exchange/trade/market feature

[codestryke]

I consider all exchange/trade/market features as a hot patato and avoid holding it in my hands/games So, people who have these in your games, how troublesome these really are? Is it worth it? Do these features add much to your cheating volume? Are these time consuming to maintain and supervise? Is the ratio of additonal interaction to additional problems good enough to allow such features?

They are very troublesome! To run a successful market/trading center in your game you are going to have to heavily admin that area and just accept you are not going to be able to stop all the cheating. It's a huge resource drain IMHO but, depending on the game, can add a huge excitement factor to the game.

Over a number of years I modified our market quite a bit to stem the amount of cheating:
* No trading / exchanges between people on the same host. (in the early days this one REALLY hurt as a LOT of player's were still on dial up service providers like AOL)

* No trading / exchanges between persons sharing the same paypal account number

* No trading / exchanges between persons in the same alliance

* When a resource was placed on the market the game randomized a number between 2-20. That was the number of minutes after it was posted that the resource would be available on the market

* Defining a min amount that the goods could be sold for. This was predetermined at the start of the round. The game adjusted this amount based on trades during the round thus allowing the minimum to grow as the cash in the game increased.

* Charge a 2% listing fee

Even with all that in place we still had players that were able to circumvent all the checks and this is were a very active and dedicated admin staff came into place.

[Harkins]

Even with all that in place we still had players that were able to circumvent all the checks and this is were a very active and dedicated admin staff came into place.

Is this all to stop players from using the market to funnel resources between multi accounts, or were there other ways they abused the system?


(Great list of ways to reduce the problem, thanks for sharing your experience.)

[Sunchaser]

I will add some consideration, based also on medieval europe game type:

* In my market people who buys pays taxes to the city where the market is. The % tax is set by the Vassal and is equal for all buyers. We are thinking of configring 2 taxes, one for residents, and one for strangers.

* The random number of minutes before the item is post to the market is a nice idea, i saw in Renaissance Kingdom that also when a player buys an item, a certain number of minutes has to pass before it's delivered. This can slow cheating but if one can wait it's not a great deal. However in my game can be a kind of solution, if the item stays a certain time on the market with an enourmous price, this can be reported to the prosecutor, that can open a process against the seller for speculation. The verdict can be a number of days in prison or, in case of multiple offences, a ban.

[133794m3r]

as others have already said making a person wait ~30min before they can recieve the traded values after it's completed would be a nice one to add.

I've also already set a minimum value for all things within the game world thus far. And i'm going to be setting the main price as ~2x as much as what that value is. And the prices will fluctuate based upon how much people sell it for. The minimum price is ~75% of that value and the maximum is 200% currently. Also it charges 5% for each item as a 'tax' so to speak and there's also a 2hr minimum for all auction like trades.

Next up is of course as i imagine all of you have done is i've already found a nice little .htaccess file to block 90% of all proxies so i'll be using that to help reduce the probability of multies using it to trade items with each other. As with the auction house/exchange/market whatever you want to cal it. All mail takes a minimum of 1hr to arrive after it's sent and each 'attachment' costs you some arbitrary value(still not decided upon yet) and there is only 2 attachment slots and the second one costs more than the previous along with a limit on 1 message per player every 30 minutes. Also the maximum value isn't a true set in stone value but anything above that gets hit with a much larger fee for listing it and anything above 10x will set off flags to investigate the person who bought it. The same thing goes for selling things below what you'd get by just giving it to an NPC. Direct trades with other players can only happen between players who are both signed in and also have a limit of one per 10 minutes. Also flags get set off if items of significant value is being given to another person for absolutely nothing or if the other person is giving them a load of money.

Those are the only ones that i can think of at the moment. And the game is mostly a player-controlled economy with set limits and the prices for things will be set to fluctuate based upon what they're going for between players and also at the trading place every week so that the prices are never set in stone. Also all trades have a set limit of 2^24 thus limiting how much one can exchange since the game uses a rather simple system of copper->tin->silver and each step up takes 100 of the previous. This limit of 2^24 is something like ~1.6k silver which is a huge amount to be spending on something in the first place but also allows for money funneling to be really limited.

Also of course all players have a set on how much 'stuff' they can hold so thus transferring everything between characters would be a rather big hassle for them to do since there is no such thing as unlimited storage along with everything else that has been said.

I'm also really liking the random amount of time thing and the same paypall number for the exchanges as i hadn't thought of that yet.

[Chris]

They are very troublesome! To run a successful market/trading center in your game you are going to have to heavily admin that area and just accept you are not going to be able to stop all the cheating. It's a huge resource drain IMHO but, depending on the game, can add a huge excitement factor to the game.

If you were to make the same game again (assuming no players that got used to the old system and zero coding cost). Would you implement these again? Or would you discard them and modify the game to work without exchanges?

* No trading / exchanges between persons in the same alliance

Sounds very nasty. I mean, the whole purpose of sending goods (I mean pure sending stuff, not trade) is to help your friends. If you can not help your friends then the only reason for this feature is to help yourself via multi. Wouldn't then the whole feature benefit cheaters only and be useless to honest players?


As for trade I was thinking about making real stockexchange. You sell to/buy from "computer" for a given fixed price, at the end of day/hour the price changes depending on supply/demand. Really hard to abuse such system, but it removes the interacton of direct trade and the prices are very static.

[Sunchaser]

Next up is of course as i imagine all of you have done is i've already found a nice little .htaccess file to block 90% of all proxies so i'll be using that to help reduce the probability of multies using it to trade items with each other

I would like to ask if this .htaccess may be shared and where one can get an updated list of proxies?

[133794m3r]

Next up is of course as i imagine all of you have done is i've already found a nice little .htaccess file to block 90% of all proxies so i'll be using that to help reduce the probability of multies using it to trade items with each other

I would like to ask if this .htaccess may be shared and where one can get an updated list of proxies?

one second, i have to remember the bookmark. I have a few hundred atm, and thus it's going to take a little while to remember it.

http://perishablepress.com/press/2008/04/20/how-to-block-proxy-servers-via-htaccess/

that guy's blog also has a nice blacklist to use too. I even forgot i had it until i came upon this thread his posts are rather amazing to say the least.

[codestryke]

Is this all to stop players from using the market to funnel resources between multi accounts, or were there other ways they abused the system?

The 2% listing fee was to stop players from putting there resources on the market to hide them from attacks. They would list the resources for huge amounts that no one would or could ever buy then, when needed, remove them from the market.

[JGadrow]

The 2% listing fee was to stop players from putting there resources on the market to hide them from attacks. They would list the resources for huge amounts that no one would or could ever buy then, when needed, remove them from the market.

Hmm... what were any other options you considered doing instead of this? This sounds like something where you had a couple of elegant ways to solve it but opted for the quickest approach.

Honestly, most people don't need to be awarded anything for successfully defeating an opponent. They'll still beat up lower-level players simply becaue they can. Take WoW as an example again. You're questing around as a level 10 player. All of a sudden, a level 80 runs by, fires off a quick spell and 1-shots you. Why did he do this? He didn't receive any in-game reward for doing so.

He did receive a psychological reward though. Winning is a reward unto itself. Some people get enjoyment simply out of dominating another player. Others take pure delight in specifically killing the fun of others.

How about creating a different currency that could only be generated through defeating other players. This currency could be used to buy vanity items or something to that effect. Thus, you've provided the player with the usual psychological reward, an in-game reward that they can use to show off to other players who are competitive with one another, and you've done so in a manner that doesn't punish the losing player from being gang-raped by larger players, nor does it provide any actual power to the attacker (which keeps you from building in a power-pyramid into your game).

These are just random thoughts based on a small glimpse into your game. So, maybe they're completely off-base. But I'm curious to hear some of the other options you toyed with.

[MystressNyx]

If you were to make the same game again (assuming no players that got used to the old system and zero coding cost). Would you implement these again? Or would you discard them and modify the game to work without exchanges?

I'm not Codestryke, but I had to post because it's funny that you should ask that. We're actually in the middle of revamping the code for that game right now. The market was such a beloved feature that I just don't think the game would have prospered as it did without it. I might feel differently after we're in the thick of running it again though lol

"* No trading / exchanges between persons in the same alliance" Sounds very nasty. I mean, the whole purpose of sending goods (I mean pure sending stuff, not trade) is to help your friends. If you can not help your friends then the only reason for this feature is to help yourself via multi. Wouldn't then the whole feature benefit cheaters only and be useless to honest players?

There were many legit ways to help out your friends. Also, the way he worded it was a little misleading as their was no way to send resources directly to another player. You could only steal them or buy them. Unrestricted market purchases would have basically given a group of dedicated people the ability to decide the outcome of the round by using the market to funnel their collective cash to a player of their choice.

[codestryke]

I would like to say that when this game came out and was running there wasn't a lot of other PBBG's. The term PBBG's wasn't even coined yet, there was no WoW and UO had been online for about a year. We really didn't have a lot of other games to look at and see how they managed these problems. Pimp Wars tried to have a market for a while and gave up based on the same problems we had. I wasn't going to throw in the towel so I though everything I and my admin's had at making sure the market was as free from abuse as possible.

I have since seen some pretty neat ideas in other games on how they try to reduce these problems but none have really nailed it without sacrificing the whole concept of a free market. Some of the players really enjoyed trading and that itself became the main focus of the game. When coming up with a way to deter cheating it had to be elegant enough to not kill that aspect of the game for those that were doing legit trading.

For other things I tried but removed were:
* Put a max amount on asking price. This really takes away from the whole free market idea. People are going to pay what they can afford.

* Limit on the amount that can be traded. This hurts the "market player" and removed that aspect of the game for them.

* Ebay take the free market away and make it an auction system. Since this was a round based competition game any additional real time removed the instant gratification a market provided and thus was not used by the player base.

I'm sure I probably missed a few things I tried, the game ran for over 8 years so some of the memories are a bit hazy. At certain points in the games history I was battling a lot of problems:

* server - I ran it from my house line for a while
* bandwidth costs - back when bandwidth cost a LOT of money
* code optimizations - I was a Microsoft developer, PHP and mySQL were new to me
* one man band - I did it by myself for a very long time
* popularity -increased all the above 10 fold

[JGadrow]

lol Some of my memories get hazy beyond the 3 day mark. I can totally understand 8 years. lol And, thanks!