Move the Trade Forums into SWG Itself

 

http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=economy&message.id=6685

 

2005/03/22

 

The new portal makes it easy to see what message boards are enjoying the most traffic.

 

Here's the ranking I noticed this morning:

 

RANK

MESSAGE BOARD

MESSAGES

1.

Bria Galaxy Trade

479937

2.

Chimaera Galaxy Trade

386605

3.

Ahazi Galaxy Trade

419106

4.

Eclipse Galaxy Trade

463961

5.

Jedi

729065

6.

Corbantis Galaxy Trade

258428

7.

Bloodfin Galaxy Trade

404811

8.

Bria

664365

9.

FarStar Galaxy Trade

251956

10.

Ahazi

496539

 

This makes three things very obvious:

 

 

It's that third item I'd like to discuss. Why are the trade boards on the external website so active?

 

As a programmer and software development manager, I always have my eyes and ears open to try to identify high-payoff opportunities to make my customer happy. (By "high-payoff" I mean small changes that are relatively simple to make but that have significant effects, often because they address a feature that a large percentage of users have to use.) If I can see numerous users doing some simple task over and over again, I recognize it as a candidate for making that feature easier to use -- it's a high-payoff opportunity.

 

By computerizing repetitive manual functions, I eliminate "grinding" (which makes my users happy), I increase productivity (which makes my bosses happy), and I make my software more valuable (which makes me happy). Everybody wins.

 

So when I look at the SWG board usage stats, and I see players who are so interested in doing something related to SWG that they'll actually go outside the game (to the forums) to do it, I immediately think: "This is a high-payoff opportunity."

 

Why in the world do SWG's players have to go outside the game to accomplish something they really seem to enjoy doing? And why have SWG's developers allowed this situation to persist, instead of recognizing this as a golden opportunity to make SWG more valuable to its users by adding code to let them do these trades inside the game?

 

We're not even talking cross-server trades here. We're talking about players on the same server who want to buy and sell legitimate items with each other at the best prices. The message stats make it obvious that arranging good deals is something players are really interested in doing... so why is it so hard to do in-game?

 

These markets need to be brought into SWG by moving each galaxy-wide trade forum from the SOE/SWG website into SWG itself. The Auction channel in SWG is useful because it cuts down on Spatial ad barking, but its real-time nature makes it insufficient for making deals. We need an asynchronous communication mechanism just like the trade boards on the SOE/SWG website, but we need it in the game itself.

 

It would be great if this can be incorporated in a way that fits into the Star Wars saga -- certainly the mechanism by which goods are traded ought to have some kind of Star Wars "flavor" to it. But even if it's just as simple as an in-game public message forum, there's no reason why this shouldn't be added to SWG as soon as possible -- it's that valuable.

 

One suggestion has been to simply remove the cap on Bazaar sales. I don't think this is the best approach because the practical effect would be to kill vendors (and the Merchant profession). When everyone can sell anything at any price, everyone will put everything on the Coronet Bazaar terminal, probably overloading it into a smoking ruin. We need a way to allow buyers and sellers to easily find each other that retains (or even enhances) the value of having Merchant skills, and I encourage discussion of such ideas in this thread.

 

To get us started, I'm just stating the problem: Players should not have to exit SWG to arrange deals, then go back into the game to execute those deals. Through whatever means, we ought to be able to find buyers and sellers for our goods on our server within the game. That would reduce complexity for players (making them happy), improve the game economy by making deals easier to arrange (making SWG producers happy), and make SWG a more desirable game (making the SOE/LEC financial people happy).

 

Everybody wins.

 

 

2005/03/24

 

Ah, more interesting points. Let's see if I can do a better job of answering them this time.

 

bluejanus wrote:

How are you going to implement a system that recognizes both game and website input at the same time? If the game in unavailable, you contend that the forums can still be used, indicating an out of game interface.

 

Remember that the actual buying and selling of an item can only take place once, and has to happen in-game. Any forum, whether it's in-game or on an external web forum, is just to make agreements to trade, not to do the trade itself.

So there's no difficulty in having multiple sites for making deals, as long as traders respect the rule that you can only shake hands with one person for one item. As long as enough people follow that rule, it doesn't matter where the deal gets made, whether in-game or on an external forum.

 

First, the historical information on the message board is important as well. It's not just information about what successfully sold but what didn't and at what prices. We already have mail reading clients that read from the /mailsave function in game.

 

That seems like a good point, but I'd want to know how many traders really use that information. If most users of a trading board are occasional buyers of in-demand items (as I suspect is the case), then pricing information for those items would be readily available even on a system that deleted ads after a week.

 

Also, updating a message board in-game sounds like it's adding loading burdens on the servers and the client computers. I don't think it's necessary.

 

Then I guess I have more faith in the power of the technology than you do. Seriously, I don't disagree that adding another feature to SWG will increase server/client loading. What I'm saying is that the value I believe would be added by having that capability in the game itself outweighs the costs sufficiently to make it worth doing.

 

I understand that I haven't convinced you this is the case, and that's fine.

 

A message board in-game is probably going to be more restrictive than one on a public website. Mods are going to have to pay closer attention to clear clutter. There's more likely going to be more rules about what you can say and what you can post. In other words, it's less free and limits expression. I think SOE likes the Lithium system of rewarding long time participants with more forum abilities and special posting gimmicks. A system in-game would remove that.

 

OK, I understand and disagree. If there's any difference at all in text content moderation between the game and the official forum, it's that there's *less* control in-game because there are so many more players creating so much more text.

As for rewarding long-time participants in a messaging system, why do you assume that no such rewards could be made part of an in-game advertising system? It's just ones and zeros; there's nothing whatsoever preventing SOE from having an ad system that tracks some of the behaviors of traders in an in-game system and devises nice rewards for desirable behaviors (such as how long they've used the system).

 

Flatfingers wrote:

Second, if the forum trade boards were shut down, that would free up SOE personnel from having to moderate them (which in your objection #5 you felt was an issue).

 

bluejanus wrote:

But you admitted that they would need more SOE people to moderate the boards in game. As in more than the personnel they currently need to run the trade forums.

 

Well, which way do you want it? If there are both in-game and web-based trading forums, SOE employees have to do a little more work than they're currently doing monitoring player text, but you increase your chances of always being able to make trading deals. If on the other hand SOE decided that having an in-game trading system meant they could do away with the web-based trading forums, then the amount of work for SOE text monitors is merely transferred from web admins to Live team admins -- no new work is necessary, which improves the value of the idea of having trading forums in-game.

 

Plus -- as I noted before -- even if SOE axed the web-based trading forums, if players couldn't get what they wanted from an in-game forum they'd just start up their own external trading forums (using PHPbb or whatever). Eventually one player trade forum would dominate, so you'd still have your external trading forum.

 

My point here is that I don't feel the cost of operating an in-game trading system would be as high as you suggest it would be. At worst, SOE employees would have to do a little bit more of the content monitoring they already have to do; at best, operational costs are shifted from the web forums to the game itself... and frankly, those kinds of costs are often easier to justify to the financial people because they're direct charges, rather than indirect.

 

There's nothing preventing anyone from registering and participating in the trade forums.

 

Actually, there is: Users of the trade forums on the Official Web Site must be current subscribers to SWG. So in terms of availability restrictions, there's no difference between the external forums and making deals directly within the game itself.

 

Since most of the players don't participate now, how do you justify making this system to be implemented in-game as any kind of priority? We have a track record of how ill-used the system is.

 

Ill-used? What system do you mean?

 

If you mean the current web forum, it's the very fact that it's not ill-used, that such a high percentage of users of the official forum do participate, that tells us it ought to be made part of the game.

 

Or did you mean something else?

 

Why waste the time to program the message board to happen in-game where you have to be logged into the game to post.

 

Look at it from the other direction: Why force players to use a system that's completely separate from the game to be able to access a wide range of potential buyers and sellers?

 

Yes, there are SWG players who only care about maximizing their results and are willing to use any external tool (such as the forum website) to accomplish that goal. That's fine for them. But what about the people who enjoy SWG as a Star Wars-themed experience? Having to visit an out-of-game web site to be able to access a wide range of buyers and sellers of items that can only be traded in the game itself does nothing for these players. Adding an in-game trading system would significantly improve the feeling of "living in the Star Wars universe."

 

Like I said, people check the boards from work, from locations other than where their game computers are.

 

And again, I'm not suggesting replacing an out-of-game trading forum; I'm proposing augmenting it with an in-game forum because there are advantages to having that capability inside the game itself. If the "worst" happened and the web-based forum went away, it would just be rehosted by a player... so adding an in-game forum could not reduce our ability to make deals (as you seem to feel would be the case) -- it can only enhance the ability of every player to find buyers and sellers for their goods.

 

Ultimately this discussion we're having may be moot. The upcoming changes to the Bazaar system (that allow Bazaar users to see items listed on private vendors) may be close enough to being the in-game advertising system I think SWG needs. Being able to set your vendor to "searchable" won't directly advertise your products -- it won't expose them to the widest possible audience of potential buyers, which is what a trading message system exists to do -- but it may be enough.

 

We'll have wait and to see how SWG's players react. If they continue to use the external forums in the same numbers, that will tell us that additional in-game features to help advertise items are wanted. Meantime, I doubt the web trading forums will be going away.