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Do auction houses suck?
http://www.avian-gamers.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=20749		 Page 1 of 1
Author:  X2-PB [ Tue Mar 20, 2012 2:23 pm ]
Post subject:  Do auction houses suck?
An interesting article from Raph Koster on the economy design in SWG.

http://www.raphkoster.com/2012/03/20/do-auction-houses-suck/
Author:  Cetera [ Tue Mar 20, 2012 7:06 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Do auction houses suck?
Man, I love Raph. If he were to ever make a new game MMO, I'd play it. Probably to the exclusion of everything else.
Author:  Dragon Fire [ Tue Mar 20, 2012 7:59 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Do auction houses suck?
Quote:
SWG eventually did put in a serverwide auction house, responding to WoW. It made life easier for the buyers. But it created a perfect information economy, and all that complexity and variation that was present in the market earlier fell away. Small shopkeepers were shut out of markets.

To my recollection SWG always had an auction house. It was occasionally useful for finding resources or odd clothing items, holocrons etc... Most of the time I purchased my "rare" or desired items off of the forums auctions. I don't recall ever relaying on the AH terminal, most of the time I went to merchants I knew or I stumbled across. In retrospect I find that odd. There was definitely a lack of market knowledge in many markets that prevented a race towards the bottom on pricing. Resource base price was probably the only fairly transparent market.

Quote:
All of this meant that a merchant could never rely having the best item, or the most desirable item (indeed, “most desirable” could exist on several axes, meaning that there were varying customer preferences in terms of what they liked in a blaster). Word spread through informal means as to the locations of rare ore deposits.

Perhaps for a small time merchant/crafter, I never really saw this within Avian. Emissive Technologies put out armor like it was our business, it was consistent in quality in the areas that most people noticed. Where our ability to experiment and stock quality resources created an advantage was in creating specific armor types that boosted a specific stat (kinetic/acid/stun composite) typically for people who wanted to PVP. For those that didn't our ability to experiment and the quality of our resources allowed us to bring down encumbrance down to a level where minor food buffs allowed you to get into it without having to shoot up the spice or spend 15 minutes in a cantina.

I think that because most tissue/clothing mods didn't really work with armor for a number of reasons, that we never had the problems that weaponsmiths did with kryat tissues and the like. Core Resources and our own harvestors kept us stocked.

Regardless, I don't know how you implement a similar system without allowing for a sandbox game. I have very rarely bothered with actually selling my goods after SWG.
Author:  Master Gui-Jan [ Tue Mar 20, 2012 8:55 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Do auction houses suck?
Dragon Fire wrote:
To my recollection SWG always had an auction house.

Raph is referring to a "Server-wide" Auction-house. The game did not make the Auction house server-wide for quite a while. I remember when it happened we had huge discussions in-game about whether or not we needed to start buying stuff off the auction house to pump up demand.
Author:  X2-PB [ Wed Mar 21, 2012 6:09 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Do auction houses suck?
Dragon Fire wrote:
Regardless, I don't know how you implement a similar system without allowing for a sandbox game.
I have a number of ideas on this front, however I think combining SWG crafting with SWTOR's stories would require a radically new MMO design. The thing I didn't like about SWG (other than the fact that they screwed it up and everyone left) was the lack of story or specific direction of things to do. The thing I don't like about SWTOR is its lack of sandbox. I really want an MMO with something in between.
Author:  Cetera [ Thu Mar 22, 2012 1:51 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Do auction houses suck?
Yes, I agree, Antan. I don't know that they can create a worthwhile story or direction without running into the same problems of everyone being the hero, which then forces a lot of design features that result in WoW and SWTOR, where everything must be limited. If everyone was just an average Joe, it would work well, but then who wants to play that? Certainly there is a segment of the market that would, but the game would certainly be less popular. It would be easier to do in an SF setting in a huge galaxy than in a small fantasy realm though.
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