Players have to travel to mine for gems, to hunt, to visit exo’s, and sometimes just to look around so an Auction House does not eliminate the need to travel.
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I don’t like searching for 4-6 hours for a shop that I don’t normally go to in order to sell my mined up materials so I can go buy forged hammers from places like AluTech and Golden Fist to just go mine for another couple hours.
Sorry, I don’t have that kind of time during my week to burn on pointless dumb running around. I seriously doubt you do this kind of stuff in real life and call it “fun” when you’ve got a household you probably run, family to spend time with, meals to cook and prep, work to go to, possibly school classes and work that needs to be done, and probably a whole plethora of other stuff that requires your attention and time.
In retrospect, it’s the same thing for players in Boundless. If I have to spend 4 to 6 hours to maybe find an active shop with a good request basket price and not have the time during that day off from work and all sorts of other responsibilities, then I probably won’t play the game as much. It means I won’t have as much time to build on that project I want to finish or even start another one because I have less time during the week. It also means I will log on less to even play in general because I know that it will be difficult to sell the stuff I found to a shop that’s active enough with a good enough price.
If I want to go out and explore in this game I will and I should on my own terms. And another thing, traveling is the number one thing any player in this game does. You can’t avoid it.
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Happy medium, add a lock like item you place on your selling plinth/basket. This adds the contents to a globally searchable list. The player then has to go to your plinth and buy it.
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i really think the economy would benefit from an AH. More will be bought, more will be sold. Money can be made from buying out heavy undercutters. Most MMOs have players who make the bulk of their coin exclusively this way. The minter will ensure prices never go below a certain amount and become completely worthless. I’d even say the lack of an AH is why we’re having a hard time keeping some players.
If boundless wants to be an MMO we need MMO features. Just put that boundless spin on it to make it unique.
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There have been huge threads on this and many of us do not want games like Eve Online where people just look at an auction house and see a hammer for 4000 coin and them some person makes it 3999 coin - repeat process. We have suggested things like I did - a shop yellow pages. This allows people to see active shops, what they are selling (no prices) and their location so they can go visit. It keeps it fair for everyone.
Additionally, auction houses will just make the rich people richer. They will see the prices others have and they can easily under cut or over pay for things. They can do that now but they have to work harder to do it and there might be shops they miss. This type of thing just makes it easy access for everyone.
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Maybe we could get a Dev to tell us there stance?
Actually we can just Forget About it.
But nice Posts i have to say.
Maybe if it were added, but the number of items a person could sell were really limited - like three types per week with a max of one smart stack of that item each - it could serve to stimulate the economy while not wrecking the current system, give people a way to quickly unload and find the best and most in-demand items. So, I might reserve my spots for the lucent gems I find, or the other highest profit items, being someone who mostly forages and mines. Other stuff stays in my store. And then allow you on your AH listings to give a location for your store that others could save, so it serves as advertising - someone who forges great stuff lists a few tools. I like what I see, and have never been to this person’s store, so now I know and can go. A hunter might use it for feathers. In this scenario too, I think it would serve to help cap the price on the most rare and in demand items a bit, if folks can see them in one place like that. Just a brainstorm…
I have a love/hate with this idea. If I want something it sucks searching hours for things but I love the cool builds I usually find along the way, too.
Would a per world auction house make sense? Here are my thoughts:
- All shop stands can be linked to the auction house
- An auction machine is required in your beacon to link your stands to the current world’s AH
- Any auction machine let’s you access any linked stands on the current world to see their offerings and prices
4A. Warp to the item seller’s shop stand right from the store. Free if you have explored the world and region or for a standard, 1-time transport fee of 100c if you have not.
4B. Offer coordinates/settlement/beacon/shop name info for those who would rather just find their own way - A new guild helix could potentially link all the world auction houses together
- Access the new auction helix to view universe-wide shop stands linked to any auction house
- Search by world, by blinksecs, by region (USE, USW, AUS, EU), etc.
8A. No warps from the universal AH
8B. Offer world/coordinates/settlement/beacon/shop name info to find the shop or just go to the world and look up on the world AH
Probably not a perfect compromise but it achieves two things: Basically an in-game shop scanner and a way to explore relevant shopping places once you are on-world without endless wandering.
I’m definitely open to criticism, am I way off on this?
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We allready have a similar Thing.
https://boundlesstrade.net/
Why do i have to go out of game, yet again, to get info for ingame items? I allready have to do that for in Depth info About game items, Colors, planet gates etcetc.
Would it not be better and more convinient to make a HUD using market Explorer?
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If anything, footfall is an argument for the auction house/trade hall. Footfall is completely stupid in this game. I get more footfall for my shop in Gyosha Mall or Quebec then in every of my farms. For the farms I have to keep a portal open, for the shop I don’t have any cost. And the shops don’t sell that much…
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Shopping in this game is really painful, slow, and soul crushing boring. Which means most people just remember a shop that had acceptable prices and good stock and go there.
That’s really awesome for these shops, but it means you have a hard time selling anything if you’re not one of these shops. Now you have two choices to make money:
- become one of these shops by lowering your prices, then keep it stocked which requires much time and dedication
- farm something and put it into the minter
I would love to have a third option, sell just as much as you want to farm/forge through the trading hall.
The current system is bad for buyers and the current system is bad for sellers that aren’t the biggest stores. And a market that is bad for most is going to collapse.
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for someting like that i think i would prefer it to be dev run the thing with community ran things like boundless trade or malls all it takes is 1 or 2 people that are core to the given project quiting for it all to just collapse
but eve online has a 10000000000 times better economy then boundless has at the current moment i can mine for someting then sell the given item in the time it takes me to calculate how much its worth i dont got to spend 3-4 hours flying form station to station looking for a “shop” that is willing to buy it.
this can easly be done with the “yellow pages” or any kind of price listing system we are just subbing AH for i just check (insert name here) for what shops are currently selling something for then undercut. its just a fact of life in a market system
idk the thing is with a boundless trade style yellow pages its super easy to abuse i can just list something in a shop stand that the general public cant access for a dirt low price and now all of a sudden i got people running to my shop looking for it and not finding it.
i think a AH is just the best way to go to get the economy off life support
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Well those shops, if they were actual real life companies, would have generated earned media for their sales. They don’t have to really market or advertise themselves to generate the sales they get. That’s kind of what earned media does for you. Basically, that’s the same way Minecraft and Fortnite got so big and popular today.
Some of this problem of shops not getting a good enough foot traffic or attention is through the terrible portal navigation that is currently in the game but there’s only so much any one group running those portal hubs and networks can do. However, giving a few directions, a forum and discord post or two, and thinking creatively on how to create offers that functionally work to drive sales is a really important thing to do. If you want your shop to get more sales, gotta tell people what you’re selling and about the shop and how to get to it.
I really wish I could create bundle packs of different items into a single item to sell to someone and that someone just unpacks it in their inventory. This kind of idea doubles up as a way to consolidate storage for warehouse sites but also allows players to generate specifically made item packs to trade or sell to players. An example would be a smart stack of forged hammers, a stack of 100 mega strength brew, and a stack of 100 persisting/critical pie. Could be sold for, I don’t know but let’s just say, 45,000c.
There’s a lot of creative functionality that we don’t have for shop stands that make shop competition a lot harder. Fractional coins did help but honestly I don’t think it really helped enough.
I also wish there was a way to safely and securely invest coin into someone’s build or shop and get a return on that investment. So if I dumped 5 million into someone’s shop, I would get a return on that investment periodically and still have the option of pulling that investment coin out of the deal if I want to. It wouldn’t be a coin generator though and be subject to world tax rate on settlements.
This is probably a non-issue since the game can probably be programmed to look at the average prices across the shop stands and exclude anything that’s grossly way over or under the majority of what people are setting prices too. So regardless if something is being put in a shop stand for hundreds of thousands of coin is irrelevant.
I do agree that an AH is a good way to breathe life into the game’s economy though.
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I am not saying people should go out of the game. I don’t agree at all with that site or the method used to gather the data since it a breaking of the TOS and not right. It shouldn’t be available and we should have things in game like the shop yellow pages idea I pitched…
The focus should be on not bringing over solutions from other games. It should be about fixing the economy and creating one that works for Boundless. Clearly our economy needs work and a lot of fixing. But it will not be solved by an auction house. The problem will compound.
The yellow pages idea I posted and promoted would not include any prices. It was a very simple method to help people become aware of active shops and how to get there. Here is where I started a thread about it: https://forum.playboundless.com/t/jump-starting-the-economy/
Price listing is bad and promotes a bad play style that this game does not need. Undercutting will always happen but you can either support it and encourage it with game functions or not. I am in the camp that says you do not “encourage or support” it.
Yes that is a way people would be taking advantage of it. So we can put systems in place to stop those things.
Solutions that worked for the most part from other games are allways a good idea. If Nothing else then to improve and built upon them, avoiding there mistakes.
Putting up items but no Prices is a bad idea. Might aswell not have a AH at all because not having Prices is deafeating the Purpose of time saving.
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I am afraid I will have to agree with what has been said. Without prices it is useless to me as it still requires me to wander an unknown number of planets and finding an unknown number of stores to determine where the best price is. I might as well save the wasted time and make it myself and forget about helping the economy. Undercutting already happens. Look at the forums and discord where various players are advertising power coils at low prices.
Which is why an auction house works. If they have it in stock I can get it for the price listed. Not false advertising or wasting time trying to find a hidden sales stand and doing nothing but generating footfall for a store owner that really does not deserve it.
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all that would happen is someone else would just create boundless trade 2.0 and we would be back where we started the yellow pages idea only fix’s a part of the problem and people would still need to waste hours looking at shops for the item they need the only diff is they know where the shops are rather then mindless wondering
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An auction house or somewhat timely available products listing similar to boundlesstrade.net would be the most ideal solution for me, a shopper. Malls have been a pretty good in-game solution, but even I grow tired of searching since my needs change from week to week
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PI am totally against an auction house in Boundless and I believe it would kill the game. Other MMO’s have quests and story to complete which this game doesn’t have.
As for footfall, I don’t understand why people see it as taboo. (And I don’t mean the co-op when I say this…) It’s not like the coin earned in footfall is taken from the explorer, so who cares. If my Oortian buttocks leaves you 80c just for being there, wtf cares? Every time someone stops playing they take coin out of the game, so the passive income is needed.
I also don’t see why you can’t treat ff as an additional supplemental income…
As for good shops… there are plenty out there and some have been around since the game has been released, or not long after…
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