Why a linked marketplace won't solve the issue with non-WW/Everfall regions:

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First, can I simply say how much more enjoyable it is to have discussions like this than flame wars between 2 people wanting to throw out their professed achievements in WoW as proof of their personal opinions?

You all have made my morning.

Couple other anecdotes to keep this conv going:

  • Go look at the auction house for any T1 mat in Everfall or Winsward. This breaks a closed economy, but there’s no ability to see global buy orders, just global sells. Add up the QUANTITY of all sell orders and BUY orders in Everfall or Winsward. Sells>Buys, which is causing a downward pressure on prices in that town, even before global trade opens. There’s little to no return to crafting so demand < supply, exacerbated by a declining player base. Bots are hitting the buy orders and are marginally profitable down to ~.01 for each unit (their scripting cost is sunk and for all but skins, the scripts are move to fixed coordinates to find hemp, trees, ore, get encumbered and walk to town). This morning Mu.Everfall (with no global trading), there’s 37,201 quantity on Sell Orders at a weighted average price of .2336, There’s 32,390 Iron Ore on Buy Order lists at a weighted average price of .0476. Which way are orders going to go? Down, because mining bots are getting instant profit at the marginal (highest) buy order right now of .1…without a globally linked economy. My buy orders (before I stopped crafting) were filled within a couple hours…even at quantities of ~8000. Again, the key…no globally linked economy. Just supply/demand.

  • Take a really rare item (like one not yet dropping in the game) and you’ll see an inching up of buy orders. Globally linked markets can lead to a bidding war. It’s about supply and demand…not linkages (which is only an efficiency/liquidity argument) and the speed at which supply and demand imbalances will approach equilibrium.

[Again these anecdotes break a closed economy and prove nothing. They are merely an illustration to separate efficiency from equilibrium].

One final thought in closing (repeat from first post)

  • The core issue is a declining player base and roughly fixed expenditures for town governors relative to variable income (and declining due to player base).

  • The single, best and fastest means of making satellite towns viable is to correct the fixed-to-floating imbalance of a governor’s income statement…which assumes a certain population to be viable. Make the expenses variable in line with population…and this item is solved (and we can go onto other things).

ps: thanks for reading and contributing to a fun thread.

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I think this point is additional overshadowed by a near future occurrence which not only will have an even stronger influence on the market in combination with the linking but also is putting a damper on the investment behavior of remote zones at least until it happens, even if they would get more gold out of this change.

And that are the server merges which are already talked about by official people here in the forums. No company will invest anything in a town knowing that they could possible lose it to a merge, no matter what they get out of this change. But remote zones need this leap of faith to invest to even have a chance to get somewhere.

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I just want to thank the OP for the level of effort they put into this. It’s top notch whether or not people agree with every point.

What happens to market prices is probably complicated, but a number of things are pretty clear, in my mind, foremost among them is that people will just have different list of criteria to choose what town to hang out in.

I think what’s interesting is that the main issue the devs are trying to address is the burden of holding a low-pop town. But in the process of talking about this, an assumption has crept up that all towns should be equally desirable. It’s fair if people want that, but this game allows massive asymmetry. It’s part of it’s character. I see zero problem with First Light being quiet and Everfall being super busy. It tells a story about both locations. I do see a problem with guilds being burdened with a town. It should be a spoil of war, not a chain around their neck.

If someone wants that massive tax flow from Everfall, GO TAKE IT. I say that while not trying to lessen any of the issues we are talking about. Personally, I’m never going to own a town. I play with 4 friends. We are refugees that move around the map on the tides of war that other players create. I’ve been stuck in towns when someone trolled all the taxes to maximum.

Not everyone is going to be able to enjoy the spoils of war. I never will. I will be lining the pockets of pvp companies. I find this realistic and oddly enjoy it. Small companies might not ever be able to take Everfall and gain that income. Welcome to my club.

But what ever the case, it shouldn’t be a burden. I just really don’t think this change is going to create a situation where all the towns become equal, and I don’t know why we would even want that. Just lessen the burden.

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Not only they should go ahead in linking the trading posts but you folks are way off base when it comes to the reasons you’re opposed.

This game’s economy is NOT localised, it’s centralised and it couldn’t be any other way as long as fast travel is a thing.

Globalization WILL NOT lead to deflation due to the supply/demand chain remaining untouched, it will however increase market volumes due to the decrease in costs for sellers and buyers alike.

The increase in competition caused by the global trading post will not be vast since anyone that hopes to sell in volumes already fast travels to the main hubs to put their stuff on sale where people will actually (also fast travel and) buy it.

Remote markets won’t see an immediate increase in trading taxed BUT they will become MUCH more feasible for house owners therefore inevitably increasing their economic value over time.

Crafting will slowly move from EF and WW to any other city where the owner company invested in facilities.

This will shift the economical landscape from a centralised one to a globalised one, heavily and inevitably moving wealth away from the center areas to spread it more evenly and FAIRLY, rewarding towns that offer the best services with the lower taxes instead of just shoving massive wealth in Everfall’s owner’s pockets.

Will the linking be enough? I can’t tell.
Is it a big step in the right direction? It couldn’t be anything else.
Does it have downsides? Arguably none.

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This particular point is very arguable, if prices have a tendendency to go up due to a supply/demand shift, the items on sale at a lower price would sell out way before their expiring date. This is unavoidable, it’s actually inherently part of the process.

This part is very biased and devoid of a lot of crucial elements that need to be taken into account.
First of all the AVERAGE decrease in tax revenue is not a problem since at the moment the issue is not with the amount of wealth but how it is distributed.
Secondly you are completely disregarding the fact that EF and WW have the power to invest in services (crafting stations) to keep the business, on top of already being favoured by position and resources so they will be free to keep taxes higher and still mantain a dominance.
On the other hand the ability of marginal areas to compete is a good thing, as I explained above.

I’m all on board with reducing but removing is absurd, it would crash the economy since a few individuals would get ALL the wealth.

Honestly your argument is very well constructed but not compelling at all.
Way too specualtive, not objective enough and flat out wrong in many key points.

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Brilliant feedback, very well written. +1.

It’s a shame that sense will get shouted down by the masses.

Overall though, quality feedback. I wish I could give you and nobert some gold stars.

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First off, I just want to add, as others already have, that this has been a wonderful thread to read, with well thought out arguments, constructive feedback to one another, and civil debate.

I won’t go into whether or not linking the trade posts will be good or bad, but I do feel that it only touches on a small piece of the reasoning why EF and WW have thriving economies while outer regions have little to none. In addition to the already stated points of resource availability and locational benefits, there is also the simple fact of character progression.

As a new character, I will, logically, start in a starting zone. And even if that zone isn’t WW, as soon as I start moving along in the MSQ and go to the hermit’s shrine, the closest settlement to me is WW. So whether it’s grinding those first few levels, or taking a break between main story quests, many players will find themselves in WW. And, as they do things here, a couple of effects will occur. First, if they are doing any trading or crafting, the WW region will get additional taxes, allowing them to upgrade well ahead of the outer regions. And if they are looking to level, they may wind up doing town board quests, which again allows WW to level crafting and refining stations faster than the outer regions. And all the while, the character is gaining WW standing. So, by the time the character is levelled enough to start making their way out to those outer regions, they often already have not only the standing to buy a house in those starter zones, but have also used the standing to gain perks such as lower trading and crafting fees or lower property tax or higher storage capacity. Which in turn will encourage them to continue operating, trading, and living (if they buy a house) in those starter zones. That’s not to say they will never leave them, but a house and standing will lead to increased storage, and reduced taxes will lead to a preferred usage of those crafting stations and TPs.

Moving the TPs from a local to a global model will certainly generate a small amount of additional income to the outer regions, but only through the characters who already operate in those regions. To really bring those economies closer to the dominant starter regions, there needs to be an incentive to get characters who established themselves in the starter regions to pick up and move to those outer regions. And globalizing the trading will actually mean for many there will be even less incentive to go out and utilize those settlements. After all, this means that I can still sit in WW or EF and buy the goods posted on the TPs in ES or RW or anywhere else. Which is good from the position of generating some trade taxes for those outer regions, but still leaves the lion’s share of crafting and trading occurring in the same regions they currently do. I’m not sure what, if any, the solution to this would be, but it certainly is something that will need to be considered if the end goal is to balance the regional economies.

Cheers

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Where we are in the game this simply isn’t true for the majority of players. The cost of fast travel is something that has to be considered and can be a hindrance. Two or three months from now that could change. Quite a bit could change over the next few months.
My point of view is it is to early in the game to start reacting to player dynamics and player population trends. Especially so with a change like this that has the potential to have a negative impact on the economy and does little to address the problem it is suppose to address.

I know we are in a society that is more and more expecting everything be done and/or available almost instantly but I think it would be prudent to wait until server merges and the 2nd big round of server transfers happens. Could be as we have more players on each server and a larger percentage of those players at or near end game levels the population dispersal problem will sort itself out.
And I really do believe being able to buy from one location will lead to more market manipulation of high end items than we are presently seeing. It has happened in other games and with the gold distribution disparity in this game there is no reason to expect it will not happen here.

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the prices will never go up. everything costs 0.01 -1 gold…BECAUSE we have too much from everything. guildmates just go farming ressources 1-2hours and everyone come back with 10k stones oder 10k wood or 10k XXX. Whatever you want you can get 10k within 1-2 hours…
as long as this isnt changed prices wont go up. who designed this ?? who had this idea? i dont know…

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This was designed because they wanted to make items lose durability and break or be lost in pvp. But they not implemented this and all crafted / grinded items just garbage right now

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I didn’t comment about prices of common and semi common items. I agree though I don’t see the prices ever going up especially with a global market.

I was commenting that the change does nothing to spread out the population and that it makes it easier for rare item prices to be manipulated. I do expect an increase in rare (not labeled rare by game but actual hard to find items) to increase a great deal in price.

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As 60 lvl i don’t need to buy anything anymore, all resources gonna go close to 0, even rare ones.
Infinity items = No demand = dead economy.

Why i would buy anything if my weapon i bought long time ago - will never broke?

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Population will spread a lot. Earlier you need to stay in 1 city if you wanna sell or buy anything. After update i will move to other city i like more and be able to sell/buy with no problems.

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Yeah, but most got their main storage in Everfall/WW. Why should they move, if at the same time those cities have all refining and crafting stations on max. You see the issue?

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Crafting station in Everfall downgraded a lot every week, i need to craft in other cities anyway, same for other people.
More higher tier stations you have in city - more would be downgraded.
And it’s very bad when only few cities had decent amount of upgrades - they downgraded and you waiting or traveling a lot to craft something

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This is already the case, and it doesnt need much gold to begin with nor is it a slow process.
Its only going to accelerate this whole problem.

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I do not care about marketplace that much, but I absolutely need access to tier 5 stations to level up my crafting. And maybe make some money back if I get lucky. I also need to process tier 4-5 resources otherwise they fill my storage fast. And on my server Everfall and Windsward have all stations tier 4-5 ( with maybe 1 exception)
The other towns have at best 1 station tier 5 and maybe two or three at tier 4. I just cannot live there, I do move some of my stuff there to process there but I need to get back to Winsward to process the rest.
I think the stations need to be way cheaper in regions with less people to balance things out.

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Exactly my thoughts. So many players are all about linked markets because they don’t like crafting anyway, so for them, they seem nothing but a benefit from linking markets. For the health of the actual economy, though, it’s just really bad. We don’t even have to guess that it will be bad, but just look at other games. GW2 is a prime example as the game has been highly active for quite a while and never in its history has crafting been profitable.

I also like the alternative solutions you offer. There are so many other ways to approach this, and I truly don’t understand why AGS wants to take the most heavy handed approach possible by linking the markets. It’s the same mistake they made with PvP flagging: They found out that their always-flagged system wasn’t dissuading people from PKing, and so rather than working on making it fairer, they just completely scrapped it and implemented a new system that drastically altered the focus of the game and created all sorts of new balance issues to work out instead. They consistently seem to treat big design issues as false dichotomies where you can either leave things exactly as they are or you otherwise have to make the most drastic changes possible.

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Continued to some degree the discussion regarding making outer regions more profitable in a new topic. Check it out and share your own views perhaps:

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