Curse

bilateralrope · May 15, 2007, 09:28 AM // 09:28

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lord Damman

Lot of time, considering in Western Australia , properties is a better investment than say stock market, or the banks. Most of my customers just call me up in the middle of the night and tell me they want to sell or buy properties. (We have no life apprently) Normal customers maybe 2-3 in 10 years, its all about customer relations, if you don't do the right thing by them, they will not call you again, but if you do the right thing by them, then they will call you when they need something.

Look, my point to this whole thing is that, instead of just going on and on about take take take , you should have a give and take solution, you take and give a bit as well, fair trade always works wonders in realestate. If they sell stall upgrades, I will buy it if it will make my stall more swanker than the one next to me, (depend on the item and the price of course.

)

Oh I get your point. Its just that I don't see charging more for the solution going down well with the majority of guild wars players. The only way I can see it working is it being brought in with GWEN, but even then I see it being made accessible to all chapters like the material storage after people whine about it.

Quote:

P.S. Regarding the coding, I was software development for 10 years before I got sick and tired of the people contracting you complaining about it is not simply, good enough or why can't it be done this way (you think you can do better then why don't you code it, sometime it just can't do what you want ti to do.) etc etc, so I just quit, study for 6 month for my real estate license. The interface codes is there, the idle actions graphics just get changed over, Inventory is based on what you have anyway, titling system need a bit of minor adjustments, the only thing need to be coded is the stall setup interface, if I am not mistaken, some of the code is there already as the NPC's buying and selling's AI (30%?!?), therefore most of the coding is there, just need to change a bit of it for consumer uses.

The Auction house/Commodities trading code will be a new system wide database, not a local one like your own inventory. Since you sumbit all items to a database, that database will need to be coded, and the interface *may* use about 20% of existing interfaces, but I can't see that from happening as there is not enough room to show the appropriate informations. Again thats based on how I would use it, the programers of NCSOFT could be a lot smarter than you and me, so who knows. (maybe I am just to use to the interfaced of Goonzu, I am expecting guildwar's interface to be the same as well)

Finally someone that actually has a reason other than the interface looking similar to say that it would be easier to code, though your still making unsubstantiated assumptions about how guild wars is coded. And you might want to stop confusing ANET and NCSOFT (ANET are the ones who produce guild wars, NCSOFT does the marketing).

Something for you to consider about the AFK stall system (lets ignore how its funded for now):

What MMO's have you played which used a AFK stall system ?
How many active players did they have per shard* (look under entertainment) ?
How large were their marketplaces ?

Guild wars isn't really sharded. Sure you have the different regional servers, but they can interact with each other in the international districts**. So that means that the marketplace will have to reflect the number of active guild wars accounts. Lets assume there are 1'000'000 active accounts, and they have the same percentage of people running stalls as the other games do.

Now how big would that marketplace be ?

Lets assume that the stalls in a town are arranged in a single line, when you change districts you arrive at on end of the line and that you will have no lag or loading time. How much of this marketplace will you search through before giving up ?

Now consider people who don't like the trading aspect and want to get back to playing guild wars instead of navigating the market.

*Wikipedia lists Maple Story as having 3'000'000 players across all shards. However it has a total of 8 different versions with a total of 89 shards, meaning an average of 33'708 accounts per shard. But because its free to play, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people ran secondary accounts for various reasons. This is assuming we can trust the 3 million figure while it has the [citation needed] tag. But those markets took me about 15 minutes to find the first guy selling what I wanted, and guild wars is over 30 times the size.
**To help keep prices similar across guild wars, and to reduce lag and crowding on the regional districts, I'd advise limiting stalls to international districts.

Lord Damman · May 16, 2007, 06:20 AM // 06:20

Again, I already have mentioned the games, one was Goonzu online, the other was prince online, both market places are huge (based site around twice the size of Lion's Arch), sometime on peak hour my guess around 150-200 stalls in the marketplace. off peak around 30-50. They both not really use a AFK system, but I guess you don;t sit around watching and waiting for people to buy your things, and people rarely bargin with you on the prices. Usually leave it for 1 hour, all items will be sold anyway.

Shard.. I don't know about goonzu, since there is only one server, the only time it "loads" is when you enter or leave a town/dungeon (market stall is setup on the world maps) commodity market center is in each town, there are no "districts", so I can only make an educated guess, around 5000 people running on the map, and say another 1000 in the dungeon and towns.

Prince, there are 15 servers, again no districts, loading screen at three sections of the world map, so looks like just one big map with players on each sections, my guess will be around 10,000 per section. (each section is about 1/3 of the Faction's world map.

I just remember that Ragnarok also have the stall system, and they have around 50,000 players at any one time. (they do have sections like guildwar, but their dungeons does not separate players as monsters respawn even 5 mins)

Letterkills · May 16, 2007, 06:45 AM // 06:45

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lord Damman

All the other games I saw the stall take up the same amount of space as a standing person, if you read my idea properly, I said the stall looks like a speech stand, space wise its the same as a normal person, they are having problems with people spamming 3 of the same messages as it is now, this way, at least it will keep the spammers off the normal chat line. If other games like Goonzu, and Prince online can do it, why wouldn't guildwar be able to do it?

The other games could do it since they areent using "Districts" and "Instances", they are using another kind of server-build, so to speak.

I like the idéa, but it is far from doable, and it will only give us more lagg and such, since everyone wanna stand in the same district and sell like someone else said, and that is true.

/Not signed sry

bilateralrope · May 16, 2007, 07:40 AM // 07:40

Different MMO's call shards by different names. Servers is a common name, as is worlds and I think WoW uses realms, other MMO's probably have different names. Basically people on the same shard can freely interact with each other, but people on different shards can't.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lord Damman

Again, I already have mentioned the games, one was Goonzu online, the other was prince online, both market places are huge (based site around twice the size of Lion's Arch), sometime on peak hour my guess around 150-200 stalls in the marketplace. off peak around 30-50. They both not really use a AFK system, but I guess you don;t sit around watching and waiting for people to buy your things, and people rarely bargin with you on the prices. Usually leave it for 1 hour, all items will be sold anyway.

Shard.. I don't know about goonzu, since there is only one server, the only time it "loads" is when you enter or leave a town/dungeon (market stall is setup on the world maps) commodity market center is in each town, there are no "districts", so I can only make an educated guess, around 5000 people running on the map, and say another 1000 in the dungeon and towns.

Ok so a single shard game, with about about 6000 people online at a time. Lets say that this is 1/4 of the number of active accounts. That only brings you up to 24'000 people, and at those small sizes a stall system could be manageable. But guild wars has about 1 million active accounts, so we are talking over 40 times the number of stalls.

Quote:

Prince, there are 15 servers, again no districts, loading screen at three sections of the world map, so looks like just one big map with players on each sections, my guess will be around 10,000 per section. (each section is about 1/3 of the Faction's world map.

30'000 people is still less than 1/30 of the guild wars population.

Quote:

I just remember that Ragnarok also have the stall system, and they have around 50,000 players at any one time. (they do have sections like guildwar, but their dungeons does not separate players as monsters respawn even 5 mins)

I'm willing to take your word that Ragnarok has around 50'000 players. However I'm going to have to ask to see proof that it is running only one shard, as that is a very rare thing in MMO's because of the server requirements to run a persistent world with that many players is huge.

Also last I heard Eve Online had the record for most concurrent users on a single shard at 32,955. So I find your claim of 50'000 players doubtful unless they are on separate shards. Link. (scroll down to december). Guild Wars doesn't count here as it doesn't actually have a persistent world.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that stalls scale badly as the number of players increases, and guild wars already has a much larger number of players than many MMO's, especially if we are talking about players per shard. And the people who lose out are the casual sellers because they are forced to the back of the line by the people who got the good spots and are holding onto them. If no-one comes to your stall, how can you sell stuff ?

Halbarad Wolfson · May 16, 2007, 03:38 PM // 15:38

Everyone here is making wild assumptions on what would scale well or not, about what players would do and stuff...
don't you think that maybe the people at anet might have the brains to do it right?

My guess would be that stalls scale badly as the number of players per server increases. and talking about guild wars instances - i would expect them to be coded in a way that they at least can be run on different servers.

guild wars has how many players in one instance? i think that would be the number relevant for the performance of stalls, and it shouldn't be too high.

so much for the wild assumptions from my side. why don't we just accept the idea as it is and leave it to anet whether the can make it "work" and "scale well"... and the behavior of the players can't be predicted anyways. i would expect people to adjust to an increasing number of "trade districts", maybe dist1-3... but heck, i don't know that.

bamm bamm bamm · May 16, 2007, 04:15 PM // 16:15

I still don't buy into the idea of setting up shops. You have to understand that the last thing you need is a stupid amount of money floating around in the game, since it removes any monetary 'targets' or 'goals' set by the designers. GW is in exactly this position. There are two main sources of rapid income, allowing solo or duo farming of rare materials and whatnot for 2 goddamn years, and the 'buy-low/sell-high' trader (an interesting PvE/PvP analogue

). Auction houses are for more than just buying and selling, they are for price checking too. A global trade system allows the average player (i.e the people who don't read fan forums) to know that their black dye is worth more than 100g. I don't think a district-based system could adequately replace that.

I don't think they are going to be implementing any kind of trade improvements in GW1.

bilateralrope · May 16, 2007, 09:09 PM // 21:09

Quote:

Originally Posted by Halbarad Wolfson

Everyone here is making wild assumptions on what would scale well or not, about what players would do and stuff...
don't you think that maybe the people at anet might have the brains to do it right?

My guess would be that stalls scale badly as the number of players per server increases. and talking about guild wars instances - i would expect them to be coded in a way that they at least can be run on different servers.

guild wars has how many players in one instance? i think that would be the number relevant for the performance of stalls, and it shouldn't be too high.

so much for the wild assumptions from my side. why don't we just accept the idea as it is and leave it to anet whether the can make it "work" and "scale well"... and the behavior of the players can't be predicted anyways. i would expect people to adjust to an increasing number of "trade districts", maybe dist1-3... but heck, i don't know that.

The scaling problem isn't if the guild wars servers can handle them (if they can't, the assumption is that they will be upgraded unless ANET says otherwise). The problem is that for someone to check the stalls they must go through them one by one till they have finished a district, then move onto the next one.

But there will be stalls that are checked sooner that others. As the number of players increases, it takes longer and longer to reach the stalls that get checked last, so the people forced to setup there get very few people even looking at your stall. Well if the stalls are setup in a town, I'd expect some people to start with district 1, and some to start with the highest district number, leaving the people in the middle losing out.

For instance if we assume that it takes you 1 second per stall (including the ones you walk right past without opening), and that only 1% (just a guess, probably too low) of the games population has a stall up at any time, that means that for every 6000 people playing you increase searching time by 1 minute. While this might not be so bad for the buyers who can stop anytime, it will really suck for the people with stalls near the end of the route people search the stalls in. Guild Wars is unsharded, so the market will have to accommodate the entire population, which was over 1 million at last estimate* (2 hours, 46 minutes to browse all stalls at my estimated rates).

*Based on a recent announcement of 3 million copies sold, and assuming that everyone has all 3 chapters.

tytons · May 16, 2007, 10:22 PM // 22:22

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lord Damman

The people AFK problem, is already existing anyway, I mean, I can leave my character on guildwar 24/7 so can everyone else (People already use scripts to farm anyway), so what changes in terms of bandwith usage?
.

correct me if im wrong..u cant afk more then 10 hours currently..with no single action ull get disconnected..so idle for 10 hours = dc

Tarun · May 16, 2007, 10:29 PM // 22:29

I'd like to be able to set up a stall and play the game than to waste days with that WTB/WTS crap. If only they went with the auction house, no more worries about scamming or anything.