Auction House System

I was thinking about creating a web app to do something like this

 

I've been thinking about this recently, as well. Though I was thinking from the exact opposite angle: all items except equips. For items that are nether rare nor have variable stats it would be more efficient to have a bid/ask system similar to a normal stock market. But existing bid/ask offers should be hidden to players, similar to Runescape's Grand Exchange.

But going back to the topic of the thread: I think a normal auction house style is the best choice for scrolled equips and, if desired, could also be extended to extremely rare or discontinued items (e.g. MW30 or the April Fool's miracle cubes). Some other thoughts off the top of my head:

1. The "24-hour listing duration" in the "Core Features" section seems to conflict with "Listing Period" in the "Bidding" section. I don't really have any opinions on auction duration, but I think you should make this more clear.
2. Since you're talking about integrating this within the game a feedback system would be unnecessary. Similar to paying upfront for your bids, you should also "pay" upfront for asks by putting the item in the auction house.
3. Using owls to find new auctions is fine. Using owls to find auctions you're trying to watch seems excessive. The ability to watch auctions so you don't have to use an owl every time you want to check on it would be nice. I may be in the minority here since the FM/owl system has always annoyed me (even back in my early GMS days) and I think it should be replaced by an entirely different system .
4. There should be a penalty for cancelling an auction if there are active bids. Maybe some % of the current highest bid? I don't see a reason to charge a penalty for cancelling auctions with no bids, though.
5. On top of the large amount of work it would take to implement this within the game, there's also considerations for patch/maintenance. Like what happens to auctions that are in progress and have active bids when the server goes down for maintenance? It's probably easiest to cancel all auctions, no fees are charged, and all items and mesos are returned to the appropriate players via Fredrick or something. Otherwise you have to deal with pausing auctions and choose if they resume right when the server comes back or if there's a delay or what. Then what if maintenance or a patch takes longer than expected? or shorter? In those cases there become sniping opportunities for players who are available to log on right when the server comes back up. And maybe that advantage is okay because that's already the case for things like boss spawns, but still something to consider.

This has been brought up, and even attempted a couple of times, but these kinds of apps are usually abandoned pretty early on due to the scope of work. I've also thought about this and have come to the conclusion that there's not enough incentive to use a 3rd party service due to:

1. Discord filling the need for rare/expensive items or leech
2. Shops and owls are effectively free
3. The player base is small enough that there's always room in the FM for your shop(s)

 

Path of exile recently introduced a Currency Exchange system, where you can easily buy / sell stackable items that people use commonly use. But buying them was always pain in the ass.
For regular items, like equips you still have to do player to player trade, but for consumable and crafting materials you just grab it off the market, for lowest offered price, no owling included.

The problem is, this might be way too hard to make in maple itself.

 

The client already has the Maple Trade System, it's just not programmed in the backend AFAIK and is disabled. That's what the FM button was used for in the vanilla client. MTS has an auction system.

 

IMO the timer after a bid is an unnecessary complication. If you want an auction to run for 3 days, just set it to 3 days and that's how long people have to bid. The extra bidding period might be nice for more common items e.g. 10atk gloves. But I feel like most people will just chuck them in their FM store since their price is mostly known and there's too much supply to drive a proper auction for a single one.

I think an auction house would be primarily for really rare items and people will want to leave them in as long as possible. The longer it's in the more eyes get on it and the more likely a bidding war is. To me, you should be considering the buyers and sellers of those really expensive items as your primary audience when thinking about design. I'm broke so I'm not in that audience, but I imagine having an auction house would be preferable to bumping a discord thread, smegaing every once in a while, and fielding lowball offers! I'm also biased towards this idea becoming established in the MapleLegends world as an actual map in a fancy auction house or something so it fits that vibe

Consider your first option if you put in a bid for an onyx apple that just went up for auction and you have the highest bid at 1m. Then the servers go down for a patch and they nerf apples making them worthless. When the server comes back up the seller is definitely going to choose to accept the offer you made pre-nerf.

Or consider the second if you put up an auction for an apple, the servers go down, and the bidding only made it up to 1m. So whoever happens to have that 1m bid gets your apple at a significant discount.

There will never be a 100% success rate of people managing their own auctions so they don't get the short end of those options. I think what I previously suggested about cancelling and returning everything with no fees whenever the server goes down is the most predictable and therefore fair. Maybe that's not as exciting, but when high-end items are on the line there's significant motivation for the kind of malicious behaviors that drive people away from communities. Of course it would be preferable for this feature to instead be a selling point! More things to think about!

I think maybe I wasn't clear enough or maybe I don't understand you . If this auction house is built into the game, then trustworthiness isn't a factor since the game is already the source of truth for mesos and items. I thought you were considering a basilmarket scenario where you still have to find each other in game and make a trade after an auction ends. But if we're talking about the auction house being in the game then there's no need. When you put up an item for auction it goes into the auction house and is removed from your inventory. When you bid for an item the mesos are removed from your inventory. When the auction ends the game can dispense mesos and items accordingly.

But that brings up another point: what happens to your mesos when you get outbid? I think it's unreasonable to have to pay a penalty/tax on getting mesos back from being outbid. The logistics of that might be annoying, too. Maybe an auction house exclusive storage? At least something so you don't randomly spawn millions of mesos in your pockets when you get outbid. Or it could just go to Frederick? I assume reaching max meso would be a problem for some people, too. This is probably not important to think about until nailing down things like tax, penalties, item/meso logistics, etc. Fun to think about though

I don't make games, but I am a professional software dev so I just want to give extreme caution to using phrases such as "could easily be changed for X" in the context of software. I would agree that it looks like a small change on the surface, though. I also didn't know the client already had stuff for the MTS. Depending on how far along it was it may be reusable and could provide significant information for reverse engineering the back end. That's pretty exciting if it's true!