With player-driven economy being in the center of this game and would resolve the “Don’t lock this to a certain profession cause I also want it” when they could just conveniently buy most of it in shops. I would like to know the general consensus of player’s ideas in terms of organizing shops and market. I hope we all agree that what we currently have would not suffice for 1.0?
My Main Issues:
We have to run around a settlement just to look for plinths
We have no general direction when looking for certain item (i.e. in other MMORPGs, you go directly to blacksmiths if you’re looking for equipment)
Somewhat tedious to manually check each plinths just to check the prices
For lower levels, converting your harvested goods to coins can be quite hard. Either some higher level player than you consuming all coins on a selling plinth OR no one is interested in buying your goods.
My Suggestions:
Signs would play a big part for advertising shops (Fortunately this under development)
A bulletin board on a settlement in which shop owners can enlist their goods for sale/request (or all active plinths will automatically be listed on the board). Make items in the board searchable, sortable by shop’s prestige or rating, and shoppers can set waypoint to a shop. The prices I think should be hidden but quantity can be seen. Bulletin boards can be setup by mayor or probably automatically once a settlement reaches a certain prestige threshold.
Shops can have their own icon on the compass similar to portals.
Make prices on the plinths visible without manually checking it. Could be a sign attached to the plinth or a floating text.
A rentable plinths where starting players can just dump their goods there and set prices then continue minding their own business. Owner of the plinth will receive taxes from the purchases. It’s quite unrewarding for a new player to have abundance of a good and can’t do anything with it unless you actively visit shops and sell it (which requires time) when all you want to do is just to level up fast. Also applicable for high level players not interested in setting up a shop but is overwhelmed with the rate he is able to harvest goods and can’t convert it to coins fast enough.
General Idea of My Suggestions: Engaging in trading is good but the unnecessary time we have to invest just to buy or sell running around the settlement is bad.
That would be it for now. I hope others would also share their ideas.
For the first point you raise, I think it’s quite normal that players who wants to run a shop have to invest in it.
For the next point it may (or not) turn out like that because the demand go this way. If for example in a village people organize themself to create different shop and have an agreement to stick to their shop “theme” it might work.
It can also turn out in super huge supermarket where you can find almost everything as IRL but either way it make sense for me to let the market evolve freely. The small shops that are not specialist will probably die as people will prefer to go elsewhere if they are not sure to find what they need.
This being said I agree with your suggestions.
And the only remark I have on it is that it might be a bit confusing to have too many things on the compass especially when you are in the biggest town.
Maybe the signs on the road will make the work without needing the compass?
I hope you get it all right but if you’re not sure to understand something please ask, I’m not an english native speaker so it might be a bit unclear.
English is not my first language as well so it takes me time to compose my posts to make them clear and concise!
I was actually talking about shoppers and not shop owners on this one.
Yes, I also want the market to just evolve freely but I think it needs a little help. It’s currently time consuming running around just to sell and buy things and it’s not that productive.
This %100, the programming behind an active list like this could be a nightmare for this game… but wow it would improve it… and after finding the goods on the town bulletin board, to be able to set a waypoint to that shop… so good.
I believe @OmniUno would agree that an active list showing pricing for sales/requests would help balance the market 100 times over.
@james With a data base like this running in the background… Would this even be possible to implement without adding a hell of a lot of lag / load time to city ports?
Sounds like much of this could be done with a location token plinth next to a sort of billboard. Leave it to the shop owner to maintain an up to date sign, and find premium placement for it near high population areas (ie near portal hubs or at gate entrances)
I prefer game mechanics that encourage players to interact with others and their environment in an interesting way, rather than bury their faces in a menu every time they enter a new settlement. I would prefer to see intelligently designed cities with distinct districts and organized citizens than to have a menu sort all of the data for me. It just feels more impressive to see something cleverly designed by players than a standardized menu doing the leg work for me.
I think we all want that natural evolution of a marketplace but I’m just thinking that it’s not a reliable system. My fear is that trading plays a big part in the game to rely on such unreliable system. New players are generally encouraged to go to marketplaces to fully experience the game but if the settlement near him is not organized properly, it might get frustrating for him. (Can’t progress on quest, can’t sell harvested goods, can’t find storage blocks, etc.)
I also want this to happen. The billboard is somehow an additional to the current system that’s why I believe prices should not be shown. The goal of the billboard is to prevent going to a shop that does not sell or buy what you want so you won’t waste time.
Some Scenarios:
I’m looking for a Gold Hammer. I’ll look at the billboard and finds that my favorite, accessible, high reputation shop sells it so I’ll probably just go there. If it don’t have one, I’ll probably go check the next famous, closer shop. You generally go to bigger shops since they have the capability to offer competitive prices.
I just traveled to a portal and found a nice big shop closer to me than the billboard. I can just check this shop first before checking the billboard. Minimal time wasted if ever I didn’t find what I’m looking for.
I’m looking for the cheapest price! Then that’s when you exert the effort to check each shop THAT sells them.
I took the inspiration for this in those touch-screen maps on malls. Why do I have to check each floor if all I want to do is buy some games? Just wanted to put our time to more useful things. The game has a lot more content to offer than us just going on a spree checking each shop, plinths for the petty task of replenishing your equipments, selling loots. We could have use those wasted time to grind 1 million rocks to reach the next level!
Anyway, we have yet to see how the signs will affect the current system as it will definitely change things a lot.
I think signs will greatly enhance the way players shop a market and the way towns organize themselves to maximize traffic and growth. The sooner signs are implemented, the better. I think we will see exponential growth in trade and economy ad a result. Signs will make or break many markets and towns.
It destroys most of the challenge of running a good shop and replaces it with just one factor: price.
Since everybody gets to check prices easily it is easy to undercut too.
It also makes stock easy to locate which destroys the value of oversupply and makes it just another downward force on price.
All of this is really bad for economies with many players: it makes market manipulation way too easy and the majority of players end up never getting customers without losing most of their value.
On the other hand, games with imperfect market places tend to have the best economies. The more imperfect the market the healthier the economy in a long run. A market is imperfect when all the participants don’t have all the information and doing trades takes effort (like it is now).
I know this feels like a good idea - it sure is more convenient. But think about the consequences - and how traders get much more benefit from this than casuals. A good shop needs to compete on 100+ prices - doing this helps them 100x more than it helps the average player (they get all the bargains and can constantly undercut) - and undermines your ability to get good deals since everybody buying can check them and grab any deals the explorer running past all the segregated stands do.
Well the intent is not to boil down to just price but really just some sort of yellow pages. It guides us where to find but will not guarantee the best deal as the prices are not known right away.
I think we can better judge once signs arrive. This idea came to me when I’ve tried to integrate my play style to take advantage of the market on my new character. I’ve no knowledge of where the marketplaces as well. More or less an hour to find a gold slingbow and then gave up without finding one shops looking for meat and tallow. Later on, I found your shop (Omni Shop) which has everything and found it via forums… which somehow seems like our real life version of bulletin board… We actually have a topic post here titled “Active Shops” which is us trying to serve the same purpose of the bulletin board.
The point is, in real life, we already have an idea of where we can buy or sell certain items and it’s just a matter of location which one will be visited first. I’m just thinking the current system unnecessarily wastes time.
You get to a settlement bury your face in the menu at the bulletin board then explore the city and find that shop / market you have a waypoint for… My thought was it encourages players to interact due to knowing where to go and find the distinct districts.
In a perfect world “intelligently designed cities with distinct districts and organized citizens” would be awesome, we don’t live in one though
I have to respectfully disagree. MMO EvE Online has no problem running a %100 player driven market, with all the price information out in the open, got a lot more than 40 people playing that
i wont buy an iron hammer for 300c (yes i’ve seen that price and it was not a display item) just because its a long run home and im desperate… if it was the going rate then yeah i’d buy one. (that shop is now dead to me btw)
Just thought you’d like this idea because you already have a bulletin board on the forum.
Im keen to see the economy balance out i’d like to buy and sell in more than one place, adventure a bit.
Having multiple markets with significant danger and travel time inbetween (travel is cheap in Boundless)
Having many of the markets with gated access (you need to be in the alliance or have the correct reputation to enter the system)
Adding a massive levy to location. Buying my ammo cheaper in high sec does not help if I have to risk hauling it all into null-sec.
Since Boundless doesn’t do those it has to make the market imperfect in other ways. Removing the current imperfections and not replacing them with others will lead to the stated outcome in my post.
Seems like you’d get exactly this situation in any of the games that use the big-global-auction-house method of trading, no? Are they (in your view) inherently unhealthy?
Genuinely curious here, because clearly you know way more about economics in general and game-world economics in particular than I do. Can you give us some examples of games with imperfect vs [more] perfect marketplaces? Or, what are some games that you think have healthy economies, and how do they maintain that health?
…Aaaand that sounds like I’m asking you to write a full-on dissertation, which I don’t mean to do. If you have any good starting points for reading material or whatnot I can go read up on it myself.
More on topic: what makes an in-game bulletin board significantly different from forum threads like yours and the “Active Shops” one?
[EDIT: Think I’m conflating @Lawrey’s “bulletin board” with “signs” – I take back this question, I’m good. I was imagining something more like those physical bulletin board thingies you see on uni campuses and coffee shops – giant publicly-writeable sign-houses. I’d like an order of that, please.]
I’d imagine (perhaps naively) that the largest barrier to a new trader in the present system is getting their name out, especially amidst all the defunct market stalls. So based on that, I’d expect a bulletin board system to help newcomers – because, speaking as a frequent purchaser of all kinds of stuff, I very rarely have the patience to go browse all of Therka Market on the chance there’s something new, but I’ll stop by @AlexanduhHi’s place in New Berlyn because I know it’s there.
We got the significant danger when hunting for gems over lava lol. yeah i understand the point but time is money, people grind it we buy it. Some people value there time more than others. you can only undercut so much until its not worth anyone’s time to obtain.
this^ imo in-game information is so much better, just like how the wiki is being added in-game
Yep i know right lol, easy to go shopping in the chaos out there.
In a perfect world organized cities would be easy to navigate.
(don’t worry i get the pun)
Hey, that’s the same thing I’m imagining as well! The idea is that shop owners supposedly “pin” their products there. However, with the sheer number of items posted in there, it would be a nightmare if we don’t have another menu popping up and letting us search for items, make them more viewable (not just tightly written on a physical surface), etc.
If it’s just a board with text it does no more harm than the forum (or any other external forum) would.
It becomes a significant change once multiple people update it and it becomes searchable. Then we effectively have an auction house. This does the same thing it does in all other games that have it - it trivializes trade reducing it to only price.
Think about it this way: Why not just have a big map showing us where to farm everything? Why not put just put gem locations on the compass so we don’t have to look around? Or increase the drops from mobs 5x to save us time? Why limit our inventory space? Why should we even level? All of these actions would cause the same thing - it trivializes a certain aspect of the game. By simplifying something to use less time/effort it also makes it less part of the game and much more grindy. This ends up with a game that has less activities (or activities that require less time) and overall becomes boring quickly.
Games that retain their players in the long run know how to balance effort and reward and to spread it over multiple activities. Keeping all of these in check in an MMO is the work of the economy - which in itself is an activity that everyone participates in. It should take time to barter and be a mini-game of its own - this creates another valuable activity to keep the game from stagnating.
The more imperfect the trade system - the more interesting the dynamics that it creates. It allows for market floods, price jumps and local imperfections that create interesting things for people to do in different places at different places. It helps to make the game feel alive. That shop you’re buying from now can close tomorrow, or double its prices - and suddenly your world will work differently. Losing a portal might make another shop closer, etc, etc. It is critical that trading does not stagnate - which is exactly what perfect markets tend to do.
Anyway, this can get very deep very quickly. I think I’ll stop here and get to actually playing Boundless!
Instead of listing what people are selling on a bulletin board, I’d prefer to just have interactive signposts, and have players flag their beacon as “shop”.
Players could then interact with the signpost (which essentially just shows a list of all beacon names with that flag within the settlement), select the one they want and be given a temporary waypoint on their compass showing them how to get there. As soon as they are anywhere within that beacons area, the waypoint is then removed. This is essentially like the city guards in WoW - you’re just asking for directions. It’s up to the players to name their beacons something appropriate (like “Bob’s Hammers” or “Jim’s General Goods”) to draw their customers in.
Personally, if something along the lines of interactive signposts were ever considered, I would make them a guild only perk. Both so that guild cities can be better organised and because I really couldn’t see players voluntarily building one (pushing potential customers to other shops) in a general mish-mash of players that just happened to build near each other.
This is a very cool idea. It would be nice to have these address entries (which only contain your waypoint and beacon name) as time limited (say, weekly). That way inactives will drop off the boards quickly too.
You know, I agree with your concerns but we have different ideas on the result that the billboard will make. I don’t think it will trivialize trading to just price (prices are not shown in billboard in the first place). I recently read somewhere here someone looking for “Lustrious Wood” and I think “That will be hard with how many blocks and its variations we have”. We can rely on your literally “Omni” shop or some shop labels “Wood Block Shops” but like I said, we can only rely on it on a certain degree. Not everyone want to be “Wood Blocks Shop” only, not everyone can supply an “Everything Shop” with all possible items in-game, but what most will probably do is to dump all sellable items on a selling plinth. Plus, things got sold out here and there quickly and we’ll eventually end up people running around the settlement looking for plinths.
Forums are searchable and also includes the prices. It won’t take long before we have dedicated “Shop” category here and dedicated shopowners flocking to have their shops listed there for advertisement. I understand there is a degree of difference if it’s in-game but it might be for the better for newbie-friendliness. Only few players visit the forum so some in-game system would be better.
I find it hard as well to correlate this with your example of “put gem locations on the compass”. I’ve made it clear on my posts here on the forum that I welcome grind in the game but for me to look for a gold slingbow for an hour, wow that’s a lot of wasted time in-game that is uncalled for. The only productive thing I did for that hour is literally the time I purchased the slingbow. Well I did enjoyed looking at the builds as well but you know, it won’t be the same if you’ve been doing this for the hundredth time.
I understand there are multiple sides to an idea so I think what @Stretchious suggested will be a good middle ground. Also, your idea of it being time limited is a must if ever this gets implemented.
But seriously though, I think signs or shop compass would suffice for a simple and less intrusive solution for this. I’ll at least not round around an establishment looking for plinths but it really is just a home and not a shop!
