Comments on: I sometimes wonder if the Auction House was such a great idea …

By: nugget

nugget — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 10:38:50 +0000

“If you could trade every piece of gear, every reputation, every token in the game for gold, then actually playing the game (other than to find a good gold making strategy and then sticking to it religiously) would be a mug’s game.”

FW has something like this in place. The only BoP gear is arena gear – all else is BoE.

The only BoP items are for crafting and for getting rewards, but the rewards themselves (arena gear aside) are BoE.

This means you can buy anything on the AH (with the exception of arena rewards).

And it’s WONDERFUL.

It’s wonderful because you can have your pick of the gear you want (people do sell anything eventually, it’s just a question of patience), before you ever set foot in an instance, and before you hit that level. It’s something to look forward to.

It’s wonderful because you can do instances for fun, if you shop in the AH, instead of constantly praying your gear will drop.

It’s wonderful because gear is diabloesque randomised, even for ‘set’ pieces (only the set bonuses are um. set), making set gear no better than random gear at any given time. Certainly generally no worse (unless you choose poorly), but never FAR AND AWAY superior.

It’s wonderful because with FW, PWE has solved the gold faucet problem that has plagued this genre since MU* days. I’ve written at length on how they’ve done that, so I won’t go into it here, save to say that 6+ months from the launch of open beta (heh their games never leave beta..), the economy and currency is stable and there has been no inflation. It’s the same as it was on day 1.

I’m not sure what you mean by “a mug’s game”. I just want to point out that with the right systems in place, built from ground up, a game where everything is tradeable for gold can work, and work beautifully.

(On a side note, I think PWE devs spend far longer looking at and tuning their currency and economies than they do on their PvE encounters lol.)

By: Carson

Carson — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 01:58:50 +0000

I’ve spent the last few months playing Guild Wars pretty heavily, after literally years of exclusively playing MMOs with functioning auction house systems.

And I have to say, going from some form of trade interface to old-school spamming of chat with “WTB!” and “WTS!” isn’t much fun.

I like the idea of trading in Guild Wars.. but frankly, I don’t do it. I unload stuff to vendors for a fraction of what it might potentially be worth to another player, simply because when I’m playing a game, I want to PLAY the GAME, not stand around in town spamming and hoping someone will respond.

By: spinks

spinks — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 18:32:47 +0000

My theory is that inscription was basically the industrial revolution of WoW. I’m sure there must have been people making gold in industrial quantities before that, but it seems to really have become a thing afterwards.

Yes, some people did well out of it, and it’s exciting to discover new and awesome strategies to do anything. But I don’t think the actual process of making and selling thousands of glyphs is particularly fun and I’d rather they switch up crafting and trading in more interesting ways (eg. buy options, etc) rather than making a couple of new tradeskills which happen to be ‘overpowered’ for making gold.

By: Stabs

Stabs — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 18:05:51 +0000

I think the issue with WoW was that when they introduced a system (glyphs) into an economy where the systems functioned differently because they wanted to shake things up. It allowed entrepreneurs to make vast amounts of money playing a sub-game that most players didn’t even know existed which was exciting and emergent for the players who did get it.

The Occam’s Razor of WoW is that all design choices are clever. Thinking the devs did a “dumb move” that “screwed up” the game is almost always wrong. WoW may be declining but that’s just entropy, it’s just time. There are very few things in WoW that are designer mistakes even if there are a lot of things that seem so.

By: spinks

spinks — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 02:19:20 +0000

Better in the sense of being a better simulation of a perfect capitalist market, or better in the sense of being more thematic, or better in the sense of better/ more balanced gameplay?

It makes a difference which one you choose because one of them (the EVE option) leans your game further towards Sim Capitalism. Is that where you want the emphasis on your virtual world?

By: Tesh

Tesh — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 22:16:33 +0000

On the other hand, maybe that’s a call to make the economic systems better. *shrug*

By: spinks

spinks — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 19:49:19 +0000

High liquidity does change the balance of a game and makes AH playing relatively more important. That’s probably cool if you enjoyed doing it anyway, but I think in a game like WoW (or most MMOs other than EVE) where the economy really wasn’t well designed (which is why inscription broke it so hard frex), it’s better to keep liquidity controlled otherwise your game gets optimised into a minimal set of optimal gold getting activities.

By: Azuriel

Azuriel — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 19:06:24 +0000

To be honest, this discussion to me is both bizarre and fascinating. As ArMo mentioned, playing the AH became the game to me for probably the last five months of my time playing WoW (and another 6-7 months at the end of Wrath). Without it, Blizzard would have lost $165 in subscriptions from me. It was not the gold I was after per se, though: it was the successful deal or bargain – I was loathe to actually spend any of the gold, especially if I could make it myself. I had another friend that was semi-successful (~100k) too but he refused to buy ore or herbs unless they were ridiculously cheap; he opted to farm his own materials when possible because he found the action of it relaxing.

What I find bizarre about the discussion though is the sense that high liquidity would somehow displace the “fun” of grinds, etc. I don’t think it does, or would. If I could pay the daily quest NPCs to auto-complete them, I would happily do so and spend the time I saved doing what I actually enjoy doing (AH, BGs, etc). But if those daily quests were themselves fun enough, I would opt to do them myself regardless of how easy it would be to pay my way past them.

I guess I don’t see people going the Sim Capitalism route and doing something they enjoy less simply because of liquidity. If you have to design paternalism in your game to “save players from themselves,” I have to wonder about whether you should save your players by not making the game at all.

By: Stabs

Stabs — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 16:10:31 +0000

Yeah I accept it’s impersonal. There are occasional exceptions. In Eve sometimes people will identify a competitor and open a dialog with them (or add them to friends so they can undercut them when they log off).

What I was really questioning was the value of face-to-face trading. Street corner trading which I’ve done a lot of in my MMOs is generally pretty horrible. I would spam chat with my offerings, have to read a very spammy trade channel to see if people are responding to me and then meet people many of whom were trying it on. I never made a friend off it.

Trading from my home I did a lot of in SWG and I did make a lot of friends. However there were fairly exceptional circumstances – I was the second best Armoursmith on the server, people were utterly dependent on player crafters, Mastery was a very time intensive and hardcore grind.

As for D2 you’re right but I never saw the silent 95%. My opinion is based on Us (small tight-knit group of gamer purists) and Them (the people who spam chat channels and post about uber builds in D2 forums).

By: depizan

depizan — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 15:05:11 +0000

I don’t know which came first, the Auction House or having skills (fast flying comes to mind) that are sufficiently expensive that one has to put effort into having the money for them, but I will say that – as someone who doesn’t want to be forced to interact with other people – if the game requires me to make money in some way, I’d like for it also to have a way to do it without interacting with people.

That said, would I miss the Auction House in WoW if it vanished? Well, provided they did away with the few quests that required it (which they may have done in the revamp) and dropped the prices of things like fast flying, no, no I wouldn’t.

However, since I play WoW solo or with friends, as it stands the AH is kind of necessary. If I had to hawk things in trade, I wouldn’t. The AH is one way of making extremely shy players less of a problem for the game.