Dev Blog: Auction Rework, Map Improvements and New Characters

Information Dev's Corner
1

Greetings Colonists,

Today we are bringing you another in-development look at some upcoming changes and features. With this, it’s important to note that all of this is mid development, not polished, not in a final state. We want to keep sharing development with you all as openly as possible!

Auction Rework

The auction will be getting an update and it will specifically have plenty of new quality of life changes, making it easier to sell, buy, manage everything and quickly get to the results you are seeking quickly.

Selling smarter

  • Sell to best order - one click sells a queued item straight to the highest matching buy order (price re-verified after you confirm)

  • Apply lowest comparable - one click prices your item at the current lowest comparable buyout on the market

  • Market data per item - day/week/month markup + sales volume shown right on each staged sell row

  • Markup entry mode - persisted toggle to type prices as markup % (e.g. 105.25%) instead of PED, converted exactly like the rest of the game

Safety nets (real-money guards)

  • Low-price warning - explicit confirmation if your total buyout is suspiciously far below what a buy order would pay

  • In-window confirmations - the sell confirms are now proper in-window dialogs

Sell queue workflow

  • Multi-item sell queue - stage many items, edit quantity/bid/buyout/days per row, submit as one batch with live progress/status

  • Partial-stack listing - set a quantity below the stack size and it splits + lists automatically

We are also looking into many other frequently suggested features, such as but not limited to “set” selling, like sets of armour.

Improved Characters and Character Creation

The team have been hard at work making our new character system compatible with all the existing clothing and equipment in-game - and as one of the final steps, getting everything into a new character creator ready for you all to make your brand new avatars!

And with all new facial animations:

New Map Modes

The team have been hard at work building new ways to see the world. Our current map, while functional, is highly limited in what it can show.

In the video below you can see one of the new views coming to the map - real time 3D. This allows for a much more detailed look at areas, waypoints - even new abilities to see exact positions of mission NPCs, dynamic events and more.

As always, these are just some of the in-progress projects we are working on, both to improve the game today, and as part of our work moving towards Unreal. Thanks for tuning in!

Originally Posted Here (2026-07-20)

8 Likes
2

TY. I’d hope the auction charts also have year and 10-year market data, with bugs such as shares not having volumes shown on existing charts fixed.

I’d also hope the price settings are not going to be to full peds with this upgrade, or at least allow pec settings for sales below 10 peds or so (i.e. a 4.4 ped item could be listed at 5.55 peds if we wish and not forced to be either 5 peds or 6 peds).

Along with with would also be the hope that the fixed fee part can be less than 50 pecs.

I do have a shop that can take advantage of current AH limitations, but I think it would be better for noobs and the game overall to relax that minimum fee.

Plus, set selling would be great if finally implemented. It could be an intended workaround to the above problem of high minimum fees, with sets of fishing equipment incurring only one fee for a rod + attachments set (if you don’t change the fee structure, that is.) Also, I’m wondering about how you would implement selling sets. I presume set parts would be added to a set box or crate. These could be of different sizes and capacities and be reusable or (L). This way you (MA) could generate some additional percentage fees if the boxes also command mu of their own right and get traded often (= MA revenue).

Oh, and will what you call a real-time map be able to show mobs and avatars, or only active event areas and maybe MA mobile character NPCs?

:grinning_face:

4

@Ludvig_MindArk Hope you can answer.

Will the new live map have limits so it can’t be used to one’s advantage in PvP zones?

Will you guys focus on optimizing the new stuff so it won’t destroy the FPS/server load.

About auction, some extra thoughts:

Is it possible you guys can add a way for players to send an offer for “SET” items, i.e item + ped offer?

For example if you guys add way to sell a list of items (non stackables) so i.e usable items like weapons, armor, amps etc.

A player could right click your SET and “place offer”. Hovering over the SET you could see notes for what the seller is willing to accept for the SET.

Ability to sell weapons, armors, amps etc as a SET (just select usable items you want to sell as set). For when selling this way they can only leave an offer unless a BO has been set.

This type of auction can use higher fee and maybe even last for longer time than 7 days.

Here’s the issue: Players have a lot of items to sell, most players have to offer items + ped.

When player leave you an offer on your SET item(s) those items will be on “hold” in auction, until buyer accept, or you cancel the offer or the auction expires.

Designing an “offer” system in auction with this in mind would help players sell their items much easier and it will improve your revenue as well since players will spend more on the “extra fee” to do so.

Perhaps using an “offer” system can be used for any item of higher value (so not just as set).

3 Likes
5

The main important thing above all else is speed. If this thing loads like the hall of fame board (which I now never look at because it takes way too long to load each page) and you use your current chromium/AI missions stuff again, which i suspect you are, that’ll cause us to wait to load each and every page then this update could be a serious threat to the game. With sales/economy so sluggish atm could you imagine if people had to wait to load every search etc. No one will browse for extras + nothing would sell, and when things don’t sell players don’t play and leave. So I can’t stress enough the importance of instant loading. Until you master that do NOT implement (<0.5 seconds).

On a positive feedback note if the search queue I see in picture works where when I run out of auction spaces that other stuff is automatically added to AH in a queue like that then that’d be great. But would much rather just more auction spots instead since this would only help with few type of items.

3 Likes
6

That topdown view is giving me PoE vibes, could it be that we’re moving towards something similar? diablo 3 did have a real cash thing for a while and is still very popular, so is PoE 2.

7

I think the auction rework would be a really good moment to rethink how stackable resources are sold.

The new partial-stack listing is nice QoL, but it still doesn’t really fix the main problem. If I list 2,000 PED of Lysterium, someone still has to buy the whole thing. As a seller I still need to guess if people want 100 PED, 300 PED, 500 PED etc. and split it beforehand.

For things like ores, enmatters, residue and components, I don’t think stack size should matter this much.

EU already has buy orders, so why not have sell orders with partial fills as well?

For example, I put 2,000 PED of Lysterium on the market at 105%. Someone only needs 300 PED, so they buy 300 and the remaining 1,700 PED stays listed.

And if the market has:

400 PED @ 104.5%
1,000 PED @ 105%
2,000 PED @ 105.5%

and I want 700 PED, it could just take 400 PED at 104.5% and another 300 PED at 105%.

To me that makes much more sense than searching through listings hoping someone happened to make a stack close to the amount I need.

It would also get rid of a lot of the reseller gameplay that is basically buying big stacks, splitting them up and selling smaller ones for higher MU. That kind of reselling doesn’t produce or consume anything, it mostly makes money from the friction between buyers and sellers.

Sure, smaller players can sometimes get better MU by selling small stacks right now, but they also have to pay that extra MU when they need a small amount of something themselves, so I don’t think we’d lose much there.

I wouldn’t use this system for weapons, armor, tools or other items where individual stats and condition matter. Normal auction listings are fine for those.

But for actual commodities, buy orders + sell orders + partial fills just seems like a much better fit than treating every stack as one indivisible item.

It’s not exactly a new idea either. EVE Online, Albion Online, Guild Wars 2 and Path of Exile all use some variation of this for commodity trading. WoW also used to sell commodities as individual stacks, but moved away from that system with its auction house rework.

3 Likes
8

Really love the look of the map. Can’t wait

9

Both the new avatar look and the new map could dramatically affect performance for people. Please make sure that somehow a few less powerful machines than the devs have are included in the testing environment, and are also used for real where players have already flagged up concerns, such as the hof windows performance.

Thus, even a pretty static AH visualisation may be terrible on the performance side, so actually it’s all 3 of the blog areas here that need careful monitoring.

1 Like
10

I raised my concerns during the stream the night this was posted, since my PC gone from being able to run on very high down to low during the past year. According to Socrates there would be settings for the map so that those of us who hasn’t spent $10,000 on a PC can still play.

11

I think @Socrates said in the stream that the normal map would still be available (I like the relatively new highest zoom, by the way), but there is still the question of functionality and what you get / don’t get from various settings for this live idea.

12

  1. Were the developers allowed to invest a few hours to improve the overall performance of the Chromium UI? I get it that the Chromium UI requires a plugin in the CryEngine and thus is a bottleneck, but I doubt that it really has to be this bad. Dealing with the AH window at 2 FPS will NOT be fun at all. UE is said to have Chromium UI built in and should be faster, but nobody knows how much longer EU with UE takes to be released…

  2. Will the whole code in the AH that tries to come up with a proper markup understand what price manipulations are and skip those? On a broader idea it would be cool if we could click away those trades in the markup-window. I mean that one peek with two more or less flat curves to its left and right isn’t useful to us and makes it hard to find proper markups.

  3. I can’t wait to change my avatar, that will be great! In addition it would be great to also change the gender. Please understand that some avatars in the game are 20+ years old and some may prefer to change also that after such a long time.

2 Likes
13

The system is no longer even consistent as to what markup is being asked between the AH and the shop search system. The shop search shows mu at, for example, 5% but the AH says the ‘price’ is 105%. If the shop search says 105% it is actually 205% based on the way we have always previously seen it.

Also, the shop asking price does not include the extra fee added on to what the seller gets, which although minor, means that the stated mu isn’t right at all, no matter how you look at it!

If we are going to have a new system of inaccuracies anyway (all new stuff seems to be like this - sorry!), I’d prefer to have way more functionality that includes putting stuff in boxes and selling the box with contents (and a list of what is inside) - aka sets of stuff, hopefully even ANY stuff, not just armour, but crafting packs with measured ingredients or whatever people come up with. I mentioned earlier it could be NEW boxes that are introduced for this, although the large number of options that already exist from gift boxes to anti-gravs and vehicles might be nice with boosted functionality too if possible/desired.

14

Because it will kill an entire sector of the market of people who have a low bankroll, or simply specialize in small stacks, and will give all the selling power to huge sellers who can lowball to oblivion.

Quantities that sell (for x amount of crafts, quests, dailies, etc), and quantities that dont, are part of trading expertise and depth of this game. And the ability to circumvent big sellers walls, set at a bulk price, is what protects this market from such monopolies.

15

I actually think low-bankroll players are one of the strongest arguments for partial fills.

If someone has a low bankroll and 30% or 40% PED of his resources sitting on auction for days, that’s a significant part of their bankroll they can’t use. They also have to deal with listing fees, longer selling times and guessing the exact stack size someone might want.

And people playing on a small bankroll usually want to keep playing, not sit around waiting a few days for enough of their bankroll to become available again.

Partial fills would remove most of that. Their resources could just join the same liquidity as everyone else instead of waiting for a buyer who happens to need exactly that amount.

Sure, they might lose some small-stack premium, but in absolute PED that profit is usually pretty small compared to the benefit of getting their bankroll back faster. And it’s often other low-bankroll players buying those small stacks in the first place, so they might earn a bit more when selling, but they also pay that same premium when they need small quantities themselves.

I agree that this is trading knowledge in the current system, but I’d argue it’s mostly knowledge created by a limitation of the market itself. Knowing that 50 PED sells while 500 PED doesn’t, because buyers can’t take 50 PED from the 500 PED stack is exactly the friction I’m suggesting we remove.

It also adds another thing new players have to learn the hard way. Someone starting out shouldn’t really need to know that 40 PED of one resource sells well, while 100 PED of another might sit for days, just to avoid locking up their bankroll. I don’t think that kind of knowledge makes the game deeper in a particularly useful way.

I’m also not really convinced that a large seller offering a lot of material cheaply is a monopoly. If someone wants to put 5,000 PED on the market at a low MU, they’re committing that volume at that price. And under the current system that same seller can still sell the exact same 5,000 PED anyway. They just split it into smaller stacks and sell it over a longer period, or simply sell into existing buy orders, which wouldn’t change at all under this system.

So imo fixed stack sizes don’t really stop large sellers from bringing huge amounts of supply to the market. They mostly make everyone work around arbitrary stack sizes.

16

There is not a single reason to sustain that joining “big stacks”, without any sort of priority, will improve their odds to sell nor the time of selling. Small stacks are “conveniency” service. Kind of separate market, which will be “occupied” by big stacks that will, now, be able to provide both: bulk and retail.

In RCE knowledge is as valuable as money itself. Why would you take from people, who are willing to put time and effort in this game, in order to become a better player and make a difference, ability to do so?

Well, lets break it down:

  1. Before this change: people would buy from different offers based on their liquidity, willing to pay premium, few peds, so they dont have to tie hundreds of peds for bulk stack.
  2. After this change: every purchase is consumed from the biggest stack at lowest price.

Its a sum 0 game. If one group gets more selling power, its because the other one lost an equal amount of it.

TLDR: What you are suggesting is redistribution of current selling power, heavily one sided btw, and not any type of improvement.

1 Like
17

Would love a feature to show how many auctions resulted in no sale. Terrible economy where hides, components, and oils continually fail because there aren’t enough item sinks… How about an open API where transparency is guaranteed?

1 Like