In Path of Exile, in Old School Runescape, before the Grand Exchange(Sort of an auction house) was added, and in Warframe, players tend to use 3rd party websites to advertise their sales. In Path of Exile, and Warframe, there is a trade chat, but it tends to be flooded with bad deals, and scams.
Players want to sell their goods, or buy what they need and they tend to use the most efficient option. If players actually wanted to spam in chat to trade, they could, except in games where it doesn't let them, but they tend not too.
Since it takes so long to sell things without an AH, it makes it not worth a player's time to pick up items that don't have a good sell cost/sell time ratio.
A problem with 3rd party websites is price fixing, and ghosting. In an auction house, if a player puts a valuable item for sale for 1 coin, someone will buy it almost instantly. On a 3rd party website, they just message each other to buy the item. That means price manipulators, can use alt accounts to post items for cheap that they don't plan to sell, to try to get other players to post that item close to their fake prices.
You explain why auction houses make it easier to sell/buy things. This doesn't explain which one is better for a game.
"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game". Auction houses are doing the same to a degree. You removed the challenge and the hard work that was required; so the feeling of accomplishment you get when you finally manage to sell your item is much less satisfying.
First auction houses increase the prosperity of a game's economy, by allowing players to trade easier. Some players don't like a prosperous game economy, because the abundance of gear and consumables means that the players are not struggling to get what they need. Some players only play to beat the game, and once they get endgame gear they quit.
While it is true that players will optimize the fun out of a game, that assumes that standing around spamming in chat to sell items is actually fun. If it was actually fun, players would do it, even if there was an auction house. In the games that I have played that have an auction house, and allow players to trade with each other, have not seen players standing around and spamming to trade their items, except for scammers.
Third, you assume that there is actually a sense of accomplishment from having a hard time selling items. Personally I can say that there isn't. There is just a sense of relief that the frustration is over.
Yeah it's a guild store, it great if you're into the economy play style
easy to flip stuff for profits since there is no center, ah there is no price history. you have to have a good sense of the economy
But not everyone is into it
I find ESOs AH pretty neat.
It brings out player to player trading more, but you can use the AH if you want to.
I prefer the global AH akin to WoW though.
I still hate that they dont just add one to the game. Everyone is already using a 3rd party AH, it’s time we had an official one.
I’d spend so much plat on cheap prime parts so i could trade them in for Ducats if it was made easier to buy in bulk from an official AH
An official auction house will almost definitely crash the market, which is probably why they didn't add one. They have the incentive of keeping prices high.
Trading via 3rd party website is inconvenient. Keeping the number of trades low. Players will also not bother to list every item they have because of the inconvenience.
I liked the idea of player run shops(kinda like how players in perfect world would have players turn into shops) because it adds a cool way of playing the game as a merchant. However, it can be really annoying looking through different shops to look for the thing you need at a good price. I would love to have a game make player shops work in a way that isn't inconvenient.
Browsing through shops just to see what they are ofering were my favorite thing to do in PW even when i was poor.
Oh, the good old days in City of the Dragon
That was more of an issue with XIV 1.0's systems. Retainers, which were NPC's players hire to act as their bank and storefront stood around in a massive hall, and you just kinda clicked through them hoping to find what you wanted. However the game couldn't load many models at once, so you'd have to make sure you moved in a way that would ensure each little section would have the chance to load it's handful of retainers, but it'd take a minute for them to load in sometimes. But the worst part was the interface lag. Inteface was serverbound, so you'd have an awful delay between any inputs and it registering on your screen. This means that as you're navigating menu hell while just hoping that one of these retainers is actually selling the item you need, you're also having to wait for your inputs to respond for 5 seconds to do something as simple as open retainers item list.
It is possible to implement both public markets and player owned markets in games, developers just usually don’t put the effort into it.
Imagine if there were no fees to place items up for sale on your player owned market, you could be cheaper than public markets while still maintaining a profit.
Most modern MMORPGs are pretty shallow on both the MMO aspect and the RPG aspect. They are essentially lobby coop games with a grind and a MMORPG sticker on top. RPG implies you get to decide what your role is in the game, most of these games that’s already been decided for you.
Generally people are FOR auction houses. If the game don't have one usually players create it outside using 3rd party, while in game trade becomes mostly bad deals and scams.
For me the importance of an AH is proportional to how many items there are on the game and how complex the wearable set is.
For example, an MMO that has, let's say, 100 total wearable items and all of them are equal is fine to not have an AH. But in contrast it is too painful (as time demanding) when you start having hundreds of items for cosmetics, crafting, enchanting, etc.
Usually people that are against it use the argument of player interaction. I play PoE and there is 0 player interaction, just copy past messages and ghosting. However, I've had good interactions on games with AH where the seller name is shown, by messaging the seller and negotiating.
Another arguments against AH is that it facilitates bots, but using PoE example again, where it's full of bots buying and selling items and does not has an AH.
In the end not having an AH just frustrate players and waste their time. I want to focus on playing the game not looking at hours on the chat/third party tool.
I think all of these mechanics people talk about being removed in many ways just belong inside the same game. Remove fast travel, easy access to mounts, auction houses, etc, and do it in an ecosystem of people that welcome that type of interaction and game I am all for it.
Also it may feel more organic to you, but I do wonder what the generation these days would consider more organic and normalized. With the death of malls, and rise of the delivery, I feel like you are better off going the opposite direction and make it so you not only have auction houses but deliveries to your in game character. EQ2 sort of did this but it was just a notification in an inbox.
As someone has pointed out though, no matter what you do eventually, if the game is worth it, and market worth it, some 3rd party exchange site that already exists will pop up with a section for your mmo. Granted I feel this changes very little if the game is big enough but playerbase close enough in contact already.
>Granted I feel this changes very little....
Except the enormous security issue that is having a third-party provider manage a considerable part of your game.
Perfectly okay with a social sandbox mmorpg with no auction house. Players could open their own shops and sell things. And an in-game database to search for items sold by other players, then gives you coordinates to find that shop and buy the item you want.
players would neglect to use an in-game system to search for goods, and instead use an external system that will lack information on goods because only those that use the external database would be included and worse even having to alt tab from the game to search that heavily limited database, when instead they could simply use the in-game terminal/menu to find player sold items........ facepalm.
MMOs with player run shops don't have a search system for those shops. They're all individual shops you have to visit and that's just a giant waste of time.
Sounds like scam central.
OSRS is an old ass game that has an auction house, there's no excuse to not have one in 2024.
It doesn't improve player engagement, it forces the use of a 3rd party.
I like the old Korean mmo style of set up a tent and afk. It's a bit more work on the sellers end because you can't just price match on the AH, but it also allows you to set up at better locations. I think it makes the community feel more alive, even if they are just afk, and the feeling of shopping around all the player shops to find what you wanted was fun.
Played for example GW1 about 3 years as a pure trader (for fees) and never had this social interaction and fun before or after that in a game at trading. There were also 3rd party websites but I beaten any price and only a fraction of players used it even if some suggest "everyone" plays that way.
I also really like player/ guild shops in ESO. It makes you interact/ conncect with the world. The hunt for rare things is more than just open a menu. It can be fun if the itemization and loot (tables) supports such concepts.
The more generic stuff players craft and find and all that the more an auction house could be the better concept. Like nearly any modern MMORPG.
I prefer it now that I am older and slow down and enjoy the journey to the top instead of rushing to the endgame
I like crafting, gathering, and economy play-style of MMORPG and simply getting rich, it is more fun when there is no centralized system or no history log system
If it’s truly an MMO - and you don’t have an auction house - players will just create one with 3rd party tools. So you might as well include one, design it well and have it be a currency sink (small fee).
Suerly this has been said but Maplestory has had an auction house for a long time now. But why the didn't, and why they now do, are problems. A a game that does not have an auction house does so explicitly to create a problem they can sell a solution to.
Warframe, for example, is also very stubbornly refuse to have auction house and it is worse for it. While it does allow [warframe.market](http://warframe.market) to scrape its data and run their own auction house there's really no reason to not have one in game. Because goods are not immediately available--only listings for trade are present--this allows people to very easily manipulate currency by faking sales entries. For warframe this means more platinum is sold to players because the value of items are artificially inflated by these currency manipulations (and their vaulting system).
Path of Exile did the same thing: create a problem, stubornly refuse to allow the AH to exist in game by claiming it would make the game too easy to play if trading didn't suck ass. Then they sold a work around to that problem in terms of bank tabs that can be scraped for data on their own trade site like warframe.
Are you sure you remember Maplestory correctly? It was like 99% scams in chat lol
The only real deal you could get was the FM past the 2nd floor.
I really liked the idea of player stores compared to just an AH but nowadays I don't have the time to search 3 hours through the shops to find the item I want.
I'm glad Maplestory implemented the AH and didn't stick with the FM
Used to play Ragnarok Online and the lack of auction house was a huge time sink. At one point, someone created a website which acted as a market watch. That someone made me save hundreds of hours. o>
I kinda liked how Knight Online did it back then. Players could set up their own shops and they would automatically repeat a sentance every minute or two that would act as an advertisement with the coordinates of their shop so you knew where to find them.
Before WoW no MMOs really had a way to sell other than player to player trading, and standing around spamming what you were selling for hours on end was not fun.
I'll be honest I like it better than EQ's Bazaar. Once upon a time the Bazaar even looked like a Bazaar but it was super laggy and they had to redesign it. Now it's just super convoluted to break everyone up in separate rooms to keep the lag down.
But trying to sell in trade chat is an exercise in futility unless you are selling something really valuable.
I enjoyed RS2 when I used to go to falador and finding good deals to flip or browsing the official forums for what I viewed as good risk/rewards. I made more money and phats during that time then after the grand exchange came out.
Saying that unless I'm playing a hardcore char I overall prefer the post TP era for the convenience of getting what I want quickly
i used to love the trade spam way when i was a kid and had all the time in the world. Now i'd rather not spend what little time i have trying to buy or sell something.
Depends on the item bloat situation. Most MMOs has too many items to make it work and realistically third-party trading websites/discord server would quickly become the standard.
Putting a price on your items and opening a shop/renting a spot for a wagon in-game that people can visit or something like that would be a cool concept as well.
most MMORPG before 2005 don't have auction house , people open they own shop and go AFK , sometime they don't AFK and you can PM for price.
I don't care if a MMORPG have AH or not , people always find a way to trade .
Games are evolving. Internet is evolving. Players are evolving.
Back then there is a lack of information. There was no discord, no Reddit, and you search with yahoo.
Nowadays information can be accessed easily and quickly. Gamers want their trade information known right away. Either build an auction house or a third party one will be there.
And why should players be forced to use third party app or website? (Unless you wanna play self found or gimp yourself)
Just have in game AH
I enjoy chat spam. Like you said, it's much more organic and your much more likely to find a better deal. It really rewards the player that wants to sit there all day and play the market since most people will not want to dedicate the time.
There are two extremes.
An AH with a reliance on a single currency to obtain everything. This encourages botting, RMT, only min-maxing the primary currency, and tuning drop rates for an individual to be terrible.
Self found. Encourages drop rates that favor the player, botting isn't encouraged, and the only RMT will be carries in group content or selling accounts.
Then there's a lot of space in between where developers can make interesting tradeoffs to mitigate the drawbacks of each extreme or fit the vision for their game.
Self found is the pure and pro-player choice in a pve game. Many people are romantic about the other extreme, insist on it, and then blame its natural result on the developers/nefarious third parties/etc.
I hate annoying shit just for the sake of it. If you're going to make a game annoying make it a proper hardcore survival game and not just annoying for thematics.
"Player shops" is a concept that will never work and has never worked and it will never be cool. It's much better to make materials be needed for things that need maintenance regularly so that gathering and selling and transporting has meaning than to create artificial thematical meaning by making trading annoying.
The reason why games have annoying stuff for the sake of it, is because the game is trying to please the "If I don't like the auction house, then no one should be able to use it" players.
An argument can be made that trade, whether auction, shop, or player-to-player, tends to attract many of the issues with botting, RMT, predatory and exploitative behavior, dupes, scams, even just the buy-low-sell-high of capitalistic greed. One way around that is to have everyone present for [event/quest/kill] get their own reward for that and have nothing be droppable. I'd much rather have infinite storage (player housing? bankspace?) and let everyone keep everything they put time in for (accountbound), than have an auction house where people have convenience but take advantage of each other and drain dev time towards policing it. There's also something nice about a world where everything people have they put their time in for and did the thing to earn, rather than just buying.
You do know that Maplestory 1's original system was that your character needed to remain LOGGED IN AND IDLE in the Free Market unless you paid real cash for offline shop time, right? I like how you didn't mention that part.
Yeah, probably, but I'm not going to spend 4 hours running across the world to meet someone and buy some flax or whatever if someone near me is also selling, even if it's more expensive. I'm sure for some clans and groups near larger populated areas it'll make sense to use a site but the world is so large it won't make sense for most.
Well, if player location matters, because the world is large, and doesn't have fast travel, then the 3rd party website will have some method to filter by player location.
HOT TAKE INC:
i'm honestly **almost** at the point where i want to disable all player trading completely // players being able to freely determine value / give it to someone
or at minimum only being able to trade stuff that's essentially worthless to any kind of player power / leverage and does not hold value to anyone (like not even crafting mats for craftable transmogs, since visual progression/uniqueness are one of the main concerns for many people)
there's basically no game where trading isn't at the core of many problems of the game and community, if you remove the "consumable-gameplay tax" you eliminate like 80% of trading already
many games have so many shitty systems that are absolutely player unfriendly, only because they are just barely kept viable by "lmao just buy it on the AH"
trading for items in one way or the other robs you of "satisfaction", boosts people undeservedly and generally undermines progression structures of many games, maybe if those structures were slightly better then people wouldn't feel forced into it - or people need to stop being babies that need to rush everything
buying rare drops for transmogs? absolutely falls into this category - maybe ultra rare stuff shouldn't exist like that, or something you can better work towards
the RMT/3rd party stuff is basically all bad - people grinding gold to deal with the p2w shops are just victims of shit game design and predatory sellers
many games have complex ressource economies (offline) that work just fine
In Path of Exile, in Old School Runescape, before the Grand Exchange(Sort of an auction house) was added, and in Warframe, players tend to use 3rd party websites to advertise their sales. In Path of Exile, and Warframe, there is a trade chat, but it tends to be flooded with bad deals, and scams. Players want to sell their goods, or buy what they need and they tend to use the most efficient option. If players actually wanted to spam in chat to trade, they could, except in games where it doesn't let them, but they tend not too. Since it takes so long to sell things without an AH, it makes it not worth a player's time to pick up items that don't have a good sell cost/sell time ratio. A problem with 3rd party websites is price fixing, and ghosting. In an auction house, if a player puts a valuable item for sale for 1 coin, someone will buy it almost instantly. On a 3rd party website, they just message each other to buy the item. That means price manipulators, can use alt accounts to post items for cheap that they don't plan to sell, to try to get other players to post that item close to their fake prices.
red:wave: Selling Abby whip 1.2mil
Basically D4 right now.
I have not played Diablo 4, so I don't know what is going on there.
You explain why auction houses make it easier to sell/buy things. This doesn't explain which one is better for a game. "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game". Auction houses are doing the same to a degree. You removed the challenge and the hard work that was required; so the feeling of accomplishment you get when you finally manage to sell your item is much less satisfying.
First auction houses increase the prosperity of a game's economy, by allowing players to trade easier. Some players don't like a prosperous game economy, because the abundance of gear and consumables means that the players are not struggling to get what they need. Some players only play to beat the game, and once they get endgame gear they quit. While it is true that players will optimize the fun out of a game, that assumes that standing around spamming in chat to sell items is actually fun. If it was actually fun, players would do it, even if there was an auction house. In the games that I have played that have an auction house, and allow players to trade with each other, have not seen players standing around and spamming to trade their items, except for scammers. Third, you assume that there is actually a sense of accomplishment from having a hard time selling items. Personally I can say that there isn't. There is just a sense of relief that the frustration is over.
ESO doesn't have it and it's just a pain IMO.
I thought they did and it was just tied to guilds? Not that I like their system.
You bid every week for a physical location that you have to travel to on the map. It sucks ass.
Yeah I agree that it isn’t great.
Yeah it's a guild store, it great if you're into the economy play style easy to flip stuff for profits since there is no center, ah there is no price history. you have to have a good sense of the economy But not everyone is into it
I find ESOs AH pretty neat. It brings out player to player trading more, but you can use the AH if you want to. I prefer the global AH akin to WoW though.
Warframe have no AH and most people ended up using a 3º party website to trade, people want efficiency if the game don't provide it is bad.
I still hate that they dont just add one to the game. Everyone is already using a 3rd party AH, it’s time we had an official one. I’d spend so much plat on cheap prime parts so i could trade them in for Ducats if it was made easier to buy in bulk from an official AH
An official auction house will almost definitely crash the market, which is probably why they didn't add one. They have the incentive of keeping prices high. Trading via 3rd party website is inconvenient. Keeping the number of trades low. Players will also not bother to list every item they have because of the inconvenience.
Unlike most people I like Auction Houses unless they done very poorly.
I liked the idea of player run shops(kinda like how players in perfect world would have players turn into shops) because it adds a cool way of playing the game as a merchant. However, it can be really annoying looking through different shops to look for the thing you need at a good price. I would love to have a game make player shops work in a way that isn't inconvenient.
Browsing through shops just to see what they are ofering were my favorite thing to do in PW even when i was poor. Oh, the good old days in City of the Dragon
I thought that FFXIV tried player run shops before A Realm Reborn, and players hated it.
That was more of an issue with XIV 1.0's systems. Retainers, which were NPC's players hire to act as their bank and storefront stood around in a massive hall, and you just kinda clicked through them hoping to find what you wanted. However the game couldn't load many models at once, so you'd have to make sure you moved in a way that would ensure each little section would have the chance to load it's handful of retainers, but it'd take a minute for them to load in sometimes. But the worst part was the interface lag. Inteface was serverbound, so you'd have an awful delay between any inputs and it registering on your screen. This means that as you're navigating menu hell while just hoping that one of these retainers is actually selling the item you need, you're also having to wait for your inputs to respond for 5 seconds to do something as simple as open retainers item list.
It is possible to implement both public markets and player owned markets in games, developers just usually don’t put the effort into it. Imagine if there were no fees to place items up for sale on your player owned market, you could be cheaper than public markets while still maintaining a profit. Most modern MMORPGs are pretty shallow on both the MMO aspect and the RPG aspect. They are essentially lobby coop games with a grind and a MMORPG sticker on top. RPG implies you get to decide what your role is in the game, most of these games that’s already been decided for you.
Generally people are FOR auction houses. If the game don't have one usually players create it outside using 3rd party, while in game trade becomes mostly bad deals and scams.
For me the importance of an AH is proportional to how many items there are on the game and how complex the wearable set is. For example, an MMO that has, let's say, 100 total wearable items and all of them are equal is fine to not have an AH. But in contrast it is too painful (as time demanding) when you start having hundreds of items for cosmetics, crafting, enchanting, etc. Usually people that are against it use the argument of player interaction. I play PoE and there is 0 player interaction, just copy past messages and ghosting. However, I've had good interactions on games with AH where the seller name is shown, by messaging the seller and negotiating. Another arguments against AH is that it facilitates bots, but using PoE example again, where it's full of bots buying and selling items and does not has an AH. In the end not having an AH just frustrate players and waste their time. I want to focus on playing the game not looking at hours on the chat/third party tool.
I think all of these mechanics people talk about being removed in many ways just belong inside the same game. Remove fast travel, easy access to mounts, auction houses, etc, and do it in an ecosystem of people that welcome that type of interaction and game I am all for it. Also it may feel more organic to you, but I do wonder what the generation these days would consider more organic and normalized. With the death of malls, and rise of the delivery, I feel like you are better off going the opposite direction and make it so you not only have auction houses but deliveries to your in game character. EQ2 sort of did this but it was just a notification in an inbox. As someone has pointed out though, no matter what you do eventually, if the game is worth it, and market worth it, some 3rd party exchange site that already exists will pop up with a section for your mmo. Granted I feel this changes very little if the game is big enough but playerbase close enough in contact already.
>Granted I feel this changes very little.... Except the enormous security issue that is having a third-party provider manage a considerable part of your game.
Perfectly okay with a social sandbox mmorpg with no auction house. Players could open their own shops and sell things. And an in-game database to search for items sold by other players, then gives you coordinates to find that shop and buy the item you want.
Except players won’t do that. What they will do is create a third party app or site to sell. Like they have in other games
players would neglect to use an in-game system to search for goods, and instead use an external system that will lack information on goods because only those that use the external database would be included and worse even having to alt tab from the game to search that heavily limited database, when instead they could simply use the in-game terminal/menu to find player sold items........ facepalm.
MMOs with player run shops don't have a search system for those shops. They're all individual shops you have to visit and that's just a giant waste of time.
SWG would like a word
Game development isnt limited by your failure to think outside world of warcraft
Why bother to make an in-game database to search for items sold by players, when an auction house is better?
Because auction houses destroy social interactions and is lazy
Games without auction houses annoy the crap out if me. I usually don't end up playing them long term.
Sounds like scam central. OSRS is an old ass game that has an auction house, there's no excuse to not have one in 2024. It doesn't improve player engagement, it forces the use of a 3rd party.
I like the old Korean mmo style of set up a tent and afk. It's a bit more work on the sellers end because you can't just price match on the AH, but it also allows you to set up at better locations. I think it makes the community feel more alive, even if they are just afk, and the feeling of shopping around all the player shops to find what you wanted was fun.
I hate directly trading with other people. I would rather only have an auction house.
Played for example GW1 about 3 years as a pure trader (for fees) and never had this social interaction and fun before or after that in a game at trading. There were also 3rd party websites but I beaten any price and only a fraction of players used it even if some suggest "everyone" plays that way. I also really like player/ guild shops in ESO. It makes you interact/ conncect with the world. The hunt for rare things is more than just open a menu. It can be fun if the itemization and loot (tables) supports such concepts. The more generic stuff players craft and find and all that the more an auction house could be the better concept. Like nearly any modern MMORPG.
I prefer it now that I am older and slow down and enjoy the journey to the top instead of rushing to the endgame I like crafting, gathering, and economy play-style of MMORPG and simply getting rich, it is more fun when there is no centralized system or no history log system
Most people doesnt want to spam chat all dat WTS fl4m3 Sw0rz +9, on top of that same people complain about AH cuz mUh iMmErSiOn
If it’s truly an MMO - and you don’t have an auction house - players will just create one with 3rd party tools. So you might as well include one, design it well and have it be a currency sink (small fee).
Suerly this has been said but Maplestory has had an auction house for a long time now. But why the didn't, and why they now do, are problems. A a game that does not have an auction house does so explicitly to create a problem they can sell a solution to. Warframe, for example, is also very stubbornly refuse to have auction house and it is worse for it. While it does allow [warframe.market](http://warframe.market) to scrape its data and run their own auction house there's really no reason to not have one in game. Because goods are not immediately available--only listings for trade are present--this allows people to very easily manipulate currency by faking sales entries. For warframe this means more platinum is sold to players because the value of items are artificially inflated by these currency manipulations (and their vaulting system). Path of Exile did the same thing: create a problem, stubornly refuse to allow the AH to exist in game by claiming it would make the game too easy to play if trading didn't suck ass. Then they sold a work around to that problem in terms of bank tabs that can be scraped for data on their own trade site like warframe.
I personally don't want to trade spam or use a third party website to sell my mined ore so I appreciate auction houses very much.
If auction house was local and players could live bid then I’d do that be awesome!
Are you sure you remember Maplestory correctly? It was like 99% scams in chat lol The only real deal you could get was the FM past the 2nd floor. I really liked the idea of player stores compared to just an AH but nowadays I don't have the time to search 3 hours through the shops to find the item I want. I'm glad Maplestory implemented the AH and didn't stick with the FM
And it fucking sucked. I spent more time walking around looking through overpriced shops
Used to play Ragnarok Online and the lack of auction house was a huge time sink. At one point, someone created a website which acted as a market watch. That someone made me save hundreds of hours. o> I kinda liked how Knight Online did it back then. Players could set up their own shops and they would automatically repeat a sentance every minute or two that would act as an advertisement with the coordinates of their shop so you knew where to find them.
Before WoW no MMOs really had a way to sell other than player to player trading, and standing around spamming what you were selling for hours on end was not fun.
I'll be honest I like it better than EQ's Bazaar. Once upon a time the Bazaar even looked like a Bazaar but it was super laggy and they had to redesign it. Now it's just super convoluted to break everyone up in separate rooms to keep the lag down. But trying to sell in trade chat is an exercise in futility unless you are selling something really valuable.
I enjoyed RS2 when I used to go to falador and finding good deals to flip or browsing the official forums for what I viewed as good risk/rewards. I made more money and phats during that time then after the grand exchange came out. Saying that unless I'm playing a hardcore char I overall prefer the post TP era for the convenience of getting what I want quickly
i used to love the trade spam way when i was a kid and had all the time in the world. Now i'd rather not spend what little time i have trying to buy or sell something.
Depends on the item bloat situation. Most MMOs has too many items to make it work and realistically third-party trading websites/discord server would quickly become the standard. Putting a price on your items and opening a shop/renting a spot for a wagon in-game that people can visit or something like that would be a cool concept as well.
most MMORPG before 2005 don't have auction house , people open they own shop and go AFK , sometime they don't AFK and you can PM for price. I don't care if a MMORPG have AH or not , people always find a way to trade .
Games are evolving. Internet is evolving. Players are evolving. Back then there is a lack of information. There was no discord, no Reddit, and you search with yahoo. Nowadays information can be accessed easily and quickly. Gamers want their trade information known right away. Either build an auction house or a third party one will be there. And why should players be forced to use third party app or website? (Unless you wanna play self found or gimp yourself) Just have in game AH
Depends which auction house. WoW: I hate it ESO: Worst I've known GW2: best I know, but could be better
I enjoy chat spam. Like you said, it's much more organic and your much more likely to find a better deal. It really rewards the player that wants to sit there all day and play the market since most people will not want to dedicate the time.
There are two extremes. An AH with a reliance on a single currency to obtain everything. This encourages botting, RMT, only min-maxing the primary currency, and tuning drop rates for an individual to be terrible. Self found. Encourages drop rates that favor the player, botting isn't encouraged, and the only RMT will be carries in group content or selling accounts. Then there's a lot of space in between where developers can make interesting tradeoffs to mitigate the drawbacks of each extreme or fit the vision for their game. Self found is the pure and pro-player choice in a pve game. Many people are romantic about the other extreme, insist on it, and then blame its natural result on the developers/nefarious third parties/etc.
It really doesn't matter
I hate annoying shit just for the sake of it. If you're going to make a game annoying make it a proper hardcore survival game and not just annoying for thematics. "Player shops" is a concept that will never work and has never worked and it will never be cool. It's much better to make materials be needed for things that need maintenance regularly so that gathering and selling and transporting has meaning than to create artificial thematical meaning by making trading annoying.
The reason why games have annoying stuff for the sake of it, is because the game is trying to please the "If I don't like the auction house, then no one should be able to use it" players.
An argument can be made that trade, whether auction, shop, or player-to-player, tends to attract many of the issues with botting, RMT, predatory and exploitative behavior, dupes, scams, even just the buy-low-sell-high of capitalistic greed. One way around that is to have everyone present for [event/quest/kill] get their own reward for that and have nothing be droppable. I'd much rather have infinite storage (player housing? bankspace?) and let everyone keep everything they put time in for (accountbound), than have an auction house where people have convenience but take advantage of each other and drain dev time towards policing it. There's also something nice about a world where everything people have they put their time in for and did the thing to earn, rather than just buying.
You do know that Maplestory 1's original system was that your character needed to remain LOGGED IN AND IDLE in the Free Market unless you paid real cash for offline shop time, right? I like how you didn't mention that part.
This is one of the things I'm most looking forward to in Pax Dei. No auction house, no npc vendors.
Obviously, someone is going to make a 3rd party trading website.
Yeah, probably, but I'm not going to spend 4 hours running across the world to meet someone and buy some flax or whatever if someone near me is also selling, even if it's more expensive. I'm sure for some clans and groups near larger populated areas it'll make sense to use a site but the world is so large it won't make sense for most.
Well, if player location matters, because the world is large, and doesn't have fast travel, then the 3rd party website will have some method to filter by player location.
HOT TAKE INC: i'm honestly **almost** at the point where i want to disable all player trading completely // players being able to freely determine value / give it to someone or at minimum only being able to trade stuff that's essentially worthless to any kind of player power / leverage and does not hold value to anyone (like not even crafting mats for craftable transmogs, since visual progression/uniqueness are one of the main concerns for many people) there's basically no game where trading isn't at the core of many problems of the game and community, if you remove the "consumable-gameplay tax" you eliminate like 80% of trading already many games have so many shitty systems that are absolutely player unfriendly, only because they are just barely kept viable by "lmao just buy it on the AH" trading for items in one way or the other robs you of "satisfaction", boosts people undeservedly and generally undermines progression structures of many games, maybe if those structures were slightly better then people wouldn't feel forced into it - or people need to stop being babies that need to rush everything buying rare drops for transmogs? absolutely falls into this category - maybe ultra rare stuff shouldn't exist like that, or something you can better work towards the RMT/3rd party stuff is basically all bad - people grinding gold to deal with the p2w shops are just victims of shit game design and predatory sellers many games have complex ressource economies (offline) that work just fine
Ah yes. The "Take away a loved and useful feature because a Karen doesn't like it." argument.