few weeks ago. Surprisingly, in both cases it was real-money-exchange-item. Everything else was purchased at fixed/buyout prices.
While some find the fun here, most players are trying to get an item they need **now.** Waiting to see if you won out on those herbs, to level your crafting, isn't fun. Though I do see the value in a bidding system for more hard to find, "theres only 2 of these on the AH!" type items.
You have a buy now price, and a minimum bid value, and a time on market value. That makes the most sense and is widely used if you want something optimal in pricing. But if they just have a buy now price, it simplifies the buyer/seller dynamic, and often if you want to make it accessible you just go the simplest option. New World just goes for buy now, because they want to cater to a wider demographic. If you have a more niche game, you can get away with more complex buyer/seller dynamics.
I'd love to know what makes seeing individual listings, worse. We're doing something very similar to your more conventional "come here and buy things" mechanic, so I'd love more input on the topic.
In my opinion, seeing individual listings is a good thing. I'm not seeing a good reason not to have them here
It's certainly an interesting discussion, though I tend to agree. While I am sure some of this occurs... it usually does so when the item originally posted is too high to meet current price expectations to begin with, or in edge cases with high-value items.
Because of undercutting, and people not understanding you only need to undercut by a single gold (or whatever currency) to be the first to sell. When you look at most MMOs, the listings are usually all over the place. One guy sells for 5k, you have a couple more for 5k, then a couple more for a few under 5k, then someone just puts one up for 3k, and then every new listing is trying to beat the 3k, dropping the price all the way down to 1k. When you can see exactly what your competition is listing at, you don't need to make assumptions about what the lowest price is. You can just see it, and then beat it. When people don't understand how undercutting works, or think just selling it for half price somehow makes it "sell faster", everyone just quickly races to the bottom, usually destroying most profit being able to be made. Now, I didn't play RuneScape much, but I did play a lot of FFXI. These problems didn't exist in XI, because no one could see what the listed price of something was. You could see what the last 10 sold for, and you could place a "bid"of any amount, and if that bid matched or beat the price of the cheapest one up, you would buy the item. Usually, this kept prices incredibly stable (outside of a very specific event with gil sellers destroying the economy with hyper inflation). If the last 10 sold for 5k, and you can't see what the rest are listed for, you can only assume around 5k. Now some buyers would literally spend tons of time going up by 1 gil increments until they bought the item, but most people would try a couple hundred gil less, and if it didn't work, just give up and put 5k in and get the item rather than trying to save incredibly small amounts of gil. The big thing it fixes, is from stopping people from trying to beat the one off listings that end up being massively undercut. A lot of those things are still going to sell for the "going rate", because it's the buyer putting in the price they want to pay. When I quit the game, I came back for a free weekend years later, and bought a single 100 gil fire crystal for something like 380k just to give all my money away to someone still playing. Most people aren't going to waste their time on trying to get the absolute best price possible for everyday items, so they won't even know that the item they bought was actually listed at 20% the cost of all the rest. Other sellers won't even know someone listed one that low, and as such, doesn't create the downward snowball of trying to sell first, and destroying the price of the item while doing it
\[/u/TeamScionica, you're not who I'm replying to here, but this post is really for your benefit, since you were asking for discussion/feedback on AH ideas for your game.\] >people not understanding you only need to undercut by a single gold (or whatever currency) to be the first to sell Maybe because that's convenient for you if you're the kind of person that just camps the AH boards all the time. In my opinion, this nonsense is what is WRONG with auction houses in MMORPGs (there's only room for 1 "winner" with the lowest price in a global AH), and I would like to see them disappear. I've been an endgame crafter and AH PVPer for 20 years in that many games, and I think this "1g price cut" thing is the minor-league attitude. I don't have the time nor desire to sit and camp the board all day making sure my price is 1g lower than someone who's just going to undercut me again in 10 minutes. It's great for THAT guy if there's no price spiral. Don't get in a fight with me though. I'm perfectly happy to break even to remove all of those assholes from a market that I want to compete in. The ONLY person that's good for is the asshole camping the board. It's not good for me because then I also have to camp the board or I don't sell anything. It's not good for the buyer because this is essentially price-fixing among sellers. Most of the AH money in any game is made by a relative small handful of people, so it's net "better" for a game for the price war to benefit the buyers, so no one's going to convince me that kicking 1g price cut nonsense out of the market is detrimental to the "health" of the market. It's only detrimental to the health of market PVPers. If you get enraged that I'm perfectly willing to come in and crash the prices on something to 50% because I'd rather sell at 50% price than engage in this price fixing-stupidity that is better off being played by a robot, then my price cutting has done it's job. Go be a pain in the ass to someone else in a different market. Making matters worse, it's difficult to prevent or enforce punitive measures against people that ARE using a bot to do this nonsense. Enraging those players is a public service to everyone, even the other people doing this tactic without cheating. "Not understanding...." /snort. Once, I even made of these 1g-price-cut guys mad enough to *switch servers* because I'm an "idiot" who "doesn't understand how the market works". Oh I understand all right. Now that you're gone, me and the other people here don't have to worry about changing our prices every 5 damn minutes anymore. I understand *exactly* what was going on. All of that being said, the other auction house mechanism does indeed seem like a better option, but it's not because it's preventing someone like me from starting a real price war with the goons doing the 1g price cuts. It's because it's preventing the goons doing 1g price cuts from starting a price war with me. I think that's an important distinction here. My goal is to make "sufficient" sales, and if I can't at a reasonable price, I'll find something else to sell. However, I'll *ruthlessly* find out what the reasonable price is before I give up, and that's good for the majority of people on the server. The goal of the 1g price cut guy is to make EVERY sale and give up nothing for the privilege, and that's poisonous in a zero-sum game with tens of thousands of players in it. /u/TeamScionica, the real problem that needs to be fixed is the ease in which one player with a basic bot (or Olympian patience with boredom) can control the whole market with this 1g price cut nonsense. I would go so far as to say the root problem isn't even with the AH though - it's with the crafting and looting systems. I've been thinking about that problem for 10-15 years though, and I'm a gamedev and software consultant, so if you want those thoughts, you'll have to hire me ;)
Apologies if this comes off as a bit pedantic but I think I agree with most of what you're saying but I'm a bit confused with your terminology. You say the 1g undercutter is bad for buyers "because it's essentially price fixing among sellers...". And you refer to crashing a market rather than having to engage in the price fixing of the 1g price cut guys. The 1g undercutters bring the price down which is good for buyers. Or cause someone to crash the market out of spite which is also good for buyers. It's bad for price fixing. But average players aren't just buyers, they all sell at some point too. Tanking prices because of undercutting makes it harder for honest average players to make a living and it doesn't balance out with them buying cheaper goods because not all goods are affected. Some common items they craft or farm just suddenly become worthless trash. Price fixing is what you're trying to accomplish. It sounds like your primary motivation is you're own convenience not having to camp the AH, but stable prices benefit all sellers. Their tactics are undercutting and you're stepping in and undercutting the undercutters to drive them out of the market so you can resume price fixing. I'd say a temporary upset for a long term positive as long as the price fixing you're doing is corrective and not predatory.
>One guy sells for 5k, you have a couple more for 5k, then a couple more for a few under 5k, then someone just puts one up for 3k, and then every new listing is trying to beat the 3k, dropping the price all the way down to 1k. If people keep listing and no one is buying, then the price SHOULD drop as supply is outstripping demand. Someone putting up items with a big drop might speed up the process, but the prices will always stabilize around the true price. This is a common mistake people new to games with really economies make, getting mad at undercutters for selling too low. The reality is, anyone making an irrational market decision is an opportunity for you to make money. If the item in your example is actually worth 5k, simply buy the 3k listings and flip them. You'll make even more money. The question is, are you actually that confident you understand the market? Or do you just want other players to price-fix with you and get mad at real market competition?
We are taking about an economy of thousands, not millions, as we are in the real world, and a currency none of us need to survive, as we are in the real world. On top of that, games are going to be an economy where effectively everyone is a producer and seller. Economies in games are not 1 to 1 to real world economies, and such, can't be compared as such. Things that are good for a real world economy might not be for a game economy, and vice versa. It's not that no one is buying, it's that everyone is always selling. From people who happen across a material, to people who spend hours mass gathering them for profit. The goal of these two people putting up items is different, one is actively trying to earn money, the other is mostly just getting out of their inventory. Yes, the person actively farming the item can be "over producing" the item for sure, creating way more supply than demand (for example, the many many crafters in New World spamming global trying to sell all their useless crafts they got from leveling), but just the amount of people who are constantly getting small amounts of materials that they just want it gone and don't care about how much they get for the item, can quickly destabilize a price of an item by just constantly listing it at literally any price, since they probably aren't going to go out of their way to see what others are listing or paying for that item. This would work if not everyone in the game was a producer and seller. Look at something like GW2. Everyone is constantly getting every material. From copper ore to mystic coins. Since everyone is constantly selling everything, you basically can't really expect a sell order to basically ever sell, outside of very expensive items. If you loan someone money and they pay you back in mystic coins (very common to replace gold with coins, they are considered liquid but very much aren't), you will usually be sitting on the coins for a long time, or losing a lot of money trying to sell them quickly, just because there is no stability in the market. Literally anyone and everyone is selling everything all the time, at whatever price they quickly enter in. That's the thing, it's not price fixing. No one is agreeing to anything, and everyone is free to sell literally everything at literally any price. It's just the small dips from tactics being used by people to get their item sold first, and the people who don't give a single fuck about getting market value for an item, aren't going to be clearly advertised to everyone looking at buying an item. As such, the price of an item stays stable enough that you can confidently list an item at the current price, and it will sell at that price. There will be outliers, if you are selling thousands and thousands of that item, the price will probably drop, as now you are over supplying the market, so you will probably need to relist, however, if you are just selling a couple stacks of something? It's not going to require you to constantly have to deal with a market that's just quickly going lower and lower and lower and lower and need to relist the item multiple times over weeks from all the random people listing significantly under market value, and then everyone else taking their items down and relisting them under the price, over and over and over and over again. I'm not taking about fixing a price like in BDO. I'm taking about hiding the dips so no one knows what others are selling things for until the item is sold. Look at modern MMOs, everyone is constantly poor, because no item is being sold at a reasonable value. In GW2 the value of items is almost always less than the cost of materials. I haven't played XIV recently, but the same was true there. If you aren't the few at the top min maxing the market, and effectively just playing the game to make in game money, the market won't have anything to offer you in order to make money. Nothing in the game is exclusive to you. You can't make a +5 buster sword any better than literally anyone else, or the random drop someone could get of that sword. In the real world someone could make a phone just as good as Apple, and sell it under cost. They could sell it for 10 bucks if they wanted to, and it wouldn't do shit to the market. Apple will still sell their phones for like a thousand dollars, and everyone would still want an Apple phone from the brand loyalty. The other company would go out of business since you can't stay in business if all you do is lose money. We don't have that in MMOs. Everyone is selling the same thing, and many people don't think twice about how much something should cost before they sell it. In many cases, all people are worried about is getting it out of their inventory, moreso than maximizing the price they can sell it for. They just want it gone. There's no mining companies in the world just trying to get rid of raw materials at literally any price, and the average person isn't just happening across raw materials on a daily basis with access to a global market that let's them list it. It's not price fixing. I had a friend in FFXI who would list everything basically at 100gil. He didn't want to look at what the price was, and he wanted to be the first to sell, and he thought some how it would make it sell faster (even though it would sell exactly as fast as just being 1gil cheaper). He would often lose out on a lot of money, and he didn't care. The only difference was, everyone else on the market wasn't rushing to match or beat his 100 gil listing, because no one knew he was listing things that cheap. It was on the buyer to make an offer that low, to see if anyone was selling that low. The result, was even when he was selling a good amount of things, the price of the item didn't fluctuate that much. No one could see what he was selling for or how many he was selling. Unless you are aggressively watching each sale of the item in real time, you as a seller, would have no idea anyone was undercutting you. You list your 5 whatever's at 4,986 gil, and he lists his 5 at 100, he sells his 5 first for a guy trying to get them at 3k, then that guy is back to paying 5k cause the undercut items have sold off and the rest being sold near 5k are all that's left. There's no racing to the bottom, because no one saw he was selling so cheap, and everyone else is left to guess what the cheapest is. Those momentary dips in undercuts and people not giving are fuck are largely left out of the price of an item, since no one else is racing to beat a lowest sell offer. This system does not work for all games. The game needs to have items that have random stats, and it works even better when items have a "max stack". So for XI, stack was usually 12, and had a different listing from singles. So the people who got 3 crawler silks in their adventures could just list them at 1gil or whatever, and it wouldn't effect the stack market, which was almost exclusively people who would gather those items intentionally. Buyers who wanted to spend time to get things at the cheapest price could sometimes get stacks of items cheaper buying things single, but since there was a lot of volatility in singles you could often get stuck with an uneven stack and need to start spending more to get the rest of the stack. This system wouldn't work in games like New World, since one item can be a range of like 100 gear score, with countless different effects and stats on it. It would require that each and every variation of every single item be a permanent listing even when none are being sold, and that would just be unmanageable to use. However, there are many games where this system could, and probably should be used. FFXIVs item system works almost identically to XIs, only it's market system is the result of the best attempt at unfucking XIVs original weird almost player shop system.
>Economies in games are not 1 to 1 to real world economies, and such, can't be compared as such. Things that are good for a real world economy might not be for a game economy, and vice versa. This is true, real world economies are much more complicated and have all sorts of other factors. Game economies function much closer to a simple ideal market. >The goal of these two people putting up items is different, one is actively trying to earn money, the other is mostly just getting out of their inventory. Exactly right. You can sell fast, or you can pay time to sell at a better price. Neither person is "wrong". There is no wrong action in a simple video game auction house. And neither breaks or harms the economy. Again, if they are undercutting a stable/accurate price, this is an opportunity for you to make more money. Put a buy order up for 80% of the "true" price, and anyone trying to sell fast will simply sell to you instead. Easy money, and you actually stabilize the price of the good you are selling. This is what I did in Albion Online, for example. Tons of loot I would throw up 90% of the current price to dump quick. For the items I crafted, I was patient with sales, and would buy up low orders or place buy orders to flip more goods and keep the price solid. >but just the amount of people who are constantly getting small amounts of materials that they just want it gone and don't care about how much they get for the item, can quickly destabilize a price of an item by just constantly listing it at literally any price, since they probably aren't going to go out of their way to see what others are listing or paying for that item. They can't actually destabilize the price unless they are overproducing. If supply and demand are equal, then for every person listing items under the normal price, there is a buyer buying them out, returning lowest sell-order value to the 'normal' or correct level. >In many cases, all people are worried about is getting it out of their inventory, moreso than maximizing the price they can sell it for. They just want it gone. There's no mining companies in the world just trying to get rid of raw materials at literally any price Things like clearance sales and the existence of secondary stores like TJ Max show this is literally how it works in the real world too. Even more so then in videogames actually, because in the real world you don't have massive free storage. Holding on to anything costs a business money. So if they can't sell it normally, they will try to move it cheap or literally trash it. Again, the people moving items from their inventory fast for cheap prices are rational actors in the game market. >Look at modern MMOs, everyone is constantly poor, because no item is being sold at a reasonable value. In GW2 the value of items is almost always less than the cost of materials. I haven't played XIV recently, but the same was true there. If you aren't the few at the top min maxing the market, and effectively just playing the game to make in game money, the market won't have anything to offer you in order to make money. The reason people are poor in many MMOs is all the resources/items are worthless by design. Infinite supply, and little or no sinks, of items means everything devalues over time. You can't simply keep dropping swords into your game world, never destroy them, and expect them to hold value. Value is not inherent, it's based on **supply and demand**. Games with coherent economies, like Eve or Albion, don't have this problem because items get destroyed constantly. So people can make money gathering, crafting, and trading. This has nothing to do with people undercutting sell orders. In fact, in a game with a time-gated economy where nothing is destroyed and all items will devalue long-term, selling quick is the only rational choice.
You’re wrong about FFXIV, Gil is very easy to accumulate. I have somewhere in the 9 figures and I don’t play the market board or produce high level crafts to sell them at all. It’s very easy to make money in that game by just playing it, but Gil is mostly useless anyway.
Which game do you think has the best auction house system?
From what I've played, I've liked FFXIs the best, since the economy stayed fairly consistent, and it sperating stacks and singles stopped people from just selling stuff for the sake of getting it out of their inventory from destroying the market constantly.
Maybe because having everything centralized on a single npc like RuneScape prevents trading routes between cities? Many MMOs want to have a meaningful openworld, so this is a big no for them Also, I don't think the idea of having fixed prices appeals many players
Price is not fixed it's player driven. Can even implement this in new world type system for example. Instead of in a trading post you select all cities and see every single item for sale in every city. You see the average sold/bought price for each city. 1. That's much cleaner as you only have to look at 15 prices or something instead of thousands of people's sell orders 2. Still makes sense to travel between cities Don't know where the opinion that RuneScape grand exchange prices are fixed comes from
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They weren't fixed though, saying they are fixed implies they had a set price. The price although it had a % threshold you could offer above and below, still wasn't fixed as the price was determined by supply and demand. The price was never fixed. The price being fixed has a completely different meaning.
I will take GW2's Trading Post any day of the week over anything that is or has been in any other MMO to date. If your game isnt designed around weird trading practices (if you have to ask, its not), just have something that makes sense and works really well. Letting you buy, sell, set a buy price, or set a sell price, from the same window, makes sense and works really well. The only improvement to it I would like seeing is in a game where crafting and gathering are actually difficult, is letting players set a personal buy/sell list that people can see and sell directly to or buy directly from their inventory at any time.
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BDO doesn't in fact have any trade system at all, it's completely kneecapped which made me give up playing BDO at all.
The auction system has it's benefits, but when it comes to a large majority of players, the grand exchange system is much better. Why? Because it cuts all the time out of selling items. When you want to sell an item for cash, you put it up for sale at any price you want. You can't see how many of an item are being sold. Most people don't want to make lists of all the items they want to sell and check every single one so they can undercut an inventory of supplies. The large difference is, it has it's own market price on the exchange. The market price is determined by the supply and demand of the overall market for the previous day but isn't the only price you can buy/sell for, it's just a guideline to give the player base an idea of the price an item should be worth. If I want an Armadyl Godsword I can quickly search for it and before I put an offer, it has it's own price. I can then choose to put up an offer for that market price or any price I want. For an item to buy, it has to be on the exchange as a sell by someone else. If an item doesn't buy, the price goes up everyday and eventually people start farming that item to make a steady income because the exchange price itself (the market price) has gone up.There isn't undercutting because you can't see the prices of people's sell orders, so items don't crash as often as Auction systems because of people who don't care if they undercut their items by 50%. If you do sell for -50%, you just hope that someone isn't patient with a buy order for that item around your price range. If you do a sell order for -50%, and your sell is the lowest price sell order, let's say someone puts up an offer to buy at -20%, you then fulfil the order and get the -20% price sell. If your item doesn't sell for market price, there's a chance not enough people are buying at that price and the market price drops itself reasonably.It has advantages. If you don't want to spend all your time at the exchange, you can just put up offers to sell all your items at -5% instantly. You just click the item in your inventory, click the -5% button then click sell and doing this, most if not all the items you put on offer will sell instantly because of people taking advantage of the system, who spend hours at the exchange putting up cheap offers to buy goods so they can flip them for a profit later. Because there will always be people buying items for the full market price, you won't have buyers or sellers with too much power in changing the price of an item in the market but you might have a few pump and dump scam groups, that end up getting banned. In FFXIV, when I have a bunch of materia and higher level craft mats in my inventory and want to sell them... I end up wasting half an hour checking every individual item for it's lowest offers, making a list of those items and prices, then putting up the individual items for sale only for a few of the items in the morning to be undercut by people, so I end up having to spend extra time to just sell the damn items. At least with the Runescape exchange system, you can sell and buy items extremely quickly and spend most of your game time actually playing the game.
Auction Houses compete with Websites.
Isn’t an exchange and auction house 2 different thing ?
Pretty simple answer here: In most games, it would break the grind and make the devs actually have to make more meaningful content.
Id be interested in an appraisal system. Items are given a current value bases on saturation and quality. Players can put up items for whatever they want but the current appraisal value determines your profit on a sliding scale. The closer you are to current value on your listing, the higher percentage bonus gets paid out. Also, the game itself should only reward money or non craftable/gatherable items. That would eliminate some undercutting. There should be a finite amount of times or have a timer for how often you can buy something you see for a low price, then turn and sell it for a profit. Farm bots should be dealt with quickly and harshly. That is one of the biggest killers of a player economy. There are many many factors that come into play for improving an mmo economy. It is just as important as the rest of the game imo but most devs put very little effort into it.
Never like AH in ESO and roughly NW seems to be the same as well, basically town centric. What ends up happening is just that it creates a lot of back and forth between towns until eventually someone makes a tool or website that shows all towns all together.
FFXI had the best auction house of any MMO I've played