djbiznatch: "Keep in mind guys there is no promise of WHEN this update is coming, simply that they are working on it. It could be a month, two months, or even further down the line"
Didn't Nick say the 27th?: "following maintenance the game will return with a new update, featuring new items for you to acquire"
@Milkman
That was written prior to today's update post
@General
Also, anyone about the reduced price of materials if there's an auction house... so what? You found them for free anyway. And anything from the players will be WAY better than anything from the NPCs. If you're really worried about reduced, get out there and sell your stuff now...also good luck selling anything without spending some hours just standing around doing nothing but /2...
Yeah, I guess i thought i was in the other update topic. Oops
well, also, the scheduled update only includes the new items it sounds like. its not everything he discussed, no auction house, etc.
not that im complaining, just dont want everyone to get their hopes up that these changes are going to be immediate
The Man Behind the Curtain wrote:
But since {materials} are produced faster than consumed, their prices will trend downward.
Auction house plus dynamic spawn == win.
Auction house without dynamic spawn == market crash.
Hello tMBtC! You are going to hate the economic model of this game...
Some of he problems with the materials can be helped by adjusting the recipes, but yeah, it will be almost impossible to have fixed recipes keep the game in balance.
For those that don't understand the "dynamic spawn" phrase, in one of OOO's other games, Puzzle Pirates, they have a pretty sophisticated system to keep the game in balance. Each material has a "target price range", and the number of materials spawned will be adjusted so that the price usually remains within that range. For example, OOO might decide that shards should be in the 50-150cr range. If the price drops too low, fewer would spawn, and similarly more would spawn if the price got too high. In puzzle pirates, this dynamic spawn is more complicated and not completely understood. It is possible for materials to go out of the target range for quite a while, and even within the target range, there will be price swings.
This "dynamic spawn" adds both a reasonable amount of stability and a reasonable amount of instability to the game. You can count on the prices of materials to not crater or shoot way up in price, but you can't predict whether it is better to buy today or tomorrow. If you know the long term price ranges, you can buy when the prices are low and sell when the prices are high, but you may be stuck with prices being low for a long time, or find out that you didn't buy anywhere near enough and sold too soon when the prices go up.
Leviathan wrote:
{material prices will trend down} Then, hey, time to make big loads of gear to look for UVs! Haze bombs ahoy! No buyers for all those haze bombs? No problem! Sell it to a vendor for 300.
You won't be able to do that in the long run... Once people start doing that, they will suck up certain materials that spawn slower than they are consumed, and you will end up with a market where most things are worth nothing, and a few materials are super expensive.
I can think of a few ways to make the game dynamically balance the material spawns:
* the number of materials dropped could dynamically change. This has the problem that you might end up with gun puppies spawning only blue shards and never anything else, which isn't very fun. It might also not be enough to keep the blue shards in balance anyway. Also, it might mean that Beast type monsters rarely spawn red shards, and then what would they spawn instead? More crowns, forcing the crowns out of balance? More special items or hearts, forcing those out of balance? Nothing, making fighting them less fun?
* the number of materials needed in recipes could dynamically change. I suspect people would find this surprising, confusing and objectionable. It could easily hapen that you save up for that last material needed to make something, only to find that you now need one more.
* there could be recipes/strangers that convert many of one type of material into another. For example, several frayed fabrics could be used to make one fine fabric. This isn't a very elegant solution, and not all materials have an obvious conversion path.
* the auction house could require both crowns and materials as fees. If the price of so material has dropped too much, then you would be required to pay the market a few of those materials in order to sell something else. For example, you might need to give the market 3 light shards to sell a frayed fabric and 5 frayed fabrics to sell a philoso feather. Again, not very elegant and it would surprise/frustrate people.
* Gate construction could require materials as well as minerals. This could thrown the crown spawn out whack, and it would probably only work well for low end materials. OOO would have to carefully think through this...
* "material decay". Every day, you would lose some small percentage of your materials, maybe 0.1%. The materials lost would be selected at random, so if you have 999 green shards and one trojan horseshoe, you would only have a 0.1% chance of losing the horseshoe. No matter how many materials spawn in the clockworks, eventually 0.1% of the materials that you lose track of every day will match the number spawned. OOO could even add something like "lock boxes" or "storage units" that have a daily crown cost that would keep a limited number of materials safe, thus adding a long term crown sink to the game.
Obviously, there are better solutions than I have mentioned here, but this whole game seems to only work well when there are many more new players than old players, which is rarely a good way run a business.
Why does it matter if the market for materials crashes?
I have fun finding my own materials. While I trade occasionally with guildmates, I don't buy or sell materials at all. Nearly free 1-3* materials in an auction house wouldn't affect my play one bit. Material values are not a critical or integral part of the game.
Materials trade hands pretty readily already and without an accompanying crown sink because they trade hands in direct player trades. I assume the auction house, like the CE market, will take a percentage off the top. Sure, materials prices will drop, but crowns will also sink. I think that's a worthwhile tradeoff for this economy.
The points made earlier about an auction house allowing the sale of premade gear lowering crown sinkage are a real concern, though. Allowing the trading of recipes and premade gear in general I think is not ideal, especially at the higher level where you're presumably not even meant to be able to obtain 5* stuff until you can play the top half of T3.
With that in mind, I'd like all recipes purchased to be instantly learned and untradable and all gear over 2* to require leveled-up equipment to make (so that firotech alchemer would have to level 3+ before it could become MkII) and bind upon creation. There is good reason to allow the trading of some items (rare dropped gear and minerals, especially so people in a party together can trade winnings at the end so everyone gets what they need) but to force you to play for other items (so you don't reach end game too quickly).
To make sure the folks who like "crafting" still have something to do, non-functional costume armor could be added that could be purchased directly from vendors or crafted. Such costume armor need not bind on creation, because it wouldn't get you access to tiers no matter how fancy and expensive it may be. It should, perhaps, also decay like clothing in YPP does because losing it doesn't deny you access to part of the game.
Why does it matter if the market for materials crashes?
I have fun finding my own materials. While I trade occasionally with guildmates, I don't buy or sell materials at all. Nearly free 1-3* materials in an auction house wouldn't affect my play one bit. Material values are not a critical or integral part of the game.
If it doesn't make any difference if the price of materials crash to zero, why have a market at all? Just have the game give you all the 1-3* material for free from a stranger. As you said, that wouldn't affect your game play one bit.
IMHO, having a meaningful material market will make the game funner because it lets different people play the game in different ways. It lets you just ignore materials, and dive into the clockworks. Or, you can go out and try to collect valuable materials to get crowns. Or, you can just sell CE to get the crowns to buy at the market. Or, form closer relationships with guildmates by trading with them. Or, try to beat the fees and buy/sell spread by trading manually in /trade. Choose whichever path you find the most fun.
You have the market to shut up the tradespam and to trade rarer materials whose prices won't crash to 0. Free shards aren't really a problem, but if I'm wrong and free shards are a problem, recipes could always be adjusted to use more of them. Using a dynamic spawn will just mean that people will have to use the market. The beauty of this game is that you can play it without trading and really win everything for yourself if you want to. A dynamic spawn will almost certainly make that too much of a grind to be a reasonable choice for most players.
If it's important for common materials to have a base value, and I'm not convinced that it is, then just charge sellers a minimum fee per item for using the market. This probably won't affect rare items, for which the minimum fee would likely be less than whatever percentage is taken off the top, but it will prevent the availability of nearly free shards.
I have a feeling that afterthe auction house is opened, recipes / alchemy will get tweaked in response in some manner. Just a feeling, not sure if founded on anything concrete. Whatever the case may be, they won't let it break the game in any way, so I'm sure the appropriate adjustments will come shortly thereafter. Looking forward to seeing how it pans out! :)
5* mats could be used to specify potential UVs. (edit or huge quantities of other mats)
and "But since they [materials] are produced faster than consumed, their prices will trend downward." is neither new (as in it's unproblematic in other mmos) nor proven (though likely). of course their price will settle somewhere accordingly.
If no material is worth more than 1k after a week they'll adjust rates or recipes.
(they dealt pretty well with philoso feathers too right (add ghost t3 dungeon, add feathers to token vendor after prices stabilized))
Wait and see or present representative data taken from a huge sample group of average players. (yes I'm implying current crafters as well as material sellers aren't exactly representative of the average auction house user)
"But since they [materials] are produced faster than consumed, their prices will trend downward."
For a little while.
Then, hey, time to make big loads of gear to look for UVs! Haze bombs ahoy! No buyers for all those haze bombs? No problem! Sell it to a vendor for 300.
And then we find out what that, in it's turn, does to prices, and what corrects for it, if anything.