I kind of disagree on the impact the auction house will make to getting into PvP, at least to the extent you mentioned. Slight disclaimer though before I get into it, I’m looking at the auction house through the perspective of a former trader, so a lot of what I’m gonna say be influenced and somewhat unavoidably biased from that perspective. This is also assuming that galleons are a stable, useful currency and aren’t prone to periods of hyperinflation when auctioning is added.
I agree that creating a build for PvP requires an unhealthy amount of specialization into different aspects of the game and often requires investment into each of those categories to do each part efficiently (such as needing to invest your ship loadout for dark sea expeditions or into an agility set to farm coppershrooms for gemcrafting efficiently). However, because the top gear builds for PvP are already gonna be the higher end, expensive items, the marketplace already functions fine (not great) as a place to obtain them. The main improvement that auction house would accomplish is standardization of the process as well as making trading more accessible for newer players who are worried about getting overcharged in marketplace, which in addition to a very easy way to compare prices hopefully would mean items being more affordable. This leads into a small issue with the hypothetical use cases mentioned of the auction house, since they’re either somewhat redundant due to the marketplace or aren’t as massive a benefit as implied.
Just to reiterate though, all this isn’t to say that I think the auction house isn’t gonna improve the game’s health. It’s more so that the addition of the auction house is gonna dramatically improve a lot of the issues stemming from the way trading works right now rather than creating something closer to a new experience.
100% agree with the PvE side though, one of the problems with trading currently is that if I want to buy certain niche items or a bulk amount of items that aren’t commonly traded for, it’s super annoying to find someone selling it in-game or in marketplace. What I look forward to in auction house the most is people being able to just dump some items they hoarded onto there, so if I ever need something like an archaic bandana or 300 sky apples, I can just go onto there and be able to obtain one pretty quickly.
Marketplace is still being worked on. I instead have chose to break the marketplace down into versions.
Version 1 marketplace whenever it releases will be very lackluster in features and may have limitations with some things like food, jewels, potions, etc.
There most likely won’t be any filtering or sorting either. This means if your looking for sunken swords then in v1 you would not be able
To look for a strong enchanted level 80 sunken sword as an example. Instead you would
Have to go from page to page looking for the proper sunken sword you want. By default the system WILL sort by price though so the cheapest will always show first.
Future versions would bring in filtering, sorting, and other stuff.
This is a complicated program since we are going to use external servers and vetexs items in the game can have thousands of variations for a single item. This makes systems super complicated. A system like star scape is simple to implement since the items are simple, AO is not the same sadly.
Overall I’ve been working on the lua module Vetex will be using these past few weeks and it’s almost done for him to start creating UI and making the implementation himself. There’s still a lot of work on my end I have to do for performance
Take your time Headless. I know it’s been rough developing something on this scale but sounds like you’re nearing the tail end of the road here! I’ve been looking forward to this feature since WOM, knowing it could come out this year, even in a basic, simple form, is enough to get me extremely hyped.
It’s gonna do a lot for the game man, I’d love to be able to acquire resources and the like without having to look around discord or random servers for someone willing to sell.
Starscape’s player market is amazing. Every MMO on roblox should model their market systems after what ZolarKeth did with Starscape’s player market, if you ask me.
Luckily for starscape their items are very basic and thus allows easy creation of a marketplace without external servers. Due to AOs unique items and variation its difficult to do such a thing
To put into perspective exactly what Headless means here, Ao’s items have a gigaton of variation.
Let’s take Leather armor for example. There are 6 ‘levels’ these items can be (level 0, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50). On top of that there are 16 color variations.
Already that gives us 96 possibly combinations of the same item. but Wait, what about Enchants? There are currently 18 armor enchants in the game. Wait- But modifiers too! There will be 9 starting next update.
So on one item alone, just the chestpiece of leather armor, there is a variation numbering in the thousands. (Roughly 15552 possibly variations for this one item just to clarify, and this does not factor in things like gem slots or original ownership)
Like yeah you can argue no ones throwing atlantean essence onto leather armor, but now you get the point. If they did, it’d have to be sellable, so Headless has to build something that accounts for that, and all future items and their possible variations.
Ah darn that sounds a bit hellish placed into perspective.
I am no good at Lua let alone what backend is used for AO but I imagine the items are being set by their original ID and then have aditional values in its object to represent its level, enchant and modifier.
Or are you actually implying its necessary due to a limitation of Roblox to write up to 15552 possible variations somewhere in a database?
You still have to deal with the information. It’s all good being able to store an item’s data, that’s already done in game, but you still need that data to be communicated across multiple servers effectively.
yeah and i’m asking why you can’t just send the data across servers. there isn’t anything particularly stopping you from just making a memorystore with all the item’s data and just doing an auction that way, at least that’s what i am thinking
i am just curious as to what headless’s thought process is here bc im lost
