Those are harsh words, Green Gloy, but I understand where you are coming from. The latest downgrade to the game, striking at the healthy, bustling market itself (CCP’s shining achievement) has me very concerned for the future of my favorite game.
This change to the market runs parallel to the overall longterm development strategy I’ve observed, too, in which they are rounding down the game.
Little things like adding price history charts, and the “stock” exchange ticker demonstrated an awareness that the market is a microcosm of real life economics - a high water mark in game development history - while the latest obstacle added to the market leads us away from that both in terms of the numbers of both casual and full-time market players, which will diminish because of this, and in terms of the loss of realism as more artifice takes us further away from what goes on in real world markets.
Of course we all want to see the market move faster than .01 ISK at a few times per second, but markets move slowly. They don’t go fast enough to make sane people happy. They can’t go faster or slower, or be kinder to new players. Markets by nature are a river of money and data, in constant communication, call and response:
“Gimme 5 here, 10 over there, now 15, now 20.”
If every time an auctioneer called out an increment, should each response be taxed? Should bidders have to pay a fee in excess of what they intend to later sell the item for? The rational answer is no. There’s nobody standing at the end of the row, with a notebook in his hand, saying, “OK you let the auctioneer go up by 10 increments, so multiply your item’s value by 10 and pay up!” No. Such a system in real life would be just as absurd as this change to our virtual economy here is proving to be.
Maybe full time basement lords with ZZ Top beards DO make those glacial changes happen - maybe it’s bots - so what? Together these forces created the 1-to-1 realistic movement of the global New Eden market in realtime. And you can plug a ■■■■■■■ spreadsheet into it. Amazing. Instead of paring this system down we should be finding new ways of adding octane and alcohol to the mix. Make it even more hyperrealistic by giving players access to their own, in-game AI bot upgrades that games the system for you, just like the PROS do it on Wall Street.
Or no, let’s just make it so they can’t update market orders like a human being would expect to be able to do in a game about playing realtime markets.
For fun I like to imagine what a sudden, shocking fee would do to the NYSE. Or to an auction house. Or to a store where the managers are changing prices. Now I can play it tonight