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Market discussion thread

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xarcx
Posts: 26
Age: 35

Market discussion thread

Post#1 » Tue Jan 20, 2015 6:22 pm

Since the chat usually goes wild :wapen when debating about what markup each items or resources should have, I was thinking that it would be good to have a topic on the forum about this.

My stand on the market right now is that the VU is new and lootable weapons/items should be worth at least 200%. Although the problem with this is that the loot is not good at the moment and many do not see that it is worth paying a lot of markup because they can not get good return, but I think that we should not forget about what is important now in the beginning of VU and it is to skill fast so better weapons should be worth this much even if the loot is bad.

Another problem with item markup is the value left on the item, some players think that even if an item has 5 dinar value left on it, it should still be as high as 200%, well it is not... IMO it should at least be 1/4 of the value left for it to be high markup.

What do you think about markup and the market?

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Qweeg
Posts: 24

Re: Market discussion thread

Post#2 » Wed Jan 21, 2015 11:16 am

Hi xarcx,

Interesting topic - but so difficult to come up with an answer. In principle I get where you are coming from and that items that are rare and greatly assist in skilling should have a good markup, and probably your percentages are as good as any.

But surely its impossible to dictate a pricing structure? You can suggest something that is sensible and people can in principle agree but there is nothing to stop them from selling at a different price. I can go to Babylon and spam chat offering guns at 10% less than your recommended if I want to just to get the sales. Then what do you do - keep your price the same, match me, or undercut me effectively starting a price war?

Or I could buy a certain gun every time someone is selling it @ say 200% and never use them or sell them. Eventually I might well find that I am the only one that has this gun and then I can sell it for a huge markup because I have a monopoly. People will moan but if I am the only one selling this gun and it is unique in some way what choice to they have?

The point is that the economy and pricing is driven by the players (and obviously the rarity of an item, which is decided by the dev team), and there will always be someone looking for an edge - both buyers and sellers. Equally there will be players who just want to offload things and not wait for the best price - me for example actually. I have a few bits of female armor that I can't use and will gladly trade for no markup, just base value - they are only about 1/4 value though so that kind of fits with your idea of lower value items should have less markup.

Anyway to summarise I agree in principle with your ideas and figures, but I think in practice the market will decide naturally - if traders price things too high and there is competition they wont survive. Too low, they wont make a profit. Items will trend towards an accepted price and then fluctuate a bit based on balancing changes and anomalies - such as a new trader entering the market and offering everything at a discount.

Also I think it's really early to be able to price the market because there are changes happening to loot and balancing pretty much every day. And all the prices will drastically change when crafting comes in to complete the economy.

Out of interest are you looking for a general rule to apply - or to price every item available?

Cheers,
Q

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xarcx
Posts: 26
Age: 35

Re: Market discussion thread

Post#3 » Wed Jan 21, 2015 3:20 pm

Yeah I do agree that it is somewhat impossible to create a pricing structure and that it should not exist in a player based market. My initial post is about my view on what most of the (lootable) items should be worth at the moment and why. I guess I am trying to logically find a "general rule to apply" on how to (as buyer and seller) figure out reasonable price range to buy/sell items :) Since auction house do not exist and items supply is only based on loots (not crafting) it is hard to know which price range that is reasonable, but I guess that is the challenge :top

The market will as you said naturally decide what items should be worth. I think the most interesting with Project Ion´s market is that it is totally based on "limited" items, I mean items that is not repairable. This creates a high of demand for these items and the lootpool (I guess) plays a bigger and more important role for the market than if there was unlimited items. This requires continously drops of items to feed the playerbase, so to speak. I do not know if unlimited items will be introduced but it will be exciting to speculate what those will be worth. Also I think pricing items will make more sense when crafting arrives and it will be fun to see what resources are worth.

Anyways nice post Qweeg, what do you think about crafting and limited items affect on market? :D

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Qweeg
Posts: 24

Re: Market discussion thread

Post#4 » Wed Jan 21, 2015 3:52 pm

lol - I can't make up my mind on limited versus unlimited. In EU I always used unlimited - but I started out back when it was PE and everyone used unlimited. In AW everything is limited, but repairable a set number of times - like a number of lives.

I love the idea of really rare loots containing unlimited items but not sure it helps the economy, and over time I think it might devalue the crafting profession. But I still want cool items in my loot - not just components for crafting, as there's no excitement then. You could have a system were unlimited items required a repair kit that had to be crafted - that way crafting would still be needed even for unlimited items. Or some guns are crafted and some are only looted.

Unlimited items would only really effect the market if they were more common I think - if they are super rare then most people still rely on limited items and the market won't really move much. My gut feeling is that there won't be any unlimited items - but of course only Jelle and John know for sure (maybe they will pop in and tell us ;-) ).

Crafting is a whole different thing though - it so complex to balance I don't envy the devs at all. But I think that miners will become more important for sure. That's way harder to skill up than hunting at the moment - so I think there may be less skilled miners out there. They might do really well when crafting comes in.

It's exciting though as its all unknown and fun to speculate.

Q

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