Title: Central Market 2.1

Family Name: Merlyn

Region: World

I for one, am thankful for the limited economy of BDO’s Central Market 2.0 which limits market manipulation and inter-account trading. However, some changes are required to remove bits that have been annoying players for years. Seeing as how the devs seemed eager to do a radical change as the crystal presets which insanely changed the economy of time used in the game, I am hopeful that they can do more.

TL:DR

Current Central Market Problems

• Items are not worth their cost in time

• Prices don't match supply<>demand

• Single Item Pre-Order limitations suck

• Price cap adjustments are too slow

• Crystal Preset / Price Changes have decimated the risk-to-reward ratio at difficult / endgame spots - especially those with stagnant prices.

Solutions

1. Central Market 2.1 (Conservative Open Central Market)

1. Uncap top and bottom prices; Keep control over Pearl Item Prices;

2. Tie prices with Market Demand - If more than X items are sold at max/min price, the price cap goes up/down. X amount can be tied to the value of each item (ie. 150b item needs 2 sales at the top price, 100 silver item needs 100k sales at the top price etc.);

3. Tie prices with Market Supply Stagnation - If items have Y preorders at max-price for more than weekly reset, the price cap goes up;

4. Add Countdown to any price change and other notification changes tied to the system above; Just QoL UI/UX that would show market information in-game first, rather than on Global Lab updates.

5. Increase the market cap of all single pre-order limited items to at least 3 (preferably 5 to 10); This might not be necessary if the prices can regulate themselves.

2. Central Market 2.0 + Auction House (Ultra Radical Idea)

Create an auction house for Combat / Lifeskilling (or all 1b+ items) items where the market can regulate itself. Make min prices = the CM prices. Tax is the same as CM. 2%/day registration fee.

Either of these solutions would work great to bring a bit of balance and value to the time invested in doing various activities.

-

Disclaimer

• No, the excuse of "it is a vanity/endgame item" so the time invested should cost just doesn't work (such as Debo's cost-to-time-to-difficulty ratio). a)It straight-up kills activities in the game making them dead after a certain item has been procured. b)it makes the item/economy meta stagnant because it doesn't reward the time and difficulty of the content played c)it makes content unfun if the reward is mediocre in general (more on this in a wider BDO economy feedback, link coming soon).
• Yeeeeaaah ... crystal price changes. I don't know how i feel yet, but at least I am hopeful that BDO might get pushed by it to create more radical changes to how the economy, and consequently, time><reward ratio rolls.

• Yes, there are many more problems with the CM and many dangers to making any change that could result in more chaos. So much so, that if somebody could have the data, they could make EVE-style documentaries of Silver flow in BDo. I’m just looking for a quick bandage that can perhaps juggle the CM into a more pleasant state.

• Yes, shaking up the top caps of prices shakes up the entire meta of where people spend time in the game. That is supposed to be happening in a live service game. In fact, it is already happening when subverting they make radical changes (crystal presets say hi!) to various systems.

• No, we shouldn't be just lobbying for the prices of certain items that don't match their effort to be raised (ie. Debo, Pen Fallen/Debo/Bs, Pen Manos, Lifeskilling materials, etc.). It is infinitely easier to just uncap the prices and tie them to demand than to look at crazy amounts of charts to figure out what needs to be adjusted.

• No, we shouldn't be waiting for balls/updates for prices to be {secretly} adjusted. It should be automated because BDO is a Digital Centralized Economy and that shit should be simple af.

• Yes, I am aware that the solutions that I am proposing require much more detail in the equations of how prices-vs-supply vs demand is handled. That's for BDO Devs to figure out. If they can't, they can ask the community to help them figure it out.
• Maybe, BDO Devs can start testing radical changes in the economy by duplicating it and letting the virtual dummy duplicate following the demand of the current economy and some machine learning mumbo jumbo to predict the future. That could allow them to see pretty clearly what will happen and what to be careful for. This doesn't apply only to my proposed solutions, but also to all of the decisions the team is {seemly randomly} currently making.
• Please keep the discussion civil and on the topic of the central market only. No Grinding Spot trauma. No "My Activity too" (Make a cohesive thread, ill support you). No, this part of the economy is crap too. <3 and hugs pls.

• I will add (good) ideas to the sheet above and remove bad ones

PA wants CM to be stagnant, less trouble this way.

Half of what is written here is already working this way.

The prices already change based on demand and supply, and if the max and min would not be hard capped, then at that point they might just remove the whole caps and  price ranges as you could easily exploit the auto balance system. The economy in bdo is basically dead, a single player alone can manipualte 90% of the items due to how low the volume is.

In real life the stability of prices comes from the large volume, which can not be manipulated by single inviduals easily simply due to the capital it would require to have an impact. That obviously only applies to assets with large volume, and smaller, less popular ones are fliped constantly even IRL.

But in bdo the devs keep adding more and more useless trash into the game, we have the same items literately lazily copy pasted dozens of times without use, splitting the already low demand into multiple items, making the market even more dead.

If they would care about the market then they would stop adding trash into the game and they would delete 60-80% of the useless items as starter.

The caps would be fine if they would care to adjust them properly, but they don't.

Removing item diversity from BDO would be like removing all the toys from the sandbox except the shovel. A very destructive solution imo. The issue isn't with the amount of items, it's with very linear production chains that can get bottle-necked by the supply of a single item.

I'm pretty sure the best way to fix this would be to introduce more recipe diversity and methods of item acquisition. Way too many items are tied to a singular source activity. If that activity ends up being too time/cost inefficient then nobody partakes and the market gets bottle-necked, forcing the devs to clamber around making manual price adjustments to try and entice people into the activity again... It's an absolute mess. If they instead expanded on the amount of activities in the game that rewarded all these different items and tied them into more recipes, it would introduce new supply into the market and give lifeskillers more options to min-max their production chains.

That and some basic QoL for market calculations as mentioned by the OP would go a long way towards revitalizing BDO's economy.

      Cap ranges and a controlled economy (where caps raise at a time interval in conjunction with a demand interval) is a good a thing. Idea No.2 {Billion+ Auction House} creates a secondary solution where we'd get what you're asking for. However, imo, just the first solution is enough to create true value-to-effort{timeXdifficulty} pricing on the market under the current system - an auction house is another beast of an open market. TL:DR - I've addressed most of this in the post and disclaimer. As you say, The BDO economy is dead - so... its time for a shake up. 

      Let me unpack this into two separate issues for clarity:
a) Wealth Disparity {0.1% of the playerbase owns the majority of the wealth} - True. However, the first model I am proposing still holds similar limitations to the current market by controlling supply via pre-order limitations and timeXdemand based pricing. If the Trilionares of this game currently hoarding wealth and item have better ROI for gambling on the CM - that just means those items that have been sitting around for years doing nothing will go into circulation and start being transformed into perhaps useful consumables.

TL:DR - My solutions don't interact only in a bad way with wealth disparity. They will just make stagnant wealth move more than it does now. There is no other solution without rollbacks, great resets, and demeaning people's effort/luck/persistance to create their wealth. Other one would be a BDO Classic Server where everyone starts at 0, but that will come anyway in 2-3 years.

b) Item Variety Meta - I completely agree that there is too much stuff in combination with too much stuff that does nothing. But I agree with @Desymoo that the solution isn't deleting them, as well as to all the root causes they point out. This is an entirely different topic and one that I'll cover in a complete feedback post about the entire economy, but the solutions are - 1)Vendor Sale of all item value should match rarity and effort. If it's rare, and we have a ton of it but it's not used in the game - we should be able to convert it to silver to start circulating some liquidity into the market. It's absurd how a single mob's trash loot can be worth more than something that has 1% droprate, but isn't used so has 100k+ registered on the market. 2)Reworking stagnant items so that can be inter-used for creating consumables - or maybe even via lifeskills into other items / or just pure RNG. This would both create demand for purchasing them off the CM {since prices will raise with the new use}, as well as create use for the items. This is very hard to pull off with PA's Dev Resources tbh, as they'd need another team just dedicated to reworking ALL the items and putting them into new categorizations - not impossible tho.

TL:DR - Sry, no short version of this one as it's a whole other topic concerning Item Usefulness in BDO and it only briefly touches on the Central Market Value of said items.

      That is the whole point of this article and (imo) it's not that they are failing to do it out of incompetence, or they are simply too slow - it is simply impossible to {manually} accomplish in the first place. This is why I included my short cautionary essay about the organizational problem of a Human/Ministry of Finance/Bdo Dev Update Price Controlled Economy - at the end of the day, they tried to regulate the market by hand too, {with several individuals at the helm} instead of using the systems that their dogma propagated and it ultimately imploded {with some outside help ofc}. On the other hand, nigh the rotten feudalistic bits of the USSR, if they had the data insights into their economy {and it was freaking virtual like bdo}, and if one could automate the way pricing is controlled - instead of centralizing the power in the hands of several individuals - I'm sure they would've jumped at the opportunity.

This is not true. You don't need to be 0.1% rich. Even with as low as a mere 100b you can take up months worth of daily volume on the majority of the items in the market. But you can check it on a certain site.

As for otherpart idk what you mean, I ain't talked about bash the rich and similar, however if the market caps would be not hard caped ppl could easily abuse it, literately that's the reason why it's hard caped.

You can not make the useless items usefull. The game is not popular enough for that, and neither do the itemisation suppot it. Even if you could vendor them for more, that would hardly change the fact that noone would trade them on the market, so the volume would be still low.

Just to have an idea there are roughtly 4k types of items on the market (not including pearl items). If you would take the active players on a region at a given time, you would get a number that is close to that. How realistic do you think making all of them usefull would be when there is one item type for every two active players? You are looking at a daily demand of 50ish Billion on an item to make them resistant to manipualtion, how would you achieve that?

It's literately imposible, as if players would have enough silver to make such large daily volume on that high number of items, then there would be so large amount of money in the economy that even the 50B volume would not prevent the flipping.

We already have way too many consumables in the game, and even if you could convert every trash item into consumables their price would tank to min quickly, and would not solve anything. Do you have an idea how many trash items are generated every day for literately zero effort by workers?

Making the market min price cap same as vendor sell price would be a good idea to remove items that are minlisted from the economy, but that is a solution for a another problem.

This is not true. They simply don't care. Fixing the current caps would take minimal effort, even I alone could do it in like a hour.

Also the so called "manual" work ain't mean that manually adjusting everything by hand. Items that are result of other items should have caps based on the caps of it's materials. And base materials should have a normalised price based on current target silver/h with the given activity. The hardcap price of the items would be the result of an equation, but that is where the competence comes into play, you need a certain level of understanding of the fundamentals of game design, but that's what the devs lacking of...

It would be not hard to make a table that they iterately just need to commit into their DB for the new caps, they just repetitively proven in the last 5years that they don't care. Even if I would waste my time on doing their job it would be ignored so why bother?

      But if 100b is the entry-level to be able to manipulate/profit-off the Central Market, if players can start trading properly after 100-200hrs of grinding, I'd call that a win. Please read the system(s) I propose in detail - the idea is that it can be some parts of the system only, not whole - or both at the same time. They cover many of the market manipulation dangers that you state via various regulations.

      RE:Market Item Pricing / Redundancy: As I stated in my reply, this is a completely different topic/thread that doesn't concern the CM changes I propose. "Making the market min price cap same as vendor sell price.." is literally the main idea in my suggestion. Passive income worker generation is a feature of the game - if someone can set it up to create more value for trashing the items instead of selling them on the CM or converting them to consumables, so be it. Item volume {supply} is not a problem, as it always will tied to the supply><demand of the game. The problem is that the game creates demand chokeholds on items that are used often, while ignoring items that lie stagnant for ages.

      I don't want to speculate whether they care or not. I just know a)QoL feedback on the forum gets converted to reality much more in the past 6 months / b)They've shown that they can also do radical changes that fundamentally change the status-quo of meta(s) in the past year or more. With that being said, the way that they operate the Central Market pricing is abysmal, both in the pricing itself being random and not matching the market's supply<>demand+feedback, as well as creating informational asymmetry for Global Lab Update monkeys {guilty as charged} to abuse the CM changes.

I agree that a more detailed and robust system under {silver/h x difficulty /per item} should be created regardless of the changes that I propose. But that again swerves into the value of items compared to the effort required to obtain them - another dragon to be tamed. My opinion here overall is to let the market play itself out and give the players the headroom that I'm proposing. I think that crystals change proved that even if create insanely high top caps, the items won't go that far if there isn't enough demand (+there is abundant supply).

malicious compliance thread

it seems PA is happy with players making duplicate accounts to supply worker materials to the CM

anything to get the cookers to shut up right?

100b is not much. Most players who actually play the game have net worth over trillions. If you could make more realible money by fliping the market, more players would hoard silver to do it.

But the main reason why the market work this way is to prevent moving silver from player to player with the CM. With your suggestion it would be easy to manipulate the price of low volume items, hence you could use it to trade silver between accounts.

While they do bandaid fixing here and there it's too little and too late. They did not adressed any meaningfull issue with the game so far, and probably never will, but gl on your suggestion you will need it :D