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Auction House System?
Xero_Chance
Member Posts: 519
in Guild Wars 2
Please tell me they're going to have an auction house type system in this game.
I still remember standing around Kaineng spamming B> Zealous dagger tang
B> Zealous dagger tang
B> Zealous dagger tang
B> Zealous dagger tang
B> Zealous dagger tang
B> Zealous dagger tang
B> Zealous dagger tang
While other people's plea for items pushes mine off the chatbox in a fraction of a second.
Comments
I hope not, an Auction House is about the laziest way to do a merchant system. I hope they have more conviction to a deep game than that.
I am sure i read in an article that there will be an AH. it was number one demand of GW community back then so i am sure it will be in GW2.
Bite Me
Or would you rather sit there for hours holding open a player shop stall?
I thought not.
Uhh... who said that was the only alternative to not having a WoW styled Auction House?
... No one?
I thought so.
So name some alternative AH ideas?
FFXIV tried this and we know how that went. lol
AH is best option. Why re invent the wheel when it works fine?
Who could have thought that WOW could bring super power like USA to its knees?
Originally posted by Arcken
To put it in a nutshell, our society is about to hit the fan, grades are dropping, obesity is going up,childhood the USA is going to lose its super power status before too long, but hey, as long as we have a cheap method to babysit our kids, all will be well no?
Im picking on WoW btw because its the beast that made all of this possible
Because it trivializes the comerse aspect of the game?
Why did WoW do an Auction House instead of a Bazaar or Consignment Shop? Why did it "reinvent the wheel"?
Why do ANY MMOs do anything differently? Hell, I love when all games are the same. Don't you?
As for alternatives, semi local shops would make it so that people could actually run businesses. Then again, this could be trivialized depending on how much fast travel there is. So far it seems you can just click a button and teleport anywhere so... may be a moot point.
I agree with Garvon on this one, 'why reinvent the wheel when it works fine' is a weak argument, heck, ANet made it their point with GW2 to 'reinvent the wheel' with a lot of gameplay aspects even if they worked fine in other MMORPG's. Progression can only be made by doing things differently and straying away from known gameplay aspects even if those aren't broken.
Sometimes reinventing doesn't work like with some of FFXIV's core mechanics, and sometimes they do work, like hopefully also with GW2's innovations and improvements. But better that they try and fail sometimes, than that game companies keep making the same type of game with the same sort of gameplay features over and over and over again.
That said, if GW2 has an AH that isn't much different from other MMO's, I've no problem with that.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
I don't spend hours and hours playing an AH. I would love to see something different in gameplay and not something trivial like an Auction House. So yeah don't try to fix something that already works fine.
Who could have thought that WOW could bring super power like USA to its knees?
Originally posted by Arcken
To put it in a nutshell, our society is about to hit the fan, grades are dropping, obesity is going up,childhood the USA is going to lose its super power status before too long, but hey, as long as we have a cheap method to babysit our kids, all will be well no?
Im picking on WoW btw because its the beast that made all of this possible
As cumbersome as it was, I greatly enjoyed the east commons from EQ. I enjoyed walking by peoples "Shops" and peering inside of them without crazy spamming.
Of course that didn't fix the "WTB" spams, but it certainly did fix the WTS!
Why not put a system in that isn't quite an Auction House but is more like the Bazaar with a dedicated WTS channel.
People think it's fun to pretend your a monster. Me I spend my life pretending I'm not. - Dexter Morgan
It sounds interesting, but in this I think that simple convenience wins it over a more intriguing but time and effort intensive method. To give another example, although I think that the long traveling had its charm in EQ just as the bazaar and really made the EQ world of Norrath feel vast and dangerous, the fast an near-instant travel ways in MMORPG's are here to stay.
(most) people will go for convenience over atmosphere.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
Some kind of AH is confirmed , as well as access to see your auctions without being loggged in the world. Look also up the story about mobil phone programs being developed to use with GW2.
Yeah, there will be AH. BTW, they are adding one new thing there too. I remember that they said (quite a bit ago) that there will be a WTB option in AH. You make an add to buy a certain item and deposit the ammount of money you wish to pay for it, then a guy who has that item sends it to you via AH and takes the money you deposited.
Auction House would be great, it would make trades so much simpler. I consider it a must have. Even though its a long shot but I wish they consider implementing it into gw1, which I'm still playing and will keep on playing for at least a year.
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There IS an auction house, and you can access it from a standard web browser and the phone app as well as in game. Although you can only put your items up for sale in game.
The reason why arenanet haven't bothered making a system which could be better (although what is put forward easily handles the job)? The auction house and market aspect of the game is nowhere near the focal point, much the same as in guild wars 1.
They're 'reinventing the wheel' a lot in guild wars 2, but they are only one dev team in the end, sometimes they have to concede to use established methods in order to focus on the bigger ideas that define the game.
EQ is where it started for me, and I also have a great deal of Nostalgia for ECommons. One of the sad points in my EQ career was when they introduced The Bazaar zone and shut down commerce in the tunnel basically overnight. I also champion non-instant travel, long range spells and kiting, and a host of other old-school systems. But I'm willing to bend here, because the two competing interests of player time and communication are at stake, and they trump any dedication I have to the independent shop system.
First, players don't have the time to sit online and idle for hours at a time. They didn't in 2000 either, but originally EQ wouldn't drop their accounts for being idle, so overnight vendors were the norm once the Bazaar came out--and it was an improvement in terms of quality of life, even if my loyalty to ECommons remains. I can't see anyone willing to shell out for another account ($10-15 a month for EQ, or in this case, another box of GW2) just to have a dedicated salesbot, and even if there isn't an auto-drop mechanic (no reason to think there would be, given GW1's record), that means leaving your comp on and your account online 24-7 in order to get your goods to market. Not to mention if you're afking, you're certainly not going to be broadcasting ads, and a manual trade-for-sales system is right out.
Secondly, chat is chat. As much as we might like to fantasize otherwise, the industry standard for communication in MMO's is still line-by-line text that scrolls up a portion of the screen. New stuff goes on the bottom, old stuff goes up and eventually off-screen. Even if we have voice chat, and assuming it were feasible to have an entire zone hooked up to voice simultaneously, do you really want to have to yell into your mic about what you're selling? Especially when the 13-year-old next to you wants to sell his stuff too? Didn't think so. Text it is. So if text is our medium for sales, we're still living in the world of WTS and WTB.
With those two ideas in mind, let's see what we can come up with for a next-generation non-auction house sales system:
So we have this non-auction house system, and this is what it looks like. The people with large amounts of goods to be sold have to sit their characters in a certain area with the goods on hand and spam the chat channels to advertise their wares. Eventually someone might come along and want to see, whereupon you open up your bags and the trade window, and go down the list. This is East Commons.
Well, let's not make them spam, at least. I mean... they can spam if they want, but let's have a system where the potential buyer can view the goods at a glance without the seller having to broadcast in chat or open a trade window. Say, if the character flags himself, a buyer can interact with the character and get a list. Or perhaps even open up a business interface. This is like the bazaar in EQ or the personal shops in FFXI or some of the other Asian grinders. We've cut down our chat clutter and made the system a lot more buyer-friendly.
Well what if the buyer is looking for something specific? Someone out there somewhere is selling it, maybe even in the same zone. The system should let these two get together. So let's have an index. In our market zone, we'll have an object in the game world that a player can interact with and search for vendors with specific items. Then when the buyer finds a vendor with his item, he can just walk over to that vendor and buy it. Better yet, we'll list asking prices and what not--this way the buyer has a better chance of getting a fair price for the item. We'll let people who are looking to buy stuff and willing to leave their characters logged in overnight register in the index too, how bout it?
Well, that's all good and well, but if I'm running servers for this game, I have to ask myself, why am I keeping this zone up with all these characters in it 24-7? Wouldn't it be easier on my resources just to get them logged off? We'll have the same system, but instead of having to go to the vendors, the buyer can interact with the index, find a list of the items he wants and their prices, and just buy directly from the index.
And just like that we have an auction house.
I say all that to say that the AH is a logical evolution of sales in MMO's. Our discussion of the AH in GW2 should not be a way to express our scorn for the AH in any other system--they all have their pros and cons--but instead to speculate as to how GW2 will advance inter-player trading in MMO's to its next iteration. Consignments, brokers, fences, etc., are all different names for the same basic mechanic. I think the only real concerns we have remaining are whether the system can be made to be more immersive, and whether the system can be made more convenient. Making it less intuitive or less user-friendly are steps backwards, and I honestly don't look to ANet for that kind of progress.
To me, the pinnacle of in-game economics right now is Eve. No getting around it; Eve's economics is infinitely more robust than WOW's, and correspondingly harder to manipulate (e.g., profit margins tend to be narrow, but potentially inconsistent across a large enough area) and more subject to real-world-style market variations. The best GW2 could do would be to emulate this, and it could do so by making as much as possible based on player productivity and as little as possible beyond the scope of trade. Not that difficult; in fact, even though Eve might be out of reach because a player-driven economy needs more things for players to be responsible for besides gear, I can definitely see GW2's auction aiming more for FFXI than WOW.
Their differences hinge on the fact that in FFXI nearly everything one would need to purchase during leveling could be resold, while in WOW equipment is a money sink. Different models, but I think FFXI makes for a better economy (not that it didn't have its faults): more product in the market over time->better likelihood of stable prices and more reliable availability of market goods->more incentive to contribute to the market as opposed to exploiting it->less frustration at the point of sale. All-in-all this is more like reality and subsequently more like Eve. This is all convenience though.
The immersion question is more sticky. I am willing to concede outright that the auction house model is more a convention of MMO's as a product of the internet than it is a reflection of trade in a high fantasy or sci-fi setting. We basically consign all trade in the game world to the in-game equivalent of eBay. That's certainly immersion-breaking; again Eve has the edge here--at least with Eve you don't get instant delivery of your interstellar spaceship. The market can't teleport your Battleship across the galaxy for you; you have to actually go pick it up where the seller left it (unlike in most fantasy-setting auction systems, where the AH will do just that for a nominal fee). I can't see a problem with a similar requirement in GW2. If you buy an item at the human capital that's located at the Charr capital, you should be expected to go get it. Trouble is, that's a mouseclick away in GW2, so it's hard to justify (unlike in Eve, where sometimes ... well, get a book). Perhaps at the end of the day we just have to concede immersion on this front. I for one am willing to let it go for the sake of my time and dignity. I'm looking for personal contracts, in-game mail, and other typical perks that I've come to expect from the genre, because when it comes to imagining myself an adventurer in a fantastic world, I'm not interested in having to set up a shop every day and man it all day long to make any money any more than I'm interested in being at risk of death from smallpox. Some things you just have to let slide.
Peace and safety.
Or would you rather sit there for hours holding open a player shop stall?
I thought not.
An AH is by far the best solution to the player economy situation, but people each trying to outspam one another was a problem in Guild Wars, not by design, but due to the fault of people like you, who thought that was the best way to get something.
Spam is always bad, and solves nothing. When you all spam, it is the same as no one spamming.
"Gamers will no longer buy the argument that every MMO requires a subscription fee to offset server and bandwidth costs. It's not true you know it, and they know it." Jeff Strain, co-founder of ArenaNet, 2007
WTF? No subscription fee?
Player run shops are awesome. But not for this game.
They fit sandbox building games, like Wurm.
Here you need good old AH
EQ2 has a good hybrid market place system. You have your own personal shops (in your house) that people can visit. You then have an auction house. The auction house places a 10-40% (depending on a number of factors, mostly 20%) charge for using the auction house per purchase.
This system allows people to browse local stores while allowing a search function (look up your item and who is selling and then go to thier house), or people who just want to buy off the market can pay a fee and do so.
They could enhance the EQ2 system by making a bazar area that you could post your shop if you like. They could add in the auction functionality (EQ2 only has a buy now, not a bid system). They could make it possible to add items to a seperate inventory window on your person so that you could market your items as you go them. They could also add a WTB function where you set a price on items you want to buy and people can then sell to you even when you're not online.
Eve has many of these features, bringing some of that functionality simplified would be great inovation.
would be awesome if they had a form of bazzar/auction house, where you can put up items for bid on a bulletin of sorts or choose an NPC to stock your goods with your own prices. that way a player could still look around a bazzar, maybe check the bulletin to see what items are in stock at what stands, find what part of the bazzar they are located and mark them on their map and go find that stand to buy the items.
also have sections and tabs in each merchant's inventory to show what items are from what players, range of prices, type of items, or other such filters.
Also a cool Idea would be for players (or devs) to place items of high interest in an NPC run auction, so players could partake in bidding for the super cool item of interest.
something like that would still give the player the feeling that they are making their own "store" of sorts but at the same time allowing players to experience the bazzar and explore it if they like. The option to mark things on the bazzar map and find things via the bulletin board or place rare items in an actual auction would allow for a cool role player experience, and make a cool twist for the general auction house or player stores used in most MMOs
I believe GW2 is going to mimic the Market system from EVE online. Pretend stock market is the most awsome thing ever, adds way more meta than a shop or npc. They should just do it like EVE where you actually have to go to the specific city the post was made to pick up your item.
becuase it went over so well, i think they should mimic ffxiv's system. HAHA. seriously though, plz don't.
Well in the end, the practical will always win, there is not much to innovate with economy in games in a way that becomes even more practical than AH...
So yeah, AH is the only option, bazaar style is not very practical so it becomes an annoyance
"It has potential"
-Second most used phrase on existence
"It sucks"
-Most used phrase on existence
Sorry if someone already mentioned this but why cant they implement a vendor system like Old SWG? Granted, you had to put some skill points into that system but the very basic "vendor" skill was the ability to place a "vending machine". As your skill got better you get better and more "vending machines" (some looked like actual toons) that sold your stuff if you were there or not.
I see so many posts saying an auction house is a must but it isnt, there are different ways and sometimes better ways. An auction house is lazy, both on the dev's part as well as the players. For those of you who think its needed to save a player some time, well, sorry you just might have to wait that extra 5 minutes it will take you to go to a vendor before you hit max level and complain there is no end game.
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"It has potential"
-Second most used phrase on existence
"It sucks"
-Most used phrase on existence