General Discussion

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?

Dan Fortier:

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.

You can read the whole deabte here.

They had something like this in SWG. You would have to run from player city to player city scanning what each had to sell then decide if you wanted to buy or hope someone else had it lower. Great times when you run somehwere to find they are out of stock.
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.

It's one of the (many) things I like about EvE Online: regional markets. Sometimes it's a challenge on its own to find an item in another region for a very nice price and ship it to another region to sell it with a profit. Trading is good a profession in EVE... in a lot of ways thanks to the regional markets.

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.

Originally posted by gpett

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.

 

I think it is funny you both brought up the fact that the economy in the game should be like a real economy.  The truth is both of your points are somewhat rooted in actual economic problems.  The real truth is if you want a good economy in a game, just look at the laws of economic.  Price goes up, supply goes up, demand goes down etc.. things like that and you will see that the best way to come up with this would probably be a single location market place but you would need some "government" i.e. dev regulation.  Not crazy regulation out the wa-zoo but only when it was needed, you could even include something about the dev's right to do so in the licensing agreement, no one would notice anyways.  Other than small interaction to break up market power(monopolies), other than that the fact there is limitless amounts of currency doesn't really help.  Besides that though the market should give the signals to suppliers and consumers and i am in no way saying that the devs should control a large portion of how the market should run.  So it really comes down to, you could certainly create a wonderfully balance and stable economy in a game, it really would not be that difficult, but if you were to do so I think you would see that it doesn't make for a very fun game.  I played SWG at launch and as someone else said they had a more regional type economy where you would have to actually go to the crafters to pick-up/purchase items, but the stock and price were listed in a global auction house so you didnt waste time running out there to find nothing, i like this system.  But i have also played other games with single location markets and they do alright too, they certainly are much more convenient.  The only way you are going to stop gold farmers/cheaters is gonna be to make a realistic economy that is based around the principles of economic, which would included limited currency, dev regulation, and more than likely regional delivery.  Only problem is, this would not be a very fun economic system to use in a game, a friend of mine always tells me realistic doesn't always make for a good game, and this is surely true.

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?