Data genius and UI ingenuity teamed up for yesterday’s RIFT 2.8: Madness Wakes content release with a revamped Auction House presented on the official RIFT forums by Senior UI Artist Amber “Gingers” Alexander. Gingers has been kept busy since 2.7 with many UI feature changes and upgrades including crafting, quest, macro, wardrobe, and achievement tracking UI changes. Hats off to her and the Trion team for making RIFT so much more dynamic to navigate!
Auction House Highlights
- Improved Searching – Includes searching for items by min, max (or both) stat values. For example, the minimum can be set to the amount on the item you currently have equipped, allowing you to easily search for upgrades.
- Item Previewing – Graphic improvements.
- Real-time auction durations broken down into hours and minutes not long, medium, or short.
Taxing Players
Two other very handy features were added to the Auction House yesterday. You’re now able to re-list items from your mail box and buy individual items from a stack. These positives aside, yesterday was a roller coaster of a day for the RIFT community.
5% taxes were built into the Auction House based on the amount of your chosen sale cost that you will pay regardless if your auctioned items sell. These taxes revealed themselves yesterday without being officially written in the 2.8 Patch Notes causing a flood of concern within the community. RIFT Executive Producer Bill “Daglar Fisher responded:
Hey everyone,
First off, I’m sorry that we didn’t have this in the initial patch notes. This wasn’t something we tried to hide – its a pretty obvious change once people start using things.
With that said, we are open to suggestions on how to tweak the change – without outright reverting it. We determined during the course of the AH revamp that we really wanted to change how this functioned for a number of reasons which include but are not limited too – Removing some amount of platinum from the economy, and insuring that large numbers of sub optimal auctions which hinder performance are not listed.
I totally understand the frustration that some of you are sharing regarding this. There is likely room for improvement and tweaks.
Like every other feature added to RIFT, we’ll watch the effects and make changes for the health of the game and for the happiness of the community.
~Daglar
The RIFT community has never been known to hold back, so the ideas rolled in pretty swiftly with even swifter responses from Trion with the Patch 2.8 Notes quickly updated and Daglar, Gingers, and Lead Engineer “Pithos” at the helm of the forums to address concerns resulting in changes already being implemented for next week’s hotfix.
Rift 2.7: Hotfix 1
Taxes will be set to a tiered system increasing the maximum number of hours that an auction can last, adjusting the tax pricing as follows:
- Short – 12 Hours – 0.75%
- Medium – 48 Hours – 2%
- Long – 168 Hours – 5%
Encouraging no cost if an item does not sell will be the direction I hope the final decision will arrive at. This would support not only new players and artifact hunters, but dimensioneers and crafters with all those smaller items that supplement these parts of the game.
User Interface tweaks are already rolling out for next week with Gingers listening to the community about seller names being added back in to the grand scheme of Auction House things. So, all in all it was a busy hive of an afternoon, but even as this all takes place, confidence that the economy will be polished further as Trion continues to prepare for 3.0 continues to remain. Knowledge in the amount of work that has gone into the new features of the Auction House has not been lost in the forum flurry.
Making History with Data
Researching costs or prices has become less taxing (no pun intended) with Recommended Prices for the casual player and Price History for those who like to play the Auction House regularly with every transaction and listing on the Auction House tracked and displayed in the Price History chart (previewed above) displaying useful data including:
- Amount of units sold per day
- Average daily price range
- 30-day moving average
- 7-day moving average
- Daily price range
Auction House data is shard-wide and will be traced back a year. So the final conclusion of the Day 1 experience of our revamped Auction House is that there are definitely more changes to come with all hands on deck listening to the RIFT community. This is the most valuable development not only for an economical day but a gaming day in general.
Buy Orders
Last but not least to wrap up this “on the ground – experiencing it with you” RIFT 2.8 Auction House addition, Buying Orders (previewed to the right) have us curious if they will benefit those of us buying regular or unique items. For dimensions it will be nice to request certain items by CTRL – SHIFT – clicking or typing the item’s name into the Buy Order, but we will be monitoring prices to see if this works in favor of the consumer as well as trade chat. Will trade chat finally get a work out?
What are your thoughts on the new Auction House? Feel free to let us know below in the comments section.
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