Edit: Illuminating data on people who have -1'd the OP. If you wonder why people are against this suggestion, look at how it might affect their wallet:
Dach - 8 offers on marketplace, all asking for X item + 55k gold, without rhyme or reason except to ensure a tidy profit.
Kafein - one of 5 players with a trade booth. Simplifying the market would ensure that his trade booth would no longer have a purpose.
Mwiw - 22 offer on marketplace, all asking for X item in exchange for his near worthless Danish Greatsword.
Falka - "plenty of ppl got fucked up by market sharks, but it's their own fault to some extent."
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The goals of a marketplace system should be to:
1) Facilitate item/heirloom point transfer between players;
2) Encourage possessing things of value;
3) Encourage fairness and arms-length dealing.
The current marketplace system achieves only the first, most basic goal of a trade system. I propose a new, intuitive and easy to code overhaul of the marketplace:
Players should only exchange items/loom points for an amount of gold and the 5% tax on item exchanges should be lowered to 1%.
===PROS===
- Eliminate the "lazy tax"
One problem with the current system is that understanding the implications of accepting any given offer requires a near encyclopedic knowledge of prior transactions and patch histories. Players are unable to sift through the labyrinthine amount of offers and requests, let alone draw a meaningful set of conclusions about item value from that data. Instead, both offerors and requesters understandably and lazily ask for another ~50k when they list an item.
To illustrate the difficulty in determining the actual value of an item, here is a look at some offers of a +3 Awlpike, the alphabetically highest item in my last searched category:
Bec de Corbin + 55k gold
Long Spear + 30k gold
Now the flipside. Requests for an Awlpike:
Bec + 19k gold [36k lazy tax]
Long Spear - 97k gold [127k lazy tax]
- Very easy to determine the relative value of items.
A gold-only system very clearly shows which items are valuable and helps players decide where to invest their heirloom points. An extreme example that most players already know: don't put heirloom points into crossbows and danish greatswords. But there are other over-supplied items as well. A simple price listing would reveal them with a glance, instead of hours of clicking through links on the market site.
- Reduce marketplace offer spam.
Currently, standard practice for someone trying to sell or purchase an item is to post a dozen offers or requests listing numerous combinations of heirloom points and gold. Each of these listings:
A: Require the listor to estimate the value of the item they wish to trade. A little experience with the system shows that players are not the most objective appraisers. Try the Awlpike example with any other item!
B: Require the listor to estimate the value of the other item they wish to trade for.
C: Add enough extra gold to ensure they won't feel cheated if someone accepts their trade.
D: Represents an identical valuation. Instead of players able to just list gold, that quantity has to be some creative amalgamation of gold, heirloom points, and items, carefully calibrated to meet the ideal.
===CONS===
- Some players resent change. Players who have invested hundreds of hours into figuring out how to game the market will not like this change.
- Some players think the devs are removing everything from the game and that more complexity is always good. This change will bring about simplicity.
- This change will complicate the ability of players to gift heirlooms by trading rocks or straw hats. But there is an easy workaround. Just make a post in the marketplace declaring your intention to trade to so-and-so player and then do it quickly. It isn't like there are many players spamming refresh on the marketplace waiting to grab a deal that an admin will just revert anyways.
- This change will require some additional coding. However the code for gold-only transfers is already in place.
===Reduce the Tax===
The 5% tax rate is probably too high for pure gold transfers. I suggest reducing it to 1-2%. I suspect but cannot prove that 99.99% of gold taken out of the system is done so via item repairs and not the tax on transactions so reducing the tax should not affect gameplay.
tl;dr The marketplace system is the Gordian Knot of cRPG but the devs are Hercules.
