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Post by woqued on Apr 2, 2015 14:55:43 GMT
I think set prices and/or roof on the cost would be a step in that direction. It would remove the "omg someone bought it before me now i cant Q_Q" and "omg its so hiiiiiiiiigh.... because of someone else! Damn you someone else!".
You make valid points though. Maybe this is fine, as long as people don't get antsy/jealous/whatever about it. Which is precisely why I think stygia shop is a much better concept of gold sink than the aug shop is - set prices, everything always visible and purchaseable, no luck or unluck factors included and other players' actions don't affect it. I think aug shop would be fine if it was set similarly.
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Post by desocupado on Apr 2, 2015 15:45:52 GMT
A roof seems a good direction.
I wonder if there's data on how much gold a player had when he bought an aug.
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Post by chirality on Apr 2, 2015 16:14:18 GMT
Which is precisely why I think stygia shop is a much better concept of gold sink than the aug shop is - set prices, everything always visible and purchaseable, no luck or unluck factors included and other players' actions don't affect it. I think aug shop would be fine if it was set similarly. I agree that the "luck" factor really sucks, but I really don't have a better solution than "1st come 1st served" in a game in which you'd need a full-time Augshop Czar to properly police what account belongs to what person and what the destination is for each purchase on each account. If the prices don't change for everyone, when just anyone buys something, then there's room for exploitation and abuse. I think the mechanic of dramatically increasing prices on a per-purchase basis is almost impossible to properly address given existence of multiple accounts controlled by the same player. For instance, we couldn't really have just had each account with an individual set of prices that only respected their purchase history (rather than others who "went before them"). We also couldn't really have a less-dramatic price increase, because then you'd still just have "1st come" guy just buying even more of them, and price inexorably inching higher until it's still outofreach for the whiners. We couldn't really have fixed prices because it would be impossible to assign each aug a set price that properly indicates "goldsink" value across the server. Salamander aug @ 7 billion? 10 billion? 12 billion? 15? That argument would never resolve. We couldn't really have capped prices because then we'd still just have the cap being immediately hit (prolly by same "1st come" guy, or 2nd) and then what? What's the cap? 10 billion? So 3 mins into every reset, every desirable UR aug hits 10 billion pricecap, and people lacking 10 billion still aren't happy, but the guy with 20 billion just got 2 augs instead of 1 when uncapped price was 17 bill, and the guy with 10 billion got 1 aug instead of zero augs. The 10bill guy is happy as hell, but um, if he lurked webdash and beat other contenders to WS 1st, he still could have got the aug with uncapped pricing at a lot cheaper than 10 bill. So the 1st come nature is the problem, but the only way around that is to have each player's purchases respected without regards to everyone elses, which would be impossible to control/police/enforce without massive amounts of oversight and probably someone actively checking through the database to ensure that player A didn't use his 3rd account to buy an aug for cheap and then sell it to friend B who already "maxed out" all 5 of his accounts. Unlike demi shop, these augs are far more desirable and actually translate to a meaningful (aka makes your toon cooler) powerboost (rather than what people should be focused on, as you pointed out--having more fun by being more generous party helper), and iirc the only way that "aug shop" even passed the sh*t-test was with the allowance of prices being sky-high and shifting to reflect "market". In other words, having set price on UR augs is just simply not going to ever happen, because we can endlessly farm more gold to buy something with a set price tag (again: ever-increasing goldsink was invented because demishop set prices stopped being "exorbitantly high" and became just plain "attainably high", and stopped being a goldsink once you bought rods and elecs on all your toons, which is basically same case with aug shop, except it's harder to ever finalize "uber gear" when forging/randomization continually produces more options for you to burn UR augs. But again, set price for that UR aug is simply nonsensical and would exist only as a powerboost and not as a means to suck gold from people who have too much of it because there's nothing else for them to spend it on). |
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Post by Enius the White on Apr 2, 2015 16:38:58 GMT
Personally, I'm fairly impressed with how well the dynamic pricing is working. I've bought several defensive augs to plug holes in gear combinations, and for 0.15 - 1 billion the pricing always seemed fair. It can be way more convenient to just buy the last specific piece or 2, than to nag party-mates looking for who has one. I actually bought one or 2 that I knew I had, just to save the time of rummaging through my ~40 chests of augs hoarded while farming gear.  Clearly the most desirable spell-slot augs are needed/used only to perfect extremely high end gear setups in order to push the server limit on performance/power. These gear setups can produce extreme revenue, leading to extreme wealth, leading to the need for an extreme wealth sink... the aug shop. The fact that the market reaches well over 10 billion for these is evidence that the dynamic pricing is working, not failing. A pricing dynamic that could probably use a tweak, that was already pointed out in a thread a while back, is the low end augs that can be purchased then resold immediately in town for a profit. While a toon that has access to the WS may well have more productive endeavors available than this no risk arbitrage game, it still seems a bit whacky. |
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Post by ScrewedUp on Apr 2, 2015 16:48:31 GMT
Why don't you worry about spending your paltry sums on things that actually make your toon more useful to the party, easier to play, and overall helps provide everyone with a more enjoyable run ( aka rods so you can provide basic utility when the party needs a rez, a bbod, a mords, or whatever else it is that you currently lack and are using in scrollform or don't have option to use at all)? I'm at a loss here bale, is this irony, sarcasm, or hypocrisy ? xD |
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Post by chirality on Apr 2, 2015 18:22:55 GMT
Yes?
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