Auctioneer/Cat Shops

Drewben - Dreamweaver wrote: »

The reason people set up cat shops is that auction house requires a fee, something along the lines of 5-10% thus to avoid this loss people prefer setting up shops and going afk. The auctioneer search thing does need to be fixed agreed there, but the listed filter is extremely helpful and very comprehensive. A lot of people use catshops to the contrary and if you want to access an NPC, just hold shift to avoid the players and click directly on the NPC.

If you can buy and sell efficiently, then paying a fee in exchange only makes sense. Back to my point of whether a player would rather go from cat shops to cat shops searching for what they are looking for, or go to the auctioneer, type in what they want, and voila, they pulled up a list of that item being sold by all the players selling the item. I bet the latter method would save much more time plus cutting down the lag tremendously.

Honestly, this will benefit both the players and the game designers as a whole. If 5000 players stay logged-on on any server to keep their cat shops open, it would use a lot of server bandwidth. If they can just put all the items they want to sell on the auctioneer, it will use a lot less server power and it would make your game-play much more pleasant when running through Archosaur during peak hours.

I tried using the pull down menu on the aunctioneer and it didn't work for me. Maybe I did something wrong, I will have to try it again.

I do most of my selling from a Cat Shop as well, but I keep it out of the way. Most of my selling so far is done in Etherblade or City of the Lost, where the Cat Shops aren't a big problem. You can get around 6-8 sometimes around the Pet Trainer but it's usually only 1-3.

Going through Archosaur, however... My first glimpse of that I nearly keeled over. And my husband, following me on his laptop, got seriously glitched trying to navigate it.

I'm all for having some rules in place for where the catshops can be placed, but I want them to still be reasonably accessible. Perhaps arrayed behind/near the auction houses, with a cap limit on how many can be in the area at a time. A grid, or something, to keep everyone visible.

As for the auction house, I've also used it. But out of 12 postings so far I've only sold one item. That's as opposed to selling 99% of what I put up in my cat shop. So it's a really lousy investment for me - even though I'm pricing my things in Auction fairly low, nobody's buying.

I would *love* to see a longer Auction time option. 24 hours just does not cut it, especially when the auction fee ends up being 1/3 to 1/8 of the price I post most of my items for. As long as the limit is so short, and the fee so high, I'm going to keep doing the Catshop.

Money sinks are, of course, important for keeping inflation down. I play one one of the newer servers, however, as a fairly new player, and the auction house (at least in CotL) is uber-sparse and doesn't seem to be used much. Too much money sink for someone in my situation means no coin for skill leveling. I've already heard the "can't buy skills" complaint from non-VM players. I haven't personally encountered that yet, being a VM, but if I couldn't sell my eggs I'd quickly get my tail in a pickle. I'd have to raise my prices to compensate for the fees, and who wants to pay 15k for a level 5 Lynxus egg?

I have a personality quirk where I adore selling to newer players for cheap, and I'd like to keep doing that But that's just me, and I make a bad little capitalist that way ^x^;

Keeping the fees is fine with me, as long as the auction duration itself can last a bit longer, at least 2-3 days total running time. At this point in the game, I can't afford to keep putting the items up for auction over and over again.

And the catshops aren't just for selling. I adore them for that little "buy" area when I'm low on a certain supply but can't find anyone selling that item. I walk off for an hour and it comes to me.

There's an AH? b:laugh

24 hours is silly if you have to pay a fee. Three days would much better. I don't think cat shops should be eliminated, but if the ah were a little more user friendly, then there would be a little less use of them and perhaps clean up a little lag.

I also agree that fees need to be on the items, as much as it bites, it does help with inflation. They also need to be kept very accessable.

Zoe - Heavens Tear wrote: »

The AH is used as a money sink. The best idea would be to RAISE the AH fee and remove cat shops from the game. Also disable the ability to trade between characters, foricng everyone to use the AH to get the fees to remove coins from the game to keep prices down.

The problem with higher fees is that even more low cost items would no longer be sold at auction. Who wants to sell an 800-coin item if the listing fee is 1000 coins?

What they really need to do is make the listing fee a percentage of the minimum bid. 500 coins is much too high for a listing fee for many items. If the listing fee were 1% or maybe 0.5% of the minimum bid that would greatly increase what people sell (it would also make it more tolerable if no one bids on your item). The selling fee would still be a percentage of the amount you actually get for it.

To prevent people from listing items for 1 coin and then pulling the auction when it is almost over because they did not get as much money as they wanted there should be a cancellation fee (perhaps 20% of whatever price the object did get bid up to or 1000 coin whichever is more). If people place something at a low starting bid to avoid the listing fee they should be expected to let the item sell for a low price even if they felt it was worth more.

Anesidora - Dreamweaver wrote: »

How do I set up a cat shop?

Yes, I'm a noob. lol b:cute

Click your Actions button. In the middle section of the popup are two icons by themselves, the one on the right sets up Consignment Shop. Your stand setup will pop up, just start dragging things from your inventory to the Sell section and set prices/quantity. Add the name for your shop, click Done, and you turn into a horrendous pink floating cat balloon.

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Re Auction fees: A low percentage would be nice. It would be in much better keeping - 500c for a 1000c item is ridiculous, just as 500c for a 1,000,000c item is no trouble at all XD

But as for all the potential coding changes we've been talking about here, I'm not sure how doable they actually are. From what I've been reading here on Forums, PWI has no real control over gameplay functions and changes. Hopefully something simple like AH fees is changeable, but getting rid of CatShops or restricting them to certain areas is likely imposible. (Yay and dang it.)

I suppose we'll just have to find a really active AH and try to avoid the Arch Catmarket as much as possible? I dread having to deal with those NPCs.

But perhaps we could encourage things to be set up a little neater in-game, player-to-player. A kind of honor system where we don't mob our Catshops in vital areas. Over in Etherblade they're set up nice and neat along one side of the main path, not blocking anything. They scatter in City of the Lost, with mini-clusters around the Pet Trainer and Teleporter. But it isn't too bad. The cluster of people around the PT is worse XD I haven't spent much time in Plume but they seem teleporter-bound there too, on the edges out of the way.