Horizons: Changes to Consigners

From Gale-AE at Istaria.com

Currently, the maximum number of items able to be placed on a single consigner by a player account is five. This was a value introduced during beta to prevent item dumping, and the use of a consigner as a vault replacement -- but was never really intended to be made permanent. Unfortunately, other issues took forefront and the number wasn't brought seriously up for review until recently.

There are a few issues with the current limit of five. First, since the introduction of teleport fees, multiple-town shopping is no longer completely free. This isn't so much an issue for the seller, as they can set their prices with this in mind if they wish, but for the buyer can be a source of great frustration, particularly since five isn't even high enough to allow the listing of a full set of armor.

This limit of five also prevents much centralization, as is not really practical for a crafter to use a single town as a home base. To be effective, you really need to spread your items out among three or four communities in order to get an effective number of items listed. This is a significant frustration to some sellers.

After some debate, one of the upcoming changes will be an increase in the allowed number of items on a single consigner, from 5 to 10. This is a temporary increase while we discuss further changes, one of the proposals for which is outlined below.

Note that this is just one approach, and may not be implemented in exactly this fashion.

Consignment serves two purposes in Horizons. Its primary purpose is to provide an easy way for players to sell crafted items, and for the most part it accomplishes this goal -- the current limit is one of the main limiters here. Its second purpose is to provide a way for cash to exit the economy. Every time an item is listed, 10% of the listing price disappears into the consigners pocket. Right now, this and teleport fees are the primary forms of money leaving the game.

We would like to preserve or enhance this if possible, and one of the solutions is to allow a very high limit on a given consigner (likely with a global limit of some kind in place), but to increase the percentage cost to list a new item as your total on that consigner increases. For example, it may still cost a 10% fee to list your first ten items, but each item after that costs, say, an additional 1%; the eleventh item listed costs an 11% fee, the fifteenth is a 15% fee, and so on.

This means if a player wishes, they can put a large quantity of items in one place, but they'll be getting less bang for the buck the more they list. This gives us a sort of soft limit -- eventually it will be impractical, rather than just hitting a hard limit right away. This also gives the player something additional to consider when listing. Rather than just tossing items in up to a hard limit, the player has a judgment call to make: is this worth it?

The hope is that this approach will give a crafter more meaningful decisions to make -- something more to consider than just whether they've filled up this town to their limit. At the same time, it would serve to bring additional coin out of the economy, something that in the long run will help the game.