Auction House Idea...BLOW YOUR MIND

[Gramul]

Let's make it an honor system.

We get two rooms right?
You just drop your product in the item room and take how much you think it's worth from the Gil room. Then when you want to 'buy' something you take it from the item room and toss how much Gil you think it's worth in the Gil room.

I have the utmost confidence in the game community that this will work. There is no possibility of anything going wrong with this idea, ever.

[Wolfie]

I guess fair isn't the right word but it helps keep things stable. I mean there should be no reason why I gather something and put it up for sale, and in less then an hour it drops by 50% of then value of the item(after me undercutting the lowest seller)

Don't get me wrong, I like the current system, but mainly for gear, particularly melded pieces. For everything else, the system feels like more of a headache to navigate every 5 mins to change my price to the current trend. Not to mention you can't even search for +1 things which further hinders it...

But that happened all the time in FFXI too. It has less to do with how items are transfered from player to player and more to do with the supply and demand of a given item.

[Jokerz]

But that happened all the time in FFXI too. It has less to do with how items are transfered from player to player and more to do with the supply and demand of a given item.

Not really, in ffxi could put up a stack of items and be fairly certain they will sell by the morning. In ffxiv, when I put up something, the next morning I come back to a hell of a change in price. In the ah system on FFXI price fluctuations were a lot more gradual and less impulsive.

[Wolfie]

Have you ever sold any hot item like RR hairpins, food, or arrows? That wasn't the case. You had to watch your s**t like a hawk and the moment your name wasn't the last one that sold an item, it meant someone undercut you and you had to relist all your s**t.

[Khazar]

i like the Guild Wars 2 auction house system, i hope they almost copy paste it

[ScapeZero]

But that happened all the time in FFXI too. It has less to do with how items are transfered from player to player and more to do with the supply and demand of a given item.

Not really. The big moment when you say things like that was during inflation and deflation, when massive amount of money where entering and leaving the economy. Other than that, you had no idea what other people where listing their items for. You could assume the dropped the price of something by a few gil to get a sale before other people, but all you had was the list of the last 10 sold, so you would base what you put your item up for on that. If you saw 10k,10k,10k,10k,10k,10k,etc chances are, youll but it up for a few gil under 10k. In XIV you can see exactly how much everyone else is putting things up for. You dont have to guess if you should undercut a few gil to get first sael, you know straight up that if the lowest up is 10k, you can put it up for 9k, and people will buy it first.

And then everyone else knows that as well. And then you see the last 20 items sold ranging from 100k to 10k in the past few days, along with prices all over the place being sold.

Blind bidding is just better. Some people cant hold it in their pants and drop it one gil over whos up first, they think by dropping it 10% they will get a sale faster, or something. Blind bidding can help with that, because unless the buyer wants to spend time to save a few gil, they generally will just bid its current price. It exploits the laziness of people. With this...well they can just see they can save 10%, rather than trying to guess it.

This hurts sellers. If you farm a someone common item that everyone will every now and then get a stack off, that will hurt your business. People who randomly cross items like that will undercut, because its just a bonus to them. Crafters who are spamming crafts to level, will undercut because they want their money back ASAP to keep crafting. People who dont use that item to make money (almost everyone selling it) ruin things for people who do.

This is why blind bidding is the best way to handle an AH.

[Wolfie]

I'm sorry but no, blind bidding didn't help at all. The buyers were smart enough to figure out that they should always underbid when they bought items.

Items that sold fast, like RR hairpins, food and arrows fluctuated heavily in price between weekdays (when there are few buyers) to the weekends (when there are a lot of buyers). The money entering and exiting the game was not significant enough to have major effects over the course of a few days or a week.

Deflation and inflation in the game will happen regardless of whether we use a blind bid, true bid, buyout, bazaars, or whatever. That is a tenet of a free market. What buyout has over blind bid is that both as a seller and as a buyer, I have to do less guesswork or homework when I want to use the market. Neither of them provide any protection against supply/demand fluctuations or against overall inflation/deflation.

[Zantetsuken]

I love the idea OP (I've proposed it myself as well) It wouldn't necessarily need to be player-sold items either - It would sell a variety of server-generated items, all of different values and rarities, and would be running non-stop.

A player who wanted to sell via the Action House could buy a slot for a fee (15k maybe), and then their item would show up for others to bid on, with the profits or item going back to the player depending on if it sold.

As a player, I would love fun to sit there an watch for crazy deals to come up on anything from a stack of Ice Crystals to a Fire Materia III, to a pair of double-melded Darksteel Gauntlets

[ScapeZero]

I'm sorry but no, blind bidding didn't help at all. The buyers were smart enough to figure out that they should always underbid when they bought items.

Items that sold fast, like RR hairpins, food and arrows fluctuated heavily in price between weekdays (when there are few buyers) to the weekends (when there are a lot of buyers). The money entering and exiting the game was not significant enough to have major effects over the course of a few days or a week.

Deflation and inflation in the game will happen regardless of whether we use a blind bid, true bid, buyout, bazaars, or whatever. That is a tenet of a free market. What buyout has over blind bid is that both as a seller and as a buyer, I have to do less guesswork or homework when I want to use the market. Neither of them provide any protection against supply/demand fluctuations or against overall inflation/deflation.

Right, but you never saw the variation you see in XIV.

If this was the real world, hell yeah, I would be against blind bidding, the problem here this isnt the real world. Everyone is a seller. Everyone is a business. When you hurt people selling things in MMOs, you hurt everyone playing the game. Stable prices will help you more than hurt you.

People dont do what they do now. You rarely saw items being cut for 20k less than they are worth. Things that are overly abundant like RR hairpins, oils and powders, food, etc did see lots of variance in price, but thats because these items where so cheap to begin with. Yes, it was common to see those going for say 10k a stack on Thursday, going for 7k a stack by Saturday. Thats because those items where already a decently flooded market, and then when you have more people available to craft those items on the weekend, you flood it even further.

Thats not what we are seeing in XIV. What we are seeing is armor pieces that are going anywhere from 20k to 100k, and its not because there is hundreds of them up. When there is only say 3 of those pieces up, you see the undercutting to be very minor, but once you start having 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10+ up, people start drastically undercutting these items, driving the price down to near free. Sure, in XI you would have seen items drop a few thousand when a decent amount of the items starting going up, but never these drastic changes.

Blind is better. Sure, this current model saves you a few seconds of checking of how low you can get something for, but its also going to hurt you when trying to sell things. When you have to actually test prices to see how low you can get something for, people are more unlikely to try getting things for cheaper. The current model only helps people who dont care about trying to earn money, or buy it (not claiming anyone here is either of those people). Blind helps everyone.

[Wolfie]

You say that armor prices are being driven down because you have 10+ people selling it...

That just didn't happen in FFXI. Crafting was tedious and dicy, because generally only HQ items were any good or the ones with rare NM drop ingredients.

What you're describing to me is still market factors that are not influenced by the method that players trade with each other. Items in FFXIV are extremely easy to obtain compared to the server population we have now, and with our top heavy userbase (meaning, almost everyone is at end game now), everyone is more or less farming the same items.

Take a look at low to mid level items. Prices are more stable there, and the items themselves are more profitable to farm in some cases.

Again, the way in which players trade with each other has nothing to do with price fluctuations and inflation/deflation.