I play MG for the first time and basically like it. There is, however, one thing that bothers me.
People put in items at very high prices such as 999.999.999 Gold, or at extremely low prices such as 0 Gold. It is ok to do that, but there is no punishment for doing so. The first one clearly does not like to sell the item, the second one lists the item for… Reputation gain?? It would be more useful to just sell the item to the standard vendor. But instead the bazar is getting spamed with such items and with increasing cycle time, it becomes worse.
One way out would be a system as follows:
If you list an item at a specific price, the price is automatically reduced to 80% of the initial price after one week, then to 60% after two weeks, 40% after 3 weeks, 20% after 4 weeks and drops to 0% after 5 weeks.
You can withdraw your item only once. This stops withdrawing and relisting to prevent rule 1.
As soon as an item drops below its price of the standard vendor, it is sold to “noone” and the seller receives the same gold as if he would have sold it to a standard vendor. This would get rid of all 0 Gold Items.
Point 2 is necessary to avoid people listing and unlisting to keep the prices close to infinity.
And about the 0 gold listings: I believe that you should gain reputation by SELLING items, not by LISTING them. Why? It is about storytelling… If you are a renown master trader with a high reputation, you should be known for making great deals rather than flooding the market with worthless crap noone needs.
Thematically, yes. But that would make it even harder to rank up in MG.
Personally, I think they shouldn’t even have ranks. Ranks fit thematically with the whole faction mechanic they created, but doesn’t make much sense for a trading system. Especially because ranks will always benefit grinders more than casuals. Most casuals will never get the ability to buy legendaries in a cycle because they don’t grind enough XPs for it. Which means they can’t even buy cheap legendaries that the nemesis spits out and that are dirt cheap.
Having no ranks would also get rid of the 0 gold listings, although that also has a downside, because lots of 0 gold listings are acutally nice for new players.
Although that could simply be fixed by implementing a minimum cap (just like there is already a maximum cap).
As for point 1, I would agree but not in absolute terms like that. I would say you should just reduce it by 10% (or however much becomes balanced) each time (so it never actually reaches 0), maybe every 7 days.
Although this also has a downside, which is that people wouldn’t really care about searching prices. They’d just sell for a lot of gold and eventually the price would reduce itself until someone bought it.
Overall, I think the idea behind the suggestions is good, but their implementation wouldn’t change MG as much as you intend to and it brings with it some downsides which are undesirable.
Yeah, I get that, I’m just not entirely sure why someone would put an item for sale at such an unreasonably high amount. Unless they’re using the AH as storage, but why that when you can sell stuff & buy more stash tabs?
Which is fair, but leads to the issue whereby players don’t have a way to gain enough rep “fast enough” to buy better gear.
