Topic

Need for a Bazaar ?

Hello all I am a newbie and this may or may not be in the game already. I just haven’t had a chance to explore the world enough to know, but have seen many instances for the request to trade knowledge / goods.

See the following forum topics;
alpha.glitch.com/forum/idea...
alpha.glitch.com/forum/idea...
alpha.glitch.com/forum/idea...

I would propose that the bazaar is set up just like housing districts; the one I am referring to is Tiki? Not sure of the spelling. It seems that you enter a "Square" and you can travel to different address blocks. Well for the bazaar the different blocks can be organized by what people are looking for; Tools, Produce, Ideas, Materials, Meals / Drinks, etc....

Players could either be in a certain block to conduct a live exchange or post an item up (like an auction) for a set price. Once the item sells the player would get his credit. This can be a place for players that enjoy helping others to give advice / information.

From what I have seen so far the world of glitch seems to be broken up into areas that might result in, at this point, a district of a city? Those districts are represented by the streets. So we could have a bazaar in each district, and each districts bazaar could specialize in a type of trade.

To relieve the potential congestion of the bazaar area the glitch world might have to transform from side scrolling to top down, with perhaps a side view window pop up when two players are interacting with one another.

Thanks for listening and I havent had much time to put into the idea. I will work on putting together more details if it sounds like something that could be useful.

Posted 23 months ago by Stinky Subscriber! | Permalink

Replies

  • How would the bazaar be different from the existing auction system?

    I like the classified idea because you could use it to advertise items for sale as well as items you are looking for.
    Posted 23 months ago by Zaphod Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I would like to set a bidding war on some. There could be set prices and then auctions for rarer objects to see what you can get.
    Posted 23 months ago by Ani Laurel Subscriber! | Permalink
  • That just sounds like the auctions need to be modified to be real auctions.

    I've never understood why they're called auctions when you don't get to bid on anything.
    Posted 23 months ago by Zaphod Subscriber! | Permalink
  • It is a little different from the auctions that it would give a place for people to peddle their goods, character to character interaction. You could trade for other items or currants. The auctions are very impersonal and I would like to see an area where people could specifically gather gor exchange.
    Posted 23 months ago by Stinky Subscriber! | Permalink
  • It would need to provide a notable advantage for players to want to use it, rather than just the current auction system.
    Posted 23 months ago by RobotGymnast Subscriber! | Permalink
  • the "live exchange market" aspect of this was already tried and did not work. no one used it, and so the player market was not reimplemented when the game map switched from "old" to "new" groddle.

    the "auctions" aspect of this idea already exists.
    Posted 23 months ago by striatic Subscriber! | Permalink
  • "the "live exchange market" aspect of this was already tried and did not work. no one used it, and so the player market was not reimplemented when the game map switched from "old" to "new" groddle."

    To be fair I don't think anyone quite understood what that market-place was to be used for. If there had been stalls and signs that players could have utilised then it might have been workable. Saying that, I could never see me staying in one location all day on the off-chance that someone might come by and order a pick or buy a basket or apples. I would want to do this remotely, in which case only a bit of haggling would make it differ from the auction system.

    Talking of which is auctioning going to scale to 10000 or more players? Or will we need a local auction?
    Posted 23 months ago by bluto Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I don't think auctions in their current form would scale very well, but I think it's pretty obvious there needs to be a few changes in the auction system no matter how many people are using it. Search would be a really nice function to start with.
    Posted 23 months ago by Zaphod Subscriber! | Permalink
  • there were stalls and signs. there were sub sections for selling hardware, food etc.

    it didn't work because it presented no additional utility over auctions, which weren't superpopular themselves.

    the current auction interface seems scalable. it's paged, has sub-sections, is searchable. at the very least it is more scalable than the real-estate system.

    if anything, it would be local auctions that wouldn't scale as the player population increases. more people = more locales = more markets.

    which would mean that if the production of any kind of resource is remotely centralized, it would take increasing levels of effort to distribute that resource to the ever increasing number of local markets, thus not scaling.
    Posted 23 months ago by striatic Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Yes and what happens when I and 400 other people are looking to buy honey all at the same time? A global auction system is going to suffer in the same way as a global chat - too many people trying to respond to the same message or listing. And being frustrated when their offer to buy keeps failing.

    I take your point though about resources being specialized. Difficult to auction an item collected in Ix to someone in Groddle Heights.
    Posted 23 months ago by bluto Subscriber! | Permalink
  • "Yes and what happens when I and 400 other people are looking to buy honey all at the same time?"

    the same thing that happens on eBay. someone gets it and the other people don't.

    presumably if there are 400 people looking to buy honey at the exact same instant, there's a huge market for honey and that should make more people willing to get into production... so if you miss out on an auction there will probably be someone else to buy from.

    if trading really gets as popular and fast paced as you're talking about, it is an issue of speeding up the interface so that it updates in real-time and there is no "confirm" step on purchases.

    on top of that, the market *should* correct itself for trading speed. if people are buying so quickly at a particular price point that supplies are exhausting faster than they can be produced, the prices will increase to the point where that is no longer the case, and trading will slow down.

    or a combination of both. some players selling/buying at low prices/high volume at high speed, and some players wanting to avoid the hassle of "winning" an auction buying at a somewhat higher price point.
    Posted 23 months ago by striatic Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Specialized streets for live exchange could work when there are thousands playing, but I'd rather just have auctions, KOL-esque stores, and secure trading that works anywhere. Set sale auctions would work like a store.

    In KOL, there are players who drive prices down if certain items get expensive, especially if they're integral to the game.
    Posted 23 months ago by Tingly Claus Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Well-said, striatic. Player-driven economies automatically adjust themselves to changes in supply and demand very quickly, as you point out. Additionally, part of the reason we have automated vendors is so that in the event of player-trading scarcity, we can still get resources like honey.
    Posted 23 months ago by RobotGymnast Subscriber! | Permalink
  • there could also be delivery surcharges and delivery wait times depending on how far away the buyer is from the seller [probably on a realm by realm basis instead of street by street, for technical reasons].

    this would mean that the lowest priced honey jar might be different for every single player attempting to buy honey once distance is factored in, and so there wouldn't be 400 people attempting to click a single low priced item.

    you'd effectively have local prices without having local markets. this would scale better because paying a surcharge is typically easier than moving your player manually or moving the goods manually to many different markets all over the game world.

    production volume wouldn't need to be as high because you wouldn't need to produce extra items just so that all the far-flung markets could have some inventory.

    you'd also have all the sales listings available in one easy to find place, so that players wouldn't have to constantly wander the map, re-visiting the same markets over and over again just to find the best price on honey that particular day.
    Posted 23 months ago by striatic Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Fair enough on the bazaar issue. Seems like the more experience players like the Auction system, but it just needs some tweaks. Are there areas in the game that players can meet up to exchange information? If not could there be taverns or some such type of kick back and get gliched up.

    As far as the economics of the game, how complex is it and how frequently do prices of the vendors change? Is it done in real time or do prices adjust at the end of every test based on supply v. demand?
    Posted 23 months ago by Stinky Subscriber! | Permalink
  • the vendor prices are fixed.

    conceivably the NPC vendors could be supplied by players instead of having an infinite supply. i think that could work, provided the goods sold to one vendor would go into a "pot" that wold fuel all the NPC vendors in the game.

    .. but i think the idea that players are going to want to stand around in a single location waiting for people to buy stuff from them is a non-starter. it fits into a kind of romantic notion of trade as cradle for culture, and i'm not sure things actually work that way.

    there are quite a few myths of social interaction that i don't think apply to glitch ..

    glitch put in a system whereby you could get "full" and thus make refilling energy difficult. when this happened, a prompt would appear to "relax and talk to some people" until the new day arrived and your tummy would empty. this didn't really work. i think people would log out of the game instead, or try to find alternate energy sources.

    there's another myth, regarding local chat, that if you somehow get people into the same area for a prolonged period of time their natural social impulses will emerge and suddenly people would be talking with their neighbours or some other baloney. friends would bump into each other in the street between errands and take up conversation in some romanticised notion of feudal life. this doesn't actually happen except maybe in movies or in highschool, neither of which are reality.

    so, mere proximity and time are not enough. indeed proximity may be a liability, as getting into proximity becomes a kind of tax on social interaction.

    say you have a bar for people to hang around in and meet.. maybe you give them free energy to encourage them to hang around in there, because they sure wouldn't for any other reason. so people will likely stand in the bar and go AFK while they talk with their real friends over twitter and IM outside the browser window. having a "tavern" as wallpaper behind some chat windows does not a social environment make. it's just a wallpaper, and the drinks are equally fake.

    i think instead of trying to port idealized notions of how social interaction occurs in the real world over to glitch .. like chit chat at the farmer's market or hanging out in a bar, which are often only arguably "social" even in the real world .. i think it is better to look at how social stuff happens in other MMOGs and try to improve and innovate from there.

    common cause .. *reasons* to interact and communicate are more important by far.

    socializing in World of Warcraft -- quite vibrant social landscape, that, even if the tone may not be for everyone -- has more to do with guilds and group raids than it has to do with crafting and trade. common cause and coordination leading to social interaction as a means to succeeding at game objectives, but then often leading to socializing just for the sake of it.
    Posted 23 months ago by striatic Subscriber! | Permalink
  • +1 for striatic's idea (two posts ago).
    Posted 23 months ago by RobotGymnast Subscriber! | Permalink