Make it easier to trade in EU

jwestonmoss

Alpha
Joined
Sep 13, 2021
Posts
573
Avatar Name
Francis Merlinfire Sureshot
As a relatively newish player who is still getting used to the --way-things-are-- I sense that there are ways that could speed up portions of the economy, if it were just easier to transact.

Here's some examples of problems I run into.

  • I want to sell an item, or a small stack of items, whose value is too low to justify listing on the AH. For most depo-ing players, the effort of hawking these items on a trade channel is even less economic than that in terms of player time, and so they'll just get TT'd. and while technically MU is paid by the player and doesn't matter to MA, MU paid by players ultimately is depo'd into the game, so it actually is better for MA for players to pay MU than for players to TT the same item.
    • Solution: change the formula for the minimum AH listing fee. Instead of doing 50 pec minimum, use a formula that starts lower, and scales up as the TT value scales up, to a certain point where it reaches the existing 50 pec minimum, where the existing system continues as normal. In practice, lots of lowbies are effectively locked out of using the AH to sell, so they either have to spend time and lose MU doing some kind of reseller arbitrage, or TT. Or, as some do, stuff just sits in storage, so ped isn't being cycled as fast.
  • While Calypso is unquestionably the "capital city of EU", a lot of players do live on the other planets. Due to the effort involved in commuting between planets in space (both in time and in risk), and the fact that the AH market is separate for each planet, the AH is at best 15% operational on any non-Caly world on both the buy and sell side. I know from experience this can make it difficult to cycle peds hunting on non-Caly worlds because I burn through my weapons. Assuming there are player-run shops (if I can find them, and if they are stocked with what I need, or stocked at all), i can get by, but i'm still burning time shopping.
    • One solution might be to provide an interface to show the locations of player-run shops on the planet, and a listing of their items. Even if you still have to physically go there.
    • Another solution would be to make planet-to-planet warps available across the board, for a reasonable fee. I recognize this would hurt taxi services. Would want to think of a way to handle this conflict.
  • Related to the planet divide, and player trading, is the necessity under the current regime to sync up the time and location of two players to do face-to-face trading. In my society, I have a person that I regularly will barter hunting loot in exchange for weapons and enhancers. I like to explore, so I end up all over the place in EU. My friend spends 70% of their time on Ark, and 30% on Caly. They have a schedule in a significantly different time zone (and broadly speaking, the playerbase of EU in my experience is very broad in time zones). This means that in order to make this transaction, I need to deliberately travel to Ark, and wait until our schedules sync up, to make a transaction that will help me cycle ped. The easiest way for me to describe what I'm looking for is to use an analogy: phone call vs text message. A phone call requires two parties to be active and connected at the same time. Often, a phone call is only especially convenient for one of the two parties involved, the person making the call. With text messages or email, it's convenient for the person sending, and when the person on the receiving end finds a convenient time, it's convenient for them to read. That's because the transaction is decoupled into two separate parts: send and receive.
    • It would be great if there were an easier way to transact between individuals privately that followed the "text message" model. I can think of a couple ways this might be accomplished.
      • add a private sales tab to the auction house interface. the sell listing would be visible only to a specific individual or to your society (if chosen). Auction fee would be typical, but the private sales auction tab would be global, not locked to one planet. buyout only.
      • add the ability for a player to make an "offer" to a player-owned shop, more or less like the way auction listing work: an offer of X for Y price for Z time. buyout only. offer would bounce into global storage if the offer expires, is rejected, or the vendor/shopkeeper is removed
      • add the equivalent of the shopkeeper interface but as a "safety-deposit-box" between two players.
  • none of these auction-style solutions really help with items that can't be auctioned. it's not completely clear to me why there are so many items that are tradeable but not auctionable. if there's some rationale there, ignore this point, but for things like sweat, pills, bone samples, etc you will still have this problem
  • needs to be easier to tip people. back in the day, SWG had a simple command: /tip <player> <amount>, or if you selected the player, /tip <amount>
    • right now you have to open a trade, that's kind of unwieldy when you have a one-way trade
    • i would like to be able to mail a tip to a player
      • even if this tip, let's say, is forced to sit in some kind of time-out escrow for 72 hours or something, for security reasons

I know this is a giant wall of text. I just know in my cycling of daily ped I run into these issues all the time, and wish it were more user-friendly.
 
What you list here is a 100% correct observation of flaws we all run into.
You get to the correct solutions, and those solutions are changes begged for since years.

Sadly MA is uhm... lousy in Quality of Life Improvements for their game.
Mostly because they keep wasting their precious coder time on re-inventing rectangular wheels nobody asked for.

I wish MA would read through this.
Nevertheless my experience with them tells me a different story.
 
Your comments, although valid from your perspective have been discussed on many many occasions and there are genuine reasons they wont be implemented.

Basically MA provides the universe. As it is a universe and not a game, each player has to make up their own mind on how to interact with the universe. The AH is there for players to sell loot but you need a reasonable stack in order to cover the AH fees. Imagine literally thousands of players selling stacks of 5 muscle oil. The AH would be awash with tiny stack offerings. This would be a nightmare when scrolling through the auctions

The planets are separated fo a reason. It has often been suggested that an interplanetary transport fee be created allowing avatars to TP from one planet to another. This would basically destroy space and leave a lot of disgruntled ship owners who spent years building reputations and structural integrity of their ships to find they are worthless as anyone can TP anywhere for 20 ped.

There are various options for trade. In my soc most of us TT nothing at all. We trade amongst ourselves for various items e need at any given time. For example we have a player who mainly hunts robots, so when i need robot materials to make guns I go to him. I have other players who I know hunt for certain items that I have an ongoing relationship with and will buy from them when I require their stuff.

I think the point I am making is that EU is hard work. That is what keeps the idiots away (well most of them). You need an understanding of the game, dedication and importantly (list to the ubers) BANKROLL. If your bank roll is sufficient then you can save your stacks of materials until they are large enough to cover the AH fees. In the early days of playing this is quite difficult but with a correctly managed bank roll and some forethought it is quite possible to do this
 
A lot of these suggestions mitigate an annoyance for some people while removing an opportunity for others. Some people may not like manually mall shopping, for example, but others may love the possibility of finding a great deal that no one else has spotted. That's not to say some of the ideas couldn't be workable, but I think each requires a deeper cost benefit analysis than just being appealing to people who want to maximize cycling time and ignore other aspects of the game.
 
Your comments, although valid from your perspective have been discussed on many many occasions and there are genuine reasons they wont be implemented.

Basically MA provides the universe. As it is a universe and not a game, each player has to make up their own mind on how to interact with the universe. The AH is there for players to sell loot but you need a reasonable stack in order to cover the AH fees. Imagine literally thousands of players selling stacks of 5 muscle oil. The AH would be awash with tiny stack offerings. This would be a nightmare when scrolling through the auctions

The planets are separated fo a reason. It has often been suggested that an interplanetary transport fee be created allowing avatars to TP from one planet to another. This would basically destroy space and leave a lot of disgruntled ship owners who spent years building reputations and structural integrity of their ships to find they are worthless as anyone can TP anywhere for 20 ped.

There are various options for trade. In my soc most of us TT nothing at all. We trade amongst ourselves for various items e need at any given time. For example we have a player who mainly hunts robots, so when i need robot materials to make guns I go to him. I have other players who I know hunt for certain items that I have an ongoing relationship with and will buy from them when I require their stuff.

I think the point I am making is that EU is hard work. That is what keeps the idiots away (well most of them). You need an understanding of the game, dedication and importantly (list to the ubers) BANKROLL. If your bank roll is sufficient then you can save your stacks of materials until they are large enough to cover the AH fees. In the early days of playing this is quite difficult but with a correctly managed bank roll and some forethought it is quite possible to do this
It won’t destroy space. It will just let those that like it not be interfered with those who don’t give a **** about it. It’s pretty clear that the current space situation ruins for the other PPs..
 
One "solution" for AH could be to remove the base fee and only have per centage fee on consumables, resources and materials.
To prevent the auction to be filled up with a LOT of small batches, reduce the amount of slots with this feature to lets say 2-5 or so.
They should also open up for PECs when setting the buyout.
 
What you list here is a 100% correct observation of flaws we all run into.
You get to the correct solutions, and those solutions are changes begged for since years.

Sadly MA is uhm... lousy in Quality of Life Improvements for their game.
Mostly because they keep wasting their precious coder time on re-inventing rectangular wheels nobody asked for.

I wish MA would read through this.
Nevertheless my experience with them tells me a different story.
UE upgrade is way important then any bullshit people are recommending. It's all waste of time at this point, unless it's critical bug, i wouldn't bother to work on it if i were on MA dev team.
 
UE upgrade is way important then any bullshit people are recommending. It's all waste of time at this point, unless it's critical bug, i wouldn't bother to work on it if i were on MA dev team.
I think most people expect new features that comes from ideas like these to pop up *after* UE5 have arrived. Maybe should have been more
clear on that part though in our posts.
 
Most of these have all been suggested, the only one that might happen though is the AH fees. That will alleviate a lot of problems for low quantities/new players trying to sell on the AH.

Everything else is like others have said, the game is built around annoyances and time. If you want to save time, you have to spend per, if you want to get rid of annoyances, you have to spend ped. That's the name of the game.

The less things that annoy you, the better off you will be in the game because you won't be spending that extra bed to solve those annoying problems.
 
makes sense, and i recognize that no matter what you do, when you change the rules of the game, you change incentive structures, which creates winners and losers

at this point what i'd like to see even more than any of this to change, is for the game to gain additional depth. there are so many buildings in the game that either cannot be entered, or have nothing inside. there needs to be a LOT more missions to tell the story.

they really need to actually flesh out space a little bit. i have been told by multiple people that it's not practical to take a slep or quad into space and hunt. based on that, i've not bothered, since all the bigger ships require large investments and multiple people to run. need more ships, more options, more hunting areas with more variety, and please round off the corners on the deep space borders a little bit...

there needs to be a version of the mission galactica concept that doesn't require 100k ped to complete

and man would this game benefit from a marketing campaign

EU has a lot of potential for growth, it just seems that MA needs someone as excited as we are
 
If there was a cliff notes version of this wall of text... I am sure there would've been a chance for MA to take it under consideration, albeit a minuscule chance.
 
If there was a cliff notes version of this wall of text... I am sure there would've been a chance for MA to take it under consideration, albeit a minuscule chance.
The TLDR goes like this:

if it were more convenient for me to trade with other players, I'd probably cycle ped faster instead of spending so much time traveling and syncing Real-Life schedules up to make face-to-face trades, and secondly, that the existing auction-house mechanics unnecessarily burden new players just starting out
 
The TLDR goes like this:

if it were more convenient for me to trade with other players, I'd probably cycle ped faster instead of spending so much time traveling and syncing Real-Life schedules up to make face-to-face trades, and secondly, that the existing auction-house mechanics unnecessarily burden new players just starting out
The barriers to entry you list here are exactly why markup exists in the first place. In particular the auction system.
The fact is many people are turned off from selling at the auction because they find it confusing, hate the fees etc. But if you learn how to use the auction effectively then it has the potential to be the most profitable way to sell your loot.
 
UE upgrade is way important then any bullshit people are recommending.
Upgrading to UE is bullshit compared to reforming the trading system.

Stackable items should be traded like Entropia Exchange. That would solve all the problems of lot sizes and commissions.
 
Stackable items should be traded like Entropia Exchange. That would solve all the problems of lot sizes and commissions.
Stack size is the most important factor that determines what markup your loot sells for. As soon as you remove this and pool resources then it is only a race to the bottom.
Terrible idea.
 
Incredible shortsightedness!
The size of the stack only determines how much of the final markup will be the amount of taxes. Don't confuse the nominal markup with the real markup that players end up getting. Do you want peds or nice markup numbers?

Your race to the bottom is not observable in the real workings of the entropia exchange. The argument is rejected as inconsistent with reality.
 
Incredible shortsightedness!
The size of the stack only determines how much of the final markup will be the amount of taxes. Don't confuse the nominal markup with the real markup that players end up getting. Do you want peds or nice markup numbers?

Your race to the bottom is not observable in the real workings of the entropia exchange. The argument is rejected as inconsistent with reality.
That is simply not true though. While a larger amount of the markup needs to cover the fee with the smaller stacks, there still can be an overall improvement to the net markup vs the larger/cheaper stacks. The trade off is time and risk but it’s a good way to stretch your ped a little bit more. Hell, a budding trader could make a few lazy PEDs on auction just buying large stacks and partitioning them off into retail quantities.
A system like the exchange won’t allow this however. As resources are pooled, a buyer no longer pays a premium for a smaller stack. A seller would be forced to put his materials up at the current lowest markup or undercut it to get a quick sale.
 
Okay. Let's stop the possible development of a trading system for the sake of encouraging resale by newcomers. Not for the sake of encouraging knowledge and learning of the game, but just for the sake of reselling the loot?

And one more point. Let's say you're right that markups will fall, although they won't. What do you see as the harm in that compared to the current state? I'll turn your attention to [Animal Muscle Oil]. Sales of this product through the auction are only 10,000 PED/day. Have you ever wondered how much Animal Muscle Oil is produced in the game? I sell 100+ PEDs of Animal Muscle Oil a day through the trading terminal. Only 100 of these same not-so-active hunters cover the daily auction turnover. The rest of the oil extracted by players is sold in the trading terminal. According to you, the markup on oil on the exchange will go down. Let it drop to, say, 100.3%. What's wrong with players like me getting an extra 0.3% instead of no markup in the trading terminal?
 
Okay. Let's stop the possible development of a trading system for the sake of encouraging resale by newcomers. Not for the sake of encouraging knowledge and learning of the game, but just for the sake of reselling the loot?
Reselling of the loot was just a way to highlight the markup differential between selling large stacks and small stacks.
And one more point. Let's say you're right that markups will fall, although they won't. What do you see as the harm in that compared to the current state?
What's the harm? Really? The fact that now my 20TT stack which used to sell for 105% on the auction, now must be listed on the exchange at the current lowest bid to get a chance at a sale. The small time crafter that only can afford 20TT worth of product, instead of buying my stack at a premium, can now draw what he likes out from the pool of resources on the exchange at the lowest bid. An exchange-like system will give no leverage to a seller, except for on price, while giving maximum flexibility to a buyer to always pick the cheapest price regardless of his budget.
I sell 100+ PEDs of Animal Muscle Oil a day through the trading terminal.
You don't have to. Learn the auction system, and the tips and strategies to squeeze the most out of your merchandise.
According to you, the markup on oil on the exchange will go down. Let it drop to, say, 100.3%. What's wrong with players like me getting an extra 0.3% instead of no markup in the trading terminal?
When you gain a 0.3% advantage, many other players who are successful through the auction and developed our strategies now have to settle for a 1% or more disadvantage. That's not fair.
 
The fact that now my 20TT stack which used to sell for 105% on the auction
  • 20*0.05=1.00
  • 1.00-0.50-0.05=0.45
  • 0.45/20.00=2.25%
Learn the auction system

I sell in the trading terminal, not because I don't know the auction system. I sell because the paltry markup is not worth the risk of my lot not being sold. There's a surplus of goods on the market. And there will always be someone like you who will underbid my lot. I prefer to play for the best chances.

I see nothing wrong with crafters buying raw materials at low prices. That is one of the purposes of the proposed change.

Resellers must die.
 
I have suggested this before.

NPCs/shopkeepers that are able to buy loot, not just sell. Sales wont count for AH markup.

Socs/Crafters can set up secret shopkeepers (for soc m8s or just some friends to sell there) or public shopkeepers.

Its not that different from the mechanics in game (banks do this to a degree, shame they not owned by someone with some balls to make them useful).
 
The barriers to entry you list here are exactly why markup exists in the first place. In particular the auction system.
The fact is many people are turned off from selling at the auction because they find it confusing, hate the fees etc. But if you learn how to use the auction effectively then it has the potential to be the most profitable way to sell your loot.
not sure i agree. markup is not a price of doing business, it's a reflection of supply and demand, with a price floor baked in (that does reflect auction fees)

you can have markup without an auction house. what the auction house DOES provide is a relatively stable measure of price history....which is very important to trading
 
Back
Top