suggestion to fix AH

[Aaxeyu]

The only thing wrong with AH is the horrendous tax.

[eonfreon]

While this could be subject to abuse, i think this would be a huge improvement. A noob like me that does not really know if a Large devil scale is worth 400K or 800K would benefit from this. Perhaps something that showed what the 3 month average selling price of a given item is would work just as good.

Well, sounds to me like you don't really want to fix the AH. You just want new things to be added to it to make things easier on yourself.

That's at least a legitimate reason. However, all the things you are asking for really are just time saving devices for you and other players, because you can do it yourself to gauge the market.

While it would be nice to have those things and can't hurt, I don't see a great need for it. But then the AH is a very peripheral thing to me in this game. I see it simply as a shortcut. The prices are what they are. One could do an analysis of the ongoing market or one can just spend or not spend the plat as one sees fit. I have the money, I want the item, I don't feel like rolling dice and seeing if the game will get it for me? I just may spend that money, after all once my essential supply of pots and items are taken care of, what is the plat for other then for convenience and time-saving. Plat is unlimited because once you're high enough level you'll always be at a large surplus after a few hours of questing a week. Just accumulate it and eventually you can trade that plat for an item that saves you time.

So, I certainly think adding more options to the AH is a good thing. So it doesn't really need a fix. You just want to see more player-friendly features added in. That about right?

[ViolentEnd]

Your proposal would only have every piece of vendor trash flooding the ah (more so than currently). If you can earn what you would from the vendors, with a chance to make more, the amount of true vendor trash infecting the ah would increase exponentially. Do you really want to sort through, for example, 40 pages of level 12 dwarven axes to find something useful?

I disagree whole-heartedly.

[Cauthey]

The only thing wrong with AH is the horrendous tax.

The tax is an ugly, although very necessary platinum sink. Without mechanisms to take platinum out of the economy, platinum would be totally worthless (some argue that it is totally worthless as is now).

[Dysmetria]

Given it is a known common practice to post to the ah to store items by pricing items where no one would buy them in their right mind, it makes seculation about the true state of the AH economy impossible to determine.

one of the faults of the AH is the idea that items are returned to the player. In a normal auction, someone wins. I think one way to address this issue is to have the ah set the min price, and allow the player to set a buyout, but if the item does not sell, the player does not get the item back, but rather gets what the highest bid was... if there is no bid, they get the minumum (this could be what a default store would pay...so you gamble the ah fees in a worse case senario)... This would 'fix' the ah economy in one week.

If people choose to spend lots of plat to store items for three days in the AH, then what is the problem with that, other than it preventing you from speculating "about the true state of the AH economy?"

This is a creative way to get around having to create seperate accounts just for storage, and mail items back and forth. It also serves to remove plat from the economy you seem so worried about.

If anything the issue is with Turbine limiting storage space so drastically, and making us grind favor and pay TP just to increase it slightly. Even if you do everything you can on your character you still will only have at most 200 slots to store stuff on it between the 5 bags and 5 bank tabs.

[Cyr]

Given it is a known common practice to post to the ah to store items by pricing items where no one would buy them in their right mind, it makes seculation about the true state of the AH economy impossible to determine.

They pay a price for doing this. That said who cares? With the new search function it is fairly fast and painless to find what you are looking for on the AH so clutter is not a real issue any longer.

one of the faults of the AH is the idea that items are returned to the player. In a normal auction, someone wins. I think one way to address this issue is to have the ah set the min price, and allow the player to set a buyout, but if the item does not sell, the player does not get the item back, but rather gets what the highest bid was... if there is no bid, they get the minumum (this could be what a default store would pay...so you gamble the ah fees in a worse case senario)... This would 'fix' the ah economy in one week.

This would break the AH as a useful tool for many players. Any player who was picky about what they got for their items for example. In consequence you would see less items of value on the AH and more players having to sell stuff outside of the AH.

Responses in Red.

[Aaxeyu]

The tax is an ugly, although very necessary platinum sink. Without mechanisms to take platinum out of the economy, platinum would be totally worthless (some argue that it is totally worthless as is now).

That is true, but it's really a ******** money.
The point of a plat sink is to make plat trading viable (instead of inefficent bartering), but having a huge AH tax makes plat trading less viable.
So it's basicly 2 forces working against eachother, we can only speculate which is largest.
However, we can clearly see that plat trading is not really working well. I will personally consider the DDO market a failure aslong as there is bartering going on in the forums/trade channels.

[Kaeldur]

Given it is a known common practice to post to the ah to store items by pricing items where no one would buy them in their right mind, it makes seculation about the true state of the AH economy impossible to determine.

one of the faults of the AH is the idea that items are returned to the player. In a normal auction, someone wins. I think one way to address this issue is to have the ah set the min price, and allow the player to set a buyout, but if the item does not sell, the player does not get the item back, but rather gets what the highest bid was... if there is no bid, they get the minumum (this could be what a default store would pay...so you gamble the ah fees in a worse case senario)... This would 'fix' the ah economy in one week.

I think this is a horrible solution.

Something that might work better is instead of a fixed rate to post an auction, if the AH charged you a % of your minimum bid or buyout price people might be more careful posting stuff... And wouldn't use the AH as bank buffer - yes, some people do that.

But even this suggestion I gave I'm not really sure I'd like to see it implemented either, just tossing it out anyway

[donfilibuster]

Not quite broken as free form. The issue is that buyers often have no way to know better.
What would help is to keep the entries on the list after completion, showing 'SOLD' or 'EXPIRED' for a little while.
That way you can see what the price was on those auctions and the economy won't be based on speculation.

Of course, there would be no issue if we had better sorting. Searching by title is nice but need full text to truly make garbage entries be weeded out.
Or maybe a filter on % over base value, that way you can quickly find items below 50% value or some amount more appropiate with what people will make by vendoring.
Information is not a bad thing, it is misinformation that beats the dead horse of economy.

[Postumus]

The AH is ok the way it is set up now. If someone doesn't buy my item, I get it back and can always repost it for less than I did the previous time or I can run to a broker and sell it.

/not signed

I agree.

[Postumus]

However, we can clearly see that plat trading is not really working well. I will personally consider the DDO market a failure aslong as there is bartering going on in the forums/trade channels.

That's no different than most economies. Check out places like C-list. Or even small communities where people trade goods and services rather than money. It doesn't mean an economy is broken if there is some bartering going on.

[Chai]

aaaaaaaannd SCENE!!!



Ok people, I think he understands the counterpoint now.

[Aaxeyu]

That's no different than most economies. Check out places like C-list. Or even small communities where people trade goods and services rather than money. It doesn't mean an economy is broken if there is some bartering going on.

Sure, some bartering is fine. But trade forums/channels full with bartering makes it clear that the economy is broken (I'm using broken in a loose sense here, perhaps I should say "the economy could easily be doing much better").

[Lleren]

Only thing I'd like to see added is a 15 minute rule, where if you get a bid close to auction end time it extends the auction 15 minutes to allow more bids from other buyers.

It's frustrating if somebody times it just right and puts in a bid 0.2 seconds before the auction ends and you just lost the auction.

Now this would be a decent change to the Auction House.

[Cauthey]

That is true, but it's really a ******** money.
The point of a plat sink is to make plat trading viable (instead of inefficent bartering), but having a huge AH tax makes plat trading less viable.
So it's basicly 2 forces working against eachother, we can only speculate which is largest.
However, we can clearly see that plat trading is not really working well. I will personally consider the DDO market a failure aslong as there is bartering going on in the forums/trade channels.

I disagree (and agree with Postumus).

The point of a platinum/gold sink is to remove currency that is artificially inserted into the economy. If vendors and brokers that have an unlimited amount of platinum to pay you for "vendor trash" AND there are no mechanisms to take that platinum away from players and back out of the economy, then you'll have a serious inflation problem. That's when 10pp, 100pp, 1mil pp, and 100mil pp doesn't matter because there's so much of it in the system, it doesn't hold any real value.

By heavily taxing AH sales, platinum DOES get removed. In the right amounts? Who knows...

Yes, there still is bartering (RL bartering is alive and well, too!). But regardless of your opinions of the DDO in-game economy, bartering will ALWAYS be around. Why? Because there's going to be someone out there that has something of worth to trade, yet they might not have or might not be interested in platinum. If two players come to a reasonable arrangement, then they both win (the oft termed "win-win"). And, at the same time, that is not necessarily a gauge of a broken economy.

[Samadhi]

Worst idea I have ever heard. All this would do is make sure no one ever used the AH again.

[donfilibuster]

Another solution is to cease thinking plat is of any value on a high magic world.
But then the Coin Lords are keen in bribing new adventurers into coming to Stormreach on promise of plat.
They must be all laughing in secret of how they give us fool's gold, all while they keep thriving in shard mining.

[Aaxeyu]

I disagree (and agree with Postumus).

The point of a platinum/gold sink is to remove currency that is artificially inserted into the economy. If vendors and brokers that have an unlimited amount of platinum to pay you for "vendor trash" AND there are no mechanisms to take that platinum away from players and back out of the economy, then you'll have a serious inflation problem. That's when 10pp, 100pp, 1mil pp, and 100mil pp doesn't matter because there's so much of it in the system, it doesn't hold any real value.

If people don't trade with plat it doesn't matter if there's inflation, so the point of plat sinks is really to make it viable to trade in plat.

By heavily taxing AH sales, platinum DOES get removed. In the right amounts? Who knows...

Yes, the tax removes plat, but it also gives incentive NOT to use plat at all. So as I said, the AH tax works both ways.
The thing is that it's VERY easy to simply add another plat sink and lower the AH tax (there are plenty of good examples on the forums), then we get less incentive to barter, and therefor a more efficient economy.

Yes, there still is bartering (RL bartering is alive and well, too!).

An incredibly small amount of all transactions IRL is done by bartering.
Bartering is very inefficient and hassling compared to monetary trading.

But regardless of your opinions of the DDO in-game economy, bartering will ALWAYS be around. Why? Because there's going to be someone out there that has something of worth to trade, yet they might not have or might not be interested in platinum.

In a truly working economy that is a scenario that's simply unreasonable. Why would you not want plat? If everything is valued in plat it's pretty much always better to have plat than items because plat is much more liquid.
Lets say you are looking for item A and you got item B to trade. For simplicity assume that they are of equal worth.
In a bartering system you have to manually (forums/trade chat) find someone who needs item B AND have item A.
While in a working monetary system you could just put item B on the AH and buy item A off the AH (or manually find someone who got it). MUCH simpler.

The concept of "everything is valued in plat" seems very alien to alot of DDO players, and that is a very strong sign that the economy is infact broken.

[Bobthesponge]

Only thing I'd like to see added is a 15 minute rule, where if you get a bid close to auction end time it extends the auction 15 minutes to allow more bids from other buyers.

It's frustrating if somebody times it just right and puts in a bid 0.2 seconds before the auction ends and you just lost the auction.

Now this would be a decent change to the Auction House.

How does this not put the "problem" out 15 minutes? Auctions can not go on forever. The end time is specified on the AH. If you don't want someone to beat you that way put a bid in 0.1 seconds before the auction ends. You win!

The AH is not broken. Please stop complaining about it. If you don't like the prices, DON'T BID ON STUFF. It truly is that simple.

[silvermesh]

Changes to the auction house? Try filters for what effects are on an item, not just the name of the item.... try a short auction "history" section for basic item types. The AH is clunky at best, but it's leaps and bounds above what we started with(...nothing), and setting any sort of mandatory result defeats the whole point of it being an auction, and is extremely counter-productive to the idea of any sort of "economy"...

then again.. realistic economics don't work in video games, I assure you. The idea that a plat sink could ever stop inflation or even slow it is completely ridiculous as long as there's still a single quest that generates 1 cp on completion. money isn't printed in video games. it's not backed by a big wealth of valuable materials somewhere, and it isn't actually made of a rare metal that can only be obtained in certain mines. it's generated by a computer every time someone breaks a box open, finishes a quest, or sells an item to a vendor. I've been playing this game on and off for a long time, and since the switch from gold to plat(which did bizarre things to pricing), prices really haven't changed that drastically. They went up a while after the recent pirate event(dowsing rod, I'm looking at you), but they are back now to what they were before.
platinum is not a limited natural resource, it's a personification of time. when I'm looking at the auction house I'm not thinking how rare my platinum is, I'm thinking about how much time it takes me to reasonably obtain that much platinum. This is why the "economy" works, because no matter how much money is in the economy, every character is CAPPED at how much of it they can have, and barring occasional exceptions will have a certain amount of time it takes them to get plat. you don't have massive inflation problems when nobody can have a higher ceiling than anyone else. fill your boat, sure you can make a new character but eventually you'll fill that boat too.
Trying to think of platinum as a currency like you think of euros or dollars is ludicrous.

anyone who thinks theres a major problem with AH pricing hasn't been playing long enough to realize that the pricing goes for everyone, and you have just as much chance of dropping that +1 heart of wood in the waterworks as I did recently.