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Make GTN cross-server


Elric_VIII

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In general, the more buyers and sellers a given economy has, the healthier and more normalized it becomes. I think it would be a nice change to make the GTN allow buying and selling across servers in order to create a larger game economy.

 

It is sometimes hard to gauge market prices (especially for new players) since volume tends to be rather low. Additionally, it is quite likely that in a smaller market that there will be a mismatch of sellers and buyers.

 

I was wondering what downsides such a system might entail?

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One potential problem is the relative strength of the economies on each existing server are not equal.

 

Large servers like Harbinger have a lot more very wealthy players than a smaller server community like Bergeren Colony. This means a wealthy player from Harbinger has more potential buying power than a wealthy player from BC.

 

There will also be issues with credits spent by players on one server to buy items listed by players from another server. This effectively allows the GTN to export credits from one server to another, players would use this as an exploit to transfer credits across servers/legacies.

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Search results, loading times, etc you'll try to buy something only to find out it and the next 5-20 items at or near that price are sold already.

 

Rounding up all the servers onto one GTN could slow down the game due to each character's gtn sales having to be loaded for each call on the gtn when you search for something as well as updating that db when net items are added/removed as you are looking at the results of your search. Maybe this would be limited to world with gtns but there'd be an additional load on the mail server on all planets as item sold messages go out faster.

 

Then what happens when one server goes down? We've had servers go down while the rest remain up. People lose out on sales because theirs crashed and rage follows.

 

We saw slow downs when gtns were put into strongholds I don't know why was it the increased calls from more terminals and thus searches on each server or did it have to do with the interface from the stronghold 'instance'. Or perhaps that was a more localized issue only some people had. I experienced it as well as some others reporting the same but it didn't seem to affect the majority of people. It has since been 'fixed' for me and I'd assume the others who saw the same issue.

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I was wondering what downsides such a system might entail?

 

Massive technical undertaking. This is not a 'flip a switch' kind of alteration. Games that have a global auction house/trading post/whatever have been designed to do so from the ground up.

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One potential problem is the relative strength of the economies on each existing server are not equal.

 

Large servers like Harbinger have a lot more very wealthy players than a smaller server community like Bergeren Colony. This means a wealthy player from Harbinger has more potential buying power than a wealthy player from BC.

 

There will also be issues with credits spent by players on one server to buy items listed by players from another server. This effectively allows the GTN to export credits from one server to another, players would use this as an exploit to transfer credits across servers/legacies.

 

I'd say this is precisely the reason why this should happen. I'd say that inability to acquire wealth due to server choice is an unfortunate side effect of separating play styles. I'm not sure that increased buying power or an imbalance of server "imports/exports" would be a real issue since the economy is limited only by time, therefore supply will eventually self-regulate.

 

As for transferring credits, while it may seem like a bad thing, it would actually serve as a credit sink, since the transfer would incur the 6% GTN tax. I'm not sure that transfer of wealth this way would be a bad thing.

 

This is seriously a bad idea. Resources on each server are different. It would be like trying to make the US adopt the Chinese currency. You're going to take both economies.

 

You should look up the Perry Expedition. It would probably end up that way.

 

Search results, loading times, etc you'll try to buy something only to find out it and the next 5-20 items at or near that price are sold already.

 

Rounding up all the servers onto one GTN could slow down the game due to each character's gtn sales having to be loaded for each call on the gtn when you search for something as well as updating that db when net items are added/removed as you are looking at the results of your search. Maybe this would be limited to world with gtns but there'd be an additional load on the mail server on all planets as item sold messages go out faster.

 

Then what happens when one server goes down? We've had servers go down while the rest remain up. People lose out on sales because theirs crashed and rage follows.

 

We saw slow downs when gtns were put into strongholds I don't know why was it the increased calls from more terminals and thus searches on each server or did it have to do with the interface from the stronghold 'instance'. Or perhaps that was a more localized issue only some people had. I experienced it as well as some others reporting the same but it didn't seem to affect the majority of people. It has since been 'fixed' for me and I'd assume the others who saw the same issue.

 

Huh, I didn't think a list like the GTN (especially without randomized items to track) would cause a slowdown. That is actually a quite valid issue.

 

As for servers going down, wouldn't you lose sales anyway, since the whole economy is put on pause even thought real life time still happens?

 

 

Thanks for the feedback so far. I wouldn't be too concerned about a small economic upheaval, since expanding economies are almost always beneficial in the long run. Although memory issues is a good point.

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