PirateCraft Doubloon Haven.

Turning back the tides to player marketplaces

There has been a suggestion recently to remove warps at /warp shop and all its counterparts to go back to the days of player run markets (No warps to shops, PvP, normal player claims), the argument is people don’t create Marketplaces around the world because /warp shops is a better alternative (It is) and there is too much competition at Marketplace, which after talking to people I agree and there will be some drastic changes to the entire marketplace, but before I can start I need you to understand, properly. Discord is a terrible medium to explain such complex history and reasoning, so welcome to this forum thread.

The theory nearly everyone has explained in their own was is each town/city/crew throughout the map will have its own market in their city and people will travel to your marketplace in your city to buy/sell at your shops. This is lovely in theory and this is what I told people to do from the first day I opened shop signs to players, I didn’t want the burden of having a server managed marketplace.

In reality? How it really ends up? After years of having players marketplaces with no warps & PvP what actually happens is everyone congregates into 1 or 2 player owned areas, not spread out at peoples city’s around the map, one island/city owned usually by one player that earns themselves the monopoly of the entire server economy.

This isn’t the solution you think you are looking for, To help you figure what issues you are really having I created micro-polls using the suggestions channel on discord to break down one big problem into lots of small ones to find the real struggles of having a large server marketplace and come to some conclusions and solutions.

Quick PirateCraft History Lesson

Here are 2 PirateCraft islands on the map, where we had player run marketplaces before we had a marketplace with warps, It started as one island on the left (Bislo/BE) and that player no longer wanted to run it so a new version popped up basically next-door to it to be run by another player (ae0s/Cysteen).

These were “the” marketplaces, if someone wanted to buy/sell it was a congregated single marketplace (What we have now) a shopping center  that everyone had shops, and rent was paid to the owner of the island (What we have now, except the money stayed in the economy instead of a drain)

• Each of these player markets is comprised of shops owned by people that have massive city’s around the world but they chose to end up in one place with the rest of the shops with all the other players, even though they were competing with prices, This didn’t just happened 2 times when these markets existed these are just 2 examples of 10’s of player markets that popped up over years before we had the market with warps always ended up in one place as it’s the most convenient for players to buy/sell, people have tried to setup markets around the world but they always end up in one place.
• Take notice their location, is it in the centre or edges of the map? Or did the market owner pick to place it near a warp? They chose to have it near a warp so people could easily get to it
• But why not just Tp people in? Because in reality, someone joins they ask for XYZ and ask where they can buy/sell it, usually followed by “You can buy that at XYZ shop”, Then they have to ask for a TP to someone close or use the warp and navigate to the shop.

What this told us is that people need a warp near a marketplace, they need PvP off and people always congregate around one Marketplace, it also needed to be automated plots to not have one player cheat people out of money and own the server monopoly, at the same time we could use this as a pit for removing some money from the infinitely growing economy, absolutely no brainer.

History repeats itself; this is what will happen again if we remove the warps.

At this point in time there were suggestions from players to setup a central marketplace as well! Somewhere they could setup shop with warps and without PvP. PvP caused a lot of trouble for people not understanding why there was PvP on at a market? Confusing isn’t it, why would you have PvP at a server market? People didn’t understand these were player owned areas, they didn’t understand why the player telling them not to PvP was a normal player and not staff, “Why is this person telling me what to do at this location?”. Confusing isn’t it.

A bit more History

At one point I allowed player owned warps… yeah… So we have had both player marketplaces with warps and without warps, we have done both.

Having player owned warps was by far one of the biggest mistakes implemented from players suggestions, back then we did most voting in voice chat in Teamspeak.

It was suggested to sell warps via /donate to “limit” them for the whopping cost of $8…For a permanent warp, yes this happened… They were bought 2 or 3 times and I had to almost instantly remove them due to how quickly people jumped on it, imagine doing this with the amount of people that play now! We would have 30 warps in a month!

Back then we had a few players that not only had a marketplace but a server warp to it, not a good decision but it served as a good way to see how an entirely player owned marketplaces would run (For multiple years these lasted!) This was very early in PirateCraft v2 and veterans will remember these days were a little bit more hardcore than we have today.

What I didn’t understand at the time, is every person sees a warp as a server location and they expect it to be PvP free. I won’t bother explaining why this was such a bad idea, I will just say that it was absolute chaos of confusion. We live and learn!

You are not happy

I can now see that people haven’t been happy with the marketplace for a while and instead of making small suggestions to improve it, its boiled up to “lets just get rid of it”, this will not act as you think it will, All I’m asking at this point in the thread is please do not just disregard what I’m explaining, its from a whole server perspective. To clarify this isn’t a personal, This makes no difference to me if I remove or keep warps, but it does effect how the entire server works, so it is very important decision.

I have spent a great deal of time now trying to figure out the best I can from Discord… its much harder as nobody can write a coherent explanation of what the real issues are in a calm manor and keep updated with facts/history in a live conversation, This thread has taken me ~5 hours to write, time that could have been used making changes! If only it was more coherent! -10 points for discord!

I have taken the time to read and reply to every single person in the suggestions discord and we seem to be stuck at a standstill, please consider consequences of taking 3 steps back.

Things I have already done to market since its release

• I greatly reduced all prices for all shops using an algorithm based on shop size
• I one by one, re-made every single shop region to reduce its footprint to give them better prices
• Completely remade multiple markets to be a better design around a warp.
• I created a spreadsheet for all shops with sizes/prices, which I want to make public once all legacy shops are upated

Main issues I have been able to figure out from people via micro polls & people’s suggestions/recent complaining.

• Not enough shops.
  Annoyingly at some point I was suggested to remove all the small markets we had there as they were sitting empty and nobody used them, There used to be more markets this was a mistake removing them.
• Everyone hates that some shops don’t change hands and seem permanent to people being able to re-rent the next month, even with crews that do not play any more keeping an empty shop! This was never intended. The whole idea of setting limits was for them to expire.
  • Im hoping it wont come to this, I want people to have a shop that can indefinitely rent, IF we have enough shops and more markets maybe this wont need to happen, but it can if needed.
• People go to the closest shop to the warp for convenience.
• Shop locations, mostly /warp shop2 and /warp shop3. I have no idea why people picked this as THE market the whole thing is still Legacy but they do, its amazing if you are the 2 people right outside the warp, but its design of being 1 straight road is terrible as there is nowhere to place warps. Shop bias as they are close to warps is a big issue.
• Competitive business (pro) but negative because there’s so much competition for the same things in proximity. Things are too packed together in one giant global market, people get overwhelmed with too many shops and options, creating issues for both players and shop owners with having so much choice and competition, I think this is the biggest issue and what people are trying to explain when asking to remove market warps.
• No representative for the area. This was never talked about, but its something I think will create a big improvement, this is a big issue from me, I need representatives, builders and admins to manage the shops.

My Suggestions going forward, are to improve the marketplace and open more marketplaces but not removing warps to allow players to try to run them.

My suggested Improvements to the current marketplace

• Implement technical restrictions on all shops so they have to change hands after X amount of time, secondly have a policy and rules that check if anyone is cheating this by re-renting the same shop or using a friend as a surrogate, this would be a Build leader role specifically to police the Marketplace. For example a crew that has a shop open that no longer plays just to be bumholes could be kicked off their shop area by the build leader in charge of marketplace.
  • Yes, this is shit for the people that have these shops in prime locations, its a compromise we need people to agree on, Please read the next few suggestions to understand why we may not need to kick people out of shops
• Completely redesign warp shop2/shop3 into a “square” with 1 warp in the middle like the other warps, so there is no shop that is priority over all other shops. Check that every other warp at market follows the same design. Also update these legacy shops to the new price structure which is cheaper.
• Find a method to rotate the position of the warps, so when you spawn you are not facing the same shop every time, rotate it each day, if there are 7 shops in a market, then it’s 1 week of facing a new shop each day.
• Get builders/community involved in re-building a brand new marketplace from the area I flattened at market to YOUR specifications, I will not have input in any of the design/roads.
• People want each shop to have its own personal warp, but before we do this lets do everything else first.
• Add market stalls inside the church and give it its own warp.
• Redesign the entire market stalls area
• Just remove useless shite from the marketplace like the giant castle and replace it with its own market or stalls, Im tempted to just get builders to make the stalls much larger area.

External player markets to the marketplace

• Create marketplaces outside of the market, My idea is to create very small markets at each NESW warp, for example at /warp north you have a small town at the bottom, that town is a market say 7 shops maximum with its own warp, for example /warp shop7. This will be a completely independent market, each warp will have its own unique theme, be small like a small town so its not “overwhelming” to buyers/sellers in a massively competitive market, also this gives the NESW warps a purpose! Double wammie!
• After builders have created micro markets at the NESW warps create an entire new marketplace that is entirely blank, based on islands, so instead of roads we have water and each shop is an empty island (The more I think about this the more I want it!) so your roads are the sea between islands, again keep it small to ~7 shops/islands, you could spawn on an island surrounded by islands, Who can build this?

Extended World Project – No TP Survival #2

Right, this Is dipping into a topic which needs its own entire thread, the TLDR, is I plan on having a world that’s additional to what we have now, that’s all islands, with no Teleport, its own inventory, its own Economy, has Trade ports to use ships to earn money, by trading XYZ between server ports.

What was also planned was allowing players to setup their own market in this, almost second survival experience type world. As there is no teleport at all, it would be entirely up to players to setup markets around the world and people have to use ships to get to/from them, but with server trade ports having items worth a specific value, you could have secondary player ports/markets that buy items at half the price if they are closer to the server trade locations.

Again this is its own thread as theres so much to talk about it, but just so you are aware this has been planned 5+ years and only in the last 6 months has someone come and created the world for us, I wont thank them just yet, but it was the only milestone, I just need to fine time to test/trial it.

Feedback on my suggestions to peoples complains

Before replying, please consider all of the negatives to just removing warps for shops for people, if you have an alternative suggestion that involves removing all warps for shops, with no PvP protection and are entirely owned by player(s) then you need to explain how to solve not having warps/PvP on/Not being A monopoly to a few players in one location/Not building near a warp in detail, do not avoid these issues.

I will be creating a upvote/downvote poll in suggestions on discord for full transparency if you think i’m still full of hot air with this reply and just still want me to remove warps for shops.

As always its never bias, its just logic.