What are the trading systems in various MMOs like ?

[bilateralrope]

I'm just wondering what systems for trading between player various MMOs have. For the purposes of this thread we are only talking about the systems that the games GMs run, preferably with the system being entirely in-game. Personally I view and third party run trade systems (such trade forums) as a symptom that the ingame trading system sucks.

The Guild Wars system consists of two parts:

1 - Trader NPCs which buy and sell specific items, with their price changing based on the number of that item bought and number sold, possibly over specific time interval (only ANET knows the actual algorithm). The traders can only sell players items that they have already bought from players, so they do run out of stock whenever there is a sudden increase in demand from players. The traders have some limitations though:
- The traders can only handle items with fixed stats, meaning that the items with randomized stats (the majority of the items in guild wars) they can't deal with.
- There are a lot of items in Guild Wars that the traders can work for (mainly weapon upgrades), but for some reason ANET hasn't implemented them.
- Because whenever a new item is added to a trader it starts with the lowest possible price and 0 stock, it can take a while before the trader builds up enough of a stock for its price to accurately reflect the market value.
But overall the traders, where implemented, work well enough and their price does appear to effect supply and demand.

2 - Trade spamming. This involves moving around between towns (usually the ones that have become trade hubs, but it could be anywhere) announcing the items your wanting to buy/sell over and over until you find someone you can trade with. To give you an idea how bad the trade spam is, I've taken two screenshots of the spam. First here I am standing in one of the trade hubs (the chat on-screen fades about 15 seconds after it was sent out):

And here I am again, but this time I've turned the trade chat (the channel you are meant to put the trade spam into) on:

The other problem with the trade spam is that there are some items that drop rarely enough to make farming for them annoying, but commonly enough so that their price becomes really cheap. This items become very hard to acquire as most people just sell them to NPCs instead of trying to sell them.

So what systems do other MMO's have ?

[Nephtys]

From experience, I've played 3 games for a little while of this sort.

WoW
---
There is no trading, aside from buying stuff on the auction house and reselling it for more. Pretty much exclusively for crafting mats too. For that matter, WoW doesn't even have an economy.

City of Heroes/Villains
---
There is no economy period as far as I can see. Your money serves to buy stuff from NPCs that everyone else gets too, in unlimited quantity.

Eve Online
---
Players mine for minerals which become items which are then sold to other players, and people make money by buying items from civilization to sell to people in the boonies, while bringing minerals the other way around. Price is regulated by competition. Seems reasonably neat.

[lPeregrine]

EVE has three sections:

1) The normal market: each region has one, and this is 95% of your trading. You have a list of all available items in the game, clicking on one goes to the details for it, showing all player sell and buy orders in that region. Then you either buy whichever one you want, sell the item to the highest current bidder, or post it for sale at a specific price/location. Buy/sell orders are location specific, you can see all of them in a region, but the actual item is in a specific location, and a buy order only covers a skill-based radius from where it's placed. So you'll often be willing to accept a less appealing price for the convenience factor.

2) The auction market: for rare faction items. It's just like it sounds, you post the item and your auction terms, and people bid on it. This is a lot of trouble, so only rare high-end npc drops go here.

3) The forums. Again, only for rare faction items, and non-item things like character sales. The difference between this and the auctions is you can sometimes advertise your sale better for the really big items.

[Archaic`]

Don't know where you're getting your info Nephtys, but WoW certainly does have trading. Depending on your server, the economy might be robust, or fairly non-existant, but it's certainly there.

Besides the auction houses, you've also got the trade capital in your factions capital cities, plus the neutral capital in Outland. YMMV, but on my server at least (Emerald Dream), the trade there tends to revolve more around people advertising their tradeskills (Enchanting being the most popular, with the gemcutting of Jewelcrafters in a close second). You do also get people advertising cheap bulk deals for tradegoods, as well as the occasional rare or epic world drop, when they're looking more for a quick sale than the higher profits they might get on the AH.

[Nephtys]

Don't know where you're getting your info Nephtys, but WoW certainly does have trading. Depending on your server, the economy might be robust, or fairly non-existant, but it's certainly there.

Besides the auction houses, you've also got the trade capital in your factions capital cities, plus the neutral capital in Outland. YMMV, but on my server at least (Emerald Dream), the trade there tends to revolve more around people advertising their tradeskills (Enchanting being the most popular, with the gemcutting of Jewelcrafters in a close second). You do also get people advertising cheap bulk deals for tradegoods, as well as the occasional rare or epic world drop, when they're looking more for a quick sale than the higher profits they might get on the AH.

Eh. I played pre-BC, where there were virtually no craftables worth anything. The only value was in their components, and 300 skill enchanters/blacksmiths were common as dirt. So mainly, it was buying up craploads of runecloth, and reposting them for 5 silver more.

[Darth Raptor]

FFXI has a completely free, laissez-faire economy and suffers badly because of it. The main problem is massive inflation. New money constantly enters the economy (via new players and currency drops by Beastmen) and can't escape no matter what. Square-Enix has tried to institute money sinks in the form of fees for essential services by NPCs. But what they really need are price controls. No one sells to NPCs because you can get exponentially more selling to other players through the Auction House (they have started taxing the shit out of the AH though). And although NPC prices have remained virtually unchaned since 2001 (making the stuff they sell an absolute steal), all they sell is crap.

You can trade items and money directly between two players via "trading". Likewise, money and items can be sent to other players' residences through the Auction House. NPCs sell stuff, but it's crap. The only thing you'll ever buy from NPCs are synthesis materials that are too expensive at the AH (see above) and services other players can't provide (synthesis support, chocobo rental, airship fare, etc.). The economy of Vana'diel lives and dies at the Auction House. Players put things up for sale at a secret asking price, and the first person to bid at or above that price gets it. Prices are constantly climbing out of control though, so everyone has to farm, craft, fish, or whatever to keep their equipment up-to-date and enough consumables in stock.

[Stark]

MMOs suffering from serious inflation problems make me fucking laugh. How ignorant or stupid must the devs be? Such a situation is totally predictable as Raptor shows - constant injections of cash, and nothing to do with it but drive prices up. Gee, I wonder what happens in Fantasy Town after 10,000 people have killed Evil Dragon and stolen his vast treasure?

EVE avoids this by having many money-sinks, the MMO-unique idea of ACTUAL LOSS (ie billions of ISK of ships/equipment/clones etc constantly destroyed), etc. It really isn't that hard to find ways to draw money out of the economy - but it runs directly opposite lamer MMO player 'must constantly acquire but never lose anything' attitude. Many people regard EVE's for-serious ship destruction as quite harsh, since you can't just 'lol res' with little/no penalty like other MMOs.

[Archaic`]

WoW sort of has money sinks like that now, at the highest levels. While prices post-BC initially spiked, with money being significantly easier to get, they dropped to more reasonable levels fairly quickly, once people found out they'd need hundreds of gold to get themselves a flying mount (with something costing a hundred cold pre-BC being considered amazingly expensive by most players), and thousands of gold to train their riding skill for the epic flying mounts. Once someone has actually purchased those though....well, the only time that they'll spend significant amounts of cash in a way that it'd leave the economy would be through equipment repair costs.

[Mr Bean]

Anarchy Online had a interesting system if primitive. First off there was a trade channel which you could link the items you wanted to sell into. You could do that anywhere, but if you did one of the player GM's would come down on you quite quickly and remind you the trade system was there for a reason. Some of the Macro bots people created to advertise in that channel were quite complicated and several were available free to download so you could make your own work look as spiffy.

This was the digital equivalent of Hawkers crying their wares at passerbys in the street, except the trade channel was viewable if you were in any major city, and if you yelled to loudly, to often either you would be /ignored or a GM would pay you a visit, or the flood protection would kick in and boot you.

Thing was the system worked quite well, at least I always found what I needed within ten minutes or so of hunting and often saw bargains as I was headed between missions.

[Stormin]

DAoC has housing zone where you can put items for sale on your consignment merchant. Market explorers will let you search to find what you are looking for and give you the location of the house or you have the option of buying the item through the ME with a 20% added tax.
Sometimes stuff is sold through broadcast chats in the capital cities, on classic servers its usually just Darkness Falls seals and Aurulite sold that way.

Crafters usually advertise in broadcasts/guild chat/alliance chat or just keep an eye out for crafting requests in those chats to get orders for work. Some will also set a flag that will display their craft on a /who <craftname> search.

[Shadowhawk]

City of Heroes/Villains
---
There is no economy period as far as I can see. Your money serves to buy stuff from NPCs that everyone else gets too, in unlimited quantity.

Not quite true any longer.

When CoH started, there was, essentially, no economy. Money was 'Influence', which was a nebulous concept that as a superhero, you could use your influence to acquire enhancements and inspirations (power modifiers and short-term consumable buffs). You could sell to other players, but there was basically no reason to. In the late game, you'd give away enhancements to players who needed them (like L53 enhancements, which are about 6% better than the L50s you can buy, that are occasionally dropped by high-level enemies). You can sell unneeded enhancements back to stores, but they're generally not worth much. At L50, a full tray of L53 enhancements will probably only net you as much Influence at a store as it'd take to earn simply by defeating even-level enemies for 15 minutes.
The only real items traded for significant amounts of influence are Hamidon Enhancements, which are enhancements that buff two or three stats at once, rather than the usual one. Since you could only get about one every day or two, and the drops were random, it could take a long time to get the particular one you want, so HOs regularly went for tens of millions of influence. There's really nothing else to spend it on. High-level characters would regularly just drop millions on some newbie or farm it off to their own alts or SG members. Influence is so common in the game that even 'chinese gold farmers' generally don't waste their time selling chunks of it on ebay or whatever.

Then, they added the first money sink: costume shops. You could enter these shops to tweak or totally remake your costume to your heart's content. A complete costume remake might take as much influence as 2-3 hours of playtime. Most people, however, would settle on a few costumes they like and not change them much ever again. Didn't help that the devs regularly handed out Free Costume Change tokens whenever they revamped some costume pieces, so lots of old wealthy characters can have a couple of dozen free passes to do whatever they want with their costumes.
Later on, they added Supergroup Bases, which changed what little economy we had. Now you could earn Prestige for your supergroup, which could be traded for decoration and useful items in your SG's base. You earn this by running your character in Supergroup mode, and once you hit a certain level (25, I think), if you run in SG mode, you earn less and less influence off mobs (to a point where you earn no influence at all if in SG mode). You can trade your influence for prestige, but the exchange rate is so insane (a million influence might earn enough to let you place a lamp), it's essentially unused. They also added Salvage, which is used to create base items, but it's pretty abundant and I rarely see any trading going on for it. The biggest effect on the economy was there was a lot less being earned by the more active players, since their SGs wanted Prestige.

The upcoming expansion, Issue 9, though, is going to throw the laid-back economy on its side. Inventions are the new addition, which will:
1) Rely on recipes, from common to rare. They are consumed every time you invent something.
2) Rely on Invention Salvage, again, from common to rare. Also consumed.
3) Allow the creation of Invention Enhancements, which will
3a) Create large buffs for powers, or
3b) Create multiple-buffs like HOs, and
3c) Create 'sets' of enhancements where the more you have of a particular set, the more extra bonuses are added.
4) Allow the creation of new costume pieces.
5) Cost large amounts of influence to both buy any recipes and Invention Salvage from a dealer, and even more to actually create the Invention
6) Introduce an auction house to allow these rare items to be bought by people who need them.

This game is 3 years old, and has many players who have been playing for a long time without any substantial money sinks. The economy is about to go really wonky.

[bilateralrope]

Maple Story's economy suffers from massive inflation because there are so many hackers driving up the prices because they don't use the gold sink of buying potions but still want the best gear they can find, and Nexon doesn't seem to be banning many hackers. So even if Nexon could permanently render hacks ineffective then there is still the problem of the inflation they already caused.

As for the trading systems Maple Story has, you will need to keep two things in mind while I describe them. Firstly is that Maple Story is a 2d side-scrolling MMO, and the second is that its profit model is free to play, but you pay cash for optional extras.

While you can trade with other players anywhere, most of the trading happens in the free market which can be accessed from most towns and has two sections:

The entrance consists of lots of people spamming what they want to buy/sell with the rest of the line filled with "@@@@@" so that their message is as high above their head as possible (it seems that most Maple Story players only read the all chat if they see the message above someones head) so that it isn't covered by other peoples spam. These people are the ones who can't/won't purchase the ability to setup a stall.

Then there are the stall. What you do is spend some cash (I can't remember exact values) and you then have the ability to setup a stall in that area of the free market for the next 90 days. You then place up the items you want to sell and what your selling them for. People then come along and buy them. But to keep the stall open you either need to purchase a store NPC (which lasts about 3 days, making it vastly more expensive than the AFK stall) or remain logged in with your character staying on that spot, meaning that most of the shops are people AFKing when they aren't available to play.

To buy an item from these stalls you either need to buy an owl which allows you to search all the freemarket stalls for one item. Or you have to go from stall to stall (most with useless names like "asdf", "cheap stuff", "buy buy") trying to find the item your after. Once you find it you only get to see the price that stall owner is asking, unless you keep looking. And after searching for about 15 mins just to find a stall selling the item I was after, I didn't really want to keep looking.


In this screenshot the first item is in stock there, the others have been sold at the price listed. The item I'm pointing at is one thats available for 1000 mesos each in unlimited amounts from an easily accessible NPC. But here we can see that a player payed 100 times that amount. Sadly this is a very common thing to see.

Now while there is code in place to prevent most players placing their stall on top of someone else's, hacks to bypass this are quite commonly seen.

I don't know if there are any official trade forums as the official website is IE only due to "technical reasons".

[Imperial Overlord]

Many people regard EVE's for-serious ship destruction as quite harsh, since you can't just 'lol res' with little/no penalty like other MMOs.

Adding to the patheticness of this is the fact that you can buy fucking insurance for your ship if you are worried about losing it. But lamers are lamers.

[Hotfoot]

You can buy insurance for the ship, sure...at 30% cost, and it doesn't cover components, which by the time you get good cost double to triple the cost of the ship.

[Yogi]

EVE avoids this by having many money-sinks, the MMO-unique idea of ACTUAL LOSS (ie billions of ISK of ships/equipment/clones etc constantly destroyed), etc. It really isn't that hard to find ways to draw money out of the economy - but it runs directly opposite lamer MMO player 'must constantly acquire but never lose anything' attitude.

Actually, when an ITEM is destroyed, the amount of ISK in the game remains the same. In fact, with MORE ISK from the insurance payout and now one less item, inflation actually increases. What removes the actual ISK from the game are taxes, blueprints, clones, NPC buys, and wardecs.

The REAL price controls are the static NPC buy/sell orders. If inflation gets too bad, people will buy from the NPCs and refine for minerals, thereby removing ISK and adding Items to the game. If prices get too LOW, people will simple sell to the NPCs, gaining ISK and removing Items from the game.