Idea: Introducing "tax" for market offers

[DeletedUser]

Proposal:
A trade offer remains in the market for 7 days "free of charge". After seven days, the trader will have to pay xx amount of coins per each day to keep his trade or remove it.


Have you Checked the Ideas section for the same idea posted by someone else? Is this idea similar to one that has been previously suggested?
I have checked through the Ideas section as well as used the forum search function and have not seen a similar suggestion.


Reason:
I will borrow screenshot posted by someone else to illustrate the amount of "senseless" and frustrating offers which spam the market.

Anyone care to be creative and think of a fix?

We all "screamed" when the trade offer cap was introduced and rightly so. We don't want to go back either to any sort of "boundaries' that limit free trade, but we'd want to democratically prevent chaos created by a minority of players with too much time at hand or too little time to think.

Making a player pay a "fine/rent/penalty" for using the market "stand" for longer than x days, will reduce the amount of spam trades.
It takes few minutes to create 10 pages of trade like the ones in the above screenshot. After all, it's just click,click,click.
Normally, a trade will be accepted within 48 hrs and if a trade it's still there more than a week, it most likely will never be accepted. Such trades litter the space and make the market "dirty", hence they need to pay a daily "hygiene" fee.
So, someone who abuses with the trade system will have to think twice about making spam trades because either he will have to take them down one by one and spend time doing it or pay a daily "fee"


Details:
Option A:
A timestamp can be added next to each trade to show how long ago was created.
Option B:
24 hrs before the "tax-free" time expires a notification let's the player know that some of his trades will be "fined" if they remain in the market.
Option C:
provide an option in the settings for a player to let the system to automatically take trades after 7 days


Visual Aids:
not able to produce visual aid


Balance/Abuse Prevention:
Should create no balance or abuse issues, as far as I can tell.


Summary:
Introducing an offer time limit or "tax" to be paid after a certain amount of days for market offers

 

[DeletedUser65]

A big +1 from me, this will hurt those annoying spam traders. Perhaps also have the tax amount linked to the cost of the good being asked for, so the greedy players offering IA goods for CA goods would have to pay a CA sized fine if its up longer than a week

 

[DeletedUser3723]

His Economically Literate Lord Vortican does not support such a tax. More filters would provide greater ability of those traders who wish to see all trades, see none, or only see some offers. Alternatively, a simple ignore function would provide the same opportunity. There are many other ways to reduce the number of pages of contracts in the marketplace other than a punishing tax. Lord Vortican shall reserve his taxation only for the peasants who work his fields, for they should contribute to the defense which Mighty Lord Vortican provides them!

 

[DeletedUser]

I have wondered why the purchaser is taxed the same 1 fp whether he buys 10 items or 100 items in one transaction. I have also wondered why the 'system' gets the 1 fp and not the vendor.

But back to the ways to keep the market neat: I would have the free trades expire after 24 hours. I'm not sure which of the opening post options I support but its the one that is closest to giving all players the option of a trade that lasts 7 days (instead of 24 hours) at a price to be determined by minds greater than mine. I see no reason to have trades listed for longer than 7 days other than spamming.

 

[DeletedUser13082]

Problem is that the day before a player will start having to pay for the trade they will simply remove it and re post it giving them another set amount of days to have the trade up for free.

Personally I don't think the idea is required but never the less it is still a good idea just not something I would see as worth while myself. Also I can't really see it being workable due to other loopholes such as the one I mentioned above.

 

[DeletedUser]

Problem is that the day before a player will start having to pay for the trade they will simply remove it and re post it giving them another set amount of days to have the trade up for free.

The idea does not aim to get rid of "spam" trade and traders. The idea is about making it harder to spam the market.
Removing one by one 80-100 trades is time consuming and boring. Spammers are like the teenagers and market is "their" room. They hate nothing more than having to clean up.
So, if they latter have to clean up, i'm sure they'd rather be making less spam.

 

[DeletedUser]

Any proposal that aims to tackle this kind of spamming gets a +1 from me. I have a neighbourhood where at least 10+ players are offering BA/IA goods for LMA/CA goods and the market is more or less costantly cluttered. What I do then, is just select the "guild offers option", but a lot of players rely on their neighbours for goods trading.

Personally, I prefer putting a time limit on trades rather than a penalty, but I can see how this can work too. Any player trading fairly will never have to worry about having taking his offers down after x amount of days, because the offers will have been accepted long before that.

 

[DeletedUser]

The illustration in the OP shows trades of 5 cloth for 6 ebony which I don't see as an unfair trade, merely aggresive. (I mean you can leave all the stock sitting in a warehouse or you can put it on the 'shelf' in hopes someone will make the trade and give you a small profit).

The previous poster talks about the unfairness of people offering BA good for CA goods. If that is what is REALLY bothering people then just don't allow it. Set the market so you it only allows people to trade up one age or down any amount of ages and that will eliminate the con men who just want to make a killing off someone who makes a mistake or just does not know the value of the goods or is simply kind hearted and thinks they are doing the con man a favour.

 

[DeletedUser]

-1 from me

Offering can never be taxed by amount of offers made. The local tax collectors in your government will never tax you by amount of offers or amount of product bundles you have. The taxes are a "dependent variable" that depends on the "independent" variable which is anything from profit, salary, sales ... etc.

So after i have critiqued the idea i will post the way in which i can see it implemented in a productive way:

Simply create a filter that will sort out offers higher/lower than "x" ammount of goods.
E.G. All offers which give 10 or less goods for any age you are searching will not appear in the list. Or vice-verse, all offers which offer more than "x" amount of goods will not appear in the list.

Once again, you can never apply the "dependent variable" which is the tax you are proposing on an irrelevant "independent variable", which in this case is time offers stay on the market. This will create very big imbalance in guild and/or neighborhoods that do not have active traders. Frankly, the higher level people will pay less taxes than the lower level people. Because usually the higher level players are more active than lower level players. Thus trades will vanish faster and taxes payed will be lower for higher level and/or more active players. Taxes are meant to be at least equal for everybody or in best case higher for bigger fishes.

 

[DeletedUser]

The illustration in the OP shows trades of 5 cloth for 6 ebony which I don't see as an unfair trade, merely aggresive. (I mean you can leave all the stock sitting in a warehouse or you can put it on the 'shelf' in hopes someone will make the trade and give you a small profit).

The illustration is not about the ratio being "wrong". It's neither about the goods being traded (they are same age), but the amount of them. Several dozen pages of 5 cloth for 6 ebony amounts to 400-500 offers of that particular trade. So, no technically speaking the seller didn't break a rule but the excess to which he/she exercised the right to unlimited (in time and amount) trade offers has created an annoyance to the public.
You may be allowed to perform in the subway/metro station but if hundreds of musicians hang around in the same station with their instruments laying besides them.... it does create a problem for the thousands of commuters rushing to catch the train.
In fact, the root of the problem is exactly the abuse with public space

(I mean you can leave all the stock sitting in a warehouse or you can put it on the 'shelf' in hopes someone will make the trade and give you a small profit).

The market is not a personal warehouse where an individual decides to break his possessions in tiny little pieces or bundles and display it in thousands of shelves

The previous poster talks about the unfairness of people offering BA good for CA goods. If that is what is REALLY bothering people then just don't allow it.

In fact, that's an even simpler idea which can effectively help reduce the "scam"

Offering can never be taxed by amount of offers made. The local tax collectors in your government will ...........

I placed "tax" in quotes, so readers can be alerted by, or pay caution to the literate meaning of the word.
As i went on to explain in the detail paragraph, i mention several forms of "tax" such as:

penalty - An infraction of a rule; a foul. Some form of punishment, such as a fine or forfeit for not fulfilling a contract, etc.

punishment - A trade offer that hasn't been taken in a week is a sign of "scam", therefore the game authorities have a little script that automatically takes it away after the week has expired

rent - as in you have the right to 50 offers in the market. If you wish to place more than that and "occupy" more stalls, a fee will be applied

fine - If creating 100 pages of of trades was to be illegal, the system would fine the player who exceeds that amount.

All those, i wrapped in one package and called them "tax". But i certainly didn't have in mind sharing market profits with innogames, nor getting into economically sophisticated mechanisms

 

[DeletedUser]

... the higher level people will pay less taxes than the lower level people...

i use to play real life for 41 years now and reached to the conclusion: thats the way it goes all the time.

 

[DeletedUser]

+1
I'd actually be quite ok with paying a tax on every trade up front, i.e. I want to offer 20 Dye to buy 20 Stone, and that might cost me one of the goods I'm offering (1 dye), so it's actually 21 dye for 20 stone. (The purchaser still pays a forge point unless in-guild). In-guild trades (marked as for guild-only) might be exempt (or not)?

That said, as per the OP, I'd still like the masses of trade offers on the market (often offering 10 for 15 of same age good) to either automatically expire after a few days, or start costing something to the originator, to force a cleanup. There are often way too many junk and duplicate trade offers on the market. I bet those "trade shark" players will scream a lot though.

 

[DeletedUser]

I just wanted to comment on people discussing whether the word "tax' is appropriate.

It is just a word. You can say that people shouldn't be able to tax offers, and sure I guess. But if you call it a "deposit" it'd work pretty similar. Like, you have to put up a deposit of X coins or extra goods when a trade is posted. If it is accepted within the time allowed you get that deposit back. If it isn't accepted after a set time, the trade expires and that deposit gets eaten. Same result, just semantics.

Personally I think having trade offers just time out after a certain amount of time would solve this problem just as easily while being less intrusive. I would hate having to monitor trades to see if I need to manually pull them down or not. ("Well this has been up for 6 days but I may be busy tomorrow, should I go through the trouble of removing and re-posting it now?!")

EDIT: Or more filters. Or being able to ignore trades by player name. Same general idea, but less complicated way of going about it, maybe.