Game Wide Markets / Auction Houses
Staff Writers Dan Fortier and Derek Czerkaski take opposite sides of the issue of game wide markets and auction houses. Do they help or hinder?
Editorial By Dan Fortier on February 17, 2007
Saturday Debate: Game Wide Markets / Auction Houses
Staff Writers Dan Fortier and Derek Czerkaski take opposite sides of the issue of game wide markets and auction houses. Do they help or hinder?
Editor's Note: The opinions expressed in this editorial are those of the author and not necessarily those of MMORPG.com, its staff or management.
One of the best and worst things about MMOs are the complex virtual economies they create. Poor planning, excessive hacking and infinite cash generation have caused serious inflation and top heavy markets for a number of popular games in years past. This weekend we are going to debate one specific issue in particular: Game wide markets/auction houses. The question will be whether listing all of the items in the game for sale and being able to buy them from any location is good or bad.
For some players, having every possible item available for bid or purchase from anywhere might seem like the most convenient way to runs things. The problem with this type of system is that only the most successful crafters/farmers will get their items sold since they can sell it for significantly less than Joe Nobody out in the borderlands, even if the items he creates are easier to gather/produce in the area he is in. Keeping markets specific to certain regions forces prospective entrepreneurs to develop a strong logistic system if they want to dominate a global market, which is the way it should be.
While setting up a regional economy can help to generate a more realistic feel to the game, it doesn't really have a place in today's world. A little bit of healthy competition never hurt anyone in the market place. By creating a world market, you're allowing players to get the most bang for their buck; more goods for less money. Aspiring crafters may not do as well to start, but the overall adventurer will benefit from these lowered prices. This is much more realistic; obviously a Mom and Pop grocery store won't be able to beat out a world famous brand like Wal mart, so why should Joe Schmo's inferior goods be as valuable as Mr. Elite's superior wares? In the world market, you have to build your reputation to earn your keep; you're not given an advantage simply for "born" into a different region.
Would you rather travel to Point A to buy your helmet for an inflated price, Point B to buy your chestpiece in limited supply, and then to Point C to try and find a sword, only to find out there's currently none in stock? I thought not. Having world access allows buyers easy navigation and comparisons between goods and their pricing. I for one prefer NOT to alt + tab to check popular websites for auction values every time I want to make a purchase. I want to see competitive gear, compare before I buy, and I want it readily available for my disposal. Reward those who play the market, and penalize those who just throw money at the AH until they succeed.
Lower prices sounds great at first until one group or another develops a monopoly and starts jacking up the prices. There is a good reason why governments in the real world give giant subsidies to small business. Everyone knows what happens when a company gets a firm monopoly in an industry and, unlike the real world, there isn't anyone aside from the Devs who can regulate this.
Games that require no skill or effort to sell items are usually top heavy because the high level players don't need anyone else to sell for them when they can just throw it up for auction and go back to farming those raids. MMOs are supposed to create opportunities for players to cooperate and a single market economy completely destroys this.
Other issues that would arise with a region specific economy can be noted with 3rd party markets. At least with a world market, players have to compete for the lowest prices, and there are a larger variety of sales opportunities at any given time. In game currency farmers already destroy economies; imagine how much more simple it would be for sites like www.ige.com to take advantage of a regional market. Massive farmer guilds could simply monopolize regions entirely, completely limiting the control and flow of certain goods and resources to the player, and in the end, everyone suffers, while the ''cheaters'' who buy their in game currency are rewarded. This is not a trend I feel should be rewarded, ever.
Also, with most regional economy setup, the game slowly evolves into a more centralized market anyway. I can cite FFXI as an example. There were numerous auction houses which were region specific. However, Jeuno was a central city in the game, and as a result, it became the central hub for ALL trade in the game. While establishing regional economies may work in the initial stages of a game, players almost always choose to centralize a specific location themselves. Why prolong the inevitable? All it's really doing is hampering the rate at which crafters can produce goods, and the rate at which they can sell them.
Having a single market does more to encourage RMT than it does to stop it. The type of regional market in my example is one that requires you to actually be there to engage in commerce in that region. To dominate a region as you suggest may be possible but once again the idea is make it as difficult as possible for a single entity to monopolize ALL the markets in the game/server. As I mentioned previously, it would require a well run logistics method to achieve anything resembling a large share of every market. This would force people who wish to engage in this sort of thing to actively participate in the game and use it’s mechanics in order to make money, which is something all but the largest currency seller have been unwilling to do.
While it is impossible to generalize the many varied in-game economic models, I am of the firm belief that any step we take toward a realistic player-run economy is a good one. Having a one stop shop for all items is counterproductive to the development of smaller specialized crafting and discourages well planned merchandising.
Now that Derek and I have spilled our guts on the topic, we want your take on the different kinds of in-game markets. Come out swinging!
Great time when big cities had barkers than just spammed channels.
Then they switched to a auction house and I prefered it.
The global market makes it easier for the small scale enterprise to market their goods making it easier to compete with the large enterprise.
Who is more likely to be able to put in that complicated logistics systems you mention? It sure isn't the small enterprise.
Products being marketed globally makes them all more accessible, increasing supply, which should in turn decrease prices as demand is satisfied more easily.
Global market makes it harder to gouge the market because someone has the only 1 of that uber item in a region.
I have noticed the trend that when many small markets are offered, the players take it upon themselves to declare one market as the main one.
If you look at Ultima Online, there was a bank in every town, each one allowing the player to do the same thing, however it wasn't to long before players got sick of running from bank to bank. Thus Brit bank became the standard area to buy and sell goods.
Even in world of warcraft, there are two auction houses each side has access to, one in there main cities and one in booty bay. However I don't think there is a single server I have been on where the booty bay auction house is really used. Because the players had access to the auction house in there main cities first that became the standard one for global type sales.
Individual markets in a video game is just a waste of time for the players. I see no advantage at all for individual markets. In fact, individual markets punishes people that do not know the game economy. Why would a game intentionaly put in a system that rips-off its new players? Why, encourage "middle man" price speculation for people to inflate prices on goods that they think people are selling too cheaply.
With a centralised auciton house, anyone can check the prices on anything. New players can quickly browse for the prices of goods and sell thier goods accordingly. Thus decreasing the "middleman" price speculators and those that drive up the price of the market. Also, why make a player run all over the game world looking at seperate shops manually? That is annoying and a waste of time that can be better spent in a fun area of the game.
This is such a dumb article. I doubt developers really ponder old questions like this. There are better ways to solve the issues of inflation in a game. How about a moneyless game system of pure barter? Or how about making the economy player driven by not putting npc vendors in a game?
Just, make things like buying and selling as painless as possible.
I think you got it. AHs are not about RPG, they are just game play element to keep players happy. It's convience over inconvience.
Email systems in game are outside the confines of RPG in most game worlds. It exists because players demand it. It makes things a little easier on the players.
These discussions about in-game economies always amuse/annoy me because it seems they are always based on one fundamental flaw: production. I don't mean the infinite creation of wealth, I mean production. MMO games tend to add crafting as an afterthought. It's always the ugly stepchild of the game, seldom given the attention it deserves. So what is the economy of a game actually based on? Theft. Kill the orc, steal its loot. Kill the kobold, steal its loot. Kill the troll, steal its loot. Moreover, it's the orc, kobold, and troll crafters who are superior. How do I know? Because the best loot in the game is achieved by stealing it from them, not by depending on your own home race's crafters.
An entire gameworld whose economy is dependent upon theft. And then we try to talk about a "balanced economy". How daft is that?
I have to totatly disagree. Trying to find the best prices acrossed the galaxy was the greatest thing in SWG and the global AH is one of the things I hate about the newer games. In SWG if you needed to get a little bit of something you could just go to the mini AH thing and snag it, but if you neeeded large amounts you would have to find a vendor. Sure you might get gouged now and again but that was half the fun. Finding that shop with cheap treasures was awesome and exciting when it would happen. The ability to create repeat buisness and gain a reputation for your products and shops. I still remember opening up my chef shop selling brandy and canapes, sooo much fun getting it going and giving out free samples in the cantinas to get my name out there. It wasn't hard and as long as you had a decent product you could get buisness. Then you would need to hire/find some sort of mass supplier so that gave the hunters/farmers a buisness and a name. So when I would get, Hey who supplies your berries? I could tell them my supplier and buisness spreads. It added depth to the game and was fun in its own right to a lot of people.
The individual buisnesses created something that newer MMO players just don't get, Community. Sure you can have speed and ease of use but where is the community? You don't care WHO is selling as long as it is there and cheap. Some people have fun making a buisness and AH's take that away. I don't even care if it is just a centralized market where people set up "stands" to sell things that is better than 1 stop shopping andf at least people will get to know your name. In things like WoW where the only way you can make a name for yourself is to have those rare patterns that takes 1000g to make. There is no crafter community in that game and it honestly made the game less fun for my friends and I.
You can have your ease of use but I will take community over ease of use 1000 times over.
Everyone has to craft. No more loot players could actually use, merely synthing ingredients that can be used to create something better.
For example, instead of killing that kobold and him dropping some chain armor, he might drop a few chain links instead. Get enough of these, build your chain armor, and go with it.
It would be interesting, but then again, what economy would there really be? On paper, it sounds really fantastic, but if you had to craft to make money, who would buy or sell? Everyone would just make their own goods. I think it would also lead to an extremely boring game. Grinding isn't exactly fun as it is, can you imagine if there was literally NO rewards along the way?
The lower income from drops could easily be compensated by through higher quest rewards in terms of money from quest givers. Humanoids could also still drop items of high value.
On the question of markets, while I ike the realism of separate markets, I also enjoy the transparency of at least regional, if not global markets. Local markets is too much of a hassel, unless you devote your time to trading. However, even with a global market, there is the possiblity of taking geography into account. Why not place a transportation fee between auction houses. EVE has done this to great effect, in that you either have to travel to the station where the goods are located to pick them up (paying in time) or pay another player to bring them to you.
Auction houses eh?
The issue for me is much more than that. The issue is the "dumbing down" of MMOg's over the years, into an "easy mode" style of game play, and it's not just the method of how you buy and sell, It's everywhere you look! MMO's today are trivial games.
My definition of trivial "the more a game does for you, the more trivial it becomes"
You have to remove some tedium, but todays games have automated just about everything.
Just like everything else it's a balance.
Forgive me though, I'm oldschool. I played UO when it was real game world.
MMOg's today have been deluged with one utility after another, dumbing down and trivialising the most ordinary activitys. The impact of all of this is lost on most players and developers. They don't get it, and I'm feeling I may be the only one that does...
I could produce a list of how many automated utilitys commonly exist in games, but it's of little use. Most players today know no different, and again... just would'nt get it.
Anyways back to Auction houses and the market.
The first thing that comes to mind with this utility is the damage it does to community. It removes most if not all player interaction. Sure it's convenient as hell, but buyer and seller never meet, never discuss the product, and it's all very antiseptic.
Next be the auction house regional or server wide, they disrupt or overpower local economies. So you will rarely ever see a price difference in a region or on the server duee to natural and local supply and demand.
Also as was mentioned in the artical, it makes it easy for farmers and RM.
From a roleplaying perspective, for you roleplayers out there... how many real medieval markets had an auction house where you could buy from the other side of the world and have your purchace sent to you? So were I a roleplayer I would find this a bit unimmersive. Not to mention the fact that this style of transaction completely removes any roleplay activity.
Nah auction houses, wired transactions, are best left to Sci Fi games like Eve, where this idea of communication and transaction fits, and works well... Even in Eve you must travel to make the pickup, but in WoW the mailman delivers :)
Eve or a game where this mechanic is not out of place, is my only compromise on this utility.
Below is the URL to a thread in which I tell a tale of street vending in UO, as it was back in the day. It may help you to understand my community argument.
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/114764
Actually, when I think more about it, how much is our real world economy based upon theft? I don't mean the game type theft, I mean the way the masses are exploited. There would be no wealth without mass labor, for which the masses are paid a pittance. Everyone in America has the opportunity, with hard work and sacrifice, to move through the strata? Don't make me laugh.
Now that's the right way to think! ;) Recommended reading for the day:
http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Economies-Jane-Jacobs/dp/0375702431
I have a copy on my bookshelf, and it's a very easy and educational read. My take on it is that she tells a story of how the velocity of money in an economy is related (metaphorically) to the flow of water (and other exploited natural resources) in a biological ecosystem. A desert, for example, is a living ecosystem but it is very susceptible to changes in natural resources... like perhaps a gold mining community would be economically susceptible to gold extraction rates. The water (/gold) arrives in a deluge, and quickly disappears. More complex environments like a tropical rainforest have resources travelling between many different layers. Resources there are retained for much longer during various transformations before they finally lose their utility. No resource can be exploited without some kind of cost. No economy exists without exploiting some resource.
And yes, in America just about everyone can better themselves with hard work and sacrifice. I worked with a young woman from India, and her father came to the US with no skills other than farming. He raised his family here as a Janitor, still speaks no English...and has 4 children with Graduate degrees, one is a doctor and one is a lawyer.
He did it through hard work and sacrifice.... others can as well....
LOL thought I'd better edit and stay on topic.....
As to game wide markets, I prefer them over regional ones. I don't enjoy running all over looking for the best deal..but I can certainly see how others would prefer it the other way. Not a game breaker for me either way it goes.....
Hmmm,
Maybe the Real World rules of Econemy don't apply to the standard MMO model. Real World, people will always be online, MMO World people might not "wake up" for months.
As someone posted above, Crafting is treated as the bastard stepchild by the developers on whole. Why should that not carry over to the Econemy as well? Its not Combat (which is universily accepted as the only entertainment of value) so why bother with further understanding it or developing it fully? I applaud Vanguard for creating the Political System as an alternative to combat. I would push for this avenue to have stronger Economic ties to results than "kill and steal" based action.
IMHO
There's an item in dark age called Azure Silencer Fang. The stats are decent but people really like them because of the way they look. When SI came out I got really lucky and got 3 on raids and bought 2 others relatively cheap. Wanting to see what they were worth I saw in housing that the cheapest one was 150 plat, (that's 75% of the maximum amount of money any one toon can even have). I put two of mine in my cm wanting some cash but not wanting to gouge people. I put them up for 25 plat a piece. They sold the next day, but then I noticed the guy that had 1 for 150 plat, now had 3 for that price. I've seen the same thing happen to a lot of items I've sold. I try to bring items to the market at a lower price, but they are bought almost immediately and the prices are jacked up. Realm wide markets are extremely easy to create a monopoly in. If someone has enough money, they can buy out all the cheap items and jack the prices up to a point that any average player will never see them. And this is not an item that even dedicated players will ever see. It takes a very strong bg of people to even get to the mobs that drop them, and almost every raid I've been in over the last 2 years where it might drop, the bg leader simply takes the item and says screw you to the 60-100 people that made it possible. An idea that seems to be catching on are the raids where everyone in the battlegroup gets the item.
Local markets for each city/town, created and managed by the players of that town (Threw use of NPC mode ETC) is the way to go..not only for all MMO's but most.
I will be very disappointed if they continue to list items across the entire game.
No broker, auction, bazaar or what ever you want to call it.
As far as ingame mechanics..I do hope that you can set your NPC up to be able to list items FOR acution on THAT NPC As an option to a flat price when selling.
Acution houses (or what ever you wish to call it) are a bane to MMO's.
Thew history of them each and every MMO that uses one has to take drastic mesures to combat the things i listed above (such as no trade, soulbinding, ETC...).
Considering every one has the ability to to become a crafter in most games, If a game uses an auction house (or what ever) that lists all items across the game (Becouse thats what they do) all games WILL have the same problem.
[h1]IT NEVER WORKS.[/h1]
Thoes guys in the mountains may have the iron..but they dont have the weat.
If a crafter in a small village wants to craft his swords for 10 goths and seel them in his town for 15 goths...More power to him. If there is a crafter in a town 30 miles away that sells them for 20 goths, more power to him. If that same crafter wants to but the first crafters swards for 15 move them to his town and resell them for 25 goths MORE POWER TO HIM!
This is the way of the world...and it should be no diffrent in
MMOs.
The only way it would be a good thing is IF the acution house IS a house IN one of the starting citys..and you have to be IN that house to bid, and it is NOT listed across the entire game.
A true acution house IN a loacation and not listed in any place other than that house. Peroid.
Anything other than that we will get the same problems that every other MMO has faced.
i dont mean EACH city should have one... I would attach it to a size and make this allowed building City size restricted.
Only large citys should have somthing like this.
And im only speaking about acutions...not flat priced items.
I would still prefer if when we start getting options to go into NPC mode and have the option of listing an item open for biding while still listing other items for flat prices. So in the smaller citys its up to the merchant...in larger ones you have the option of this house.
This all of course works better for games that are not item/loot based, and player created based. (Mobs drop parts/components)
I love economy debates they always get so indepth.. Anyways I have to weigh in on the subject . I think regional economies are important. For one it gives the new player a fighting chance to join the crafting profession. Which I think is simportant if you want a larger community. I think the pre NGE SWG was proof of that. By having regional suppliers you limited the crafter to selling on only a few planets. It also made people talk with one another "hey man you know a good vendor who sells such and such" To me regional economies are best it adds to the RPG and encourages community. For those people saying convieniece is most important all I have to say is if your willing to raid for hours on end to get an uber item. Why is it so different shopping around for your other needs a little while. If convienince is such an issue, I think it should be a cross of SWG and their listing all items but make it so you still have to fly out to buy the item.
Lastly I think the real problem with game economies is the lack of money sinks. As long as you can make way more than you spend you will have inflation and skewed economies.
I think there are enough money sinks. Devs look for more all the time. But, some people make more money than others do; not everyone enjoys crafting, believe it or not. So, adventurers have to rely on quests and drops. With the new "you pick it up, you own it", there isn't much chance to make money from that. So, please, no more money sinks.
I can't help wondering how gold farmers make their money now.
/more SWG
The planetwide search helped a LOT, there were tens of thousands of vendors, if not more, full of mostly crap. The vendor search allowed people to find what they were looking for, at the best prices. It was one of the few changes they made post-cu that I think made a positive impact.
Also, about the "little guy," dont feel bad for those smaller crafters. If they're little it either means 1) They're not as devoted as the bigger crafters 2) They're new. Either case, with hard work and dedication, even if you're new, you can easily outquality the big crafters. Most of them make decent equipment for a decent price, this is where the smaller crafters can come in and make uber equipment for uber prices. This is how I always ran it on SWG. I didnt have the time, resources, etc to mass produce quality goods, so I stuck to making enhanced equipment, and I made a fortune doing it. Sure, it takes a long time, I spent over a year just collecting resources, and I still never got everything I needed (I never did make a T-21), but I made what I could, and I made it good. This is all that matters.
*Carresses the memory of his 1800 dura +130 krayt geo pistol*
*Cries for whoever bought it, since durability and stun went out the window*
One of the aspects where the "real world" argument for regional markets breaks down is that for most MMOs, it's relatively easy to traverse all or most of the world without too much time penalty or risk. In SWG, if I wanted an item that was only made by a crazy chef using an exploited vendor on Dathomir, (the other end of the universe) it would be an annoying waste of an hour to get there and back, but not much more than that. In the "real world" if I (a middle-class American) want an Double-Double from In & Out (Southern California hamburger chain) it's a major undertaking, because I live 1000 miles from the nearest location. It's stuff like this that I think makes the regional economy work in EVE, but not in SWG.
Another point on SWG. I don't know about other servers, but for the one I was on, Coronet, Corellia pretty much became a giant trade center. Malls (guild halls full of vendors) pretty much became the main place to buy stuff, neatly circumventing the regional economy argument. Sure you could waste an hour looking for the perfect piece of armor, but most people (me included) would rather pay a little more for the convenience of finding what we need in ten minutes.
Does a global economy make it more difficult for crafters? Maybe a little. I'm doubtful that it makes it all that much easier for a monopoly though, simply because I feel a global economy makes it easier to undercut the leader. For most players, though, it's a win. Less downtime, and more time playing the part of the game you enjoy is always a win in my book.