Why is there no trade channel?

[Melodia]

What's the reason for not having a trade channel in this game? Every other MMO I've played has one. I find it highly ridiculous you can literally only communicate with players from the same faction thanks to no global chat either. Also, this game has one of the highest marketplace taxes I've ever seen, wouldn't people benefit from trading expensive items directly? For example, right now I'm trying to buy some silverfrost transformation stones. I have very little money and I belong to the minority faction on my server. There's literally no way to communicate to anyone in the game if they want to sell directly to me so we both avoid the ridiculous marketplace tax, which is literally 6-7g just from tax. That's a LOT of money for players like me with very limited funds in case the elites start yammering "oh 5% tax is nothing I've got millions of gold". Win-win situation and requires literally no effort, yet I've had not a single whisper in 2 days. For some reason people would rather throw that 6-7g down the drain to list it on marketplace instead?

 

As for the "trade channel = spam" argument, turn off the channel if you don't like it? For stuff that sell slowly or really expensive stuff, direct trade + trade chat is way better than marketplace.

[Brand X]

It would give the gold spammers more channgels to spam in.

[Melodia]

You're joking right? As if they don't spam the other channels nonstop already? As if having no trade channel would somehow mean they won't spam... "gonna be a law abiding citizen and not spam faction chat or party chat because it's not for trading purposes!"

[Tsuchiryu]

1 hour ago, Brand X said:

It would give the gold spammers more channgels to spam in.

Not a real argument, sorry. It just comes off as an excuse to remove features or, in this case, not add them. Try something else.

[Brand X]

2 hours ago, Tsuchiryu said:

Not a real argument, sorry. It just comes off as an excuse to remove features or, in this case, not add them. Try something else.

lol.  My post was joking.  :p  It wasn't serious at all.

[Skotlex]

There are fees for the buyer? I thought all fees applied to the seller only. I have a 5% fee to pay when enlisting an item, and when it gets bought, I only get 95% of the listed price, another 5% was cut-off. So I would say that all market taxes are paid by the maker, not the buyer.

 

Tera had a way to void the market tax, if both players were online and agreed to a transaction. If only BnS had that mechanism it would be a solution to the complain here. Otherwise, I'd really prefer to have the marketplace.... people not using it for selling/buying items would highlight a failing of the marketplace design.

[Tsuchiryu]

7 hours ago, Skotlex said:

Tera had a way to void the market tax, if both players were online and agreed to a transaction. If only BnS had that mechanism it would be a solution to the complain here. Otherwise, I'd really prefer to have the marketplace.... people not using it for selling/buying items would highlight a failing of the marketplace design.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there's no way to make a direct trade with people from different servers. If there was, whispering and going cross-server would be a possibility to trade without any taxes. As it stands, though, that's only possible with people in the same server as you.

[Youmukon]

14 hours ago, Melodia said:

Also, this game has one of the highest marketplace taxes I've ever seen, wouldn't people benefit from trading expensive items directly?

Believing that less taxes = good for players is short sighted. Marketplace taxes is what is enabling inflation to remain controlled. The first gold sink in Blade & Soul is coming from Marketplace taxes.

 

Players often complain about "inflation" without even understanding what it really means. Inflation is the delta between gold injected into the economy (pure drop from monsters, quests rewards, items sold to NPC etc.) and the amount of gold removed from the economy (taxes, weapon upgrade costs, NPC purchases, repairs made at NPC directly...). 

 

Inflation in MMORPGs is inevitable, especially as players gets more powerful and as new content give bigger rewards. To keep things somewhat balanced, we need to remove gold from somewhere and we need to do that constantly. Taxes are today's biggest gold sink in the game, if we were to reduce taxes then it means more inflation than we already have. If you want to keep inflation controlled while still reducing taxes then we would have to take that money from elsewhere (raise upgrade costs / NPC prices) or lower gold obtained through questing which I'm sure wouldn't be popular among players :)

 

Now when it comes to having a trade channel: first of all we aren't super keen on having a global chat. Faction is already half the server and that's wide. Then we want to encourage players to use the Marketplace so... they pay taxes and help to keep inflation in check.

[Kitah]

 

11 minutes ago, Youmukon said:

Believing that less taxes = good for players is short sighted. Marketplace taxes is what is enabling inflation to remain controlled. The first gold sink in Blade & Soul is coming from Marketplace taxes.

 

Players often complain about "inflation" without even understanding what it really means. Inflation is the delta between gold injected into the economy (pure drop from monsters, quests rewards, items sold to NPC etc.) and the amount of gold removed from the economy (taxes, weapon upgrade costs, NPC purchases, repairs made at NPC directly...). 

 

Inflation in MMORPGs is inevitable, especially as players gets more powerful and as new content give bigger rewards. To keep things somewhat balanced, we need to remove gold from somewhere and we need to do that constantly. Taxes are today's biggest gold sink in the game, if we were to reduce taxes then it means more inflation than we already have. If you want to keep inflation controlled while still reducing taxes then we would have to take that money from elsewhere (raise upgrade costs / NPC prices) or lower gold obtained through questing which I'm sure wouldn't be popular among players :)

 

Now when it comes to having a trade channel: first of all we aren't super keen on having a global chat. Faction is already half the server and that's wide. Then we want to encourage players to use the Marketplace so... they pay taxes and help to keep inflation in check.

I think a trade chat could benefit this though. When you say that faction is already half the server, this is somewhat correct. I'm currently on Hao District and switched from Cerulean (which is the leading populated faction with masses of active players) to Crimson (which is lowly populated by active players which means less discussion / selling / things happening) This will take away from the factions and allow people to sell things between the factions.

While we are on about chats. Why are the shout things not sold on the Hongmoon store?

[Melodia]

Honestly the logic of this game's playerbase baffles me.

Honorary ornaments are 12g on marketplace and constantly rising, so earlier I said I'm selling 10 for 11.5 each, which means the buyer will save 5g instantly. Any normal human being with a functional brain would say yes, you'd think? But no, players in this game would rather buy them for 12g each on marketplace for some retarded reason. Some guy even literally told me he'd rather buy from marketplace.

Lose-lose scenario, seller has to pay that blasted tax and buyers buy it for a higher price, resulting in a two-way price hike.

Facepalm is not enough to describe the stupidity I just witnessed.

 

[WhoAmI1]

On 6/22/2016 at 6:23 AM, Youmukon said:

they pay taxes and help to keep inflation in check.

So in shorter words he means so people have to grind and do more dungeons to make up for the lost gold when using the marketplace. And to the people who don't want to grind, they can use the currency exchange... with their parent's credit card of course! :)

 

Really good marketing technique if you ask me.