Introducing The Chibera Auction House

Today, we here at Chibera want to present you guys with some of the basics of how the auction house will work in our upcoming MMORPG.

The auction house is one of the centerpieces of any MMORPG’s economy and that will be even more the case for Chibera. Since we are going to be connecting the real world economy with a fictional one making sure the auction house experience is as smooth as possible is very important to us.

For More Information About The Economy - Read Here

The most important thing we are constantly thinking about when designing our auction house is clarity of information. And there are several reasons for that. As previously mentioned, the auction house will be the centerpiece of our economy. It will be the place where in-game currency and cryptocurrencies (and because of that, real-world currencies) meet. Thus, achieving as much clarity of information will help our players to make informed decisions.

The second reason is just that we understand that our game will be complex. And many more casual players would be highly intimidated if the first thing they saw when they approached the auction house were highly complex graphs. Yes, they are invaluable for people who have a lot of experience playing the markets, but to your average Joe, they don’t provide much and scare them away.

The auction house will use two basic methods of selling and buying items.

Bidding
Bidding is how most of us imagine auction houses work. You set a timer for your auction house - let’s say 24 hours - and a starting price. From there you just have to wait and hope that someone bids on your item and that the price goes sky high.
Or if you are on the other side of the fence - bidding on an item - you hope that nobody else will be interested in the item at the price you offered.

Of course, you can’t just have your auction go on forever. Nor can it exist for too short of an amount of time. Right now we are considering the shortest auction to be 12 hours and the longest auction to be 7 days. But these may change.

Selling
The more traditional way of acquiring currency. Setting a price for an item and just waiting for someone to snatch it up. Nothing complex about it apart from deciding what price you should want for an item or how much are you willing to pay for one.

One thing that should be mentioned though, even if you opt to sell an item, the listing will have an expiration date. That means if your listing doesn’t sell within a time-frame the item will be sent back to you and you will have to list it again. Probably at a lower price giving it a better chance of being bought.

There will be a very small number of things you will not be able to sell on the auction house. The bigger question is, will you be able to sell them at a profitable price? That is up to you and the invisible hand of the market to figure out!