I agree with you. There should be other options for spending favour (although you do have gambling, the odds of getting anything halfway decent is very small). But flooding the market isn’t necessarily bad, since it provides new players with options for baseline gear.
And, if you are up to it, you can also spend favour by listing, de-listing and listing again. Though, as with the previous point, it shouldn’t be necessary.
The UI, though, needs a MASSIVE upgrade. Not the least of which is a global stall where you can search for everything at once, rather than playing “find the stall”.
Actually… from an economic standpoint flodding the market is a disaster.
Inherently it seems like no problem but it causes 2 major issues.
The people which just put things inside without looking up the proper pricing create a false sense of value, making it inherently harder to list items with the proper price tag.
Also it makes it so the price disparity becomes extreme. Less listing means the market is more contested for the things someone wants. The supply gets automatically handled to a degree. It’s ‘not worth it’ to list specific items.
This mostly happens at the lower end of the spectrum, and while true that people this way can gear up with mediocre items… they can’t make gold with those items anymore. That’s the majority of them which are accessible though for them until they progress far enough to multiply their drops naturally.
So overall the pricing is hence all over, nobody knowing what things are ‘actually’ worth. This causes people to hold back listing items as they don’t want to ‘muss out’ on profits for decent gear.
On the other hand lower leveled gear is so swamped that you can’t make profit.
A healthy market on the other hand automatically handles supply and demand to let people undercut each other regularly, the more effort spent the more likely someone is to sell and the closer it is to the perceived value of the community.
Some ‘nice’ people obviously will list for far less but that only means that item will be taken off the listings extra quick then.
Which is another issue… no way to re-price an item. Adjusting prices is a mandatory mechanic which currently has a cost attached to it. So this inherently tampers with pricing as well, adjusting them down lower. Which means that especially rare items despite being fairly similar have grotesque price variance. 2 ‘great’ +skill exalted items for different skills… one skill starts at 500k or even 1 mil per piece while the other dimples around at 50k. And since access is denied for so many nobody knows if they would actually sell or not for a good chunk of people in the first place.
Oh yes… so so much yes.
I think I ran around in circles there for a good 1 1/2 hours by now like a headless chicken, especially with how they’re set up. Some weapons lower right, some upper left, middle armor, stuff inside buildings versus outside and not right away displayed… it’s a mess.
Remove reputation gain being tied to favor usage.
Favor usage solely for buying.
Limiting the amount of listing space per account.
Using the rank system to ease tax-payments to the system (gold + favor for buying)
Remove any access restrictions.
Create a power-level system for items in the background which is invisible to the player, creating a ‘favor price floor’ for each possible listed item this way.
And suddenly it functions.
Ah, and fix the UI, but that should be the basic stuff.
Proper sub-priorities for searching.
Multi-affex searches with different tiers.
Fixing the search function to entail all the affixes for idols (how the heck are they not in there in the first place properly by now?)
Make sold items listed on top.
Giving a ‘claim all’ button.
Combining the stalls to one NPC rather then headhunting the right ones for every single item.
Provide a quick-search function for items held in the inventory to price-check.
And probably a myriad more which I can’t remember… shows how much of a mess there is with that list already.
