A dev blog has stated the intention to link all trading posts. The purpose of this change is to strengthen the economies of less frequented settlements and improve item availability for players.
I recognize the problem as legitimate, but I’m against this solution. The drawbacks seem to outweigh the benefits.
The Ultimate Effect: More Wars. The tax revenue of outlying territories becomes more manageable resulting in those territories becoming more desirable, which results in more conflict and war. Though not stated, I suspect this outcome is motivating this decision. And that’s a good thing.
But you’re removing meaningful gameplay from some players in order to give it to others. With this decision, there will be no more scouring the market for money making opportunities. There will be no more planning a harvesting route to coincide with a trade run. There will be far fewer opportunities for the “small folks” to improve their accounts. This doesn’t have to be the case. You can improve the gameplay of everyone. Please don’t dilute overall gameplay for the benefit of companies.
Rather, introduce more complex mechanics that give us more to do.
Like trade caravans that link the markets of settlements but must be maintained via PvP flagged missions. Or goods that can only be found in outlying territories.
Ultimately, you may get your wars and conflict, but you’ll also be diluting the market game and efficient planning that (I would argue) many players appreciate.
100% agree. The game has good gathering/crafting. AGS should be leaning into developing and improving the player-driven economy. This change simplifies the economy, reducing content for people who are into the market side of the game. It also hurts the immersion and uniqueness of the game. It’s interesting to have some cities be trade hubs, while far off outposts have little to buy. You going to shattered mountain? Make sure you stock up. Or be someone who travels to it with lots of potions and food to sell for a big markup.
There are lots of potential ways to help other settlements that could enhance the player-economy, rather then limit it. Look at Eve and Albion, players can easily spend 100s of hours flipping and trading items, and they have major cities with separate and equal economies.
Digging into the heart of the issue, I think AGS gets feedback from very casual and themepark players who don’t want to deal with a player-driven economy. They don’t want to replace or even repair items, they’d like to be able to sell to vendors for set prices, they don’t want to have to travel for trade or have any limits on traveling, etc. But needless to say, those are short-sided and bad ideas. It makes things easier in the short-term, but leaves you with a shallower game.
im pretty sure, u are one of a few who think, its somehow good to travel far distances to buy stuff… this is just one thing, super annoying. it dosent make the game special, fun or anything, just annoying.
It’s annoying because it has to be to force you to make a choice. Instead of having everything you want served on a platter. And choices is what makes it interesting.
As an exaggerated example I’m pretty sure we can find a lot of people who find farming annoying, but that doesnt mean it would be good for the game to make every resource freely available.
The knives sell because no one else is selling them in that settlement. The nuts are sold to a buy order and have a price 5x higher than iron ore.
My research and travel time is rewarded with decent prices because other people haven’t sifted through the market or invested the travel time.
It’s time consuming and sometimes tedious, but so is grinding for quests, grinding for levels, grinding for resources, grinding for gear, grinding for insert here. Games are fucking grinds, and no less so for NW. It’s finding those little tricks around the grind that give those actions purpose and meaning.
After this change, here is what will happen: you just scroll down what you can sell and click the highest price for an item. No research, no travel investment… just mindless, meaningless market interaction. “Oh, someone’s buying berries.” Instant sell.
actually the goal behind this is to make the other territories more competitive. right now its pretty obvious that the territory that is king on every server is Everfall. None of the other territories save for maybe Wyndsward come close and thus owning the other territories causes companies to bleed gold rather than being able to keep things upgraded to entice players to visit them.
You may be fine with just going to everfall to do all of your selling and buying on the market, but the vast majority don’t believe that is fair
the problem is noone is going to any territory BUT everfall to do their heavy trading. the easiest and most effective way to deal with this is just link em
Linking them in this game is a good move. The game is tiny.
What I mean is, using another mmo with a player driven economy as an example, EvE online, there aren’t that many territories. 10? So that’s 10 trade posts. Yes you could use the ones in each of the 2 settlements for the non-claimable zones, so we’ll say there’s 16 for clarity. That’s 16 trade hubs. It doesn’t take long to travel, so there’s really no need to keep them unlinked tbh.
But in EvE, where it isn’t linked, there are more trade hubs than I can count. Every station is a sell point, whether npc owned, or player owned, and there are as much as 5, if not more, stations in one system at times. Linking that would be a disaster.
Until we get to that stage, and realistically, we won’t, linking is a good thing.
Edit: Just checked, there are 7,930 systems alone in EvE, all having at least 3 stations in. That’s a minimum of 23,790 trade hubs.
Sorry but trading is busted, Everyone trades in one or two areas because trading doesn’t function in all of the areas. People need to bring their stuff to one place so there’s an easy, active, competitive market.
Aside from looking at all settlements and sniping some lazy person’s horrible mistake, there aren’t reasonable justifications for the lack of a linked trading post.
Linking the trading posts also allow taxes to be competitive, rather than EF/WW jacking the rates up because you cannot get your stuff anywhere else reliably.
Right now: 99.9% of transactions are done through EF or WW.
After the new change: Transactions are done through whatever territory has the lowest taxes or aligns with faction or aligns with company. Many different places are used and even if a faction has no territory you can use the neutral outposts and get a low rate.
The difference in EVE is there’s extremely costly penalty for making everything in one system. The gathering materials is spread out and travel takes time. And yet 80% of the entire game uses one trading station.
Compare to new world which is like you said tiny, gathering materials are everywhere, crafting is instant, travel takes seconds with recalls and 90% of the game uses one trading post.
LOL remember in the first years, Jita was capped at like 1k players. Would just block players from getting in. Thats when the satellite trade hubs were at their strongest.
Imagine if Everfall was capped at 200 players LOL, be a herd at the gates waiting to get in.
In Eve, each region has it’s own trading hub and the galaxy has Jita. People literally spend hours (and sometimes millions of ingame isk) traveling to and from Jita to trade in order to get the best prices. And despite the routes to Jita being “PVE zones”, you can still lose everything you’re carrying to suicide gankers.
You can sell stuff outside of the hubs, but it won’t sell as well depending on price. It doesn’t sell as well because even though you can buy that item from a distance, it does not magically teleport to another place.
Magical teleportation is what NW is planning to implement, and it’s not a good choice.
All of these things drive player behavior. They give opportunities to traders and gankers alike. The pain in the ass of going to Jita creates gameplay opportunities. All of that goes away with teleporting goods.
New world has no pain for traveling though, you leave everfall empty and recall back with stuff on you. Unless you need a t4/5 crafting station that everfall doesn’t have every other town is merely a teleport/questing point.
The crazy thing is the Everfall is central and trading dominant shift took less than 2 weeks of rl time even though the game dumped everyone across 4 zones and was copied on every server I’ve heard of (500 times).
The only realistic thing that could be done is to remove free inn/house recall but nobody would want that.