This is probably the only time I will ever harrumph about something that encourages exploration in any MMO ever, but... noooooo. Every MMO needs a Stormwind/Jita/Cebarkul :|
I agree! Cebarkul is a really useful place, because there's always guaranteed to be people there. Without Cebarkul, I think there would be less player-player interaction, and more people just wandering around not talking to each other.
I also agree. Or have it move around or something but have something else special about a couple key spots. People have suggested special glitchygraveyards where people go to mourn/get mourned but I don't think that alone would replace the Cebarkul feel to me.
Games that don't have a 'hub' are pretty sad, I agree.
A lot of games don't give you a reason to go back to certain areas and there's little to no interaction with the low level players. I like that there aren't any 'level zones' in Glitch, and Ix is near enough to the newbie areas that it gets discovered pretty quickly, therefore giving everyone a chance of meeting other players and make new friends.
If we could do something with our useless votes, I'd say no to this :)
Now they're closing down City of Heroes (although the players are doing their best to save it and there's a petition if anyone is interested), I've been looking at old pics of the gatherings of players at Atlas Park - pity.
Cebrakul is pretty special. It needs the vendor to say there to encourage group forming. Playing UK time means I can find people when all my friends are offline.
I always thought it was odd that one vendor gave more than others, but unless the "moving around" has some logic to it, it's just going to be an annoyance.
I think Cebarkul could remain a hub of sorts without the Tool Vendor (although admittedly it helps). I direct people there, more often because they want to find lots of people than because they want to sell things at the best prices. :)
Hopefully the moves are not too frequent; if it was, say, every game day, the "special" vendor would become practically invisible, and vigilante "vendor hunters" would roam the land every 4 hours. Hopefully it's more like a RL week, or a glitch-month (would give the months a little more meaning too).
Zira said "... Ix is near enough to the newbie areas that it gets discovered pretty quickly," - except, new players enter the world all over, not necessarily near Ix. New players come into Live Help frequently asking "where do players gather? I haven't seen anyone yet!" so I point them to Cebarkul or Groddle Forest Junction. Also, now, Madhur Hathur. To keep this on topic, I think there needs to be a few locations we can count on having people gather regularly, so there's a chance for actual interaction between players when they want it!
Oh guys, please don't take away the incentive to hang out in Cebarkul. It's really nice to have a regular spot where you know you can find other Glitchen... It would in no way enhance gameplay to mix up the location of the "good" tool vendor, but it would blow up an organically formed community hangout.
I have one word for all the complainers: LAG!
I cannot even get into Cebarkul on some days. Finding other Glitch is great but whenever there are more than 5-10 people in one spot, my game gets laggy. The game is fine otherwise. I am waiting for group streets personally.
To TS: First you tell us (for the past year) that global chat will be closed down when we get too crowded for it to keep up, then our housing couldnt keep up so we got rid of neighborhoods, now you are taking away cebarkul, too.
Are you wanting the social aspect of this game to go away? How on Urth will we find large groups of people?
There has always been a way in Second Life for players to see the density of others around the larger world map using the same sort of colored dots we see on the teensy street map when we enter a street in Ur. Second Life "residents" could then use this information to approach or avoid that area/street, depending what they were looking for. If we had this ability in Glitch, the concern about losing interactions in Cebarkul might be moot.
Maybe there just shouldn't be a buy-back vendor at all.
It seems weird that the 'sugar daddy' bureaucroc is always there and will always buy an infinite amount of anything offered. People are always carrying on about the economy and trying to apply laws from the real world to Glitch, yet the fact that an infinite injection of currants goes on all the time never gets any mention.
Obviously vendor buyback can't go poof and be instantly gone, but it is one of the more unrealistic parts of the game. There is no backstory that explains where the currants come from or where all the 'stuff' is going. We're left like the rat in the cage pressing the bar, not knowing why we press it or where the food pellet comes from.
I don't understand getting rid of buyback. We are all doing stuff, earning img, making progress towards badges, aren't we all making more than we consume?
What does vendor buyback correspond to in the real world? How is it realistic? If glitch is a 'model world' that real laws of economics apply to, where's the government agency that I can just give an infinite amount of anything I produce to and get back real dollars?
A lot of the people considered to be 'economists' here are mostly just reverse engineering the lookup tables and forumlas in the Glitch source code. And that's pretty boring, it's descriptive, not analytic. There's a lot more to consider.
And if we're all making more than we consume, there should be so much stuff piled around each of us that we can't see each other. Without periodic 'drains' in the form of the rare item vendor and the gambling casinos known as the toy vendors, that would probably be the case. But said 'drains' are really just ugly hacks put in place due to design shortcomings.
It's just a game and it's all just for fun, so maybe dissective analysis doesn't belong here. The DM can come in and say 'you die if you roll a double six because I said so' and the issue is resolved. Stoot doesn't seem like that sort of DM tho.
Why does it need to correspond to anything in the real world? No one can master as many skills as I can in the real world. If it was real world stuff, some people would be doing nothing other than chopping grain into flour
I think the tool vendor should stay the same and keep his buy back pricing cebarkul and level 4. Other vendors still offer their normal pricing; but are chosen at random or even pop up like the rare item vendor and offer buy back bonuses. Say like additional "SUPER SALE BONUS" of an additional 5-500% on what you sell. So, you don't know where these guys are, it may be different vendor or location for an individual and it would also make sense that you don't know you get a bonus till you confirmed the sale with that vendor. (kinda like when you shuck a flower and don't know if you are getting 0-4 seeds) Then you could gamble that you may get a bonus and more $ at different vendor. I think it would encourage more exploration and socialization when there's a hot vendor that's been giving out bonuses.
Ironically, if vendor buyback were replaced with a more player-driven economic infrastructure, the players whose game time would be the least affected would be those just looking to dump things on a vendor. They'd be filling buy orders. Search. Craft. Dump. It's the exact same meta-game, but without fixed payouts, it would possibly lead to more variety among profitable products.
But there's a million things that would need to happen. The biggest being a source of currants.
I like it a lot more when the tool vendor stays in Cebarkul. It's one of the only reliable places to find a crowd in Ur, and if the vendor moves, that will be gone. Please stay!
I imagine the one that would be moving about would be the one in Level 4 East, which should probably be the case -- It's not that much further just to go up to Cebarkul.
I do like that the mention of change just dropped in as a partial sentence at the end of a tweet can spark a lively discussion. We're so conservative; the threat of a little change in Our Town stirs things up so. Keeps things interesting.
"so you don't like our town, huh?"
Yeah I never understood why the tool vendors were so close together. I'm sure the fellow down in the caves can move about a bit without affecting too many people.
Move the special! Make us explore and work for those extra currants! But central marketplace/ hub/ graveyard sort of places instead, maybe with a notice board, game tickets, etc, that could be nice...
I'm not sure what has caused the sudden flare up of pushback against vendors but it seems to be cropping up on forums more lately; So here it is TS is getting us to a vendor-less economy... slowly.
Though I do hope they have a killer idea to give us a reason to congregate in a central location ^.^
If they don't want vendors at all...
1, they need ways for us to be able to make all the in game items we can't yet make: birtch syrup, ice cubes etc.
2, we need group places which were hinted at a long time ago, team built halls.
3, we need a graveyard.
4, I like lists.
5. Somewhere for all of the items to go... the insane surplus of items would drive the value of everything through the floor.
But I feel like many of TS's actions are just re-enforcing the presence of Vendors, including the upgrade cards, balancing the "official prices" of items, etc. Plus, I don't recall where, but I believe more recently than 8 months, stoot has said that they are no longer planning the total elimination of every single vendor, but rather de-emphasis of them. But who knows.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't any economy need to have an injection of money? So if TS decides to "completely" do-away with street vendors, wouldn't the currant supply dwindle per person (when the game opens to the public and Glitch has a larger influx of new players), to a point where we might have to do a barter system?
For those of you who want the game to forever remain small enough that a single location can always remain "the place in the game where everyone gathers": there is a 100% chance that Glitch would be shut down in that case and a 0% chance that the game would exist. So … be careful what you wish for! :)
I'm presuming the point of the buy-back upgrade cards was so when the best priced vendor moves, it matters less which vendor we happen to use. Because the buy-back prices would even out. Also the point of making the vendor move is two fold, first we need to have more than one gathering place, and two it gives us cause to explore more, along with getting us to be less dependent in selling to vendors. The intention was stated a long time ago that it was always meant so vendors would be slowly phased out as we can make / harvest more and more items that we couldn't of previously. Personally rather I'm looking forward to it, getting rid of vendors will increase player interactions and sales, will give us more reasons to make things, and wont make it quite as easy as it is now to earn currants. It should in theory make the game more balanced.
But Stoot, right now Cebarkul serves as a major hub of player interaction because of the tool vender. What are you proposing to replace it with? When I log in to play, I want places to explore, but I also want places where I can easily find other players who are also looking to socialize. Right now that's Cebarkul. As other players have pointed out, an MMO needs a place (or places) where players can reliably find each other. Usually they are towns; in Glitch it's the tool vendor. Are you going to make us a town instead? (Which would be kind of cool!)
I agree a hub area of sorts would be nice. I never actually go to cebarkul, maybe thats why I'm such a loner lol. But I struggle to think of another way to create this sort of dynamic, theres lots of simple solutions I can think of, but none seem optimized. The best thats popped into mind is an idea I'd mentioned in another thread about possibly having a central area where you can enter a sort of housing or shopping listing tower, that would give a sort of faux address in the real world, in that you'd have a few towers that could be infinitely heightened by adding new levels, and these towers would basically be rooms of doors, where you could buy an address, which could double as a sort of advertisement for whatever you sell or do by being customizable with a sign and various themes. I feel like this would create a sort of public marketplace, and places like that seem to generate lots of traffic, and eventually people meet eachother, whether through the shops themselves, or by going to the same shops, or going even just to the same floor. You could probably achieve this most efficiently by using an elevator system with a loading screen in between, that way you'd only have to load 1 or 3 full rooms, depending on whether you'd want to keep up the visual illusion of a persistent tower, or just stick the room in hammerspace.
Other games have managed to have unlimited vendor buyback and still have a robust player driven auction economy. I hate to use WoW as an example of anything after my 6 years of playing it, but one thing it does well without question is to have both coexist.
One difference between this game and WoW, economy wise, is that in WoW, because players are limited in function - for gathering, for crafting - there is always demand for the items they produce. In Glitch, because theoretically every player is capable of producing everything (whether everyone chooses to or not is a different story), oftentimes it is easier to be completely self sufficient, meaning with the exception of a few items, there is little demand.
Another difference is that not all currency creation happens with the vendors in WoW. Money drops from doing the thing that is the main focus of the game (killing mobs). We do get money drops from harvesting, but they are small and sporadic. If the vendor buyback stops in Glitch, the demand for a reliable alternate source of new money will rise even further.
We also have quoins, but as small as we (the playerbase) are now, the high value quoins in the AL are under high demand, and high value value quoins in other locations are camped. Sharding solves some of this problem, but I have difficulty seeing how the current state of quoins will effectively scale up as we gain the amount of players that the game needs in order to make it.
I adore that this game lets me be self sufficient. But in order to have an honest to goodness functioning economy, we cannot all be islands in ourselves. TS is going to have to force some kind of specialization in order for the economy to work.
Ideally, I think what needs to happen is this. Vendors can stay, buyback can stay, but prices must be reduced greatly.
The AL must be expanded. More currant quoins need to be added to other zones.
Players must be forced to specialize in specific areas of play to create demand for items that are produced (And this leads into a whole new discussion about how some products are useless. Cooking, I am looking at you.).
The auction house must be revamped to offer both a bid function and a buyback function. The 10 minute delay on purchases needs to be drastically reduced or done away with.
Currant drops from harvesting need to be made more reliable, or increase in amount dramatically with the same frequency as right now.
With these ideas in place, player driven sales will become more attractive than vendor sales. Purchasing from the auctions will be better than just farming things yourself. There will be more opportunity to create new currants from harvesting and quoins. All of those things together will add up to a more stable economy.
Reirei Umezaki: If this happens, someone will probably just make an app for finding the tool vendor.
If the comment means the "special tool vendor" (and not simply the property of special-ness) will move, as someone pointed out to me in the help channel, that app is called the "i" key.
+1 Grupletruge I like the idea of a central "town square" not with resources but a directory of sorts or options to go to different "store" areas. If people were moving quickly through the area rather than congregating in it then the lag would potentially be reduced. I appreciate stoot's comment about the game also. Is this because of the server issues and lag, or because the game would not grow and evolve and thus die from limited monetary input, etc.?