That is like saying there is no grass growing in the front yard so I am going to take water from the back yard and use it in the front yard. Sure the ground gets wet but there are no seeds so the grass is not going to grow.
The problem is population. market dispersion doesn’t fix lack of population dispersion. You have to get players wanting to be in those areas then if the problem persists do something. A global auction house isn’t going to entice players to suddenly hang out on the coast.
Even if it were a real incentive how many would abandon homes to call some other settlement home base?
They are already talking about sharing the wealth from Everfall with outlying territories so I don’t think that is an issue. The shared market is going to make certain lower level zones ghost towns once the population levels up.
Finally a good step by Amazon
merge will only effect no life traders and dominant companies
it will bring more motivation to smaller companies
companies will focus crafting tiers more
i believe it will also bring more pvp when useless city s have more value
It is not balance what NW are doing, this change is only about covering holes in their concept.
As you know, every territory besides Everfall and Windsward is a “quiet village”, this change will spread players out and people will now choose their homes and recalls better but it still doesn’t root out the glaring problem of that there are no systems in NW to promote or strengthen a territory besides lvl’ing up the stations.
Where exactly are the competitive angles? That is pretty much the whole deal with NW, there are none.
This isn’t a balance issue or a fixable issue, the system itself is in need of a rework. @Saladid and yes, you lost your bit of monopoly/good play, now you will have to reap what AGS are sowing, a game of no real competition.
I personnaly love what your doing and can appreciate you are one of the few actually trying to create an economy.
Having said that… everyone else is right. Not on any moral grounds but right in the sense that AGS will probably put the TP on globally as a QoL update. It’s no secret that the ones asking for this change are WoW refugees and like most refugees now a days they are going to try and change where they are now back to the garbage they left and thus the cycle continues.
The biggest problem you’re going to see from this is there are A LOT of people that sell things that are needed at those remote stations. Meals, Ammo, Potions and those prices are going to be tanked by this.
There NEEDS to be a “minimum” price to everything. It is ridiculous to see people undercutting things like Orich Ammo down to .05 coin just because they think undercutting will sell it faster, when they can make the coin selling AT the price it is at in the market. And you see that EVERYWHERE with everything. People continuously undercutting until the value is nil. Just set a MINIMUM price for each item.
Give it two weeks. When prices across the board take a 50-100% reduction, and people are once again complaining about deflation, even though markets over the last 3 weeks have started to even out; I will sit here with my cup of coffee and just breath in that sweet sweet satisfaction of “I told you so”. It’s kinda great, I feel a nice calm sense of satisfaction knowing I’m so clearly in the right after having experienced this same moaning in countless MMO’s. I can’t say dumbing a game down is never the right take, but it’s often not the right take.
It will change the market from a antique central city driven market into a global market as we have today where taxes and construction costs are more important than a central spot in the world or being located on trading routes.
I think the problem of market flooding once this change is rolled out is being overstated. Sure, something to be mindful of - but at least in my experiences, many settlements had very little trading happening to begin with (and this was back pre-exploit fiasco when my server would flutter between medium and high during prime time).
I also do believe the game is at a point where iterative tweaks on some aspects of the game aren’t gonna cut it - and the economy and its perceived health is one of those things. Short, I don’t think AGS is in a position to make an incremental change and see how the current localized market responds.
By linking the markets, it also feels that AGS’ preference is for each settlement to have some baseline value and promote a more distributed player-base than having the current hubs that have emerged.
In the current state, I don’t care what arguments are raised, but WW and EF were really the only places to be given the market and player activities there. Outside of quests, there was very minimal reason to travel to mid-end game settlements (even more so as companies found them hard to maintain and keep attractive for players to visit).
If “traveling” merchants were truly making a difference at large across all servers, I imagine AGS would not have turned to linking the markets.
tbf there are other ways to fix the economy. They need a better way to incentivize going to other settlements. Everyone congregating in BW, EF, or WW is the issue. They need to give people reason to not want to only go there for trade or only to level up. This is a bandaid fix for the bigger issue. Settlements have nothing worth going to or incentive to make players want to go there.
That would be contingent on having an awareness of factors driving players to Windsward and Everfall.
With the linked markets, players have additional options to consider in regards to deciding where they buy/trade.
Taxes/fees?
Location/convenience?
It also means settlement owners will have to have a greater grasp of what is happening in other settlements. Taxes/fees may have the potential to be a larger influencing factor in regards to where players decide to trade.
Granted, these factors exist now, but they are marginalized a bit simply because players are likely to sell where things will sell fastest and buy where things are cheapest. Even more so when players feel like gold is hard to come by (sure, I may be able to put this up for sale over there for a good bit more, but it may not even sell at all).
I agree it will affect traders. Don’t see it bothering dominant companies any at all.
The rest will not happen unless players are first given an incentive to go to those places. What in this idea makes a player think I will make First Light my home town?