I'm not sure I would agree to that change. People farmed their asses off when server went live to get the first housing lots so their stuff appears at the top of the market research.
The "dangerous" thing about suggestions like these are that they look good on paper and probably a huge amount of players agrees on first sight. Who hasn't stood at the market explorer clicking through huge amounts of RoGs thinking "i wish i could just search for Utility"
The thing is, if such a feature was implemented, everyone would be able to search for utility. And "goblining" or "playing the market" is a huge thing in all games. I guarantee that such a feature would lead to much higher prices on the good and usefull ROGs. Since they can't be targetfarmed it would be very easy to corner the market and buy up all competition.
I have seen it happen and did it myself to some degree in WoW and other MMOs, where individuals sometimes even managed to corner easy supply markets by simply driving their competitors out of the markets. A competitor joins and tries to sell his stuff...undercut him. undercut him no matter what. undercut below crafting costs if you need to. Make it enormously tedious for him to sell stuff, and he will give up and leave. It might cost you, but you will make up for it afterwards when you are alone. I have seen markets that were at 500%-1000% over crafting price for months, drop to 50%craftingcost in a single day, stay there for a week and then soar up to 500%-1000% again.
Unless you are basically living in the market yourself, easy search and overview will hurt more than benefit you
That is however not true in this case. Basic merchandise like pots and crafted stuff will always have their price, and if you dont like the market price, you can just gamble the crafted stuff at a crafter or level one yourself (which is easy here). So basic craftmanship that is too expensive or is flooding the market is not an issue. Sure there will be pots that are 10g cheaper but in the end you dont care about those 10g, especially not on this server.
And the other part is that you can never undermine the value of an item, since they are rogs. If you find an identical rog with an identical utility, then its an issue. But that probability is not high. So even if you find a 75 util ring, chance is that it will 10% fit your template and is worthless. While in some circumstances it will fit 100% into another template, and then it is worth something. The real value of an item is always unknown until someone can fit it into a template, and if that item is necessery to complete a full template or just a fun item to have for cheaper armor parts will determine the value further. You dont buy a 10p item that will save you 1 MP part, but maybe you buy that item to save you 5 MP parts.
So I don't get how you can make the items cheaper or undermine their values. You can of course buy the whole market. But with the rogs flowing out every second on this server, you will be bankrupt in hours. I can easily farm 50-60+ util stuff solo and people go on raids all the time. When people are done templating they will still go to raids because feathers are needed for other stuff than just items, thus farming high utility rogs that they will sell and as long as there are 1-2 raids per week (which is likely to be / day still) high utility items will flood the market like crazy.
The real problem is not to find the high utlity item, the probem is to find that one item that fits your template. The current basic merchant interface is kind of useless for that. Lets say you want an item with shield, +all melee and 3 basic resists. Rest can be excluded. It doesnt matter if its utility 5 or 100. That item will still fit my template if the stats are high enough (sure util 30 will probably not work).
i believe you missed the quintessence of my post. The examples i gave about market manipulation in other games were simply to illustrate how far people go with "playing the market". That it is the whole game for some people. Ofcourse it doesn't really translate 1-to-1 into daoc, but similar things will happen.
There are also classes that cannot easily template their chars, Hybrids and assasins for example. They need full-MP AND high-UT rogs on top of that. Even higher ROG when they want to use specific chargeitems in their temp (offensive charges or because they don't want to litter their inventory with items that could be put into the template)
Yes, a caster will probably not have trouble still finding cheap ROGs, but a caster currently also doesn't have to search a lot on the market because he can take basically any 55UT+ ROG that is sold and succesfully build it into his temp.
The items that people that are searching for by sifting through tens of pages of ROGs are exactly the items someone would scoop up and resell at a higher price. And the more gold these people have, the more expensive their prices will go because they can afford to buy out more and more that is cheaper than their offers
Sepplord that is not entirely true. If you look at the market now you can easily sort out high utility gems, that is not that hard. Just set a higher minimum price and you get higher utility items since people automatically set them higher than a lower utility item. What you miss are those cheap utility items that fit your template. And second problem is not gold or items. You get 70+ feather items on mostly anything.
My infil got Neck (80 util, cloak 72 util, belt 70 util and so on) from just feathers alone. And I also use Sidi weapons. The full MP gear (leather) cost me 4p and Im using the Sidi chest. Spellcrafting is like another 300g if you have a friend or guild to do it. I think I spent around 5p on items that are 60+ to fully cap everything. And it wasnt hard to find a lot of 60+, its hard to find the RIGHT 60+.
So yes you could stock up on all 60+ items spending like 100p / day on it and setting 100p on all items. Problem is that you will get new 60+ items every day to replace the one you bought so you will have to farm non stop to be able to purchase them all. And even with the current interface you can easily target them, since again, they will have a higher price.
And you most likely dont need the 60+ to fully temp. Its just that you dont want to browse through all 50+ items, that will take days to test and see how they fit the template. You rather overcap a few stats with 60+ just to be done with it. A new system to sort out items would also mean that a lot of 50+ items will fit just as good as a lot of 60+ since you overcap and make the utility a lot lower than suggested.
But basically to "stop" the problem you suggest might be a problem, is that sorting on utility doesn't have to be a thing. The problem isn't sorting on utility its finding the item that fits your template. So just making it easy to exclude, include and filter on stats would be enough. Like: - Include skill shield - include stat strength - include resist thrust - exclude resist spirit
That would show me all items that have those 3 stats (or more) and exclude every item that has spirit (which I have already capped). Then I can pick the one not based on utility but based on the perfect match of the template.