lani
GameAmp Staff
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Joined: 09/08/2005
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| Giving NPC vendors some luv |
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With 90% of this site's visitors on holiday, I think it's safe for me to talk a bit about NPC traders in MMO's and how they're under-appreciated and how they could be used to regulate Player movement better in order to prevent clustering, which causes lag.
A common site in many an MMORPG is that of the huge crowd of people standing around an auction NPC or a terminal providing the same services. In EverQuest II there are the Traders, in Vanguard there's the Auctioneers, in Age of Conan, it's Traders again and in City of Heroes/Villains it's a group of store-clerks or back-alley ruffians. In Guild Wars there aren't any but there's no General Chat as a result either, with all the fish-wives, I mean Players hawking their goods. A pun in that game is that the best place for a quiet chat is the Trade channel.
Something you also see in each of these games and many, many more are A) Your FPS rate dropping dramatically whenever you get near to these large groups of players accessing the game's global auction / trade system. B) A lot of "useles" NPC Vendors trying to pawn off rubbish armor. We the Players visit them sometimes, or at least the one that's closest to our route to the nearest Auction-house, to sell our "Vendor Trash", stuff we can't even get the dumbest player to buy at inflated prices. For the main part they are completely ignored though, unless they've been inserted into a Fedex-style quest chain for instance.
I mean, I recall buying quite a bit of Armor from the NPC's in my first time through the Guild Wars: Prophecies campaign, but by the time Guild Wars: Factions came out, I'd be taking a character to Level 20 and Droknar's Forge (the long route, I never got ran) in little under 12 hours and with a set of armor bought in the northern Shiverpeaks. In EverQuest II I don't recall buying armor or swords from NPC's after hitting 10. I do recall the lag-fests in the Crafting Houses. SOE tried to do something about that by littering the streets with stumble-upon crafting stations after realizing that selling from your home just wasn't cutting it.
(Hello SOE?, ever heard of home-order/delivery? Like those Pizza's you get?)
In Vanguard, that Pinnacle of Unfulfilled Potential it was pretty much the same deal. 5 FPS around Auctioneers (or any area not fully optimized) and ghost-towns around them except for the spots where Crafters had been hidden away or the triangular route between Bank - Crafting Station and Trader.
Age of Conan even tries to put it all into one spot, including mail. So in order to check your mail (most likely RMT Gold Sellers spamming you and blaming Google for raising ad prices) you have to stutter passed dozens of people checking their banks, guild-banks, mail and the auction-house while pretty much the rest of the city's instance is a ghost-town filled with lovely Vendors who never get any custom. Except for he General Goods vendor just outside the Tradepost in Old Tarantia sees lots of Vendor Trash custom and the Potion vendors who constitute just about the only money-sink this game knows. Like the other games, the armor and weapon vendors see no custom at all.
So, there are two "problems" right? Laggy areas around auction house access points where players congregate to not socialize but try to get the biggest price for their goods instead. And NPC's that were painstakingly inserted into their cozy little shops or stalls but are really wasted memory space as they have no purpose.
Just about every game, including CoX these days, is item-centric. That makes "sense" because when people stop levelling, you need to find them another time-sink. I don't know who came up with the idea to level gear, but it proved brilliant and Blizzard perfected the system of gear-levelling through Raid-Dungeons, amongst other things.
But it's a sad fact that the stuff that Vendors sell is almost always "Salvation Army Grade", meaning it has the lowest possible stats for any given tier (usually 10 levels) and you'd really rather not be caught dead in them, except you're very likely to end up just that taking the gear out to the nearest dungeon.
I'm taking a long and roundabout way to get to the point here and you think you see it coming but it's not Player Shops. Or at least not the way people sometimes propose it. Your own personal NPC to sell your crafted or looted gear on would instantly create scenes the likes of Lineage II with its towns full of secondary accounts used for auto-selling/buying materials.
I'd much rather see a system where the NPC Armor Vendor allows you access to both his Salvation Army stuff as well as the armor section of the Player Market. If you got separate NPC's for each tier, restrict their access to the Player Market to that particular tier. The same for Weapon Smith NPC's, General Goods sellers and whatnot.
Benefits that I can see are manifold.
Not only can you lower the amount of people congregating on one single spot, thereby reducing lag in those areas, but by making people "run around town" to visit various stores for their shopping sprees cities will become more lively. Add no-horse/dragon riding signs while you're at it. Additionally, you'll bring people interested in the same gear (Tier 3 Armor for instance) within proximity of each other. Like-minded people are more likely to chat and socialize, even if it's only to complain about the rarity of such-and so item. Maybe some on the spot bartering or group-forming takes place. Furthermore, the specialization of the NPC Vendors with access to the Player Market means pre-fixed search queries to that database, meaning you can optimize (reduce server-load) for those. It also helps people knew to the whole player market and searching auction-house thing. Finally, it makes "botting" the player market that much harder.
The one drawback I can see about it is "virtual laziness". If you were to suddenly spring this system on a game where the single-point access Auction House has already been applied, and people are now forced to run around to do their shopping rather than do it all in one spot, will probably scream bloody murder and come up with various theories on how your company isn't trying to make money of of your customers but secretly to ruin their lives and make them hate you. If that actually IS your business model, please explain how you can get that to work? Since that's usually not the case though, I doubt we'll see this anytime soon.
I am curious, does anyone know of MMORPG's that actually support this kind of trading? I played several MMO's but don't recall this kind of system being used anywhere. I'd also like to know people's ideas on cons to this system.
Edit: Bunch of typo's
***THIS POST HAS BEEN EDITED***
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| 07/22/08 12:33 |
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Ataxia
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Joined: 04/21/2006
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| RE: Giving NPC vendors some luv |
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Well as bad, as childish, as just plain dumb Runescape is... the old trading system in it was probably the BEST I've seen in any MMO, and it didn't have a auction house/trader.
Most people just spammed near the banks etc, but over time certain places became used for selling different things, clans (re: guilds) were used for businesses and a REAL supply and demand system was built up, X can be turned into Y, A makes B and Y + B makes C that gets sold for profit to everyone.
Then they added a trader and that system went to hell =P
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| 07/22/08 13:03 |
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Phedre_D
GameAmp Staff
Posts: 462
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| RE: Giving NPC vendors some luv |
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Yep, it would make a lot of sense if an armor vendor only buys and sells armor. The idea to make all vendors traders makes a lot of sense. Maybe it could even go further and have them split in level ranges as well. The armor trader/vendor in Tortage only buys and sells items up to level 20. If you want level 50 stuff you need to hike to the fields of death. Not only would make it less of a bottle neck, but also from a reality point of view it makes a lot of sense.
I think in DAoC it mattered where you sold your vendor trash. The armor vendor gave less for weapons than the blacksmith. I think he should really not accepted it. Or will people then cry too much they have to run around town too much? I am sure they will.
Pure player vendors are not a great concept in my mind. That really means an awful lot of running around and introducing a whole new group of players spending all time trading and inflation prices.
So yeah, great idea. An armor vendor selling and trading his own and players goods. It is so obvious, there must be some technical reason it is not done like that yet.
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| 07/23/08 04:23 |
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lani
GameAmp Staff
Posts: 595
Joined: 09/08/2005
Credibility: 28 pts
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| RE: Giving NPC vendors some luv |
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I think the technical issue might be time-to-implement.
Setting up tiered Traders for each assortment of goods that provides player-traded goods within that tier along with generics takes a bit longer and trading is typically a bit 'tagged on' on most MMO's. Well, the story driven ones. The more-sand-boxy a game gets, the more liable you're to have decent economy tools. Still, I was given to understand Ryzom pretty much had the system I envisioned for AoC.
P.s. I recall hating it that I had to run by 5 different vendors in single player RPGs to get the most out of my vendor trash loot. Drop rate and such are an influence there. I think I'd prefer a Weaponsmith gives 25% of selling value for weapons and only 12,5% for armor. Of course, it always annoyed me no end to accidentally sell UberSword of Slaying, which I can't wear yet until I gain one more level, to the NPC for a tenth of it's value then have to buy it back at full value. Kinda like selling your 2Gold horse in AoC until the latest patch.
MMORPG (Roleplaying): Mostly Men Online Role-Playing Girls
MMORPG (Acheivement): Miserable Malcontents Online Rehashing Past Glories
MMORPG (PvP): Macho Men Obviously Really Prefer Griefing
MMORPG (itemization): Misers May Obfuscate Recently Purchased Gold
MMORPG (Social): Virtual Worlds with Virtual Wealth and achievements, but with Real People with Real Feelings.
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| 07/23/08 05:23 |
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