Things have been quiet recently...

[Karl G.]

I wanted to give everyone an update on...well...the next update! It's coming along well, and I plan to introduce the core of the game with this update: 1.11 will include both merchants and Geosids.

I have decided to go with a slightly different approach to merchants than what I originally anticipated. Although I would like to introduce the bazaar system at some point in the future, for now I thought something a bit different would work even better. My fundamental gripe with NPC merchants is that they introduce a limitless supply of items or gold into the world. Of course, this can be limited--but how do you specify the limit? How can you predict how much to sell a "sword" for, for example? I have no idea how relatively useful these items will be to players, so I don't want to impose some kind of artificial fixed value.

The solution? Free market economics! Let the players be merchants. In the next update, you will be able to make your character become a merchant. By bringing up the appropriate dialog, you can assign prices to anything in your inventory and list them as being "for sale". Players that are selling items as merchants will be easily identified as such (help me out--how should this look?) and those wishing to purchase items would only have to go up to them and look through the items they have for sale.

I am thinking about making players in merchant mode stay in the world when you leave the game--thoughts?

The currency for Evidyon will be introduced this update. I'm thinking of just using the standard "gold". Monsters will drop gold and quests will pay gold; also, I will be giving everyone in the game gold to jump-start the trading and see what happens. I will try to add more items and vary the monsters this update to make gaming more interesting, but the big change will happen for 1.12 when I wipe the items (I am pushing this decision back because I want the bugs worked out of the geosid/trading system first).


Ideas? Comments? I'd love to hear them

[Burnt Ferret]

Love the ideas. You mentioned something about possibly limiting the supply of gold into the economy. I'm not sure if that would even be a smart thing to do unless the limit itself is pretty darn high.

Imagine a world of 100 characters, and lets say Exo and myself are really adept at gaining wealth and trading around. We end up controlling 90% of the gold, leaving a fixed 10% for the rest of the 98% of the population. Would kind of suck for them.

You two ways to easily solve this gold issue would be to introduce something like RuneScape does where you can sell an item to a merchant for 10g lets say, the merchant has it in his inventory for maybe 20 minutes before it disappears, and every 10 items the merchant has, the value the seller gets decreases by a fixed percentage until a minimum value of say 1% of the initial value is reached... That was long winded, but i think you get the picture.

The other way is to also implement items in the game that are useful and are needed. These would be similar to the portal scrolls, health potions and mana potions, possibly "propping" items -- stuff like that. It will take some tweaking to get the prices right, but with some time i'm sure it would balance out.

Overall i really enjoy the player-merchant ideas, and i like the "staying logged on" part too, i just think it should be in a certain area in the game so it's all localized.

Also really looking forward to the new items !

[Karl G.]

Thanks for the response. Yes, I did say that I wanted to limit the amount of gold in the game--but it's not going to be a hard limit. It's just that, like any other currency, if there is a lot of it then the currency starts losing value. In a system where there is no "exit" for the gold but gold keeps coming in, inflation is unavoidable. There will definitely be enough to for everyone to have money though.

I was thinking of making a central point in the world that is a large safe zone; essentially, a merchant town. That way people can set up characters there to hang out and sell stuff. I suppose at some point there will need to be a limiter so that there aren't hundreds of merchants set up there...

[Cagen]

Imagine a world of 100 characters, and lets say Exo and myself are really adept at gaining wealth and trading around. We end up controlling 90% of the gold, leaving a fixed 10% for the rest of the 98% of the population. Would kind of suck for them.

Hahaha, I would say this is a realistic possibility .

As per the player mechants idea, I am not a fan. I have briefly played awful korean/chinese MMOs with this system and it gets very tedius having to go through each players merchant that is online and go through their items to see what they have, especially compared to having a central location where all the items are stored and can be cycled through (or preferably searched).

As with leaving the players online after they log off, everyone will have a merchant up all the time, even if they had to be online to trade most people would have multiple accounts running, one minimised or in the background running the merchant. I can't see any benefit of having player run merchants over just having a bazaar or auction house personally.

Gold for the currency is fine, keep it simple.

[kuba]

I agree with Cagen. Besides leveling the only thing left for players to do is trade. With a merchant system everyone will always be left in merchant mode, and as mentioned I'd hate to have to check on everyones inventory. I would go with something more simple. Introduce currency, set prices for items, get feedback, and go from there. I think most of us won't mind not having a bazaar/auction system for some time as long as we can trade and communicate. Ultimately though I would just go with an auction house.

[Karl G.]

Hmmm...yeah I could see how walking around to different players could be annoying. I guess I'll just go with the auction house--it's a bit more difficult to program but it might be worth it.

The reason I'm very concerned with this is that the Geosid system is designed to work specifically with a user-based sales economy and I can't release one without the other.

[Joe M.]

Definitely something like an auction house.

[Burnt Ferret]

Would it be possible to do an auction house, where of course you put your items you want to sell in there for others to buy, but also you can put it what you want and for how much you want to spend? So you just deposit the gold and wait for somebody to throw in the item for that amount or lower....

well, you'd know what would be the easiest way to program that, the idea is just a mesh of the two main ideas.

[kuba]

Your post is a little unclear but I think what your asking is for an auction house that allows us to also post "Want to Buy" offers that others could use to make a sale (granted the price is right) instead of putting it into the auction house.

It's a good idea but I imagine it would require a lot of additional programming to the auction house, in which case I'd rather see us get a working AH and leave it to players to use the global chat or message boards to post WTB offers.

If an auction house is a big task for you Karl I'd prefer to see more content and gameplay fine-tuned before a feature such as this, imo.

[Karl G.]

Would it be possible to do an auction house, where of course you put your items you want to sell in there for others to buy, but also you can put it what you want and for how much you want to spend? So you just deposit the gold and wait for somebody to throw in the item for that amount or lower....

well, you'd know what would be the easiest way to program that, the idea is just a mesh of the two main ideas.

Yes, that is possible and I've thought about it before--but I've never been able to come up with a solution to the problem it introduces. How do you specify the item you want to buy? If you provide a list, then the player is able to see every item in the game (even the super-rare ones) and it removes the element of mystery. If you don't give a list and just use items the player has seen, when one player moves from a character to another he or she will have to go look at items before he/she can make a bid for an item the player knows about but the system doesn't know that the player knows about.

[Burnt Ferret]

Then only use the auction house for common -> semi rare items. Keep the rare items restricted to player-player trading and message board advertising?

[Draco]

How about this?

Have an auction house, much like the Xen auction house only when it comes to putting your items up for sale.

Each item can have an average acceptable price that if someone wants to sell their item for the 'acceptable' price (or under), the item will sell to the auction house directly, and the player can get the cash instantly.

If the price you put in is above the common acceptable price, you must wait until the item sells for you to get your money.

The more expensive items and less common items sold can just not be given an accepted price, so they won't sell instantly.

All items put into the auction house of one type can be piled into one slot... like 5 people can sell their HP Potions at different prices...

1 person sells an HP potion for 50 gold
2nd person sells same for 100 gold
3rd sells for 125
4th sells for 125
5th sells for 200

The common acceptable price for a Health Potion can be fixed at 150... meaning the players who chose to sell their items at 50, 100, and 125 will get their money instantly... but anyone selling over 150 will have to wait until theirs actually sells.

Of course though... the commonly accepted price would be a lower than the actual worth of the item.

This would probably cause each person to sell their items right at the fixed price so they get their money instantly... so maybe if someone decides to sell an item, if it DOES have a commonly accepted price, they can just press "Sell" with no price entered and it'll sell at the accepted price.

If someone wants to buy all 5 potions, they'd have to pay the total of 600, but... players can set their own price that they'd like to buy the items at... so if someone sets their bid price at 150 maximum, they will buy all but the 5th potion which was over their bid maximum.

Single items can show their own price, and perhaps when viewing multiples (as stackables) of an item, it can show details like this... the one slot for all of the items, each with different prices shown in a list started with cheapest price.

Health Potion
Minimum Price: 50
Maximum Price: 200
Current Price: 50
- 100
- 125
- 125
- 200

When a player chooses to buy an item, it will buy items like potions 1 at a time, but only at the lowest price each time... with each of the higher prices listed 10 prices or so in advance so the player doesn't accidentally buy a potion 5 times at 50 then the next price coming up is like 10,000... they'll see the prices in advance, and not accidentally pay 10,000 for a healing potion.

If a players max bid price is set to 150 for the potions, they can freely click as much as they'd like but it will stop when the price exceeds their maximum willing-to-pay amount.

Again, this is another one of those ideas I come up with that looks really complicated, and actually is slightly complicated in the game, but try to imagine it all, it's probably simpler than some may think.
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Any further thoughts, anyone?

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Other points:
Making the players the merchants sounds like a good idea and all... but I have to agree, I despise the trading system among other games like Conquer, Cabal, Last Chaos or many other Korean MMORPG's... they're all alike and it's very boring, very difficult, and sloppy.

[Burnt Ferret]

I think this is a complex solution to a simple problem. And I think there are a few flaws in the idea. In a way, this would be just like the merchant idea that Karl was trying to stay away from. A person could sell all his crap he gathered from hunting at the "acceptable" price, get his money instantaneously, and then the AH would have, most likely, a surplus of crap that nobody would want to buy.

[Draco]

Well, I tried...

Things could be changed about it only slightly so that there aren't too many items nobody will use... but, I tried.

If anyone likes the idea and/or can think of something to change it or come up with something better, please, go right ahead.

At least with my idea, the items don't necessarily come from nowhere, and it's all sharable among players... players can also give away cheap items to newbs indirectly but they'll just lose out on the cash they could have instead.

I, personally, would love to have instantaneous money... otherwise it's extremely unappealing... I'd much rather use what I can of my supplies to get items to sell, go and sell the items and have money again to continue hunting right away... Once I got the money, however, I don't want to have to go through multiple merchant inventories and very random prices to find what I need.

However, if there's no way to farm instant cash, I'd be screwed out of hunting until my items sold... items would be sold at low prices through desperation of people wanting to simply hunt but not having the supplies.

The way I see it... if an item isn't used and it's not needed... make it needed, make people want it (give a reason for people to want it)... I don't think there should be any useless or otherwise not-used-enough items in any game; everything should be useful to someone in some way...

In the auction menu there should be only one slot for each named item anyway, so obviously it shouldn't look cluttered at all... but as for items that don't get used like multiples and multiples of cheap newb gear... where do you suppose these items go without this kind of system? I don't want to fill my inventory full of cheap newb gear just so newbies have gear to use... I'd much rather put things up that will give ME a sufficient profit.

There can of course be a limit in the auction house or town merchants for how many items they hold (at a time; any extras sold to the merchants/AH would just disappear) so there isn't a constant surplus of unused newb gear.

[Joe M.]

I think this is a complex solution to a simple problem. And I think there are a few flaws in the idea. In a way, this would be just like the merchant idea that Karl was trying to stay away from. A person could sell all his crap he gathered from hunting at the "acceptable" price, get his money instantaneously, and then the AH would have, most likely, a surplus of crap that nobody would want to buy.

Absolutely correct.

[Burnt Ferret]

I'm sorry Draco, I didn't realize how coarse my last reply was until I re-read it. I wasn't trying to be mean in any way.

I also would love to have an instantaneous cash source from selling gear that drops from monsters, and that I wouldn't use. With Karl's initial suggestion, the only way to get "instant" cash would be through quests. I don't know if these quests would be repeatable or not, but I would hope that they would be. If they are though, that idea directly negates the "no merchant" idea where Karl didn't want a non-stop gold supply.

Like I stated previously though, I think the best way to do this would be a combination of the following:

the selling of "junk" gear to merchants for instant spending cash

the questing idea for more gold semi-instant

the AH idea where you can sell in-demand goods to people

But perhaps most importantly...

make sure there are items (armors and weapons) as well as consumables for a decent amount to help trash the accumulated gold

Ej tried to do the last point, with merchant Ayer and the other evil merchant dude, though he failed miserably. Now, if those were things like spirit armors, then that might make a little more sense. You NEED a big enough variety of gear to do this though. Perhaps even making them "non drop non trade" or something similar.

[Joe M.]

make sure there are items (armors and weapons) as well as consumables for a decent amount to help trash the accumulated gold

Yep. If I'm correct, it will be the geosids that really help drain excess gold and items from the game. This might have the effect of turning every item into a consumable, and could make for something of an item-based standard of player power (the only way to be powerful is to be wealthy, game is entirely dependent on items, &c), but perhaps that will be the only way to make this work. And drops on death and careful attention to how the geosids work should help shake that up.

New question:
Karl, when is the planned character-wipe and restructuring of the classes? Is that still on for 1.11, or are we waiting for 1.12 (to go with the item wipe, so that we have time in 1.11 to fully test geosids & trading)?

[Karl G.]

New question:
Karl, when is the planned character-wipe and restructuring of the classes? Is that still on for 1.11, or are we waiting for 1.12 (to go with the item wipe, so that we have time in 1.11 to fully test geosids & trading)?

We are going to wait for 1.12 for the wipe because I want to make sure there aren't any major bugs with the system.

Yep. If I'm correct, it will be the geosids that really help drain excess gold and items from the game

That is the intention. Items that would otherwise accumulate or be sold to merchants will be "liquidated" by the geosids. The difference is that this doesn't have an effect on the economy, so money shouldn't be able to inflate endlessly.

The only qualm I have at this point is on how best to introduce money into the system. Monsters can drop it, but I don't think that would generate quite enough unless *every* monster dropped gold...which would defeat the purpose of the system in the first place. I could give each player a starting amount of gold, but then people would simply create tons of them to get more gold. A better way, I think, would be to introduce quests that give gold as a reward. However, since quests are a little ways off at this point, there needs to be an interim solution. Perhaps I could have the server periodically buy items from the bazaar until the economy gets going...

[Joe M.]

Also (while we're on the subject of future updates and re-structuring):

Is there a plan to make the game more friendly to the lowest-levels sometime in the next couple updates? It will be necessary to do so at least for the character-wipe and class re-structuring: currently it is very difficult to get a character off the ground.

I posted my observations elsewhere, but I'll repeat myself here. These are all regarding the lowest levels of play:
problem:
The map is problematic in 3 ways: (1) spawn is very spread out and difficult to find; (2) there are no areas for low levels to hunt without running into monsters that kill them quickly--trolls, more difficult skeletons, &c; (3) characters are too slow relative both to map size and to monsters (takes forever to find an enemy, and when you do and succeed in getting the monster to low hp, it runs away and you're too slow to catch up!).

solution:
A more compact and clearly defined area of lowest-level monsters (crawlers, very easy skeletons, &c) would be of huge help. Ideally (1) the area of lowest-level hunting would shrink, (2) spawn would increase to fill the area up with lowest-level monsters, and (3) characters would speed up relative to monsters/map-size. But for a quick and dirty solution, it might work just to take the current starting island and raise the spawn of lowest-levels by a whole lot.

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Sorry for all the different topics in just a couple posts, but I think they're all relevant to the immediate future and impending re-structuring.

[Joe M.]

Perhaps I could have the server periodically buy items from the bazaar until the economy gets going...

That might work. An easier (and could be temporary until quests are implemented) solution might just be to have a "junk merchant" to buy up lower-level items. If there's not enough gold in the economy, have him pay more and buy higher-level items; if there's too much, have him pay less and for lower-level items. &c.

[Karl G.]

Evidyon definitely needs to be restructured for noobs in the near future. Once I reduce the class spread and redo the spells, I'll be working on that.

[Karl G.]

The internal code for the bazaar has been finished and tested. I will be adding the GUI interface for it next.

[Exempt]

Just curious is there a time frame for release? Not rushing or anything...maybe a bit.

[Karl G.]

Welllll I wasn't going to post anything tonight, but since you ask: I'm almost there

My goal is to release the bazaar this weekend, plus whatever else I can throw in to make things more interesting.

Have you gotten the game working?

[Exempt]

Yeah, i couldn't connect earlier but the game is starting now.