As a seller, you may have up to 5 listings on the Bazaar at a time and once a starting price and closing time have been set you will be unable to prematurely remove the listing. Other players will then be able to bid on your listings and once the bidding window is up the winner will receive your item and you will receive the gold they bid on it.
I love trading in Wow, 2007scape, (even diablo3 at the time)… but man, 5 listings is like barely trading. I’d argue for runescape-style, where you can have a set number of listings per item category (mostly to stop players from buying out all of 1 item and then artificially setting the price). Like 5 weapons, 5 armor, 5 mat of X…
Bidding is a really boring mechanic in my opinion, and also can lead to items selling for near nothing. I think 2007scape GE with the option to buy-instantly, or even if no one is selling, put a buy price, and other players can sell at a lower price, but then instantly sell to high price and make more money is a lot better.
I know grinding for items is fun, but due to variance, you could grind for (hyperbole) a year and not find the item you want, but have millions, billions of gold to buy said item… if only you could sell the other good items (but not for your class) to other players.
Anyway, regardless, it’ll be awesome fun to trade with other players, but as someone who loves trading (and playing), I don’t know if I’ll even bother with the Bazar if it’s bid-only and has a max of 5 items.
I hate trading. In the end, it’s just makes content a lot shorter. Being able to complete all content or builds, easily within a league/cycle, just puts pressure for more frequent content, skills, classes etc. This can quickly lead to a drop in game balance/quality, just so you can keep people interested for a short period of time in every new cycle, which is what happened with PoE.
Imo, trade in arpgs is a mistake. And before someone says “play solo mode”, I have a better option. Make items tradeable to people that were in your party when the item dropped and have a completely separate mode with free trade, for newcomers or people who like trading as an endgame.
You realise that means the same thing as solo mode right? People who trade will go to this “trade mode”, the mode you’re left with will be the de facto “solo mode” whether you call it that or not.
i said it in another thread. if you want to encourage people to play the game as opposed to trading, then you must make playing the game best way to progress, not making trading bad.
you do not want to have these 2 scenarios,
1- Trade is horrible, BUT still the best way to acquire gears (aka PoE now)
or
2- The gears you want don’t drop, & these gears can’t or very hard to acquire via trading due to trade quantity limitations.
It is undeniable by now that the reason behind the success of PoE and trade in PoE is the free market. Nearly all you can win in the game is tradable. For better or worse, this is one of the pillars of PoE. Part of the excitement of finding a valuable item is to know that you will be able to sell it and buy what you need.
Does the free market favor real money trading? This is the key question. At first glance it would seem that yes, it does. But I have my doubts. All of the games that restricted free market have failed to decrease bots and RMT, not to mention eliminate them from the game. Unfortunately, bots and RMT will always find a hole in order to make their things in an online game.
That being said, I have hopes the bazaar will be different to all of what we saw in the genre, and how knows, maybe it is the best option to keep most players happy. Time will tell.
I’ve been a giga trader since forever. I enjoy making money and I’m almost always the top 0.001% in every MMO game. I played 2007scape for a month only because I like trading in the auction house - that’s all I did and I enjoyed it! Most of my Path of Exile goals were around accumulating wealth to test my trading skills, I made around 1 Mirror every 2 days. If the trading is crippled, I doubt my enthusiasm about the game will stay as it is right now. I have never RMTed myself simply because I don’t have the need for it.
One thing that you have to understand is that real money trading will never disappear. Even if you remove trade completely, there will be probably as much or even more RMTing. People use RMT to bypass time-consuming aspects of the game, be it either not willing to grind or not willing to learn. People offer RMT services or goods because they have found methods which are far efficient than what an average people can come up with.
If you want to design your game around avoiding RMT, you’ll most likely end up making more users unsatisfied with the limitations rather than making people happy from being completely aware that they’re not in an environment which is RMT friendly.
Absolutely all popular games have RMTing, yet I have never heard it being an issue for the majority of the players. All that has come out of it has been a few individuals being envious about someone’s achievements and use RMT as a slur.
If you don’t believe me, take a look at Path of Exile’s forums( Reddit is more modded but still has plenty of highly upvoted angry threads) where the trade is also artificially limited and forced. It’s a MESS for over a year already and for the last few months has gone exceptionally bad.
The Path of Exile’s trade manifesto which has been linked everywhere hundreds of times is extremely flawed, filled with contradictions and readers often without understanding it give their support rather due to the appeal to authority. Decrypting the whole manifesto for you would steal 2 hours of my precious keystrokes from my life.
In my opinion 2007scape and WoW have done trading the best. Trading itself is a fun aspect of the game if it’s done right and does not lock content away from you.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but your idea is to create central planned economy with neural network in charge. It doesn’t matter who is in charge in such system it will fail eventually.
For such system to operate optimally it have to have entirety of knowledge about needs of every individual. But there are problems:
individual knows for sure about it’s needs only
that knowledge can’t be fully formalized and transferred since it can be based on intuition, etc.
That means what knowledge in economic are dissipated. No one know everything and it is not possible to gathter that knowledge in one place.
The Bazaar already sounds better than PoEs trading system. Don’t get me wrong I’ve spend thousands of hours playing PoE but the trading system is so frustrating. Usually the reason I burn out on a league quite fast.
Well, we’ll see. I’m still somewhat sceptical, because Diablo 3 already showed that (RM)AH can hurt the Game. I understand / know why they try to implement it, due for Diablo 2 trading was a big deal for a part of the Community. The thing is a huge part of the Genre is the Hunt for Loot, which means “selffound”, and the reason why it worked for D2 was due first of all it was not as accessable, thanks to trading via third-party (website); secondly due you didn’t trade with gold, but for Runes, Gems or Items with similiar Value. So the Problem which i see here is first of all: Gold / Currency Value, which means they need really to find the right spot that Gold as currency does “worth” enough, otherwise we will see insane numbers for Trading… which can kill in the worst case scenario the fun. Secondly it’s also an issue about droprates, because Items itself needs to have an value as well, otherwise folks online don’t see any neccesity for trading, if it’s to high (like Diablo 3) it can however impact every selffound player in an negative way so you can grind for hundrets or thousands of hours, but might see only a handfull of good / unique / legendary Items. Don’t get me wrong, i enjoy grinding for stuff and spending time in Videogames… but even there need some kinds of limits so droprates are fair and encourages, but that’s where it can bites itself with an AH / Bazaar.
Than again, i’ve to point out, that in World of Warcraft is i actively played it (long time ago) trading / ah / economy is one of the most fun and encouraging thing for me, so i really like to see a well done impelementation for an ARPG.
#Topic
Amazing, thank you for sharing. I’d also argue Phase 3 and Phase 4 could be maybe one of the important times for me, because some friends said they will look into it once Multiplayer is in (with rogue), but except that i’m happy with all the Phase’s.
as long as you cant bid, only buyout i dont think there will be too high numbers in the AH. too high numbers come from guys who think like that: “i want sell an item for 100g but i woul also take 100k gold if someone want it now”. If you only can list with buyout prices they have to consider twice for how much they really want to sell an item
What’s the point of AH if I can’t buyout a thing that I need here and now? You expect me to stop playing and wait for a couple of days or what?
I expect players to just come up with an unofficial secondary market for immediate transactions using external tools, just like in PoE. Do you want that to happen?
Then again the Question raise, if it isn’t faster to bid for it anyway… because AH will still be more accessable and faster, than group up with strangers which may or may not get an item you want / need… in case of Bazaar you also have the advantage of browsing through items, maybe some which might not have considered before. Also while i get where you come from, it’s also a question if you really need said Items “asap”. If the core-idea behind the Bazaar is that you get BiS and such, or for twinks which you won’t play for now anyway etc etc… do you really need it now?
I can’t say that i prefer one or another, so don’t take it in a wrong way… but i simply wondering if it would really escalate that much, because i’d argue majority of people prefer to not add strangers to their FL and so on, so i can’t help that your “idea” would do only a small portion of the playergroup anyway.
Well you have a point there. No one will use a system that is slower than an existing one.
Regarding the point of the bazaar though, just as with anything else really, people will use it the way they want and are able to get away with, not the way it was intended to be used.
I can wait for BiS, maybe, but often enough I want just a specific T10 item for leveling/SBiS. Which can be pretty easily crafted by myself, provided I have enough runes. But if I don’t have runes, I might want them here and now. Or the item I wanted to craft in the first place.
In any case, if some elaborate trading scheme emerges, it would only mean that game is a success, to the point where a lot of people are ready to jump through the hoops, all for the sake of improving their in-game efficiency.
I actually really dislike this when I read about it. Being able to gift items/gold to random newbie strangers is something I wish is possible in LE. These are also the feel good stories from newbies that you hear in other ARPGs (e.g. POE, D2).
Yeah I think the whole system is a bad idea. It makes this game seem much less desirable. I can easily trade with whomever I want on PoE, instantly, if they’re online. Which is more than LE can say.
Devs consider AH/free trade to be bad for the game, because people will spend more time browsing AH instead of actually playing the game. and then complain about how boring the game is.
