So, after putting some effort into the Bazaar I’ve got a bit of feedback and several suggestions for QoL as well as basic functionality.
The current initial stage of the Bazaar is nice, It looks great and has the feeling of being a place to trade. Which in design is well done. Functionality though leaves much to desire.
Which is why my suggestions here will be function over form.
Basic UI:
Finding the right trader before running to it and trying to find the right type of item is clunky at least. It for a full tab with ‘useful junk’ one wants to put onto the market it can easily take 30 minutes or more, even when the rough price-range is known already. Solely from walking time and trying to be at the right space.
Suggestions:
-Implement a ‘general trader’ allowing to browse through all the categories, leaving the others for more distinct searches if someone so desires. Kubra could take over that job as he already provides a direct access to the personal stall, leaving the other vendors for more narrow-ranged searches directly.
Affix and item-type search:
While gorgeous to look at it clearly has failed to provide one of the most important functionalities any game with high depth should provide: Clarity.
You can’t decide individual tiers for affixes, only overall. Also the range in which those affixes rolled are nowhere to be seen, that’s fairly important for both cases.
Suggestions:
-Provide an option to search for individual tiers of affixes. When chosen present the roll-range if a sub-type is chosen. This gives full control over the search and is far more functional then having to remember ‘how much life was T3 Life on a belt once again?’.
-Let the found items be sorted by priority. What’s the most important? Biggest life roll? Biggest resistance? What’s the second most? So instead of it simply being expensive or cheap one gets an actual comparison to what to buy as currently you have to sift through several pages of items to get close to the one you actually want to buy.
-Make Forging potential easily visible. I actually don’t know if you can see it at all, this is a mandatory stat deciding if a non-‘perfect’ exalted is bought or not after all. And even if it’s visible, my comment about ‘is it even?’ should be clear enough that it’s not visible enough. Also… a search option with a minimim forging potential available.
That’s the major points for now given the basic functionality of the Bazaar. The overall implementation is definitely interesting, the core design even fantastic. Hence it’s a bit of a shame to see the whole system undermined by missing base functionality.
Thanks for this list of suggestions, saved me having to write them down myself
I agree with all of these suggestions. Whatever you want to do in Bazaar, buy or sell, it takes way too long to find what you are looking for, mainly because of the limited filtering and sorting options.
I would like to add one more point: It takes too much reputation to unlock the higher ranks. It is not in proportion to the overall progress. For a level 90+ player who trades a lot, I have way too much gold and can’t buy anything with it that really helps my character progressing because it’s locked behind a huge reputation wall. To me, it feels very unrewarding to invest that much time into the current trading system.
Blockquote
-Make Forging potential easily visible. I actually don’t know if you can see it at all, this is a mandatory stat deciding if a non-‘perfect’ exalted is bought or not after all.
You can see it when you change the results display mode. You can then hover over the item and inspect everything.
Thanks for the reply!
I actually didn’t know you had to switch the view-mode to even see that… that is one major fix which is needed definitely.
As for the reputation:
After having played a decent while with the system in place I have to say… yeah, it’s far too much.
My character is level 99 and I can’t even buy all uniques!
The system seems to be set up for leveling several characters up and acquiring the needed reputation that way, but it goes counter to making ‘a good character’ first before switching over. Also the reputation gain early on is miniscule in comparison to high corruption monoliths, so it slows down the process heavily as well.
To reach Level 10 it probably needs to be cut down by 5-10 times the amount needed, adjusted between the different stages accordingly.
Because so much reputation is needed between ranks, we have this weird situation where there are so many items in the bazaar that cost 0 gold, which completely destroys the market for them. Just so the sellers get a little more reputation because so much is needed.
Probably not every player has the intention to level up multiple characters and denying them access to the entire market with the first character, even if they reach lvl 100, will most likely cause frustration for many players, like it does for me.
I’m using my whole gained favor to put items onto the market, non-stop. Mostly idols as those are wildly varied and don’t cost much favor to put into the system.
Still, despite putting every… single… one into it and always pricing them for 25k a piece (Unless I know it’s a very important combination for a specific build) I still float around level level 6. Well… I would be level 7 by now if I hadn’t taken a in-depth look at CoF, which is plainly spoken superior in every way simply by throwing endless amounts of uniques and exalted items at you.
The only upside for the Bazaar is funds to get more tabs swifter.
This is a major issue destroying their whole possible economy.
Since supply/demand is so heavily skewed and functionality doesn’t come in before raising the reputation to utterly massive amounts it becomes one utter mess.
I have currently over 200 items listed to get extra reputation. Meaning I haven’t used a single point yet to buy things… just selling them.
Why? Because I am not allowed to buy anything I would need, and the few very specific things aren’t listed yet.
I totally agree. CoF benefits you from the start, while the Merchant’s Guild can enable you getting a lot of gold, but you cannot actually spend it in a meaningful way during your playthrough to lvl 100.
To improve the current situation, I have the following suggestion for changes to the Merchant’s Guild at the current reputation requirements:
At rank 6 or 7 a player gets buying access to all categories in the bazaar, the individual ranks would have to be adjusted accordingly. This could be achieved before the player reaches lvl 100. This way, if a player can afford the gold, he will be able to benefit from good gear in the bazaar during the first playthrough towards the level cap.
To provide motivation above rank 6/7, the bazaar could automatically deduct a 15-20% gold fee on the selling price of all items right from the start. Ranks after 6/7 forward may reduce this fee by 5% per rank, to 0% at rank 10.
The thing with people selling for zero is a failure to communicate clearly by EHG.
Nothing tells you that you only get Reputation by listing, not selling items. Players list for zero gold, because they think that a sale will give Reputation. Likewise, with CoF, nowhere are you told that you get double your Favour cost in Reputation when you purchase prophecies.
