The MMORPG Experience

The intent of this blog is to educate, learn, and understand the many aspects of MMORPGs without interuption of belief, opinion, and fact based on the need to deface, degrade, or defile the views and beliefs of others spawning from malicous gratification.

Author: Mithios

I remember when EQ instituted the auction house. How wonderful that there was now a place where sellers could set up shop and walk away from the keyboard and buyers could find everything including all those rarest of items all in one place.  I, like many other buyers would run around all night looking for the best deals. For quite some time I found this to be very useful.

After awhile though, I began to get frustrated when I would send the seller a tell asking if they would bargain only to be returned with the lonely shadow of silence. So maybe I wait a day and come back and make an attempt at bartering again, only to be again assulted by the cold, dark, semblence of silence.

After awhile I started missing the old days when everyone would gather in the tunnel outside of Qeynos shouting out thier goods and wares. It was a great feeling when you zoned in and was suddenly assulted by "Selling Ring of strength +2" or "Looking for stacks of small spider webs", etc... You could actually bargain with players and being a roleplayer, offered me a chance to show off my RP skills. I myself remember countless times of shouting "will pay 5 plat  per stack to young adventurers that will gather webs and pelts." I remember the excitement newbies would get when they would bring back two or three stacks of something and I would hand them a handfull of plat and then throw in an extra sword or robe for thier time. It felt as if I was actually part of a live community.

Though I do believe auction houses do have thier place, I think auction houses should be run as any other flea market type of extablishment. Seller must pay a fee, auction houses are open only during daylight hours, and stalls can only be rented for so many days at a time.

The reason i say this for several reasons...

1. By instituting a fee, not everyone will want to pay a fee. So they are free to shout away all thier wares and findings. The fee would not be a large one, but large enough to compell low to mid level players to have to get out there and earn the right to have a stall in the "all famous market".

2. Markets should have set and normal hours of opperation, thus again making players have to at least be present to set up thier stall and close all deals causing more player interaction.

3. Players can only reserve a stall for a certain may of days at a time always allowing different items to cycle through as well as not allowing players to set up shop and then walk away for three weeks not having to participate in the selling of thier own goods.

I believe it is possable to have the balance for players have the conenience of an aution house and still have community interaction. Though I might be wrong, I believe these ideas to be considerable.

I wholeheartedly agree

definitely not a part of the second M in MMORPG

its sad though, that there isnt a single MMO scheduled that adresses this

instead they're catering to the lazy people and promoting silence and instant play

no pain no gain i say

besides, id rather talk to people instead of a bank interface

just look at the newest improvement from the upcoming Chronicle of Spellborn

the interface is IN YOUR GUI, you dont even have to move to sell something

im not sorry i sound like a doomsayer

i could tell from 7 days of play that AoC had a short life (in terms of player base), though apparently some of it was because of a missing Trader (auctioner)

i think the middleway for this would be the ability to set up shop

it would entice people, lazy or not, to trade

maybe i could sell my stuff to someone, and he would pass it on, because hes a shopkeeper, or rather, seller

i dont know, but atm in terms of automation of core features, mmo's have definitely stepped backwards in time

fast travelling and instant teleport PvP-minigames

why not just walk there? it would make the world alot more whole

as far as im concerned, if these are the things people will complain the most about, then an MMO is doing well for itself

there are worse things than having to walk that can ruin your game

SWG did a bloody good job of player run shops.

what you had was a building (anyone you wanted) fill it with the goods, set the price and stick down a few vital objects (to turn it into a shop, to show up on the minimap as a shop and to connect to the AH)

once all that was done players would go to the AH (Bazaar) look up the item they wanted and then they would buy it on the AH.  once that was done they were mailed a waypoint to the shop and would travel to it to pick up their item.  alternatively (and the way i always did it) they could get the waypoint to the shop off AH without purchasing the product and look around the shop before buying

backed up by the strong crafting system (with decay...very important) add in politics (player cities) and merchants (specialized merchants who could hire NPC's to do the selling and advertising) and you had one great (and stable) economy.

i'm not saying get rid of the AH as it does work sometimes (see above), what they need to do is re-think how it works and implement new rules and regulations or a new system

An AH in today’s MMOs is very important to the community, maybe not so much as a feature to bring players together and get them talking (other features can do that, and better; Public Quests like what will be in WAR I think are a good example), but it is a great way to get players to at least begin to participate in the community.

You see for a lot of players new to MMOs and those brought in by WoW, myself included, an AH represents a relatively painless, easy, and often more than reasonably profitable way to trade; an AH encourages us to at least “have a go” at 'trading' rather than just selling all our stuff to an NPC vendor and heading on our way.

An AH is also a great way for new players to quickly and painlessly find out what something is worth; not sure what your stack of healing potions goes for? Simply look them up, see that 10 other people are selling them for 2-2.5g and base your price on that.

In the end it all comes down to convenience, so while others systems may have worked fine ‘in their day’, just like filling out a withdrawal slip at the bank, there is no denying that a centralised AH (though hopefully with access points throughout the world) is, like an ATM or EFTPOS, simply more convenient, and for the not so straight forward stuff there’s always the trade channel.

With regards to the OPs suggestion; while it does add another layer of convenience (as you can achieve the same thing right now, but it involves the seller cancelling the auction and physically meeting up with the buyer) it also adds another layer of complexity to the AH system, and is trying to bargain down the price of every item on the AH really something that should be promoted? Personally I think it should be left the domain of those with the initiative, patience, and / or drive to do so.

Erm... Let me kinda re-phrase, the AH that i suggest dosen't involve players to cancel and meet up physically with others.

But a chance that they can interact. The seller can assign the goods on AH to player B, but on a time limit, just in case Player B change his mind. So during this time player B have to go to AH to get his goods before they expire to him.

So actually both of them still depend on AH but with a more flexible way and 1 more way to let players interact.

Just think its high time that we bring more "togetherness" between players from the word  "go"....