Project Utumno forum

The Market/Bizarre

Consignment
All players will have the option of posting their items through a vendor and gain 75% of the items worth.

The vendor
Could be a program that organizes the items and places them consecutively giving the right players the money as they sell. I would think that it would be good to place vendors in several areas and make some hard to find. The players would learn that the least used vendor would sell more items for them as we would have a code that the least used vendor would post players first or at the top of the list for the day. This I would hope would keep people from being forgotten as they could always move their items to a better opportunity. Perhaps we could have the vendor give hints to move on.

or

Have it be a job option for a player to do the vending. Where we would post dates and locations where the vendors would have to go to sell. Then we could give them 40% while the person with the item gets 60% as the vendor is an actual human doing work(we have to make it worth it for them). If we did that we would have to have a place where the vendors could go to pick up consignments or have a place where we post the vendors names for players with items to go to.

In order to do that we'd have to get rid of the walmart sort of merchants. This would make an items worth go up or down according to it's availability and badassedness, which I think is really cool. It also keeps people from just finding out that they can get the best armor in drockners forge cheapening the thrill of victory.

We could issue armor or swords or whatever, that there are only a certain number of. Lets say there are only twenty forged of this badass armor. Then there could be issues where there is only one forged. That would make people feel so special and full of identity and establishment. It would also be awesome to set the armors worth by the last auction it had so people would set what it's worth. If anyone is willing to pay 100,000 for it (meaning they buy it for that) well that means it's worth that or more. Let the person set what they want to sell it for. If they can't sell it for what they want they can always go back and lower the price. So the thinking beings who play our games would do our refining of price, for example, "It's not badass enough for me to pay that" or "DUDE... it's SO worth it".


This is a completely rough idea. I'm not sure if it would even work or is possible but I think it would be cool.

Hope you're all doing great.

Tal
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That is some good ideas. I think we could expand on your concept of vendors and player-adjusted-prices to create a virtual open market. I think we could make it simple and not difficult to understand. People are always trying to sell stuff they can't use (a warrior selling spell books, a wizard selling swords) in MMO games. Depending on the rarity of the item, it usually sells for much more than it's game-designated value. having NPC vendors like you suggest allows players to hock their wares and make a profit that is greater than what they would get at a regular in-game store, even if the NPC vendor always takes 40% off the price as a commission. This also allows Player characters to be vendors and tell other players "Hey! I will sell your stuff, but i'll only take 20% commission, so you get even more profit!" Now both the player with the item to sell and the player selling it make a profit. Of course the player providing the item has to set a reasonable price, and the player vending the item has to have good salesmanship, so the market value of that particular item is automatically set at a competitive price.

This is a way to automatically balance parts of the game that we couldn't have forseen being imbalanced. Lets say some players discover an overlooked feature of a weapon/necklass combination we placed in the game. The weapon does more damage the lower your life is. The necklass makes you undead. Since undead are considered to have negative health, the combination of the two make the sword do WAY more damage than it should since negative life is VERY low health and therefore causes the sword to do VERY high damage. The result is people scrambling to buy the two items. Demand for the items goes up from 1000 gp each to 5000 gp and then rapidly to 1000000000 gp each. The cost is set by the amount of gold that the highest bidder is willing to pay, so the richest player just spent his life savings on this weapon combo. Sure the player may have an unfair advantage, but he paid dearly for it and will probably be spending some time earning all that gold back. Other players will find it very difficult to get the same "unfair advantage" and will find that it isn't worth the effort to "cheat" like that. Now the game is balanced and it really isn't considered cheating anymore...

I think we want to avoid doing what Blizzard did with starcraft: Every time a player would develop a devastating strategy for winning, Blizzard would "fix" the game so players couldn't have an "unfair advantage". I know that some things will need to be tweaked to avoid truly unfair advantages, but the fun part of starcraft was coming up with effective strategies to defeat your opponent. The whole point of that game was to find unfair advantages and exploit them. The player who does it best, wins. I think an in-game free marken economy will help automatically adjust for unfair advantages while still rewarding players for creative strateigic play. In the above example, we may still decide to fix the glitch and have the sword do damage by the absolute value of the player's life once we notice the problem.

What are some good ways to incorporate cool game economics without making the game overly complicated for the player?

How much should we consider fluctuations in game balance to be "part of the game" and not just a glitch?

The post about is somewhat related to this discussion. Check it out.