SAVING BAG SPACEFollow

Wow!

I agree ten slots are not enough

That is not the sole reason. SOE is purposely restricting traders in bazaar to 10 slot trader satchels to force you to pay for another account if you want more than 100 slots (10 slot bag x 10 satchels) for your trader. This way they are able to leech more money through membership if you put up another trader. That is also the reason why you have to have All-Access Membership to have a trader/buyer up in bazaar. For you to pay for another account basically. Whole system doesn't make sense nowadays because there are over 500k+ tradable items in-game. Restricting you to 100 slots is just bad game design.

Honestly, the whole buyer/trader system is bad in general. Any type of barter system that locks up your main character from being played (current system and even the new offline trader mode system) is just ridiculous.

Yep that is exactly the reason. I'm surprised people don't see the math like you do. If you look at all the regular servers, there are atleast 250 traders up at any given time, so thats $25,000 they would loose a month, or $300,000 a year per SERVER, so about 13 servers, they would loose ~ $4 million. I know its their thinking cause I've talked to devs about improving the system at SOE Live and its a flat out NO on changing the current bazaar system. Its why they offered offline trading and not a full overhaul of the system to something like what the newer games or what WoW system is, because it still ties up your account. It truly is bad game design when you can't play your character and have to buy another account just to setup a trader, but they are in it for the $$$, regardless of the way they please their customers.

What I would be curious about is how many subscriptions they've lost over the years cause people get frustrated, with paying the insanely high bazaar prices cause only the select few can have traders or buyers up (not a "equally" fair system for everyone if you think about it, cause the time involved keeping your 1 account up , so you can't play the other aspects of the game). If one real person is able to have 10 accounts in bazaar to sell 1000 items, a person with 1 account should also have the means of selling 1000 items, that is where the fairness should be. I'm sure they've lost a ton of subscriptions from players moving onto other games cause of the frustration with how the current system works. I mean lets face it if you have to pay those ridiculous prices in bazaar cause a select few hold a monopoly on all items, you aren't going to find that aspect of the game very enjoyable.



Edited, Aug 31st 2014 3:17pm by Nikoral

WoW still requires you to pay subscription fees to be able to post to the auction house, so Blizz is still earning their monthly fees, despite players using alternate characters after making a trade. SOE could do this as well, institute an auction system where you can swap characters after posting trades. They would still require us to pay monthly fees to do so. That way they would continue to meet their income threshold. Its way way way past time time to they did this, too. Its just so archaic. I suggest they create 20 or 30 slot trad satchels and offer them for sale for station cash, AND throw in a free one for each account for each new expansion, including, say, each expac since HoT.

$15/month isn't bad, no... Its a movie ticket once a month. But its $180/year. That thought makes me dislike paying the fee, and thus I don't play anymore. It still rankles me that my characters are locked out of their cultural HoT gear and their augs due to it all being purple. They remain unplayable until I buy a sub again... But I feel like an 85, heroiced, has little to do, besides camping augs, and my camping days are over.

I'm not sure if I buy the idea that they have kept the trader satchels 10 slot to force people to operate more trade mules (and have to buy more accounts to do so). Most people who pay for multiple accounts do so to box while playing. The potential for extra trade mules is (I assume) secondary. Hell. If you aren't boxing, you probably aren't actually generating so much stuff that you need more than one mule. Honestly, with just one account, it's mostly the extra junk that gets vendored rather than put on my mule. I imagine folks heavily into trade skills might have more of a need for this, but I really think it's the storage capacity rather than being able to put more than 100 items for sale in the bazaar that is the pressure point for most players. I've never come close to having 100 high value items on my trader. 20 maybe, then maybe 30-40 medium priced items, and the rest of the lots get filled with junk that might sell for a few hundred plat. What gets killed is the low priced items floating around. I don't bother looted ornaments, for example, because you can't sell them for enough to justify using a slot. So there is a hole in the market being created by this, but I just don't think it's the driving factor for SOE.

IMO, the bigger deal is that most people use the trade satchels to fill their bank slots. So right now, if you want more storage, you either have to create alts just to hold the stuff (which may require more accounts), or buy bigger bags (in game, or with SC), or pay for housing. If they up the size of the satchels, they cost themselves potential revenue.

Dunno. Maybe my experience is different than most, but for me, it's about being able to hold all the stuff my character is using. Most tradeskill stuff can be shuffled off to alts (to a point), but the quest stuff can easily fill up a hell of a lot of slots. I'm one of those silly people who holds on to things I find and then checks the quest for them. Even if the reward isn't anything I can use, I like to actually complete quests. Yeah, silly me! But this is *really* hard to do with the limited bank space in the game. Like I said earlier, I bought housing for my main purely to store old gear he has so that there was enough space in his bank to hold quest items he's working on now. Now that character is a bit of an exception due to age. I seriously have full or nearly full sets of the old class based armor, then the old planar armor, some bits of kunark armor, PoS class rares, Skyfire armor, and OOW armor (that's about the point I took a several year hiatus). And no way am I not displaying my Falchion of Koda Via, or my bullsmasher, or my PGT, Morning star of Light, Shiny Brass Shield, Theologian Claymore, etc, etc, etc.

They could probably mutate current guild bank coding (nicer bank interface with the list in my view too) to provide each character a personal vault. Likely the size of this (and guild bank) could be increased too. This would likely make a killing on the marketplace as a $10.00 unlock for the basic with 2-3 tiers of upgrades in slot #'s for $5 a piece. [I think we have to give SoE a financial incentive]

As an aside, but connected to some ideas in the thread I personally feel three things have hurt the baz far more than the paid-account trader thing:

1. No $ in the lowbie gear market. This died before defiant (which really is the only occasional bump aside from the uber twink weapons) and they went attunable so long ago (now) that we no longer recycle much in EQ. Once upon a time you could name the 3 characters (that weren't on your account) that wore that chestpiece before you.

2. Tribute... sucked the "junk" out of baz. Made some "junk" worth more as tribute than it ever was as a twink item. Now most that use tribute have so much saved they don't even need to farm it anymore... so there isn't even the spin off of the 1-2 items from a tribute run that might be worth selling in baz vs. tributing.

3. Augments, nodrop and Attunable. Augments stopped people switching out their weapons/armor for minor upgrades due to the cost/hassle of taking off augments (I realize they have simplified this lately). Before LDoN era, you'd login to my guild and there was a few people that replaced half their gear every day in baz for tiny (+1 stats) increases for maybe a +10 gain overall. They'd hunt for deals and sell the stuff they were moving on from. Nodrop gear really starting increase in Luclin for the desirable stuff but there was so much 1-60 available from the older content it didn't matter. Some attunable stuff is sellable, but not reusable so it is a compromise that gave a bit back to the baz economy.


In a defiant world I can't see any reason to try and resurrect the lowbie gear economy (and lowbie is arguably under level 85 now).

Tribute is one thing they could really scrap/revise.

I think they have played with the balance of tradable/nodrop/attunable gear for years. Unless they go extreme such as "nothing is tradable except raw materials and player crafted" I don't see a change they can make there (vs. just tweaking the balance more).

Actually, I find that the lowbie defiant stuff sells quite well. Surprising, but true. The last couple levels of defiant get washed out with much better sellable gear out there, but prior to that folks will drop 1k per piece without blinking. This is actually where I get most of my sales. The higher value stuff sells for a lot more, but you might sell a few pieces a week (maybe). Every time I log my trader back in, I'll see 8-10 messages of various bits of defiant I've sold (well, that and spells). The global drop stuff actually does seem to work pretty well market wise.

I don't know what you consider modest amount of plat, but I surely don't put anything below 5k in value on my trader, since we are restricted to 100 slots. If you count inflation over the years, 1000 plat is equivalent to 1pp from about 14 years ago. Its so easy to make 1k plat in less than 10 minutes in game just from killing mobs, practically every 1 out 3 mobs drops blue diamonds or diamonds post level 70. Recently, the best way I've found to compare the value of plat is to compare how much a Krono is selling for. On my server Krono is going for 900k+, so 0.1% of that is a good guestimate of the value of 1pp from the old days.

Right now SoE makes a fair bit of $ selling bigger bags through the marketplace. Quest content over the years has pretty much always provided "good bags". Raid drop bags have traditionally been elite...


It would likely be easier to get SoE to move on some more items being stackable, and stack sizes.

Tradeskillers (been one at times) fill their banks super fast. I'm out of the loop (I know some things have been made better) on which things many people are storing a lot of, but there is probably a handful of items/materials they could change and really free up some bank space.

I see no problem with the current system. In fact I'm loving it. I am one of those individuals that runs quite a few traders, usually 10-11 traders, sometimes I"ll put up 14 if I have alot of stuff to sell. And usually have 2 buyers up. I do have to say I've pretty much monopolized the bazaar on my server with my setup. But this is a game and that's what I find enjoyable instead of experiencing and questing. I usually make 2-4 million pp a day, sometimes on weekends I'm able to make about 6 million pp, and my record has been 9 million pp or so in a single day. This has enabled me to buy over 1500 krono in the past year or so. I haven't payed for my EQ subs in over a year and half now cause of it. The only thing I pay for is expansions.

You do have to realize this is a game, and each person has their own opinion of what is fun in the game. For me the fun is playing the bazaar.

Good for you...

So that may be why the price of all Dreadmotes and Latent Ether Armor drops have gone through the roof of late. From an average of 20-25KPP for a glowing dreadmote 7-8 months ago (when I initially began stockpiling for my main crew), to a staggering 60-80 KPP for one glowing Dreadmote presently on my server..

Now it costs around a million plat just to outfit a character with his 96-100 Rk2 spells..I feel sorry for a true returning player who wants to reach max level without help and in game resources, guild groups etc...

You're right though..One mans junk is another's gold the same way that one mans hobby is another's punishment.

Sippin,

I caught a 41 foot trout in a 2 foot deep creek in the outskirts of Toronto when I was eight years old !


Edited, Sep 9th 2014 5:19pm by hexeez

Lol, be sarcastic all you want. I'm the one walking away with over 1500 krono (down to about 1k krono now, for supporting all those traders for a year and half on Krono alone), thats $27,000 US dollars buddy for doing nothing but setting up multiple traders in bazaar.