Auction House Feature Discussion

[Kian 170]

I understand it might not be feasible for the initial Auction House launch, but here's what I'd love to see:

1. Limit selling privileges to premium members only.

2. A "Teleport to Starter Town" button on the new upcoming quickbar.

3. Auction House as a building within the starter town.

Edited March 27 by Kian
tweak item #1

[topkos 504]

I hope that you all requesting this to be a premium only feature refers to Sellers Only.

Otherwise  no point on implementing something, that is mostly oriented to help newbies.

[Kian 170]

5 minutes ago, topkos said:

I hope that you all requesting this to be a premium only feature refers to Sellers Only.

Otherwise  no point on implementing something, that is mostly oriented to help newbies.

 

Yes, I meant premium for sellers only. Fixed my previous post. Congrats on 1000 posts btw!

Edited March 27 by Kian

[BarnabySpraggins 35]

3 hours ago, Simyaci said:

Location locked Auction House would mean 30+ free alts in local, nothing more. Each alt would login, say hi and do its business in the auction house for a few minutes, then logout to be replaced by another free alt logging in to do the same. Some of the free alts would be let online just to check the auction house frequently.

 

Should a few bad apples spoil what could be a very nice little social space for the non-altaholics out there though? I can't imagine I'm the only person who plays a single character and would be excited to take the few minute's journey to the nearest starter town when I want to use the auction house. It's always nice getting off-deed and seeing what my neighbors have been building since I last came through. Isn't seeing the world that we're all building together part of the whole appeal of Wurm?

 

Besides that, having any amount of life coming in and out of the starter towns would go a long way to making the world feel more alive. Especially for new players. I remember when I started playing a couple of years ago, seeing the barren starting town I spawned into after the tutorial made me question whether I had made a good choice. Even seeing a few players idling near a building would have made me feel like maybe this game isn't dead. It was a sour first impression that I chose to push through and found a game that I love on the other side, but I wonder how many players have that same experience and made a different choice?

 

But maybe those of us that prefer the immersion of playing a single character over juggling  a whole flock are an anomaly and shouldn't have a voice. Like I said, I'm still pretty new here in the grand scheme of things so I don't know all the cultural norms. I just see an opportunity for something really cool and would hate for it to go unexplored solely because some people don't want to see what amounts to NPCs standing around a town.

 

That's just my opinion though. I tend to enjoy Wurm as a shared virtual world more than as a video game to be optimized, so I'm personally more concerned about immersion over caring about having a frictionless experience. Wurm is such a special game and an auction house is such a big addition, no matter how it ends up being implemented, so I just wanted to make sure I said my piece while we have the opportunity here.

[Simyaci 425]

3 minutes ago, BarnabySpraggins said:

 

Should a few bad apples spoil

 

Should = Already happened countless times in public slayings.

 

Few = Majority of the playerbase.

 

Bad Apples = People just playing the game as they are allowed to play. 

 

Spoil = Massive lag. 

[BarnabySpraggins 35]

10 minutes ago, Simyaci said:

 

Should = Already happened countless times in public slayings.

 

Few = Majority of the playerbase.

 

Bad Apples = People just playing the game as they are allowed to play. 

 

Spoil = Massive lag. 

 

Your reply feels unnecessarily curt and I wish you had given any thought to my post beyond the first six words, but it is what it is. I'm just happy I was given an opportunity to put my opinion out there.

[Kian 170]

If we can't have the auction house as a building in starter towns, let's at least give it its own unique item instead of just sticking it onto the mailbox. For example:

Edited March 27 by Kian

[joedobo 1,187]

This is kinda of a disappointment. Your missing the mark Wurm.

I strongly oppose the so called "anti-spam" limitations. The fee to use AH is good, but any other limits should not be. Who cares if someone wants to try and auction 100 of birchwood scraps? That player will wasted at least 5s (no refund on 100 of 5c deposits) and not sell anything.

 

Okay, now what Wurm markets need is information. Who has what for how much and where is it.

 

Current Wurm merchants are what I call a Want to Sell merchant. They sell a players stuff for the prices the player asks.

Wurm needs what I call a Want to Buy merchant. This is sometimes also called a Job Board.  Bascily Wurm players give the NPC some money and instruction to buy certain items. The NPC facilities buying those items from other players.

Ideally Wurm would have an information index, which would answer: Who as what for how much and where regarding WTB and WTS merchants. And we'd access this index from some construct on our deeds. There should probably be a fee to the sprits to keep your index updated (role play / immersion thing).

Edited April 1 by joedobo

[joedobo 1,187]

  

On 3/13/2024 at 4:21 PM, jaytoo said:

I'm not particularly a fan of reserves.

Start an item's initial price at this minimum required price. I don't see how hidden reserves add anything valuable.

 

 

On 3/13/2024 at 8:11 PM, jaytoo said:

Enchantments are going to be rough unfortunately. More investigation will be needed but due to how that data is stored it is not easy to scan quickly and may not have much in the way of filtering on initial release.

Please consider focusing on providing players with flexible tools to search instead of trying to design a user interface that does that for them. I'd like to see a standard regular expression tool. There is a large data field, which is usually used for say the written text in a letter, you could use to store a lot of information. List all the relevant data in this field as a standardized text blob and let the players search through it with Regex. Although, it sounds like your going to make a whole new UI for the AH so I don't see why you can't add a new variable to the AH UI class that holds a bunch of text. Then, provide players with regex tools to search through this. 

[jaytoo 687]

On 4/1/2024 at 2:22 AM, joedobo said:

Please consider focusing on providing players with flexible tools to search instead of trying to design a user interface that does that for them. I'd like to see a standard regular expression tool. There is a large data field, which is usually used for say the written text in a letter, you could use to store a lot of information. List all the relevant data in this field as a standardized text blob and let the players search through it with Regex. Although, it sounds like your going to make a whole new UI for the AH so I don't see why you can't add a new variable to the AH UI class that holds a bunch of text. Then, provide players with regex tools to search through this.

 

I'll provide as many filter tools as is possible but the primary issue is just scale. Polling the entire database of auctions joined with items joined with the table that keeps the enchantments and other tables of extra data and doing a text comparison or regex is extremely expensive as far as database operations go. It would potentially lock the database for seconds at a time where potentially hundreds of people are trying to use it at once. So it's just not performant to our requirements. We have to use a UI that narrows the searches considerably to tackle that. Additionally we can't really inform the game client of all of the auctions and let it do the work. For the same reason we limit item stacks to 100. It's not that we can't do any single data transfer of more than 100, it's that we shouldn't do it all the time. The data transfer size isn't huge to you or me but would be too large to do at scale with larger numbers of players given the limited server infrastructure we have. Filters and what you can view has to be specific and pagination needs to be used so we don't cause server lag by IO locking ourselves. 

[Kian 170]

@jaytoo, just wanted to say a big thanks for stepping up and discussing this new feature. It's nice to see developers like you getting involved in these conversations with the community, and I hope this could spark more participation from the other devs as well. 🙏

[urgol 3]

Looking forward to the Auction house, but could there not be something like a fee for delivery to mailbox (higher the further it travels) or free collection from the merchants deed to get people travelling?
I love taking long trips and seeing peoples deeds, so it would be great to have an incentive to make a trip across the Wurmlands.

[Lethyria 161]

On the topic of auction cancellation, you could have a short grace period of 5 minutes before the auction starts where the seller can cancel and potentially buyers can see it. It would reduce mistakes and potentially make it a bit fairer when 2 people are looking at the same buy it now item but I'm not sure if its worth the additional complexity.

 

On 4/4/2024 at 1:28 AM, jaytoo said:

I'll provide as many filter tools as is possible but the primary issue is just scale. Polling the entire database of auctions joined with items joined with the table that keeps the enchantments and other tables of extra data and doing a text comparison or regex is extremely expensive as far as database operations go. It would potentially lock the database for seconds at a time where potentially hundreds of people are trying to use it at once. So it's just not performant to our requirements. We have to use a UI that narrows the searches considerably to tackle that. Additionally we can't really inform the game client of all of the auctions and let it do the work. For the same reason we limit item stacks to 100. It's not that we can't do any single data transfer of more than 100, it's that we shouldn't do it all the time. The data transfer size isn't huge to you or me but would be too large to do at scale with larger numbers of players given the limited server infrastructure we have. Filters and what you can view has to be specific and pagination needs to be used so we don't cause server lag by IO locking ourselves. 

Wil there be a text description field in the auction table which we can type in enchants etc and people can read while scrolling through the list, its unfortunate that we won't be able to filter by enchants/runes but makes sense since you'd either have a join explosion across a bunch of critical tables or have data duplication into the auctions table which has its downsides.

[Finnn 3,322]

offtopic.... kind of, partially

 

huh...

didn't expect that.. but ai have a point..

...huh

 

 

huh.. what, what, what does it mean by that?

Quote

how do you suggest to integrate auction house with in-game mechanics like crafting and exploration for more immersive experience???

 

That's something existing in normal trading.. maybe ok to adopt at some point in some way?

 

 

 

along with rare drops etc.. to actually revive the market with low % chances to drop etc.. (but this is another topic.. for a some new content)

[Felthanne 291]

Alright - I finally took the time to read through all of this thread, some I agree with and some I don't.

@jaytoo- I appreciate you taking the time to consult with the community instead of just throwing a bugged and broken or DOA piece of content out.

 

The biggest glaring issue I have is mailboxes are already overworked; can we look at something that got abandoned a while ago?

How about Traders? Everyone's favorite NPC to throw on your deed and get a reduction in your upkeep.

How about we allow a portion of that % tax to be given to the deed owner at the purchased location as directly fed upkeep.

     Say 10%. So that means you would get 10i - 50c per item BOUGHT at your deed via your trader. This isn't a huge number, but it is non-trivial.

Markets would still have a community driven approach with merchants, but they'd also house a Trader to access the new system.

 

To do this though, the mayor of every deed that currently has a trader would need to be refunded the trader contract and the ability to purchase them reinstated.

But you can still give them the deed upkeep reduction, which there was supposed to be a substitute for (that we never got) + by putting it in a public location, you have a chance to further gain upkeep.

 

And I understand the goal is to promote player retention - but new players that don't stay near the starting villages have a tough time.

If they do settle near someone, why not make it fashionable to have a public access trading post (including a wagoner!) set up that the new player can benefit from?

If they don't settle near someone, they won't have a mailbox anyway.

 

Those are my 2c at least.

 

- Kaufecake, CA