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Why not just add a store system?


(XBOX)GodMasterTP
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In this post, I hope I illuminated the abundance of potential options available in designing an Auction House that could stem any number of points people use against them. It also showcases some of the major pros of an Auction House. I also pinpoint the origin of some of the anti-AH crowd's opinions, and why I don't think they're healthy for the game in general. (if you are a naysayer and don't fall into the naysayer categories I listed, so be it, it's not a comprehensive list.)

 

A problem people have, who speak against an "AH/marketplace" (searchable shops with buy-out prices), is that they only see their personal pretty profits dropping like a stone due to prices equalizing to their real values (false scarcity and requiring player interaction at the moment of trade, leads to inflated prices). They don't see the upside for the people who won't use 3rd party sites or the horrendous trade chat to trade. Those people (non-traders) might as well not exist to them - and it profits them to keep those others out of the market, (for many reasons, but a big one is because if those others are not around, they can't buy anything that trader wants, so they can find a steal (I mean, deal), or those others aren't around to sell the things they (the current traders) themselves want to sell to others (lack of competition.)

People who don't use the 3rd party trade site(s) make un-informed decisions on the value of their items (and sell way too low, or buy way too high) because there's no in-game way to track:

  • sale prices on completed transactions (not listing manual "barter" trades outside the automated system)
  • volume of sales over time
  • number of the item currently for sale
  • history of transaction seller/buyer names, to see if it's the same people trading back and forth, or in the same guild, or whathaveyou
  • etc, (there are a number of metrics that I'd include in a functional marketplace to give people the means to make informed selling and buying decisions, and I'm not laying out my proposal here for how such a system should work, in this thread)

This disparity leads to the ease of flipping, buying low and selling high, due to a lack of information on one side, or simply lack of time to devote to trading. This is what really drives people to want to keep the market the way it is (a mess), so they can profit. (No, this is unhealthy, and leads to disillusionment and feelings of being "scammed", which will be vehemently argued against by the scammers, I mean, flippers. Yes, flippers.) These people are not using the AH to sell stuff they got, and use the plat to buy slots and cosmetics, or some other valuable thing they want to trade for... no, they're playing the market, not the game - and in general, playing the market like this is in no way helping DE sell more plat. These people are getting plat-rich without buying plat.

 

Then, there are those who just want to undercut everyone and make a little plat really fast, which would be damaged by a good AH system, and is an urge that a good AH would diminish, since you wouldn't necessarily have to undercut to make plat (and prices would not be able to bottom out on an AH I'd design, past 1 plat per transaction - you could still barter through trade chat and PMs and make trades like that for more than 1 item for 1 plat, but not automatically, through the automated system) and while there are idiots who will sell for super cheap just to sell, they're just cutting their nose off to spite their face... and reasonable people will put some value on the time it took to get what they're trying to sell, but I don't want to get into the whole psychological dynamics of an AH system here... (However, a major point here, is limited transactions per day, making each listing, each trade, have value... are you willing to make 10 plat a day, or do you value those slots and potential trades to make 50 plat with the same items? There are a lot of factors that people don't consider, and not all AH systems are made equal.)

Some nefarious people like the ability to "list" a price for an item "for sale" but it's not really for sale - no intention to actually complete a trade, just to try to manipulate the market by driving the perceived price down, whereas an AH would force a person who lists an item for such a price to sell at that price),... I'd be happy to see these people disappear. This is a major pro, in favor of AH's.  (There are other potential features such as "blind listings" that would only show the current number of items for sale, but not say what the lowest "buy out" price actually is - so people couldn't just list "1 plat lower" to try to undercut like that, ... this system requires people to submit offers into the listing of that item until their offer matches or exceeds one listed (and they'd have to pay what they offered to the seller, even if it was well above their set buyout price.) In such a system, people may attempt to list at 1 plat, hoping that the sales history of the item will prompt others to automatically offer the standard price, and theirs would sell first for the standard price, despite their low listing... it's very risky, and people could just buy it at 1 plat... this system essentially lets people "haggle" with everyone selling the same item, only the sellers never change their prices - until they re-list the item at a new buy-out price. As a safeguard to these sorts of "outlier sales, they could be excluded from the sales history proper, along with exhorbitant prices that are well above the average.)

Some people don't want other people selling what they have to sell, "flooding" the market. (This is an exaggerated fear, mainly due to sales per day, and the influx of new buyers who didn't exist before the AH made trade available to them. Though, some amount of flooding is to be expected, and is part of the whole meaning behind the "false scarcity" leading to the currently inflated prices...)

 

Everything that would otherwise be trade-able, but falls into the hands of players who don't trade, essentially doesn't exist in the game. And that stuff has 0 value.

Telling people to use the 3rd party sites or trade chat (the equivalent of "git gud" comments in other conversations) is more like "live with it, because we like it how it is. We walk up hill, both ways, to the store and back home in a blizzard, and we like it! Now get off my lawn made of platinum!"

This stance is good for them, but to the detriment of everyone not engaging with the gushing wound that is trade chat, and the band-aid 3rd party systems.

It is a system that benefits the few, at the expense of the many. The few will defend it to the death, and it's easy to defend, because it's the easy way out for the devs. Players already created the 3rd party site(s), and that's "enough" for the current traders.

I hope I've brought up a few points some people haven't thought about, at the very least. (especially the devs, if their eyes are upon this thread at all.)

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On 2019-09-09 at 6:33 PM, GinKenshin said:

They want you to take time to get plat.

I'd love to see the market research backing this, from my perspective profits are directly tied in with product turnover. If they introduced an option like this and took a 5% platinum fee from all sold items, it's effectively a plat sink-hole where rapid sales delivers rapid profitability. Have the fee % round up so sales of 9p or less are free of charge to keep things civil.

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7 hours ago, FrostDragoon said:

Just because you don't know doesn't mean they don't exist. I've played a couple myself, but I think it would be in your best interest to do your homework on that instead of asking for "examples" that you will just dismiss anyway. Until then, you simply come off as ignorant.

How can people know if they have not been told? And how can they be told if there is no one to tell them?

If there are so many, list them. Until then, you simply come off as arrogant.

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Trading in this game is really a hassle. You have to rely on a third party website to kinda have a semi functional broker thingy? Come on, it's too painful to be constantly online and ready to trade if you want to sell anything and it severely disrupts one's gameplay. I don't have specific suggestions on what new trading platform DE should build in game I'm simply saying this need to happen. Trading that requires players to be actively online is too much pain in the butt. 

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4 hours ago, (PS4)guzmantt1977 said:

FFS. How many times do we have to explain the same basic concepts to the same ignorant but noisy few? 

Seriously, is it so very difficult to find a basic entry level economics textbook and educate yourselves? 

AH = CRASHED ECONOMY IN WARFRAME = BAD IDEA. 

 

When you put it like that with no irrefutable evidence.. how long is a piece of string?

People respond better when logic is used instead of aggressive language

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Like in the other thread I started. 

Go try out Guild Wars 2. JUST FOR THE AUCTION HOUSE. 

It's simple . Easy. Has a sink for premium and in game currencies. Also it promotes trade due to it's convenience. 

When that game had a re-vamp in it's AH the white knights made a huge fuss. They all said it would be ruin. 

Turns out more players used it and the number of people willing to buy and sell at higher prices went up for the harder to acquire items, INSTEAD, of down. 

Whatever though, research is tough when trying to give an educated opinion. 

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3 hours ago, Jax_Cavalera said:

When you put it like that with no irrefutable evidence.. how long is a piece of string?

People respond better when logic is used instead of aggressive language

You're currently viewing Page 10/10 on this thread. 

I've personally been responding since page 5. I've given very simple explanations for why the proposed system will cause the economy to crash. I have explained why the proposed system will cause an increase in supply without any increase in demand. I have explained why this will cause a "race to zero" in prices of the vast majority of items in this game. 

I've explained that many other games with auction houses feature aspects of the economy that are simply not present in warframe. I've explained how those literally enforce a level of demand which keeps prices high. I am not alone in having attempted to explain the concepts, many, many people, across many, many threads have made similar points 

On the previous page one particularly ridiculous post in support of an auction house, literally proclaims proudly that they would willingly flood the market with goods at a ridiculously low price, undercutting the current competition, because they want the plat. They are too myopic to see that everyone else will be doing the same thing and instead of getting 5 plat, they'll be getting none

 

The problem here is not one of an attitude making it difficult for them to see the logic in what we're saying. The problem is that they are literally ignorant, they don't grasp very basic concepts in economics. They are in fact so ignorant that they don't even realise that they don't know wtf they are talking about.

 

They keep wailing that "other games have auction houses". This is true but those games do not have economic systems that are identical to the one that we have. It also discounts the fact that even in games where they system is built from the ground up to have auction houses, there have been significant issues with the system. Market crashes, people working to corner markets, even the literal destruction of an ecosystem that took insane amounts of effort to create, in hours. 

They say "but warframe.market didn't crash the economy", without using the search engines available to us to see the complaints of prices crashing when that site initially went into action. Again this is a matter of pure ignorance, which could have been remedied after the information was presented. Somehow they chose to keep making such silly claims. 

They say "but if prices fall we'll be able to buy more stuff". But with fallen prices, they won't be able to make as much plat from trades, which will make life much much worse for F2P Tenno, which is to say "the majority of players". Greed for a short term windfall, blinds them to how much worse they're going to make it for so many people. 

The most ridiculous thing they try to say is "people who oppose this only do so because they make a profit ripping people off". I hardly ever sell anything in warframe. I have given away far more gear to newbs, than I have ever sold. I do that because I figure it will benefit the game overall. My plat comes from buying prime access bundles when I like what I see. I do that because I figure it will benefit the game overall. I stand to possibly make a major killing if an auction house system is implemented. The game economy as a whole, however, will rapidly go into a state of decline. 

 

The more intelligent of the proponents admit that the market will crash. They just don't think that it will be as bad as all that. They're probably wrong. I say probably, only because there is a chance that it'll be less terrible, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it. We've know that the Tragedy of the Commons is a thing for quite a long time. 

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4 hours ago, (PS4)guzmantt1977 said:

I have explained why this will cause a "race to zero" in prices of the vast majority of items in this game. 

I've explained that many other games with auction houses feature aspects of the economy that are simply not present in warframe. I've explained how those literally enforce a level of demand which keeps prices high. I am not alone in having attempted to explain the concepts, many, many people, across many, many threads have made similar points 

Ok so have you heard of a game called Habbo Hotel coz it's been around for over 10 years and has had an auction house for a decent quantity of that time.. and interestingly enough the prices never race to zero, they go up and down as a fluctuation. And yes in that game once you own something it's yours forever and there's no real reason to want more than one of a given item other than for the glory of showing others you have more than one of it.

With a long running example such as that of how an auction house works just fine, I find it difficult to buy into the notion of doom and gloom racing to zero value on all items in the game. Plus if DE want to keep values up a bit, they simply implement some safeguards around insider trading, long term averages, hard capped min and max values (or just hard capped min values for all I could care)

The habbo system only has a crazy high upper limit and a 2 credit minimum value. has been this way since it began and sure every game has unique aspects that will impact the market flow. On initial release, there is always going to be an influx of fodder flood.

What eventuated in Habbo is that anything readily available had the price crash to 2c per, anything seasonal maintained similar prices with an initial 20% dip on re-release. It always works its way back up again the longer it is vaulted so the final price it lands at is substantially higher than it ever was on average.. so when it gets re-released it dips.. and averages out again.. rinse and repeat.

Anything rare / one-off with limited qty available finds a going rate that has a subtle but certain bump each year that goes by. This sounds familiar and you can even picture what items fall into each of those categories for Warframe.

So I would say .. no, not everything would crash.. the artificially inflated items definitely will and the rest will simply even out either seasonally on average riding that wave or as an investment for limited or rares.

I'm fine with that outcome and if DE are really that concerned that this would impact their platinum sales.. perhaps they need to look at other ways of driving that side of the economy more such as new player created content that has a platinum aspect to it.

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15 minutes ago, Jax_Cavalera said:

Ok so have you heard of a game called Habbo Hotel coz it's been around for over 10 years and has had an auction house for a decent quantity of that time.. and interestingly enough the prices never race to zero, they go up and down as a fluctuation.

Are there player run stores where every single item is being offered for a single coin/credit/gem/gold/turkey feather /whatever currency they use? Because if so, then that is proof that the race to zero was and continues to be, a thing. 

18 minutes ago, Jax_Cavalera said:

What eventuated in Habbo is that anything readily available had the price crash to 2c per, anything seasonal maintained similar prices with an initial 20% dip on re-release.

Yeah looks like you didn't recognise what you were seeing. Thanks for confirming that it's a thing. 

 

20 minutes ago, Jax_Cavalera said:

So I would say .. no, not everything would crash.. the artificially inflated items definitely will and the rest will simply even out either seasonally on average riding that wave or as an investment for limited or rares.

So rivens get even more expensive and everything else crashes.

Great idea. Brilliant. Genius. We'd all love to be paying even more for rivens while earning less on everything else, wouldn't we? /s

Whoever came up with it and thought that it would be a way to fix trading, needs to get their head checked. 

24 minutes ago, Jax_Cavalera said:

I'm fine with that outcome and if DE are really that concerned that this would impact their platinum sales.. perhaps they need to look at other ways of driving that side of the economy more such as new player created content that has a platinum aspect to it.

That's something that some idiot came up with as a reason for them not getting the auction house they got. Nobody who actually thinks about it would make such a silly claim for reasons that would be obvious to anyone with more than two brain cells. (In case they're not obvious, a larger percentage of the players would have to buy small amounts of plat just to be able to continue playing the game, since that's going to be the only way most of them can get plat thanks to the stupid auction house crashing the economy. Of course in the long run this would mean fewer and fewer players, which is obviously not a good idea.) 

29 minutes ago, Jax_Cavalera said:

And yes in that game once you own something it's yours forever and there's no real reason to want more than one of a given item other than for the glory of showing others you have more than one of it.

You really should have looked at what you wrote there, realised that this is a rather major difference, and not tried to claim that apples are the same as oranges. 

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14 minutes ago, FrostDragoon said:

You pretty much proved the reason for me to not just hand them to you. It's obvious you're only here to troll and don't have anything worthwhile to say.

Don't you have an appointment to keep with some billy-goats? 

14 minutes ago, FrostDragoon said:

Oh, damn. Didn't realize Google was top secret NSA tech! Wow!!!

That's been your tactic from the start, hasn't it? Demand that we give you specific examples you think we can't provide, and then act like anything you claim doesn't need to be verified. 

So far I've been taking your contributions as being close enough to good faith, as possible. But the only way that's possible at this point is that you're ignorant and incompetent beyond all reasonable expectations. 

I'll tell you to go educate yourself about the topic you're trying to take a part in one last time. Maybe that way you will be able to figure out why everything you've said so far just makes you look silly. 

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I already cited one game earlier in this threat, not that any of you bothered to read it. There are plenty more games out there, hence, #GoogleIt. Not only do I have extensive experience in online gaming across various forms of in-game economies, but I actually have studied economics--I doubt (m)any of you who like the current system have. But where I become bored with your arguments and nonsense is when you say things that are straight up factually untrue.

6 hours ago, (PS4)guzmantt1977 said:

I've personally been responding since page 5. I've given very simple explanations for why the proposed system will cause the economy to crash. I have explained why the proposed system will cause an increase in supply without any increase in demand. I have explained why this will cause a "race to zero" in prices of the vast majority of items in this game. 

You gave hypotheticals based on nothing. Your over-simplified view of supply/demand doesn't account for a large number of other factors. Your "race to zero" proposal is total garbage.

It's you who is acting in bad faith.

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19 hours ago, (XB1)Phantom Clip said:

Yes. But please give me any instance in which you want to buy an item and every single item sale fire that item is viewable? Even online you have to search between stores, wholesellers, resellers, private sellers for best price. There's no 1 list with every single seller of the item you want and the price. If you don't find the cheapest deal oh well. Quality and use of items don't degrade 

This statement is.. dumb. It is the same as having stuff on AH. I will buy from the cheapest seller. As is in real life. And there conceptually no difference between that and the current system, except accessibility. 

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47 minutes ago, (PS4)thegarada said:

This statement is.. dumb. It is the same as having stuff on AH. I will buy from the cheapest seller. As is in real life. And there conceptually no difference between that and the current system, except accessibility. 

Most of his statements are, because he gives bad examples/analogies--especially those that have no in-game equivalent.

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2 hours ago, FrostDragoon said:

You pretty much proved the reason for me to not just hand them to you. It's obvious you're only here to troll and don't have anything worthwhile to say.

Lmao. You are the definition of a troll. You on every post, in even section , even when you got nothing to say or show. Just to say the opposite of the next person.  Many members already admitted no other games let you trade premium currency like Warframe.Proof or it didn't happen. Otherwise, keep trolling on every post every 3mins.

 

38 minutes ago, (PS4)thegarada said:

This statement is.. dumb. It is the same as having stuff on AH. I will buy from the cheapest seller. As is in real life. And there conceptually no difference between that and the current system, except accessibility. 

You must be bored.  The point is the way the system is now,  you have to wait for the cheapest price.  Not everyone will undercut the next person. And if you do find that one cheap price most likely someone else may want it and decide to pay MORE than you instead of waiting longer.  Now you back to sitting in chat looking for cheap deals. A seller's market favoring players that choose not to buy much ,if any plat. You can make tons of plat. Higher gains for the average seller 

With an AH, the cheapest price is always listed for extended time. Because of this, players are likely to LOWER price just to get a sell. A buyer's market. Favoring players who buy plat often. Allowing them to always have access to the lowest prices available. They don't sell often or not at all. If they did sell items, they would have plenty of plat with no need to buy. So instead of trading for it, they buy plat. Low gains for sellers. 

Not hard to understand. 

 

 

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There are a few prices in game currently that will not change much unless affected by DE.  Things like ayatan sculptures, vault mods and rare mods from events or specific locations.  You also have to take into consideration that pricing is controlled also by the in game market.  For instance, the xiphos parts; pretty difficult to farm and really not worth the farm considering the price on the market.  Price is also controlled by the Ducat system.  5 prime parts for 5p was a thing and probably still is, I haven't checked in a while.  Point is this, there is no economic reason to not have an in game trade system, because pricing is controlled by DE.  There is really only 1 way that plat is introduced into the game and that is through a purchase from DE's website.  The plat give aways that DE does are not a significant quantity to affect the dollar to plat ratio which DE is VERY WELL AWARE OF, because that's how they make their money.  So, the only argument to be made is that DE wants people to continue to use a 3rd part market on the web that's already in place rather than putting something in game.  As one person in this thread has already stated "there is no negotiating"  and this is true!  I've sent many pms looking to buy items and the classic response is /offer, so I respond and get the /nty and ignored.  There's no bartering and for the most part talking to people about trading is toxic, this thread is a key indicator of that.  Want to keep the large base of people playing warframe happy?  Then put a trading system in.

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A few ways to control/prevent certain problems people ascribe to AH's:

Limited trades per day. (Already MR locked)

Limited duration of listings. (like 72hrs) This encourages people to price their items at values that are realistic to see them sold because of the next point:

Fee to list things (or even change listings - maybe a one-time fee for setting up all the trades you can do for the day, to keep things nice.) If you have to pay a fee every time you change the listing, or list some new stuff, you're going to want to restrict to this to the minimum number of times. Nobody likes fees. So you're going to value every single sale you set up in this, because it's costing you something to do it. This is potentially the most controversial point about an AH, depending on what sort of fees we see applied - especially if it's a fee in plat (it could just be exhorbitant like 1mil credits for prime mod trades).

Minimum price (1 plat per transaction) (although, with listing fees and the other above things, people will already have minimum prices in mind when they decide to sell something, to be sure it's actually making them some money, and not costing them... or breaking even just to be nice to people.

Blind Listings (as noted in my post above, so nobody knows exactly what prices are being asked, but being given the tools to see a past history of sales and the current number of the item currently available. People might try to undercut the last recorded sale price, or even list things for only 1 plat, risking that people will buy at the previous known value of the item, but it's risky, and can backfire badly.)

Reverse Auction House - listing "Buy Offers" which could cost nothing to place, and just require you to wait until someone is willing to trade you the item you're after for the price you're offering. (no recurring, indefinite buy offers, it's a one-time one-buy listing)

 

I mean, use your imagination people. There are ways to mitigate potential problems. And I've seen all of these used in successful AH's in other games. Most using in-game currencies, which made the potential abuses even worse than Warframe's limited real-world premium currency that requires real money to be spent for more to be added to the economy, whereas in-game currencies could be created infinitely with bots, flooding the economy with cheap currency.

There are so many differences between game economies and real economies, I find it comical to try to apply more than the basic principles to in-game AH's, seriously.

 

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28 minutes ago, (PS4)AyinDygra said:

Fee to list things (or even change listings - maybe a one-time fee for setting up all the trades you can do for the day, to keep things nice.) If you have to pay a fee every time you change the listing, or list some new stuff, you're going to want to restrict to this to the minimum number of times. Nobody likes fees. So you're going to value every single sale you set up in this, because it's costing you something to do it. This is potentially the most controversial point about an AH, depending on what sort of fees we see applied - especially if it's a fee in plat (it could just be exhorbitant like 1mil credits for prime mod trades).

The fee can't be in plat, for reasons stated earlier, but it could be in other resources. Endo might be a decent idea to play with. Sure, some players have enough to not really care either way, but that would be true no matter what resource you use. The point is to make it something anyone MR 2 has access to, and something they can afford to use for this, but not something people don't entirely disregard (like credits or common materials).

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2 minutes ago, FrostDragoon said:

Oh, so we're going with the argument from ignorance of the masses now, are we? You're posts are pathetic.

Just like we all thought. Just avoid posting proof of other games that trade premium currency and smut talk. The lowest form of communication. All trash, no heft. You make a bunch of post trying to talk your way out of the lies. When 1 post with proof would have been enough.

But then again, a fool can not act intelligent.

At least you waited over 3 minutes. I'll start the timer again. . .

 

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