Originally posted by darthblaze Honestly I'm surprised no one has brought up Star wars galaxies system... I loved the "Bazaar" idea, a local auction house that limits the cost of something sold, but would then branch out to player housing vendors. I think it was a great idea, and would be an awesome addition, A small auction house for day to day sales... Bags, Quest items, anything of small value, then branch out to look at player prices and auctions and be able to travel to the player's shop or given a location..? Maybe seems rather large of an idea, but i loved the "Community" in it.
I liked the system in Star Wars Galaxies. I was thinking of bringing it up in a prior post.
The only compromise I would be willing to make for an auction hall would be race/faction based. Each city has their own auction hall that only inhabitants or those who are friendly/allied with the city could buy from. If one were to try to sell their wares to a different faction/race, then they would have to use /auction or have to do some serious faction work to become allied.
I would not be opposed to localized, faction based market places. I just don't want to spend my limited game time dealing with /auction spam (or worse, forced into spamming /auction myself).
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do. Benjamin Franklin
i liked the idea of FFXIV 1.0 .. but at the ends their "trading ward" system failed horrible.
for the ones who arent familiar with ffxiv 1.0
you had 3 citiys, every city got an instance for "wards"
there were several wards (instances) each city.
a player had to hire retainers and send them to the ward for selling
you can then place your retainer in one of the several wards and let him sell your goods....
worst part:
you couldnt tell who is selling what, you had to browse each "bazaar", wich took couple of menu clicks
and there were like 100 retainers each ward.. there was a buttload of retainers who soled just cheap crap...it was tiredsome to buy something from the market wards.
i think at first there wasnt any trading or world chat.
I liked FFXI auction house system, i know not the best either^^
otherwise ..im sure the dev team will figuer out a good solution for us ;:)
What i hate any shop is that players try to sell useless items that no one will buy....
But if i had to chose : Player Driven House. Players seting their own prices. Players screaming their wares in the trade chat. People actually arguing for how much to sell something.
The entire point of selling items is to be : Quest items, Unique items, Usefull items. I dont see anyone buying anything else.
People are always looking for items to throw on new lowbies. Items for crafting, spells, droppable quest items, multi-quest items (ye ole, you bring me gold, I give you you the items needed to complete a quest) Buffs, gambling, ports. Ah I can see it now, so many people it is hard to move around. *Sniff*
First PC Game: Pool of Radiance July 10th, 1990. First MMO: Everquest April 23, 1999
I don't know but maybe you could have a companion which you could place in the city which could sell your stuffs for you. You should of course be able to set the prices. You could pay him a fee depending on how long he stays there and if you pay him enough he could stay there even when you have logged out. He will max stay there for 24 hour (4h 5% fee, 8h 10% fee, 12h 15% fee and 24h 20% fee of what he sell + minimum cost of 1sp).
I an enjoy the story behind what is possibly the very reason why the AH was created in mmos (or heavily influenced it's proliferation). It encapsulates the very beginning of the progression of taking away from players what they once controlled in mmorpgs.
EQ originally was like Asheron's Call and had no central AH in game when launched. Out of necessity both games then had players who crafted or wanted to sell looted items directly to other players start organizing events in game and specific places became known to all players as trade districts. In EQ the specific story was that a certain guild started a weekend auctions that very quickly started being duplicated across servers by many others. Same thing occurred in AC.
This was 100% player driven content above and beyond what developers had to spend time and money on ... the VERY thing most developers are so desperately trying to recreated in mmos. Then EQ added auction houses and completely obliterated this community event that became very popular. Instead of building upon to both add more tools and solutions to existing shortcomings it they instead dismantled it. The irony is devastating when looking back compared to what we see today in most games.
EQ had likely one of the most possitive, unplanned side affects of their game design to ever develop within an mmo, the very start of player driven and sandbox like content that gave players something to do, drove interaction and cooperation, built entire guilds based upon the need ... and proceeded to strip all of it from their game.
I laugh and cry all at the same time every time I remember it.
I have no idea how Pathfinder will handle selling of goods both created and looted but I hope their decisions reflect the lessons that should have been learned from the past.
I have similar thoughts about the EQ1 monk class. They never intended monks to "pull" mobs but player creativity actually imbued the monk with amazing utility that was not foreseen. Monks were not always the best damage dealers or tanks but their utility as a raid or even group dungeon puller gave them amazing value. It was also very challenging and fun to play in that role and even better to witness a skilled monk do amazing feats of pulling.
What did EQ2 and every other MMO do with this knowledge? Introduce chained mobs with evasion code to prevent trains and kill "pulling" as a needed skill and devalue one of the truly unique MMO classes of all time. I would love to see the return of this mechanic.
The thing is, unless the devs are aiming at a player base around 1000 or so payers, the game needs a auction house, or auction houses for difference region, or some way for player to sell and buy things except for spamming and staring at a channel for hours. Lets say we have 10000 players online, and 5% of them want to sell something, which is a small percent and could be much higher, its 500 people, even if these guys are all super polite and no one spam at all and only post their message on the auction chennel once per minute, its 9 messages per seconds in the channel which no one can read.
i think Pantheon should have an auction house but not linked to other cities, thats too "unrealistic". Lets say i want to sell my stuff in Freeport? Ok, thats possible but people in Felwithe can not buy it. You will see, a trade-capital per faction will cristallize very fast because people willing to buy or sell will go where the market is the biggest. In this way we will fill the city with life, people auctioning the wares, socializing, and so on.
I come from the 1999 EQ1 - EC tunnel era too (on my server SolRo it was Gfay tough) but i never felt it funny, scrolling trough all that trade-spam searching for an item...
VG tried regional auction houses, they don't work. Everyone will just sell their wares in the most popular city and the other auction houses become irrelevant.
FFXI had both a fantastic auction house and well as individual player shops outside towns. That system had the convenience of just throwing an item on the AH but doing so came with a steep tax fee. A large portion of players decided to go the personal shop route to save on taxes as well as have a more intimate one on one price haggling system. Just wandering the player shops was a game in itself that i really enjoyed.
Having both works well if the system in place allows for both to succeed.
This for me.
It should also be noted that auction houses were separated by town/city (until a relatively recent change) which would create that change of economy by area that some have talked about in here.
I kinda liked the eq2 approach (as it were around launch, I am not sure if they changed it later).
Goes something like this:
You could sell your wares from your house - This worked by advertising your wares in chat/channel, and an interested buyer would enter your house and buy the item in question.
The other way was through an auction house barter who took a hefty cut (I believe it was 40%) for the service.
----
I like the approach of putting wares up for sale on a stall, and hire various levels of npc helpers to manage this or just do it yourself if your have the trader gene. For example:
1. Fully manage your stall, and having to be present to trade.
2. Hire a npc at low cost to show your wares, but only able to take notes of offers from players and pass them on to you - You cannot set prices on anything. The actual trade must be made player to player. Cost extra to work while you are offline.
3. Hire a npc with merchant, who can show your wares and cleared to sell them. This merchant will take a hefty cut (50%?) as payment, and even require payment for showing up. Cost extra to work while you are offline.
4. Player driven auction houses, reserves or no reserves, best and most trustworthy organisation wins. These will likely offer cheaper services than a npc merchant, and hopefully offer an alternative to the hirering npc.
This might be a nice way to get players to interact but not scare away players who find trading boring and just want to get on with the adventuring.
I kinda liked the eq2 approach (as it were around launch, I am not sure if they changed it later).
Goes something like this:
You could sell your wares from your house - This worked by advertising your wares in chat/channel, and an interested buyer would enter your house and buy the item in question.
The other way was through an auction house barter who took a hefty cut (I believe it was 40%) for the service.
I liked the EQ2 broker as well. The broker fees were something like 10% for same faction and 40% for the black market broker (buying between light side or dark side cities), if I recall correctly.
I think the people that will be playing this game will tend to be older and have a lot less free time than they used to, but like the game play of the older style mmorpg's even though it will require more time.
Forcing people to spend days in a player driven marketplace like EC tunnel just to repeatedly paste text and read spam is going to eat up way too much of what little time they have and take away from the regular game play time. And selling wares is really kind of necessary to do if you want to have any kind of spending money for your own upgrades.
I know I probably shouldn't exclude player auctioning from my use of the term "game play", but it's just how I feel about it now. Though, I used to really like that aspect when I was younger and didn't have a job or children.
I wouldn't mind if there were multiple unconnected auction houses where you could find different wares in the auction houses on different continents. But it just might end up that the players will just tend to always put their items on the most active auction house.
To me, player auctions are what a virtual world is all about. You kind of have to step away from the modern line of thinking as to what an MMO is and remember that there is a lot more to an MMORPG than killing monsters or players.
Even when a player has less time to play than they once had, just knowing that when you hit "Enter World", it will involve a variety of interactions and that time devoted to the game is put towards a meaningful long-term goal. Lately MMOs have become a flavor of the month, short lived bit of fun that people devour and move on from. That isn't the kind of game I want to play, and even if I'm gaining entire levels or posting dozens of items on an AH in the hour I have to play, it just doesn't have the sense of accomplishment attached to it that playing a game like Everquest did. I'd personally rather use my hour of game time on something that I can work on for years than a game that provides merely an illusion of great progress because your goals are trivial ones.
Even when a player has less time to play than they once had, just knowing that when you hit "Enter World", it will involve a variety of interactions and that time devoted to the game is put towards a meaningful long-term goal.
That's the thing, not everyone has the same goals. Sitting in some tunnel spamming an auction chat to me is (and was)... BORING. That's not an experience I look forward to having, and didn't enjoy it the first time around. I'd have much rather been out in the field poking things with the pointy end of my sword with a group of friends than sitting idle.
It felt like a punishment. I had been bad and was being made to sit in the corner for a time out.
Even when a player has less time to play than they once had, just knowing that when you hit "Enter World", it will involve a variety of interactions and that time devoted to the game is put towards a meaningful long-term goal.
That's the thing, not everyone has the same goals. Sitting in some tunnel spamming an auction chat to me is (and was)... BORING. That's not an experience I look forward to having, and didn't enjoy it the first time around. I'd have much rather been out in the field poking things with the pointy end of my sword with a group of friends than sitting idle.
It felt like a punishment. I had been bad and was being made to sit in the corner for a time out.
Well, technically nobody actually makes you trade at all, you can go out in the field and poke things with a stick and be happy with the items you can get doing that. I would rather eliminate trade than trivialize item acquisition, by allowing every item acquired by everyone to be obtained in seconds from a single location. If it feels like punishment then don't do it.
I am surprised no one has brought up how DAOC does it (or used to do it, not sure if it changed). Next to the player driven EC tunnels, I always felt they did it the best.
Basically you would go into the player housing zone and they had "for sale boards" which you could click on and acted like a search engine for the item you wanted, or browse item types.
The board would tell you what player was selling the item, and what the location (zone,region) their house/shop was in. You would have to travel to that house/shop and click on their shop keeper, where all the items they had for sale were purchasable just as if you were buying from an NPC vendor.
To distinguish houses from shops, players were able to buy signs that go out in the yard to show what kind of shop they were. Stuff to distinguish between say a weaponsmith. a tailor. or jeweler... or general goods.
Was a very immersive system.
Some fun things about it were if you found an item, and while on your way there someone else was buying the item. Can't tell you how many times I saw someone leaving that shop only to find the item I wanted was now gone, even though it was listed a mere 10 mins ago.
Another nice aspect is that housing zones had more of a community feel to it. You would just wander around the housing area to check out peoples shops to see what they are selling. Sometimes you didnt know something even existed to look for until you saw a PC vendor selling it by chance.
Even when a player has less time to play than they once had, just knowing that when you hit "Enter World", it will involve a variety of interactions and that time devoted to the game is put towards a meaningful long-term goal.
That's the thing, not everyone has the same goals. Sitting in some tunnel spamming an auction chat to me is (and was)... BORING. That's not an experience I look forward to having, and didn't enjoy it the first time around. I'd have much rather been out in the field poking things with the pointy end of my sword with a group of friends than sitting idle.
It felt like a punishment. I had been bad and was being made to sit in the corner for a time out.
No one had to go to the player marketplace. I don't think I ever went there intentionally. I'd utilize it when I passed through, but it wasn't my thing. I would generally sell items to my guild, in the city if I was banking or along the way coming and going from a destination. There was still that player interaction involved, I just wasn't as prudent as some. I liked the fact that the process of selling wasn't automated like I was playing some video game instead of interacting in a virtual world.
For me, if an Auction House exists, I think it should be localized so every city has its own marketplace. Then it should have a sizable tax. If the Auction Houses are linked, I think there should be an even bigger tax on items from another city. This would encourage player interaction and cause folks to congregate in one or two cities (probably one with evil and one with good alignment).
As for the way DAOC did it, I always thought that was just a really inconvenient way of automating trades. It still removed the interaction with players, but it made it so you had to trek across multiple zones hunting down a players house and their vendor. I didn't completely dislike the system, but I still think automated forms of trading should be taxed and manually trading should still be the most profitable form of commerce. In every sandboxy game I've ever played, there tends to be a lot of people who like buying, selling and accruing wealth as a main form of gameplay. I feel that should be both rewarded and encouraged.
Well, technically nobody actually makes you trade at all, you can go out in the field and poke things with a stick and be happy with the items you can get doing that. I would rather eliminate trade than trivialize item acquisition, by allowing every item acquired by everyone to be obtained in seconds from a single location. If it feels like punishment then don't do it.
And that is exactly what I do in games that attempt to force me into dealing with walls of spam before I can trade.
I don't.
I build a full set of tradeskill alts and funnel resources from my main, assuring I can craft. Some of this is just because I enjoy crafting, but in games without a decent broker system, or a broken economy, I find myself far more driven to be self sufficient without returning anything to the economy.
In games like CoH or EQ2, I can participate in the economy without dealing with walls of spam or giving up my night for something else I would rather be doing. Bartering in /auction is just not an action I enjoy. Requiring usage of /auction to conduct business won't stop me from playing, but it will drive me away from participating in the economy.
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do. Benjamin Franklin
...but in games without a decent broker system, or a broken economy...
Honestly, I haven't really seen an MMORPG without a broken economy. Most game economies are imbalanced because items and gold don't leave the world at the same rate they come into the world, so as the server matures the money supply grows and if the velocity of money is constant you get unrealistic levels of inflation. Items rarely leave the world at the same rate the are created so you get some items with tremendous deflationary pressure while others rise in price.A glut of some items occurs, mostly things low level players get as drops, and without access to valued items the rich get richer and the poor, not so much. Hey, it's kinda like real life with central banks supplying money to investors while the poor don't have access to it.
Games with auction houses have additional problems. Auction houses are way too efficient resulting in unrealistic levels of seller competition. No real economy has every item made compete directly with every other items made. What happens is that anything but the rarest items sell for rock bottom prices, and rare items sell for rediculous amounts because there's too little competition. Then you have some players who play the auction house. In real life it's a bit more challenging to corner the world market on virtually any item.
Guilds complicate the economy by having a growing hoard of items they can hand to members. You don't want to stop that process but it can remove a lot of players, or at least a lot of items, from the economy.
Anyway, IMHO an MMORPG economy is at best a compromise, and all you can really hope for is a good balance between being able to find the buyers you know are out there in a reasonable amount of time and sellers being able to get a decent price for a good item.
I always liked the Bazaar from EQ best. While I enjoyed the wheeling and dealing of the EC tunnel or NFP bank, I liked being able to buy an item off someone. Often there were people advertising too for even better deals or trades.
What I really liked about the bazaar was people having to be on to sell, even if it was afk over night. So instead of the market being flooded with 20 of the same item on an AH, you might only see 3 up in the bazaar. It just seemed to produce a more stable economy.
I love crafting and in-game economies. I don't think an EC type tunnel model is really practical. Hoping the Pantheon team can come up with something that facilitates the convenient exchange of goods without allowing for something like EQ2 whereby the market is completely flooded with thousands of identical items.
I am a huge advocate of the Star Wars Crafting and Selling Systems, it was the very best model I have ever participated in. Perhaps they can be inspired by that model.
Comments
I liked the system in Star Wars Galaxies. I was thinking of bringing it up in a prior post.
I would not be opposed to localized, faction based market places. I just don't want to spend my limited game time dealing with /auction spam (or worse, forced into spamming /auction myself).
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.
Benjamin Franklin
i liked the idea of FFXIV 1.0 .. but at the ends their "trading ward" system failed horrible.
for the ones who arent familiar with ffxiv 1.0
you had 3 citiys, every city got an instance for "wards"
there were several wards (instances) each city.
a player had to hire retainers and send them to the ward for selling
you can then place your retainer in one of the several wards and let him sell your goods....
worst part:
you couldnt tell who is selling what, you had to browse each "bazaar", wich took couple of menu clicks
and there were like 100 retainers each ward.. there was a buttload of retainers who soled just cheap crap...it was tiredsome to buy something from the market wards.
i think at first there wasnt any trading or world chat.
I liked FFXI auction house system, i know not the best either^^
otherwise ..im sure the dev team will figuer out a good solution for us ;:)
People are always looking for items to throw on new lowbies. Items for crafting, spells, droppable quest items, multi-quest items (ye ole, you bring me gold, I give you you the items needed to complete a quest) Buffs, gambling, ports. Ah I can see it now, so many people it is hard to move around. *Sniff*
First PC Game: Pool of Radiance July 10th, 1990. First MMO: Everquest April 23, 1999
I have similar thoughts about the EQ1 monk class. They never intended monks to "pull" mobs but player creativity actually imbued the monk with amazing utility that was not foreseen. Monks were not always the best damage dealers or tanks but their utility as a raid or even group dungeon puller gave them amazing value. It was also very challenging and fun to play in that role and even better to witness a skilled monk do amazing feats of pulling.
What did EQ2 and every other MMO do with this knowledge? Introduce chained mobs with evasion code to prevent trains and kill "pulling" as a needed skill and devalue one of the truly unique MMO classes of all time. I would love to see the return of this mechanic.
Hallo,
i think Pantheon should have an auction house but not linked to other cities, thats too "unrealistic". Lets say i want to sell my stuff in Freeport? Ok, thats possible but people in Felwithe can not buy it. You will see, a trade-capital per faction will cristallize very fast because people willing to buy or sell will go where the market is the biggest. In this way we will fill the city with life, people auctioning the wares, socializing, and so on.
I come from the 1999 EQ1 - EC tunnel era too (on my server SolRo it was Gfay tough) but i never felt it funny, scrolling trough all that trade-spam searching for an item...
TL,DR: make an auction house :-)
Zero
like i described in my previous post.. ffxiv 1.0 tryed that and it sucked also
This for me.
It should also be noted that auction houses were separated by town/city (until a relatively recent change) which would create that change of economy by area that some have talked about in here.
I kinda liked the eq2 approach (as it were around launch, I am not sure if they changed it later).
Goes something like this:
You could sell your wares from your house - This worked by advertising your wares in chat/channel, and an interested buyer would enter your house and buy the item in question.
The other way was through an auction house barter who took a hefty cut (I believe it was 40%) for the service.
----
I like the approach of putting wares up for sale on a stall, and hire various levels of npc helpers to manage this or just do it yourself if your have the trader gene. For example:
1. Fully manage your stall, and having to be present to trade.
2. Hire a npc at low cost to show your wares, but only able to take notes of offers from players and pass them on to you - You cannot set prices on anything. The actual trade must be made player to player. Cost extra to work while you are offline.
3. Hire a npc with merchant, who can show your wares and cleared to sell them. This merchant will take a hefty cut (50%?) as payment, and even require payment for showing up. Cost extra to work while you are offline.
4. Player driven auction houses, reserves or no reserves, best and most trustworthy organisation wins. These will likely offer cheaper services than a npc merchant, and hopefully offer an alternative to the hirering npc.
This might be a nice way to get players to interact but not scare away players who find trading boring and just want to get on with the adventuring.
"I am my connectome" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HA7GwKXfJB0
I liked the EQ2 broker as well. The broker fees were something like 10% for same faction and 40% for the black market broker (buying between light side or dark side cities), if I recall correctly.
Forcing people to spend days in a player driven marketplace like EC tunnel just to repeatedly paste text and read spam is going to eat up way too much of what little time they have and take away from the regular game play time. And selling wares is really kind of necessary to do if you want to have any kind of spending money for your own upgrades.
I know I probably shouldn't exclude player auctioning from my use of the term "game play", but it's just how I feel about it now. Though, I used to really like that aspect when I was younger and didn't have a job or children.
I wouldn't mind if there were multiple unconnected auction houses where you could find different wares in the auction houses on different continents. But it just might end up that the players will just tend to always put their items on the most active auction house.
To me, player auctions are what a virtual world is all about. You kind of have to step away from the modern line of thinking as to what an MMO is and remember that there is a lot more to an MMORPG than killing monsters or players.
Even when a player has less time to play than they once had, just knowing that when you hit "Enter World", it will involve a variety of interactions and that time devoted to the game is put towards a meaningful long-term goal. Lately MMOs have become a flavor of the month, short lived bit of fun that people devour and move on from. That isn't the kind of game I want to play, and even if I'm gaining entire levels or posting dozens of items on an AH in the hour I have to play, it just doesn't have the sense of accomplishment attached to it that playing a game like Everquest did. I'd personally rather use my hour of game time on something that I can work on for years than a game that provides merely an illusion of great progress because your goals are trivial ones.
That's the thing, not everyone has the same goals. Sitting in some tunnel spamming an auction chat to me is (and was)... BORING. That's not an experience I look forward to having, and didn't enjoy it the first time around. I'd have much rather been out in the field poking things with the pointy end of my sword with a group of friends than sitting idle.
It felt like a punishment. I had been bad and was being made to sit in the corner for a time out.
Well, technically nobody actually makes you trade at all, you can go out in the field and poke things with a stick and be happy with the items you can get doing that. I would rather eliminate trade than trivialize item acquisition, by allowing every item acquired by everyone to be obtained in seconds from a single location. If it feels like punishment then don't do it.
I am surprised no one has brought up how DAOC does it (or used to do it, not sure if it changed). Next to the player driven EC tunnels, I always felt they did it the best.
Basically you would go into the player housing zone and they had "for sale boards" which you could click on and acted like a search engine for the item you wanted, or browse item types.
The board would tell you what player was selling the item, and what the location (zone,region) their house/shop was in. You would have to travel to that house/shop and click on their shop keeper, where all the items they had for sale were purchasable just as if you were buying from an NPC vendor.
To distinguish houses from shops, players were able to buy signs that go out in the yard to show what kind of shop they were. Stuff to distinguish between say a weaponsmith. a tailor. or jeweler... or general goods.
Was a very immersive system.
Some fun things about it were if you found an item, and while on your way there someone else was buying the item. Can't tell you how many times I saw someone leaving that shop only to find the item I wanted was now gone, even though it was listed a mere 10 mins ago.
Another nice aspect is that housing zones had more of a community feel to it. You would just wander around the housing area to check out peoples shops to see what they are selling. Sometimes you didnt know something even existed to look for until you saw a PC vendor selling it by chance.
No one had to go to the player marketplace. I don't think I ever went there intentionally. I'd utilize it when I passed through, but it wasn't my thing. I would generally sell items to my guild, in the city if I was banking or along the way coming and going from a destination. There was still that player interaction involved, I just wasn't as prudent as some. I liked the fact that the process of selling wasn't automated like I was playing some video game instead of interacting in a virtual world.
For me, if an Auction House exists, I think it should be localized so every city has its own marketplace. Then it should have a sizable tax. If the Auction Houses are linked, I think there should be an even bigger tax on items from another city. This would encourage player interaction and cause folks to congregate in one or two cities (probably one with evil and one with good alignment).
As for the way DAOC did it, I always thought that was just a really inconvenient way of automating trades. It still removed the interaction with players, but it made it so you had to trek across multiple zones hunting down a players house and their vendor. I didn't completely dislike the system, but I still think automated forms of trading should be taxed and manually trading should still be the most profitable form of commerce. In every sandboxy game I've ever played, there tends to be a lot of people who like buying, selling and accruing wealth as a main form of gameplay. I feel that should be both rewarded and encouraged.
And that is exactly what I do in games that attempt to force me into dealing with walls of spam before I can trade.
I don't.
I build a full set of tradeskill alts and funnel resources from my main, assuring I can craft. Some of this is just because I enjoy crafting, but in games without a decent broker system, or a broken economy, I find myself far more driven to be self sufficient without returning anything to the economy.
In games like CoH or EQ2, I can participate in the economy without dealing with walls of spam or giving up my night for something else I would rather be doing. Bartering in /auction is just not an action I enjoy. Requiring usage of /auction to conduct business won't stop me from playing, but it will drive me away from participating in the economy.
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.
Benjamin Franklin
Honestly, I haven't really seen an MMORPG without a broken economy. Most game economies are imbalanced because items and gold don't leave the world at the same rate they come into the world, so as the server matures the money supply grows and if the velocity of money is constant you get unrealistic levels of inflation. Items rarely leave the world at the same rate the are created so you get some items with tremendous deflationary pressure while others rise in price.A glut of some items occurs, mostly things low level players get as drops, and without access to valued items the rich get richer and the poor, not so much. Hey, it's kinda like real life with central banks supplying money to investors while the poor don't have access to it.
Games with auction houses have additional problems. Auction houses are way too efficient resulting in unrealistic levels of seller competition. No real economy has every item made compete directly with every other items made. What happens is that anything but the rarest items sell for rock bottom prices, and rare items sell for rediculous amounts because there's too little competition. Then you have some players who play the auction house. In real life it's a bit more challenging to corner the world market on virtually any item.
Guilds complicate the economy by having a growing hoard of items they can hand to members. You don't want to stop that process but it can remove a lot of players, or at least a lot of items, from the economy.
Anyway, IMHO an MMORPG economy is at best a compromise, and all you can really hope for is a good balance between being able to find the buyers you know are out there in a reasonable amount of time and sellers being able to get a decent price for a good item.
I always liked the Bazaar from EQ best. While I enjoyed the wheeling and dealing of the EC tunnel or NFP bank, I liked being able to buy an item off someone. Often there were people advertising too for even better deals or trades.
What I really liked about the bazaar was people having to be on to sell, even if it was afk over night. So instead of the market being flooded with 20 of the same item on an AH, you might only see 3 up in the bazaar. It just seemed to produce a more stable economy.
I love crafting and in-game economies. I don't think an EC type tunnel model is really practical. Hoping the Pantheon team can come up with something that facilitates the convenient exchange of goods without allowing for something like EQ2 whereby the market is completely flooded with thousands of identical items.
I am a huge advocate of the Star Wars Crafting and Selling Systems, it was the very best model I have ever participated in. Perhaps they can be inspired by that model.