OK, the same caveat as the last time I commented on the merchant. I am an economist in real life so forgive any jargon.
Before we try to understand how to "fix" the merchant, it is important to recognize 1) what are its goals and 2) how is it not meeting those goals.
1) The goal of the merchant is to help distribute cards in a fair and consistent fashion to the people that value the cards the most given wealth. At a fair price, there will be some people with the card who value the card less than the price and so will sell it and others who value the card more and so will buy it, given enough wealth.
I'd like to revisit #1, because it has never been clear to me what the goal of the gemp merchant is. I feel like I know what its goal is SUPPOSED to be, and that is:
*To give players a collecting experience that mirrors the collecting experience in real life, back when cards were still being made.
...But it seems to me that the gemp merchant has never come remotely close to that goal, nor has it even tried to. To my mind, it has overcomplicated the process, and yet ultimately created an environment that is nothing like real-life collecting was and is. The merchant seems overly focused on simulating an economy, and not focused enough on what the end-results are, i.e. the experience had by the players.
2) I believe that most people would agree that there are two primary ways in which the merchant does not seem to be working.
The first is "the exploit" where someone with multiple accounts manipulates the price of the merchant in order to sell the card at an inflated price. At least, I assume that is what the exploit is. The only person I know that has admitted to performing "the exploit" is Hugh-Jass (which is a great Simpson's reference). He claims that the exploit is still in the current system.
I think that's part of it. I think another part of it is people using multiple fake accounts to start a tournament, and then letting their main account win the tournament and get the biggest prize support.
The second (and often related) problem is that sometimes prices do not reflect the true value of the card. While this problem will hopefully lessen if we can completely do away with "the exploit," I believe there are some corner cases where this problem could crop up again.
It seems to me that the only sure-fire way of doing away with the exploit, is to fix-price and/or price-cap all of the cards. If users cannot influence the prices of cards, then there is no exploit.
In my opinion, we should not switch to a trade system because any exploit that is possible with the merchant is doubly destructive with trade.
I tend to agree... although trading is a big part of the real-life experience. Without it, gemp can't really simulate that.
We should also not change the merchant to sell packs instead of singles or to be a fixed price, as this will make it much harder for someone to construct the deck they want and will not allow for the same flexible allocation of cards as the merchant or trading does.
I'm with you on the first part. I don't really see the point of a merchant that won't sell singles (I'm amazed this idea is so popular!), and in my experience the card distribution when buying packs from the merchant can be really terrible. If there is no option to buy singles, it's all down to luck.
I disagree with you on fixing prices, though. How would fixing prices make it harder for someone to construct a deck they want? Just make all prices uniformly reasonable. Say, all commons cost 1g, all uncommons cost 5g, all rares cost 50g. Sure, some rares will be more popular than others. But WHO CARES???
Is it really necessary to have fluctuating prices for a fake economy dealing in virtual cards that don't really exist?
I prefer the former to the latter as I want truly new players to quickly become invested in the game. They should be able to make a deck that has a chance at winning.
I've been here for months now, and the current systems have not helped me become invested in anything gold-related. I never used any exploits, and found it far too difficult to create a viable deck of My Cards that I actually wanted to play. I was also annoyed and discouraged by sealed deck leagues that don't let you keep the sealed deck cards. I finally put forth the effort (without exploits) to build my first viable My Cards deck... which was then promptly erased by MarcinS when he reset the system. So, my current impulse it to just say screw the merchant, the gold, and anything "My Cards" related, and just play casual.
I also feel like the current gemp environment is biased against players who want to play Expanded Format. That's pretty much all I really want to do: Play in Expanded Format leagues and tournaments. Expanded Format is one of the top three most-played formats on Gemp, yet it doesn't get very many leagues, nor does it get a Daily tournament. So, Gemp is not catering to what I really want to do, other than casual play.
Topic: What should we do with the Merchant? (Read 5324 times)
