Global Trading Post Reconsideration

Suggestions
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I’ve read there will be no Trade Post or Auction house and I hope you guys will reconsider, even if it just shows you goods for sale on your own planet it would be great.

Trading posts or auction houses are a staple of all MMOs (I’m not talking games that claim to be MMOs and have 40 people per server here, I’m talking proper MMOs) , and there are people who literally sit on these trading posts 90% of their play time, investing, speculating on future patches, flipping goods, looking for niches and gaps in the market - and making a huge amount of cash. They are a huge time saving tool and it’s fun to “play the stock market”.

Right now this is my routine if I want to sell or buy some goods - Run round Therka market, Pixelgate and Dragons Watch checking every plinth, collecting prices and writing them down with a pen and paper. Then re-run round and go back to the one with the lowest price. It’s absolutely dull and hugely time consuming and will only start to take more and more time if every player in the game has an average of 20 plinths to check. If each planet has a conservative guess of 2000 players that’s 40,000 plinths to check per planet, 15 planets would be 600,000 plinths to check - manually! Really? Plus recording all those prices?

Right now if I was a serious trader I would want to be doing this “run around” 5, maybe more times a day at least to ensure my prices were the best.

If there was no way for me to show to everyone else how good my prices were I’d also be spamming up the forums/in game chat constantly, and bumping my forum post each time someone else posts. With everyone doing the same thing these forums + in game chat would be an absolute spam fest.

“WTS A!!!
WTS B!!!
WTS A cheaper then him!!!
WTS B cheaper than him!!!
WTS C!!!
WTS C cheaper than him!!!
WTS B even cheaper than him!!!”

I’d like to propose that you consider something similar to the EQ2 method of a trade post.

All goods for sale were displayed on the global trade post whether they had been directly placed on the trade post, or they were sold from boxes (think plinths) at a players instanced housing. You could actually see the all the prices which saved you the time of searching through thousands and thousands of boxes.

The trade post was heavily taxed and took time (think delivery charges, interplanetary taxes - higher tax and longer delivery from further away) BUT you could avoid 90% of the extra costs by visiting the players house and buying it directly from his box (plinth).

The choice is there to order goods without traveling but it is heavily taxed so you really are paying for convenience.

I know you want to encourage travel but if it takes less time for me to grab a hammer and travel to a planet and get the goods myself, than to manually check 10K plinths in that city then I’m clearly not going to bother buying anyone’s goods. However, if I see a place has a cluster of cheap prices through a Global Trading post then I am going to make a point about visiting that place more often.

I am guessing the coding will be difficult - but I hope you’ll consider later adding one in. it also makes for some great player made tools using the API which show the values of items over the life of the game. I’ve never played a proper MMO without a Trade Post/Auction house and after trying to gauge the market manually in Boundless - I can see why they all have one, searching for an item you want right now is extremely time consuming and painfully boring.

Quick Edit: Other ideas that are coming out of this thread to combat some of the problems I mentioned include a “price checking upgrade” or “information stand” available only for Capital Cities (please see Stretchy’s post in this thread), A high end Guild Upgrade, or a high end skill on a specialised Trader toon to see this pricing information.

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2

Spot on Annie :blush:

Even just an interface to view global prices and locations without the ability to buy would be almost as powerful.

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I agree that at the very least a sort of planetary AH will be necessary when the game becomes popular, if the current market system remains intact. However, I don’t think that will be the case.

Firstly though, based on my personal experience hosting a large public Minecraft server with many thousand registered users, I will be highly impressed to see 50-100 simultaneously online users per world. That will drastically reduce the hypothetically outrageous number of prices to check.

Secondly, posted signs should make market places much easier to price gauge at a glance. This should also naturally help unify shop prices in the same town to within a few %, simply because it would be easier for other shop keepers to track their competitors prices.

Thirdly, guilds may (pure speculation here!) drastically change the way markets work. You may eventually see several vendors all under the roof of a single guild per city. That should further reduce the number of prices to shop, assuming the guild is somewhat organized.

IF none of these things become true, then a planetary AH will become necessary, though I fear that will replace player owned shops :frowning:

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The only con about the trading post/auction house in any game, is that people will fight to display the lowest price. But that’s nothing new and it’s a con we have to deal, in order to enjoy the convenience that brings this system.

Also, if you see an item for 5 coins on someone’s house in a remote zone, versus someone selling it for 6 and the quantities you need, in an easy to reach location, then location and access to the place gets huge importance. Another important point for those wanting to create good cities or capital cities, get good traders in, so both you benefit, I know what I just said is common sense, but you’ll be surprised.

On another note, I’ve come to kinda know and feel by heart some prices, just the usual things I buy, sell or come across.

  • Rocks for 1 coin

  • Stones for 3 coins

  • Compact soil in any type for 9 coins

  • Refined cream gleam for 11 coins

And so on, really. What’s a hard task to price correctly is the things that are not usually sold. And with my point mentioned above, true, it’ll come a point where traders will need to consider a profit, and reach the bottom price for things, but not everyone is gonna be able to make a profit out of it. So in unison with the trading post, we should be able to pay those offering services like building, crafting, hunting, exploring, etc. So even though they can’t offer the lowest prices for things, they still get to spend and earn a profit. Because really I don’t think anyone can’t be involved in the economy if they want to enjoy the game. If they don’t interact in the economy, they’ll just keep dumping coin in the warps, not been able to gather efficiently or make high grade tools, and having to farm coins too.

Also, this is not sponsored :slight_smile: but Jiivita’s shops in Dragons Watch and in the leading portal between the two dragons, is the cheapest I’ve seen.

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@Havok40k You really don’t think we’ll get 2K people per starter world once this releases on Playstation & 1.0 on PC? I thought I was actually really underestimating there, there’s already 15K copies according to Gamespy been sold and I am guessing that’s just on Steam and doens’t count any Oort online ones earlier or any Packages that only give access to 1.0 - unless you think we’ll have many more starter worlds to split them all down? Even if “only” another 15K are sold on Playstation it’s 30K people to accommodate. ( I personally think there will be more than that sold)

I agree @Dzchan94 I definitly wouldn’t want to take the travelling away at all, that’s why you’d really tax hard anyone who doesn’t want to travel. Trading your stack of gold for a titan location marker, or building services is going to be a really interesting aspect of the game. Maybe the Global Trade post could also advertise building services, portals, or “LFG for Titan”? It will keep the spam out of the forums and game chat.

I feel it’s just OK now with limited blocks, limited colours, limited items and limited people, but I remember a comment to Stretchy when he started his Boundlesscrafting.com by one of the devs saying he’d better be prepared as when the game was released he wouldn’t be able to keep up with all the planned items, colours and block types. (I’ll try and find it again)

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Right, there are pretty severe server limitations involved with voxel games. Each player loading in many chunks at the same time plus entity tracking (everything from mobs to item drops) plus modification to the chunks by placing or destroying blocks, and dozens of other things can load down a server pretty quickly in my experience. I don’t know what the goal for boundless is, but when pixel-gate has a dozen players in the area, it’s already loading the servers pretty severely. Even if that gets 10x better, you’re still looking at a 100 player capacity before lag makes things unplayable. Boundless’s answer to this is simply to have lots and lots of server worlds.

Also I said simultaneously online. A world can probably support 5x that number just fine.

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That’s still a lot of plinths to check manually, even if they are spread out on more worlds :wink:

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Sorry Pixel Gate is destroying the servers :frowning:

But on a serious note, yes Boundless is gonna be pretty taxing with a lot of players around, with everyone doing portals and tons of stuff.

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That was when I first started the site and I was manually entering everything as I gleaned from the wiki & forums etc.

Now that I have access to some of the game data, I built a lovely import script which I just plonk the new game files onto and it does it all for me :wink:

The only issue I’m going to have really, is the images … and I’m working on something right now which should hopefully make that so much better (especially as most of the item images are either non-existent or wrong at the moment!).

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Great stuff, really glad it’s been made easier for you! I’m still excited at the thought there will be that many things released.

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Looking at the world builder as well, you have the ability to assign up to 128 different colours to each item. So I would think we could probably expect at least that many to make it into the game at some point, so there is definitely going to be a lot of variety spread across a fair few worlds I think!

But yeah, back to your original post, I like the idea! I actually had a little thought, which I think would fit quite nicely in with other discussions on the forums right now too…

I think it would be cool if the ability to see the prices of all items for sale on a planet, was an ability only granted to the capital city of each planet. So, when an area takes on the mantle of being the most prestigious city in the world, they also have some responsibilities and rewards to go with it.

Responsibility
The capital city would need to build an open area containing one or more new “information stands” (think ledger/log book on a stand or whatever). From these blocks people could then see prices throughout the world. So that travelling is still a requirement, you would not be able to buy through this information block … it’s just for information only. Included in the pricing information could also be the name of the Beacon it’s being sold from (I think the ability to actually name a beacon is in the pipeline), along with the sellers name and possibly a “North of blah” style location identifier as well (this would have to be an actual name and not the ??? so people actually have a reference point to work with).

Rewards
For hosting this market information area and making it accessible, the captial city would then have a reason to be able to earn sales tax from items sold via plinths. You could potentially make the tax profit gained by the capital city be incremental, based on how many information stands are available to the public (something like every 2 stands allows you 1% tax profit). The capital city would then get the coin instead of it going to the mysterious central guild.

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Great when other people bring their brains into things, it really didn’t cross my mind that the time consuming bit was checking all the prices so the price checking/information stand could be a capital city bonus as you suggest, or a Guild upgrade, or even a high end skill on a specialised Trader toon.

Thanks!

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I think this is partly just what the devs are looking for. Much like open betas where devs sometimes want to stress-test the game and server. :wink: Build on fellow Oortians!

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