… wow.
That’s very kind of you. I guess there’s only one way for me to trade from here.
I enjoy the ‘marketplace sim’ aspect of the game.
Hauling crafted goods (arrows, potions) from the crafting Hubs to distance high level zones.
Bringing back high tier mats or loot drops to the refining hubs and high traffic marketplaces.
I just hope that the disincentives (higher transaction fees for buying/selling from outside markets) are enough that haulers and flippers can still exist.
In my opinion, the existing economy model should be test for a longer duration before making a large change such as this.
Alrite ty, guess I was a bit tired when i read through it 
Still dont see this change to be impactful enough for the outer zones to get competetive with the more popular ones. Its a start, but I dont think its enough. Again, ty for the clarification tho ^^
Probably even overall increase sales, there’s plenty of people that just don’t but because they’re not going to travel so they hold off… i know personally I’ll be dropping 2-4k every day just on buying when it gets linked
Linking the trading posts should not happen until at least server merges and does not resolve the core issue of why other territories do not earn income. Reasons why it won’t work any why some of the other territories are dead.
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Players enjoy being around other players. As such, people will naturally congregate in one or two towns like Windsward and Everfall since there is just simply not enough players online to fill all the towns that exist. People are dueling PVPing chatting since it is where people are.
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Individual Storage and Azoth cap limit crafting and trade in other towns. I have lots of 200 crafting levels with max trophies and the biggest restraint I have to crafting in a different town is my gear and raw materials are in Windsward and Everfall so I can’t go anywhere else.
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Total server population is way too low on most servers. At peak times my server has around 800 players. In terms of numbers I would estimate at 700 of those players are not in towns which leaves around 100 to be located in towns. If all towns are active that would make towns feel dead and you would lose out in all the player experience of being in an active thriving town.
Ok so now I personally am not a fan of someone posts the problems with a solution and doesn’t offer a solution so….
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Make town upkeep significantly reduced with a higher degree scaling cost for towns near max upgrade tier. Smaller towns should be specializing. Not every town should be maxed because that’s not realistic.
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Remove the azoth cap and reduce travel costs for non territory controlled faction. My server faction owns a lot of the map and it is a huge factor in why I can travel more when I please to others towns and I can clearly tell that other faction members do not even go to those towns because they cost astronomical costs to go to unless it’s their color.
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Allow for items to be transferred between any territory regardless of control. At the same time reduce the cost significantly for importing items. In order to still provide a benefit for owning the territory reduce the cost to import goods by 30%.
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Remove many of the existing gold sinks in the game since I guarantee a lot of the gold that is ‘in the game’ is sitting in gold sellers pockets and/or is in players inventories who quit. On our server there are many great pieces of gear listed reasonably but because no one has actual gold they can’t buy them. The only real way to make gold is outpost rush and as all of the ‘quest money’ is slowly being removed from the game by gold sinks. If we have too much inflation and players start consistently getting close to the 500k cap then add some gold sinks in order to rebalance the economy.
If money is not being spent you can’t say that it’s in the game since it’s not contributing to the economy. We need more transactions to fuel the economy.
Thank you for taking the time to read this post and please do not remove one of the most enjoyable aspects of this game which is the local economy development and political level of territory management.
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The problem is exactly that most players DON’T understand how an economy works and instead of putting a fair price and being patient they undercut, which gets undercut, which gets undercut, till no one profits. The worst is when it’s an item you usually need multiple of and someone undercuts it hard with just 1, a player is going to pick that up pretty quickly, but someone still undercuts it with 200 now the low price is sticking around longer, and again, then just keeps getting undercut
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Hi, sorry about that. I tend to forget things pretty easily when they’re not right in front of my face and the email notification of your reply got buried.
Lets use your example of ES for an example. ES will definitely become more desirable because it’ll be the closest region you can buy to the new zone. Most people that would (or could, for that matter) buy a house in ES likely already have at least one house if not two. They’d be buying the house either solely for a convenient fast travel point or because they like the region (I’m a huge fan of ES, and it will be where I buy my third home for sure), or both.
How upgraded do we think ES is on most servers by this point? Probably not very unless they win all of their invasions. So, what benefits are there to doing your refining and crafting there? Whoever owns it probably has next to no tax income, and unless they have 100 members all donating like crazy, affording upkeep + upgrades is a tall task.
Let’s say you buy a house there. Next thing you know, there’s 15, 20, 30 houses bought in ES with the new zone’s arrival. The only consistent money ES is making now is housing taxes, so they have two options. Set them low, or jack them up to in an attempt to make any profit they possibly can to lessen the burden of maintaining it.
- If they leave taxes low, people keep buying homes and they can probably get a very modest income off the taxes. Maybe enough to handle upkeep, but it would take a lot of homes. In MB on my server, there’s about 60 houses or so currently and the tax is set to 6.5%. We barely scrape 10k a week in housing because most of the houses are lower tier.
- If they jack up the prices I doubt they get many people interested in buying homes, and definitely not any high tiers, so what money they do make is almost assuredly less than it would be if they’d left the taxes low.
In either case, how many people actually need to do town boards that are out in ES and are heading to explore a new zone? Maybe some high level 50s depending on the new zone. They probably just want to hit lv60 ASAP and might grab the quests while they’re in town, but it’s so out of the way and there’s literally no resources like iron, starmetal, hemp etc in ES so how are they going to do the boards? Travel all the way back to one of the central zones to farm, go all the way back to ES to turn in? Why would they bother grabbing the boards in ES if that’s the case?
So, the company that owns ES is probably going to be the only ones consistently running boards (and that’s if their members are willing to cooperate, I can vouch that it can be like pulling teeth getting people to run them), and that’s just not enough to keep up with invasions unless literally all 100 of those people are grinding the boards at all times. Who has time for that at lv60?
It just seems like another perpetual state of regression. I can understand certain regions being more desirable, I won’t argue that fact. EF and WW will always be higher on the list than MB or BW or WF. But there needs to be some way to even the playing field, or else it’s literally just not worth owning them. Might as well just have the only crafting stations be in one place with the entire map being a single region and everyone fights for ownership of that one region all the time rather than bothering with having all the others.
I fully understand the argument of your playstyle, trust me. I enjoy playing with the market myself, it’s how I make money in every other game I’ve ever played. But when I need to donate 60k+ in my own gold between helping the company buy the territory originally and consistently donate in order to upgrade when I just continuously see the upgrades get wiped away every 4 days? It’s a kick in the gut, honestly.
Plus, it’s also extremely easy to make money in this game as a player. Sure, the buy low sell high aspect won’t be region based anymore and instead you’ll have to actually monitor market fluctuations. Figure out what is in demand overall, sell it. Grind a craft, sell your goods. If you truly enjoy finding ways to make money you can still do that with a linked trading post. It’s just a little harder/more time consuming than harvesting herbs in one region and selling them in another. Raw mats like rawhide, green wood, fibers etc will always be in high demand because you need such a disgusting amount of them to level up crafts and just to craft in general. Merchants are clever, I believe people that like to be traveling merchants will be able make money regardless.
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Stopped reading here.
Server mergers are akin to cataclisms and they’re inherently going to be problematic when it comes to handling the pre-existing territoral situation of the involved server. You might think you have a good idea about it but a lot of people wont like it.
Everyone waiting on mergers should really take off the naive glasses and realize that
- they’re not as good as you might think,
- they’re not coming soon since they’ll be THE LAST RESORT after the second wave of free transfers and the actual paid transfer service gets online.
In every conceivable circumstance allowing player to choose when and where to migrate it’s going to be preferable over mergers.
Also server mergers and trading linking have absolutely nothing to do with each other.
That’s funny because I really don’t engage in flipping at all. I have not time for it and have no enjoyment in it (but it’s a very valid way to play). I do sell more expensive raw mats near their nodes though, but arguably flippers have made more money off of me than I have off of that.
No, the problem is it won’t help the situation whatsoever, mess with the economy in bad ways and will destroy some people’s way of playing, and on top of that it removes player choice in a sandbox game with already way, way too little meaningful player choices. And diminish the game in return.
I have expressed this in every message on this thread. You might be projecting the self-interest motive.
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Yes. That, and the relationship between supply of resources and the gold delta was completely ignored in that post.
We aren’t seeing literal deflation, in that the gold delta isn’t negative (overall… I hope you don’t die too often with all your gear on you, cause that will mess your delta up real good. Ask me how I know), but the ratio of resources delta to gold delta seems (again… We can’t know, cause AGS hasn’t deigned giving us trade history. Not that we didn’t ask) to be way above 1. And, if right now it may be partly driven by botters, it’s also going to be a problem in the long run as there is no resources sink in a steady state beyond consumables (which is pretty minor).
I think it’s funny how people are saying that the cost of traveling to sell from one place to another has to be considered, but paying to buy things in another city is inexpensive and can be done by just putting the fast travel there…
I may be biased because of my server’s current status, but most things are only available in EF, and if you put anything to sell in other places no one will buy it because there’s no one in the other cities. For me and for most people that don’t keep flipping and/or live in a low pop server this is a awesome change!
Come on, which choice? where to sell your trash? That’s a pretty small choice to make in the game… and it has the potential to benefit the gameplay of a lot of people in low pop servers
No, it’s not just “where to sell trash”. It’s also whether you’ll buy expensive here when you need it, or plan ahead and do several things at once in a trade hub. You know, like… A living and organic economy: you could buy on AliExpress for half the price in a month or two, but on Amazon you’ll get same day delivery.
It’s whether you’ll go farm this resource in this location at this time because the prices are spiking over there…
It’s also about where you’ll put your house(s): in the hubs where tax is more expensive? Or in the outskirts where you gather/refine base mats en masse?
And all this granularity adds choices at the company level, on what to upgrade in which territories, and/or what territories to conquer, how to tax intelligently…
Simplification is good for themeparks, but not for sandboxes. In sandboxes, you need the complexity to have player driven content generation. Local economies are a big part of that drive.
Maybe you haven’t played a sandbox MMO before, so that might not seem obvious, and that’s okay. But it should be pretty self evident if you play them 
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I mean, you are talking like those things are not gonna happen anymore.
You still gonna farm a particular resource because the prices are spiking in the server (e.g. a meta change and people are crafting new armor or resources that are harder to find),
Also, the house locations still gonna be affected by those prices and your farm route, they may become more stable and you may not have to move your Inn so much, but the hubs won’t have reasons to be so expensive anymore, at least not for trading post, and will be affected by the other factors (e.g. crafting tables levels),
I mean, when you compare the aliexpress and amazon thing kind of makes sense but isn’t like that really, right? you don’t wait for 2 months for a resource, you just spend more azoth and get in 40secs longer, in the worst case, if you have a good server, just pop a quick OPR and you get the azoth,
Moreover, you are ignoring that the current way, you kind of force the members of the bottom faction in unbalanced servers to buy more expensive stuff because, for them, fast travel is a lot more expensive, which makes the gaps between them even bigger
“Are you trying to say people holding gold, and not spending is not a deflationary pressure?
Are you trying to say more supply = higher prices?”
I’m late on my reply - but here goes.
I think what you’re missing is that there are different types of “spending” in-game, which are conflated in AGS’ charts.
- Outflows into the trading post, which function as you say
- Outflows into in-game money sinks (like repairs) - where the money simply disappears from existence, which is effectively the same as “not spending” in your model, and is deflationary.
If you disagree with this, as a case in point, I’d like to get your take on how repairs apply inflationary pressure to the market.
For me, this is clearly removing currency from the money supply, which should be purely deflationary.
Property taxes are more indirect, because they first go to the company that owns the settlement where the property is located - but I believe the ultimate sink there is the upgrade costs for the settlement which again remove currency from existence.
So again, my argument is that it’s unclear what the numbers that AGS shared mean - if 90% of a level 60’s outflows end up in money sinks vs. the trading post, I would dispute that their net influence is necessarily inflationary.
Really, if you want to model trading post prices, it would be more useful to limit the analysis to the influx and outflow of goods vs. the influx and outflow of gold, specifically through the trading post. What matters is products supplied to the market vs. products consumed from the market.
A lvl 30 that saves most of their money earned from quests, but still spends more on buying stuff from the market than they sell through the market is still going to move prices up.
Bottom line: I think a tacit premise of your argument is that all or the vast majority of spending goes through the trading post, which I don’t believe is true
Agreed, thanks for clarifying. Makes sense to me now.
Accidently deleted my post. vv
100% agree, 2nd paragraph nails it. Now that whole unique side of this game will be gone, and it only took a little over a month for the louder whiny voices to be listened to.
Decreasing the money needed to upgrade & keep outer settlement upgraded to high levels after failing invasions + population server merges within world-sets + possibly raising the 2k server limit would together work to solve a lot of these “abandoned outer territory on dead server” issues WITHOUT the need to change a fundamentally huge part of this game/experience that many quiet grinders enjoy.
I hardly ever post on any forums, but this change man…
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Maybe before merging the TP it would be good to add some important functionality first, such as being able to search by suffix, search by any stat, and fix the “show only usable” filter which doesn’t work currently.
Then we can discuss some more whether merging them all in one entry is a good idea or not.
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i like this update but i think you need to put minimum selling prices etc…
and list by sold time please, IDK what item i had been sold for so long…