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MMORPG Economies, crafting buying and sell, what do you prefer? Shops, auction house, market place?
Stiler
Member Posts: 599
We had a loooooong discussion on the Age of Conan Forums about this subject and I was just wondering how people felt about it in general across mmorpgs.
Do you prefer an Auction house based system (A la WoW) or player ran shops (a la UO/SWG), or a mix of them?
For auction house people, do you prefer a World wide Auction house or a regional based one?
And lastly, does it depend also on the game? IE in futuristic games you'd prefer an AH but in older time based games (middle ages<, etc) you prefer shops and such?
In my opinon, I greatly prefer Player own and ran Shops with a mix of a market place style region bashed AH for non-crafters to sell their misc items.
The Ah style region based marketplace basically would work like:
1. A "storehouse" building where the sellers go to a storehouse and then are able to put up the items they want to sell.
2. Once they list them for sell the game funnels them into the "market-place" which would actualyl look like a market place. You'd have stalls which would be dedicated to certain items (IE - an armour lookin stall for armour, weapon for weapons, etc).
3. The storehouses would have a limit on stocks to sale, so that players wouldn't merely use one Marketplace and ignore all the other regions and thus it'd turn into more of a "world" based AH instead of regional like it's supposed to be.
However for shops, those would be the main thing. Where crafters place their equipment (forges, etc) and make items. You can have an npc vendor for the seller to throw up generic items he made, however for more custom items and orders it'd promote the crafter and customer to interact/socialze, while still offering other players the ability to quickly buy items they want/need without having to.
As a whole in terms of crafting, imo I wish mmorpg's would actually let crafters...craft, and not simply manafacture goods like most do now. Where you merely hit a few buttons and BAM out pops a breastplate/sword, etc. I'd like to see crafters actually use their equipment to craft a sword, and then be able to customize it for their customers. Like choosing different style hilts, blades, pommels, among other things. With armour being the same sort of thing. Start off with a "base" style of armour (IE plate, scale, etc) and then over that base you can place etchings, rivets, among other things.
Anyways, back to the economy. I think as a whole, AH's, espically world-wide AH's, lead to a lacking economy and also promote less social interaction between the crafters and their customers, etc. You simply go to the ah, buy whatever you want and that's that for the most part. Then you have no actual import/export's into the ecnomoy, there's no sense of good "a" being more vaulable at city "b" because of rarity to that region among other things.
Though I was suprised to see how many people simply don't care about an actual working/immersive ecnomoy and simply state that they just want to be able to instantly buy all the items and see everything everone has for sale...
So what's your view on the subject?
Comments
Of the games I've played, SWG had my favorite system, or at least my favorite concept for a system. The only thing that really detracted from it was the low auction house cap and the fact that you never really knew if you'd find a darned thing in the player shops (and there were a billion of those shops on every planet). As a result, finding what you were looking for was less like trying to find a single needle in a haystack than it was like trying to find a single blaster in a galaxy. The convenience of an auction house of some sort is pretty much mandatory at this stage; it's a one-stop shop that allows players to buy and sell without developing migraines.
Ideally, there should be certain item types or values that can only be purchased from player-run shops (but not the visual-spam player shops you find in most Korean games), though perhaps these items should be limited to luxuries rather than necessities; crafters could, of course, sell whatever type of thing they wanted to on their own vendors, but players who had no desire to "shop around" could still get their necessities from the bazaar. Regardless of the type, though, there really needs to be a centralized method of checking the inventories of player shops before travelling to them. I touched on it in the first paragraph, but there's nothing more frustrating than spending eight hours trying to find a vendor with a weapon of average quality in stock.
Really, player shops have only two things going for them that auction houses don't, though: 1) it can be fun for buyers to find a shop with quality stock sold for good prices (ala finding a great little restaurant downtown), and 2) it gives a certain pride of ownership to sellers. While those two things are nice, it's questionable whether or not they'd bring as much to a game as it would take to develop them adequately. Auction houses, on the other hand, offer far more functional convenience at the cost of ambience and exploration. Neither the existence of auction houses nor the existence of private vendors prevents players from doing business face to face, though, which is a definite plus. I've made some terrific friends during the process of trade negotiations in nearly every game I've played.
Hmm I liked the own shop feature in Ragnarok Online,but the auction house in WoW is good too,So in my opinion it should be made a game with combines both features xD...
I don't know any,the last game i played was Silkroad online and there i found the Own Shop feature...but I didn't play it long enough to say if it was effective or not,In Ragnarok you can sell your stuff very fast for much money,but only when you have better prices and more stuff then the others to sell,sometimes its kind of frustrating when nobody wants to buy your stuff,but on the other hand when u want buy something for yourself u will definetly find something useful,because in Prontera the biggest city there is half of the members on the server active xD
all three. SWG had an Auction (altho the auction system needed work) and the player based selling using the Market/Vendors etc. I think having a system for ppl to browse if theres crafting in the game is integrel, looking for deals and good sources of items that you need to restock constantly is a part of the economy that needs to be there IMO, player crafting and player prices set supply & demand dynamics in motion and therefore the economy evolves more realistically. Just simply placing merchants in the game is not enough.
I'm personally all for the AH.
I hate player shops randomly scattered throughout the world. One may suggest that putting them in one area may deal with that, but then they may lose some business. Sometimes people just check Player stalls because they're just nearby or convenient. Unless a player was sure that he or she wanted to buy an item from another player, they wouldnt visit these Player shop areas.
You may argue about this, but in today's MMO market I dunno if having Player Shop areas works very well. So I'm happy with eliminating player shops altogether. Its a good idea, but unless it can be done well in a game all it does is clutter up cities. Perhaps shops can only be set up in City 'slots'. I think player shops would work so much better if they could be arranged properly like a market place, in a city. Not instanced. All this would really require is allocating points where you can actually set up shops. Sure there would have to be ample slots to satisfy all traders, but I think its a far better idea than letting traders set up shops just about anywhere. Having neatly organised shops makes it a much more believable environment.
Perhaps introducing a rent fee for your spot would be a good idea too.
Auction houses are simple and dont require you to be there all the time. Thats the main reason they're great! So I'm pretty happy with em. A mix of both would also be good, depending on how its done.
DAOC has a pretty good player shop system, in the housing zones.. there's NPCs called "market explorers" who you can go to.. they have a search system similar to the AHs of other games.
That said, WoW's AH system is good too.
Personally, to me the idea economy setup would be an AH/Playershop browsing system, with functionality which is deep enough to search for items in any way which would be useful.
I personally like the idea of player merchants, but to make them as variable as possible would be ideal.. for instance, make it so that you can set up an actual store, with a building, counter, NPCs selling things, etc. kind of like player housing.
Mixing player based merchants with that level of detail with the browsing AH/player merchant system would be ideal, in my mind.
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Looking forward (cautiously) to: Age of Conan, Dark Solstice, Armada Online.
Will soon try: Guild Wars
Overall: Amazed and bewhildered at the current sad state of the artform of gaming.