I think if you have an auction house for people to buy and sell from it’s going to open up a Pandora’s Box. First what happens to all the people like major vex or Shogun or Spartan 514 or Gina Bean and all the other people who’ve invested in malls? Just throw them in the trash? What about all the footfall that is created from everyone looking around all these different planets these different shopping malls Etc? So what happens the portal Seekers? Hubbit? Ultima? And all of the other portal Networks when their footfall decreases exponentially because of the people not traveling around looking for products? I do not believe that the other reasons to travel mining excetera are going to allow them to function or at the very least it will harm them very much. What are we supposed to do with all the requests baskets and Shop stands? Throw them all into a giant fire? What about all the people in the game who designed shops and like to sell stuff in shops? Do we just totally disregard their enjoyment? The idea that we had to travel physically to shop has been part of the game from the beginning so it is safe to say the developers intended it to be this way. With the Advent of things like boundless trade. Net we do have options to search for items . It’s not perfect I mean it could definitely be updated much quicker but it is definitely a step in the right direction
Having been in many other MMO’S I do agree that the auction house will probably end up actually only help a few players and will probably lockout many others all the same time driving prices down even more items that are almost being given away now at a loss in some cases. Probably would end up crashing the economy.
I would much rather have the Developers work on new content for the game versus Reinventing the wheel which is exactly what this would be. This is my opinion and it is unlikely anyone will change my mind.
Not going to lie I didn’t read your whole post. But I’ll repeat it again. FF is not the tap. Nor was it ever supposed to be. Guild buffs were not designed to be run off ff. They were designed to be a group effort which most of the time doesn’t turn out that way.
Also from my understanding the devs never expected there to be so many portal networks. Not really wanted there to be either. But maybe I’m just reading various different comments wrong.
Also imho I think the game would be better off with 1 major portal network instead of the 8 we have now. And that’s actually probably an understatement on how many we have.
The game also has way too many malls for the population. Even so, I don’t think the most prominent ones would suffer. It’d still be advantageous to have your shop in a well known mall with good connections even if the prices were browseable from off-site. According to that 2016 post the dev’s vision is that all goods have to be transported by players, so instant delivery doesn’t sound likely.
If we got an AH of some sort that doesn’t instantly deliver items to you, people will adapt to it’s existence. Just like people will adapt to the economic changes Farming will bring along with what the Chrysominter has done for people.
No matter how you want to chalk it up… the problem with time being wasted in finding the ideal shop to buy or sell what you want at whatever price you want needs to be resolved. This problem will explode even more as we get more players. We’re actually lucky the player base is this small and we’re able to identify the problem now before it grows out of control. Fix it now before it becomes a disaster in the future.
So if people that ran malls are afraid that their work in building it is threatened to be for nothing, then adapt. I kind of would like to see AHs be a multi-block crafted device that allows shops to expand their shop’s inventory much larger than what we have now. It would provide a player with all of the auction-like features that you would see, such as bidding, but also provide buy out feature; which we already have with request baskets and shop stands. So the extra functionality, even if it was just put on shop stands and request baskets, wouldn’t be a bad thing. It would actually provide players that run shops with more outlets to compete with other shops. I seriously feel like this is something people are really afraid of: actual real competition.
So some how it’s okay to suggest we could have paint ball pvp competitions and okay to suggest we should have more beacon functionality and features but some how it’s horrible to ask for more shop functionality through the idea of an auction house style functionality. It really boggles my mind why people don’t want the game to have more depth to it even if it’s just a simple game feature addition.
I feel like if you replace the words “major portal network” with the words “major shopping center” this whole post would be very supportive of the idea here.
To be clear I’m not interested in an “Auction House” per se as in my experience that does normally include some sort of basic escrow and centralized pickup/delivery.
I do think that we need a PROPER price indexing system and one that includes point coordinates.
As for being so down on portal networks, when did choice become bad?
I tend to think that “bad shops” have been a lot larger problem (in terms of harming economic participation and gaming footfall) in the game than “too many portals”.
You’re taking my comment out of text. It was directed at krasniy about networks being hurt by an auction house.
As for malls sure i guess my comment can apply to those too. But honestly there’s only two maybe three malls that really have a lot of stores. And those same ones are the only ones I ever really see people at. Any time I go to one of the other malls it’s completely dead.
Ah yes I did sort of see it as a general statement about portal networks glad I clarified.
I’m not really supportive of a full on auction house, but protecting the portal networks isn’t why.
I have mixed feelings on a price indexing system but believe that it’s desperately needed right now because players are bluntly refusing to participate in the economy. And I believe that the player-kludged partial solution we have now is more harmful to the situation overall than helpful.
The opinion I’ve developed on footfall over time is decidedly unpopular lol. But it’s another distraction and large scale efforts to blow it up as the “tap” for in game funds are also a distraction from a real economy developing. Just IMO.
That has always been my biggest frustration with footfall. I see shops in malls, and in G. Mall, as much as I love having a shop there, that have several shops that have the same two or three items in the store with high prices or even empty stands and they get footfall and it really ticks me off.
My shop sells little as it is way back, would I do better if it was closer to the front? I don’t know, but when a shop has items that are desirable and you Have to enter to see what is selling and the price is really high, that is a footfall trap, in my opinion.
Go to a open market and see some items you need and they are in the center and most stands are empty. Go to get those shimmering orbs you are desperate for just five to have enough for a mass craft and see that the price is 1k coins. That is, in my opinion, a footfall trap and the market owner can’t do a thing about it.
Players set up that type of shops and we have seen really good markets close because of such players.
I think it is too late for a auction house, but do agree something needs to be done.
The settlement that I have my base on doesn’t have a shop nor do most get footfall, I get very little and have never considered it as a means of income.
I get most of what I need from gathering or trading. Sometimes I have to buy and I hate the running around trying to find the cheapest price. I haven’t had lately the time to make the pies I use to trade so have had to buy the desperately needed items.
That has taken the fun out of the game in the running from mall to mall to find what I want. Hopper cores at one mall for 1500? Are you Nuts, do players really pay that price? I finally found one that sold them for 450, but was still out of my price range.
Found a fellow settlement member who I traded with for some and gave him teaching pies.
We either trade amongst ourselves or even have a area that we can place items for guild members, if you need something you can take it and later replace it or put in items that you have a lot of don’t need but someone else does.
We trade with each other, with others from other planets or settlements on our home planet and don’t look at footfall as a means of income.
People making wonderful builds based around shops is the heart of this game and I wouldn’t want this to change for a second.
However I would be happy for a middle ground where you can search for the items you want, but you still have to visit the person to obtain it. I love visiting and getting to know other peoples shop as well as my own; but I can also appreciate that some people don’t find that fun. So this solution is absolutely perfect as it should keep both types of player happy.
If I have to visit the place, then I am still forced to wander the universe to get to the store. Every store is not connected to every portal network and finding a store is not a quick or simple exercise in some cases. Just coordinates on a planet do no good. But if it is acceptable the majority that someone has to travel then maybe we should look at alternatives.
Maybe the shop owners should deliver the items to the consumers versus the consumers having to wander the universe after all are they not the ones that are making a profit off of the sale?
They have to adapt just like a lot of players are going to have to adapt for the farming changes that are coming up. We have all decided to play a game that quite frankly is not finished and as a result we will invest time and effort into things that may or may not have any value as the game changes. Should they not make any changes to the game? And why does an Auction House mean that players cannot still shop in the traditional way if they want?
First an auction house does not mean that players that like to shop cannot shop. All it does is offer an alternative. But I would disagree with your assumption that an auction house will kill the portal networks. In EA the portal hubs did fine and we did not have malls on every planet. In addition the reason the portal networks need ff is coin for Oort. The Oort drops can always be adjusted if needed by the developers to increase the supply and lower the price if I am wrong and the traffic dies off too much due to players not buying from stores. I know that I have only bought from one store the first week the game launched to get the objective out of the way but other than that, it has not been something I have done so at least my travels would not be impacted.
I think you still need these to identify the goods that someone wants to buy and sell and the pricing for an auction house to work so I am not sure this is a problem.
No, you make it an either or proposition which it does not have to be. Again there is no reason that a player that prefers to go out and go to a mall to look for items cannot do so. There is no reason they cannot buy from a shop. And to be quite frank, it is not like the players are hanging out in their shops to interact with customers. If that was how it worked then I would think this was a more radical change than it is. Shopkeeping in this game requires no active interaction between the buyer and seller. Hand trading is the only way that players actually interact for the exchange of goods for coin or other goods.
I would like the developers to provide more content also, but with the condition that they quit trying to boost the economy. It is supposed to be a player driven economy, if it does not work well then tough. Trying to implement game mechanics that force players into having to participate in the economy when it is so broken are not going to help. If you want the economy to work well and work for a larger player base across a very large universe then they need to decide how to make that happen and get it into place sooner rather than later. Otherwise as the universe gets bigger I think fewer and fewer players will want to waste time having to travel an even larger universe very time they need a forged tool.
Quite honestly, I can’t see that happening at all… and if it did, price of items would go up to cover whatever additional time the shop owner had to put in.
This is generally the responsibility of the shop owner to make sure people can actually find and get to their shop.
I wonder if it’s possible to include information about portals closest to the shop - maybe within the same settlement and including the destination portal - based on highest prestige maybe. I don’t know if that is even feasible, but it could potentially give additional information on finding the shop, or at least somewhere recognisable.
That I find interesting. You can extrapolate that the shopkeepers time has value and the consumers does not. The shopkeeper gets the profit and the footfall and the consumer just gets to spend coin and time. This is where I have the most problem with the existing setup. If we have 3 planets then maybe it would not be an issue, but we have 50 planets and as the players count (hopefully) expands we will get more so it is going to require more and more effort as the game grows to buy items under the current setup. I really think something needs to be done to address this or we are just giving up on a real economy in the game.
Something like this is the minimum that needs to happen or again I think we are just accepting that the economy will be a footnote for many players.
Prices allready fluctate. On my search for pies, which took me the better part of my RL day, i saw Price differences of up to 30% to both sides. The highest Prices were in the big malls, which by default should have the lowest Prices because of the low time invested and the FF they automatically, as a mall, get. But it was the opposite.
So as a consumer, i not only pay with my time to search for an item but with higher Prices aswell? And on top of all this, i have to pay, game inposed, tax.
The Seller should pay me for visiting his overpriced shop in a mall.
The info about Portals closest to a shop stand i find a good idea i have to say.