ok... so im new with posting topic and stuff however i've been reading some new suggestions/ideas and watnot but havent seen any "realistic" topics on how to stop idiots from posting outrageous prices for stuff on the trading center... so here goes...

we should have the 20% deduction in the trading center be deducted from our credits rather than the profits we make, bought or not. do u guys understand wat i'm talking about?

if not then heres my example....

if i sell some items/stuff at a price of 2 M and no one buys it, then 20% of that price (400,000 credits) WILL be deducted from my credits when the timer for it runs out, since it WAS NOT bought. HOWEVER if some1 buys that stuff at that price (the 2 M, the price i set) then i would get all the profit i made from it (the 2 M) and the deduction (the 400 K) will still occur, resulting in my profits being 1.6 M (2 M - .4 M = 1.6 M, easy math rite?) the SAME as it is NOW. the same thing happens even if the price rises due to multiple bids.

that way we can stop some idiots and punish them for their greed and for setting prices at 999,999,999,999 or 1000B an watnot, while still keeping the 20% deduction Dan chose.

oh just thought of another idea (it isnt new but watever)

also i kno everyone (at least i hope) wants a cancel button for bidding and stuff for the trading center. i want it too but it should come at a price. i would say we need 20 energy to cancel a bid, thats twice the amount of energy when we place a bid.


wat u guys think about my ideas? any more "realistic" suggestion would be greatly appreciated and thanks!

*sorry for any misunderstandings while i was trying explaining my ideas. like i said im new to posting stuff

-1 why should we lose credits for just posting a auction that doesn't sell? and some people do crazy prices on purpose so they can clear out cargo to accept mineral shipments faster.

I would like to see the number of bids that have been placed on an item, and see my auctions among the others. If there's no counter on how many bids have been placed on an auction, I would at least want to see whether or not there has been any bids on it. For the sake of lower ranks, I think it should only take 5 energy to place a bid. Energy to cancel a bid to penalize idiots is a good idea too. If no bids are placed on an item, you should be able to edit or cancel it. What if you accidentally add too many 0's, or too few?

You can see if there are no bids already. If you click on it and the current bid and min bid are the same no bids have been made.

Why not just check the average selling price on the artifacts for a weekly period and set a min and max starting price based on 20% either way of what ever that is. Also fill in the starting min bid amount a person has to select to place the auction and so the min and max starting bids that can be placed.

Ex. (Artifact = 1 type of Artifact)
Artifact average weekly price is 100M for 1 Artifact, Min starting Bid can be set at 80M, Max is 120M per 1 Artifact.
The Bid amount is filled in at 80M, but the player wants to start it a bit higher so they choose 85M to start it.

This will solve your problem, and also if people are just clearing room for a few hours they can always still have it at the max starting price and that should keep most people from buying them.

Ok, I'm not much for the GTC, I think everyone knows that already. But here's my thoughts.... Using auctions to temporarily "store" x amount of artifacts so you can claim your resources, to me, is an exploit. If the minimum bid setting is kept (wait for point #2) then any auctions that receive NO bids should be ended and the seller should lose the stuff and get normal scrap rate. Unfortunately, that won't work for non-substantive items that have no scrap value such as CTP, EM, PF, etc.

Point #2. To eliminate the "idiot auctions" and, at the same time, price gouging, just eliminate the minimum bid setting all together. Artifacts automatically start at bottom-end scrap value and non-substantive items automatically start at 1 credit per piece. Following along point #1, artifacts that do not receive any bids would be "bought" by scrap dealers for normal scrap rate and non-substantive items are returned as they are now.

Using it as a temporary storage is ludicrous as you can sell 100 of an artifact at a time. Multiply that by 2 the standard slots you get is a cargo freed up of... 200 lol If people are storing 200 artifacts they have real issues and shouldn't have 100 each of those artifacts they are storing.

With regards to taking credits from people that are selling prior to the items being sold again a ridiculous suggestion. Most people selling items on the GTC are possibly in need of credits and may not have the 20% needed to set up an auction. Is this more a case of sour grapes because you can't afford the prices on the trade centre? In real life auctions the fee is taken from the proceeds of a sale.

Sorry Darth I don't agree with your suggestion regarding scrapping items either. If you are unlucky enough to set an auction where you live it's an opposite time zone to the majority of players you could receive no bids for 100 repair nanos the scrap value is nominal yet each of these to most players are worth 200million, the cost of a repair. Scrapping isn't a solution. The GTC gets the majority of bids on items in the last minute so having no minimum price for items is likely to drive trading back to the trade channels and into the hands of a few unscrupulous traders that may charge 30 ctp for a dark pyramid for example.

Overall this suggestion is a big -1

Sorry but this doesn't really work. The way bidding is done in the gtc(all right at the end) means many items such as foci, nanos, and tm's will never get close to their proper value. most people only place the minimum bid on each item. take repair nanos for example. top scrap value is 7k credits. they are generally worth around 200M credits or more though. in order to go from 7k to 200M with minimum bids would be over 100 bids. That wont happen the majority of the time. Sure there will be times people will p the bid to closer to what the item is worth but i willing to bet that would be a small portion of the time. Who exactly does it hurt to have auctions not selling? and if people are overpaying for items then that is their own fault. i do agree though that using the gtc to clear cargo is an exploit, but i don't really think it's that big of a problem (could just as easily send the items to a legionmate, pull minerals, and then they send back).

The GTC is the reason we HAVE unscrupulous traders charging prices like that. And yes, I see what you did there. There is also already a 12 hour and 24 hour option for auctions. If you live "out of sync" with the majority of the game community, use the 12 hour. If you're on for "primetime" use the 24. If artifact starting price is ScrapMin, there is essentially no way you can lose credits so I really don't see the problem. Eliminating a minimum bid set by the players will bring prices in the GTC down because if as you say most bids occur in the last minute or so, people will run out of time before the final price reaches the insane level. That's a win for the buyers. The sellers will also be essentially guaranteed to receive more per piece than what they would scrap for. Also a win. Prices will stabilize a lot closer to where they were before the GTC was created. As a measure to keep the unscrupulous traders out, eliminate the "send to friend" option from the trade tab, and Trade Pacts should have a minimum "cooldown" after being "signed" before items can be sent via those. That leaves sending to legionmates and to well established trade partners. I doubt many legions would continually change their trade pacts for the sake of 1 person making 1 trade. If trading is supposed to be done in the GTC, then it should be done in the GTC.

for that to possibly work, anti-snipe must be implemented first. otherwise ppl will just camp for snipe instead of paying a higher and appropriate price.

and anti-snipe have been a huge battle sooo.....

Why? Having prices that are not hyperinflated is going to significantly reduce the frustration of getting "sniped."

This would also allow low ranks that don't have mega-credits to actually buy stuff too.

cause everything will be underpriced.
why pay more if u can snipe?
now at least there is a minimal so you can't snipe 100 nanos for 5m cred, but if it's going for that kinda minimal price, guess what's gonna happen?
sure, buyers are happy. but all the sellers are *beep*ed.

How can something be underpriced when the minimum you are going to get is the value DAN set? Sellers would only be pissed because this way they wouldn't be able to fleece buyers with outrageous prices. Where do a majority of the large lot auctions come from? People with high artifact productions. With hyperinflated prices (which we have right now) they can completely eliminate their mining planets. That eliminates one of the basic strategies required for this game. Balancing your planetary resources.

No two ways about it, the GTC is completely effed up with no satisfactory fix possible. No matter what Dan does to "fix" it, either the buyers or the sellers WILL be outraged. In my honest opinion, this whole thing was the absolute worst addition/change/update ever made in the 2+ years GL has been in existence.

im just staying away from it i dont want to be forced to use it

I think your idea for setting a range on what the minimum price is has merit darth but to be a bit more reasonable make it so the starting price can be no more then x4 of its scrap value this way it allows for fluctuation of the market to some degree but stops people from setting the 1,000,000,00 credits for a cloning pod prices we see now.

As for if the auction fails I dont think the person who put the item up should lose the items besides forcing them to put them up for a semi reasonable price would keep them from storing them in the GTC seeing as people would be more likely to put bids on them, also the idea of letting someone stop there sell should be limited as well to where if someone bids on the item the person can't retract the item/item's.


As for the price regulation of items that scrap for CTP these shouldnt get regulated seeing as CTP in itself is a type of currency. (not that there are any items i know of that scrap for it that you can sell yet but then I avoid the GTC like it never happened)

I agree that the traders running the show on the trade channels were the first reason for hyper inflated prices, but now the supply and demand of artifacts for a biweekly with a GOOD REWARD is causing certain items to cost more. If people don't buy the artifacts that are super overpriced then the seller is wasting their time. No harm to anyone else. But in the case of certain artis the is an intrinsic value and repair nanos are the perfect example. A repair costs 200m and if you were to put 100 up and they sold for example for 50k each that is a huge loss. Perhaps a max bid per being able to be set would work as anti sniping or even a buy now option, not auction and buy now, either or for items that way for extremely valuable artifacts you aren't going to lose as the seller.

I'm fine with Dan setting a standard minimal(per piece) for all items.
I'm not fine with the minimal you suggested
Because it will need hundreds of proper bids to make repair nano, for example, to go from scrap value to the accepted market value of today. And w/o anti-snipe that's just not gonna happen. The GTC will become a place where only the worthless items can be sold properly. All the valueables, if sold, are only going to go to ppl that snipe and the sellers never recieve a fair price.

Tbh, I believe the proper per unit auto-minimal should be 75% of the average of all units sold in the last week, with a minimal bidding increment of 3% of current bid OR a 1% minimal increment with 5 min anti-snipe.
This should provide a fairly stable economy.

Tbh, I would like a revamp of the GTC into a pipeline selling system instead of batch based.
Specifically, a player will put up purchase order of a specific item for a certain quantity and price. When a sell order "ends" it will be awarded to the highest purchase price listing for up to the quantity of the sell order OR the remaining quantity of that purchase order. Any remaining amount, if it is the latter, will go to the next purchase order and so on.
A player can see the "rank" of his order. For example, if he placed order for 100 nanos and there are 3 orders that are higher than him for quantities 24, 100, 200 respectively, then his order rank would be 325. In case of tie in price, the one who put up the purcahse order(or the time of final modification of price) will be listed first. One cannot see the price of the higher orders. A purchase order withdraw will result in either a large cost of energy (~100) or 5-10% of the order value. One can increase the price of the purchase order by at least 5% of its current price for free OR by any amount at a cost of 5 energy.
There is no cost for putting up a purchase order, there is a system-based minimal price you need to put for purchase order, specifically 80% of the average sold price of last week. Purchase order whose price drop below the minimal price due to rise in the latter will be canceled automatically.

On the other hand, for sellers, all sales are 11-13 hour period(random), there is an infinite number of slots which you can use if you are selling a maximal quantity for artifact(100 units). There is 2 slots for materials of any kind of any quantity and finally 2 slots to sell artifacts in quantities other than the maximal.
reason for 11-13 hours standard duration is so that it would be very difficult to make it so it sells to a specific person or at specific price. It would be also difficult to use this to bypass cargo as you can never know if it will be purchased in the end.

No one can see the ending time of any sell order. However, it will show the current quantity of the item in the pipeline as a whole rounded to the nearest hundred when there are more than 500 units(5000 for CTP to the nearest thousand and 100000 for EM to the nearest 10k). Otherwise it will just display "low"

With this complete blind pipeline system and fairly long period of selling order delay, most kinds of abuse would be fairly improbable and we can actually have a lower tax w/o much risk of consequence. This would make sniping impossible and minimize the impact of a few player hyperinflating the price of an item--because if 3 ppl are doing it, the rank of the 4th and below player will not be affected at all and as soon as the demand for those 3 are filled, the others can get the item at a reasonable and competitive price.

Sounds like the Kingdoms of Camelot, and other games like it with the wood, iron, food, and stone markets.