Some of you may know over the past 6+ months I've been working on a successor to the Marketplace. A system that will allow players in all games (of a certain rank and activity) to trade items for Vault Credits to earn contribution points.
Now in a simple market system in a game, you want players to be able to grow their assets by using the market. For ours, it's designed a bit differently. Here at Gaiscioch our marketplace has always been a test of a player's willingness to give. A measure of generosity. It was the whole reason behind the original system and I hope to continue it in the future. We want the reward to be less than the price so that we can tell who is thinking about "We" and who is only concerned with "Me". Generosity is one of the key traits of being a Gaiscioch and I want to make sure this system highlights it.
The challenge comes when you consider I'm trying to build a trading post system that works across several games using a singular currency. Valuing items across multiple games on the same bar is quite a challenge. I have built over a dozen models and have recently found one that I think works.
The Concept is Simple.
There are 10 item tiers. To find the tier the system will take the item level and divide it by the max level to find the percentage. Then multiplied by 10 and rounded. This will provide me with a tier of 1-10. Example: a level 45 sword in New World with a max level of 60.
( 45 / 60 ) * 10 = Tier 8
Then there is the quality tiers multiplier which is another scaling system based on the colors of the items. Each game varies on item color but each adventure leader will be able to configure the order in which the colors go. For the example, below we'll use Guild Wars 2's color tiers:
- junk or gray (50%)
- basic or white (75%)
- fine or blue (100%)
- masterwork or green (150%)
- rare or yellow (200%)
- exotic or orange (250%)
- ascended or pink (300%)
- legendary or purple (400%)
Lastly the item price multiplier changes by the type of item from one of these 4 categories:
- Raw Materials (1x) - Unprocessed Gathered or Dropped Materials
- Refined Materials (3x) - Processed Materials
- Consumables (5x) - Crafted or Dropped Consumable items.
- Items (10x) - Crafted or Dropped tradable Items.
Taking the math from all of these factors will automatically create a Vault Credit price and Contribution reward allowing us to create a system that works over a dynamically growing number of games.
The Big Challenge
The other challenge is looking at this project from the eyes of a person who hopes to exploit it or cheat the system. How can it be abused and used inappropriately? Many of my early builds fell apart as soon as I started finding ways to exploit them. My first version where I let players set the price would have destroyed the Gaiscioch economy rather quickly. It's a challenging prospect, trying to build something that can't be easily exploited. But as always I will have fail-safes programmed to flag suspicious transactions and give the ability to enable or disable the trading post on a person-by-person basis. It would be great if I didn't have to worry about family gaming the system but it's a fact of life. I've seen it in the past and it only seems to be getting more frequent.
Discussion
No Comments Posted
Post A Comment:
Login to post a comment