The idea is simple. Charge a monthly subscription and offer perks in exchange. The perks I think would drive the economy most would be removing auction fees, and a large increase in slots for selling.
Please discuss.
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No monthly subscriptions. We pay enough in TT loss to cover improvements made to the Auctioneer.
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MA is a business and I’m fine helping them with a consistent revenue stream if the service is worth it. It also provides incentive to focus more on increasing player base and less on getting existing people to cycle more.
Most auction fees for stackables are factored into the sale by the seller. The buyer pays it.
This Might work for the huge fees for UL items I’m sure certain resellers would love not having to pay 1000 ped per week relisting the same overpriced crap. Though it’s just promoting uncompetitive behaviour. But sure, pay through your ass for it.
I won’t be subscribing
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Ah yes, maybe make it so subscribers can’t be outbid by ‘regular’ users too!
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ma willnot sell time based facility… will squeeze every ped off ah fees 
One small decent idea though…. A small fee to advertise your listing in bold/yellow as soon as you open the auction screen. Id do that if selling a high ticket item on auction. Or get your listing featured on the launcher for big boy bucks.
If they sell. I was looking at it from the perspective of a new player where their stacks repeatedly don’t sell and then they sell to a reseller for less mu than they’ve put into auction fees at that time.
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Typically this becomes a nil problem as people gain more experience on what to do. And for the low end materials, nanocubes have cut the lunch of reseller services.
All I can say is if a new player is blowing enough expired auctions to economically justify a per month USD subscription to mindark then god help them, they need rehab a barring order on all terminal services.
Economical? Probably not. It would be a premium option and not a mandate. Some people like the convenience it would provide at all levels of play. Doesn’t change the fact that the first thing many new players experience is the unique entropia experience of getting less back than they put in and then being charged for loot to not sell. Not a strong impression for retention. I personally would pay a subscription fee just so I can put my stuff up and forget about it until demand takes it off my hands. It also gets more economical as your cycle and bank roll get bigger because the subscription is static, but the amount of loot to sell isn’t. Multiple reasons. Would you be against it being implemented or just against using it yourself?
I’m against it period. Who needs to learn about the game economy when you can just pay to go through it consequence free? If mindark want to make an auction tutorial (sorely needed) and give new players a bit of a break the first handful of times they try it out that’s fine. But I don’t like this as a paywall service.
Interesting. I do like the tutorial idea. I guess we disagree on the rest though. The whole game is a paywall and I’m not sure why it’s a problem in this specific application. Other than making a certain aspect of the game easier for those that pay more (because that’s only ok when it’s 100k+ in gear and not an affordable subscription to make offloading loot easier) what would the negative impact be? Honestly I was hoping to talk more about the economical impact when I made this thread. I think it’s highly possible there is a negative economic impact I’m overlooking or maybe more positive ones than I already see.
Yes it would be good to hear other people’s opinions. From my first post I’m generally ok with a premium auction service concept, it’s just this perk we have been discussing specifically that I disagree with. But others I can be fine with, such as my own perk suggestion. It all depends on what you get for your money.
Anyway I’ve said enough on the topic I will wait for some new ground to break before commenting again.
The only feature needed is partial stack buying feature that everyone has been preaching for since God was a boy.
Like: add 3000 PED stack of something to AH / shop and let ppl buy in lots of any number of items. 1 piece of crude oil if needed. And charge minimal sale fee per lot (e.g. 1 pec per ped of goods sold - rounded up, without inital fee)
That simple mechanism would revive trade and make everything more simple. Ppl would try out more crafting, sell their stack more easily.
I.
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add one auction for ALL the planets without no cost for delivery and i vote yuou for president
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I think it’s about time to have one universal auction for all planets. The reason for using warp is to travel fast & hunt / mine / craft on a particular planet. Our game has too small playerbase to sustain a proper economy for each planet.
There’s also a ton of auction fees MA could get from those players that tend to TT their low MU stuff on other planets since it’s harder to sell there, let a player choose which planet they want to hunt in. Don’t force us to take a warp back to Calypso and basically stuck there until our stuff is sold. You can motivate other players to hunt on Calypso with other ways, like robot event, migration, RDI, other MU mobs and so on, there’s tons of favoritism over the years for Calypso it’s time to give the other PP’s the carrot, not just the stick.
People would still need to use warp services, since they travel with nutrio bar, pills and so forth, and most use warp for faster travel anyhow, so I think it really could help the whole economy.
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Buying partial stacks and universal auction are both great ideas, but I don’t understand why nobody wants to talk about the topic of this post. Jake is the only person that has given me a clear idea of what they don’t like about the idea and there are a lot of downvotes. Is it simply the idea of paying MA for a service that rubs people the wrong way? This is a discussion thread with premium AH service as the topic of this particular post.
Why should we pay mindark to resolve a problem that they have designed to be inconvenient?
To me, it is the same premise as game developers (usually MMOs) designing systems with intended flaws, just to sell the solution to the player.
Personally I would like to see a universal AH where you can place buy and sell orders for any quantity of commodity. Similar to other systems such as runescapes grand exchange or the marketplaces in EVE/Albion. But that is probably better suited to another topic.
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This real issue about economy down in EU (ubers leaving, many ppl selling shops and assets) is that MA is not able to attract affluent new players, on the contrary MA attracts a lot of FTP players who are only here to sweat and fruit picking, they are not the key contributors of EU economy (no offence). As i mentioned many many times, MA needs to come up with a SOLID marketing campaign to draw in lots of affluent players, period.
I have submitted some marketing plans to MA CEO, hope they are considering and working on it, cheers~
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No idea if this has been said, but removing auction fee would completely undermine shops that people own. So doesn’t get my vote. More slots however is an absolute must, and should have that anyway, with no extra fee
Rgds
Ace