03-25-2010, 11:09 AM
Dawntide Beta Patch Notes Wrote:•Markets have been implemented in Burgvik and Jardvall. At markets, you can sell goods based on supply and demand. Certain markets will have higher or lower demands for different type of goods (one market may pay premium prices for weapons, etc). A market that has a lot of a certain type of resource or good will pay poor prices for it, while one with none will pay a high price. The size of the town the market is in determines how much goods it will buy before prices start going down. You will also be able to buy anything a player has sold to a market, again with a price based on supply - unless the town's residents buy it first.
Reading this, I was thinking it could be a good design for a market system. The PotBS market system I though was pretty good, but players still set the prices. In the above Dawntide market system, the game sets the prices, but players can still influence them depending on where they sell and buy stuff. Players can actually make money by buying bricks in a desert town that is near a lot of mineral deposits, then ferrying it to another continent in their barge and selling it to a town that is in the middle jungle.
Something players do a lot in Auction House systems is keep playing the market while standing in one place. It was common in WOW, and even worse in AION. If you wanted to sell a sword, you could look at the market prices for that type of sword and see that there were 3 up for 200k, 1 for 190k, 2 more for 180k, and so you could decide that you wanted to sell your sword for 150k. Someone else would just buy your sword and put it back up for 180k. It didn't hurt you - you still got your 150k, but it hurt the people that actually wanted to buy a sword. People standing at the AH doing that 24x7 caused prices to inflate over time since people couldn't actually undercut when something was in high supply. It wasn't rare to go to the AH in Aion and look for something like shields, see 70 of them up there, but all of them for rediculous prices simply because people were buying and immediately relisting them resulting in the price staying high.
In a system like the one quoted above, buying and relisting isn't possible without taking the time and having the means to move the goods to another town yourself.
Does anyone else think this is either a good or bad system? Do you think it's better or worse than the PotBS system? Do you think it's better or worse than the WOW/Aion style Auction House system?