Make Commonlands tunnel a bazaar enabled area

Discussion in 'Time Locked Progression Servers' started by Name2, Jan 24, 2023.

  1. Name2 Augur

    The early game live bartering kind of sucks. It's given rise to these third-party websites that track prices. While they're helpful, they take away from the actual bartering process. Instead of bartering, you're just checking what something went for on progtraders.com or whatever the site is. It's time for an improvement here. Flag the tunnel with whatever flags are on the platforms in the bazaar and allow us to post up traders to sell gear without having to watch/spam chat channels or rely on third-party websites (you guys hate third-party, right?).

    Better yet, add an offline auction house, available from NPCs in major cities, and improve trading across the board for everyone on all of the servers.
  2. Tryhard New Member

    Just stick a pok book in the commonlands tunnel that sends you to the baz. Put a book at the blocked door in the baz that sends you back to CL tunnel. Done.
    Mashef and Appren like this.
  3. UNDEADCRUSHER Elder

    How does the third party website track the item price? If its through auction cant you get someone to spam the item at 1pp.
  4. Appren Gnomercy

    Who needs a website if you can /baz !
  5. Cheet Elder

    And vice versa (which is what happens).
  6. Court Elder

    And kill the Commonlands trading nostalgia!? Boo, hiss.
  7. Name2 Augur

    That can coexist with bazaar mode, similar to how it does in the bazaar. What's not possible really is selling goods without investing an inordinate amount of time sitting in the tunnel. There's too much spam for the nostalgia to be an effective way of doing business. What if the auction spams were just for big ticket items, and there were shops set up selling tradeskill materials, potions, etc. For the enterprising sorts banded armor could be priced competitively in a stall that was set up, you don't have to sit around and wait for the auction to show up, and then hope you catch it through all of the spam. That would save the /auction for bigger ticket items that are worth bartering over and don't have a "set price." It's a bad experience as it stands, regardless of how nostalgic it may be.
  8. Tweakfour17 Augur

    The game never feels more "alive" then when 100s of people are all hawking their wares in the tunnel. The baz, while useful and convenient is soulless and dead.
    Thewiz likes this.
  9. Name2 Augur

    Respectfully disagree. The game feels alive when there are grouping opportunities, zones are populated, basically there are people around. Yes, this shows up in the tunnel due to the concentration of people there, but it's a bad experience for the intended purpose of buying and selling items. Further, it forces people to sit around in the tunnel as opposed to be out in the world playing the game, making the rest of the world feel less alive by comparison.
    Appren and Tweakfour17 like this.
  10. Crabman Augur

    big nostalgia feels seeing /auction and /ooc being spammed from the tunnel in classic-velious. It was even better on mischief. Oh man with raid loot being tradable! What a time. Tunnel was absolutely bustling. Really hope we see more free trade servers in the (near) future
  11. Triconx Augur

    Vomit
  12. Shakara Augur

    I will probably repeat this many time on other thread but you EQ players do know that you can have improvements to systems right? It feels like EQ players are so resistant to change to the point even beneficial improvements get met with inexplicable push back. The p99 version of buying and selling wears is not the pinnacle of achievement and there is room for improvement.

    Also to be realistic. There is nothing stopping players from auctioning off their wears in chat channels and even on live you will see traders notifying the population they have wears for sale. The truth is that people prefer to have bazar mules that they can set and forget and sell items while they go play EQ on their main. I think the hard truth the EQ community needs to hear is that it prefers convenient over interaction. Forcing interaction by making things less convenient seems like a poor way to design systems. Why instead as a community we brainstorm ideas that are both interactive AND convenient?
  13. Brontus EQ Player Activist

    Even though the difference between P1999 is EQ TLP is vast, change is not exactly welcome here. Even if a rare alignment of all the planets were to take place and everyone here agreed on something, then you have to contend with buyoff from the developers. You've got a better chance of winning the Mega Millions lottery than getting any suggestions implemented.

    When TLP servers are released the commonlands tunnel is teaming with people. It gets so crowed that it's very hard to interact with the parcel NPC with ogres and trolls standing on top of her. I made a suggestion to place the sole parcel NPC in the commonlands tunnel on a crate so that all players can see her and interact with her about a year or so.(Other MMORPGs put important NPCs on crates for ease of access). It's the considerate thing to do. Long story short, nothing came of the suggestion. So even small things that would take little effort to accomplish and would greatly enhance the play experience, are not likely to get implemented. That's how things work here.

    There are countless areas for improvement and refinement for the TLP version of EQ. The intial release of EQ was far from perfect. Many zones are sparsely and erratically populated with non-existent to abysmal itemization. Much could be done to enhance the TLP player experience. The Mischief loot system is one example where Darkpaw rose to the challenge and delivered something great the brought a lot of people back to EQ. From what I can see, Darkpaw is focusing most of their attention on creating expanions and fixing the bugs that they create. In the grand scheme of things, TLP servers are not really a big priority for Darkpaw. I wish it was otherwise but we are in their world now.
  14. Naiderye Journeyman

    I am somewhat bias here as I am the one that runs tlp-auctions.com but a part of me both agrees and disagrees with adding the bazaar so early. I make no money from the site, don't charge for it, and don't run ads, so I have no financial stake in the site continuing to exist to put all cards on the table and show the limits of my bias.

    The tunnel on TLPs early is the main meeting point for everyone. Yes people use the site to see what other people are selling an item for, but that doesn't prevent bartering and just prevents people (or helps people) from getting outright scammed on what an item is worth. I always tell everyone that they shouldn't use the site as an end all be all of prices, it just shows what people have said they want to buy / sell the price for. There is no proof they want to actually do it (there is no way to prove this) and what an item is worth may be more or less to you or someone else.

    I think removing the tunnel would be a pretty crappy idea and would kill a lot of what the TLP community likes about TLPs, which is the social aspect. Yes, some people hate the trade spam and would rather just use an interface, but all of those "rather use an interface and not be social" over time is what killed EQ and why we all play on a TLP, the community, playing with friends, and being an actual MMO and not just a dungeon queue simulator.

    As for:
    They can, but my site at least handles this and only displays the last price someone offered. So if you spam wtb short sword 1pp 50 times, the site will only show it as you said it once (the last time you said it) to try and combat this. Also, you can see what everyone has said to buy / sell that price, so if you see one person selling for 1 plat, and everyone else for 5k , its pretty obvious that the person for 1 plat is trolling.

    There is more logic in place to try and prevent scamming of krono as well that has been built over the years as people have tried to manipulate the price there.
  15. Name2 Augur

    I was a little bit dismissive of your site in my OP but wanted to thank you for putting it together. It's a super helpful tool in trying to navigate the early expansion economy. The fact that you do it on your own dime and maintain a good user experience is pretty awesome. EQ should follow your lead ;)

    I have a lot of thoughts on what killed EQ, if we're going to postulate that it's dead at this point, but adding features to improve user experience is not really one of them. Brontus summed it up nicely:

    Judging by the numbers, other games that have included convenience features like a simple auction house have fared way better than EQ has. Would we call WoW dead at this point with millions of daily players? Soulless, maybe, but it's hard to argue that it's dead. Even Pantheon, which appears to strive to basically be EQ 3, recognizes the need for an auction house of some level.

    We're beyond the days where EQ is a novel thing anymore. We've been gaming on the internet for like a quarter of a century now, and with that experience comes expectations of how a game should cater to its players and not straight up waste their time. I have other things to do with my time than to sit for hours on end trying to sell pixels. On Mischief I had 4 big bags full of loot that ended up just getting destroyed because trying to sell it live is tedious and boring. Really, link all 160 things I'm trying to sell 4 at a time in OOC? How is that sustainable or even possible without devoting my weekend to it? Remember I also need to level, grind my AA's, and gear up for my raids. This isn't my job, it's a game that's main purpose should be to be fun. Early expansion economy is simply not fun.

    There's undoubtedly room for improvement and innovation here, and I believe that improvements can be made that keep with the spirit of the game. I offered up the idea of adding bazaar features because it keeps the AH stuff localized as opposed to global, and because it already exists and presumably would be easier to plug in than a whole new trade system. I'm on the fence about whether a truly global auction house would be a good thing for EQ in general (I guess it sort of exists with those bazaar token things), but it would be a vast improvement over the nothing that exists on early TLP servers.
  16. Bernel Augur

    Perhaps there could be a bazaar-like feature in TLPs, but limited in ways that don't hinder meaningful interactions. For example, perhaps there could be a cap on the prices you can ask. Make the place look like a junky, run-down flea market. And just like a real flea market, it's where the cheap, low-level crap is sold. The nicer stuff has to be done the traditional way with /auction. The price cap could change over time. At first the cap is very low, but it gradually gets higher as the Bazaar gets closer to being unlocked. This would allow there to be a low-priced market where people wouldn't be wasting their time trying to sell their cheap junk in /auction.
    Name2 likes this.
  17. Waring_McMarrin Augur

    What is the point of adding in a feature like that and then limiting it? Also how is purchasing an item from an alt (possibly on an alt) meaningful? I really don't understand how buying and selling in the auction hub is considered a meaningful interaction when it is just confirming the details of a transaction.
  18. Bernel Augur

    The auction hub wouldn't be the meaningful interaction. The meaningful interaction is the face-to-face interaction of selling something in person with /auction. There's tons of stuff in EQ with low value that would be a waste of time to try to sell with /auction. Creating this capped-price bazaar would be a way for people to have a semi-automated way to sell junk that would otherwise be sold to vendors that's not worth the time to try and sell in /auction. But for things with significant value, people still have to do it the original way with /auction. So you get some convenience of the bazaar, but in a way that doesn't completely eliminate the interactions that come from using /auction. That might increase the enjoyment and satisfaction of the TLP in a way that increases customer retention and increased population.
  19. Name2 Augur

    For those junk items, I often don't care what they ultimately end up selling for. Instead, I'd like to be able to set a minimum buyout price (say, vendor price + 10%) and ultimately sell it to the highest bidder after 24 hours or something. It would be good if I didn't have to know the vendor price and the tool showed me that as a "suggested buyout." I think that would be a huge addition to a price capped bazaar feature in the tunnel.
  20. Waring_McMarrin Augur

    What exactly is meaningful about sending someone a tell saying you want to buy what they are selling and opening a trade window to complete the purchase?