I have been noticing that several of the listed prices in the Bazaar are not the same as the price in the Confirm Purchase pop-up box.
I understand the Confirm Purchase pop-up box is suppose to show only the TOTAL SALE PURCHASE, however I have only been purchasing SINGLE ITEMS therefore the List Price and the Total Purchase Price should be exactly the same, but they are not!
For example: Today (April 26, 2010) at approximately 5:24pm (EST), I was going to buy a Golden Pizza from the snack section in the Bazaar. The listed price stated it was 1,650 gold (each), but when I was about to confirm the sale I got this message..."Are you sure you want to buy the Golden Pizza for 2025 gold?" (I was only purchasing ONE golden pizza, so I should have only been charged the total purchase price of 1650 gold, not 2025 gold!) It seems the Bazaar is scamming some type of SECRET sales tax from its customers.
Could you please correct the math link that connects the Bazaar Price List to the Confirm Purchase pop-up box, so the purchased price shows correctly in the Confirm Purchase pop-up box? If the Bazaar is adding on a sales tax to each item purchased, then be fair and post the sales tax rate.
It is working correctly, however, buying and selling from the bazaar fluctuates. It is the same as trying to buy an item only for the computer to tell you that the transaction failed (it is no longer available, someone else bought it before you). Same thing here. When you were searching for the snack item, someone bought some before you, thereby increasing the gold required to buy it. The less there are of items in the bazaar the more expensive they are to purchase.
The price the Bazaar buys and sells items for is based on supply and demand: the more they have in stock, the cheaper the price is to you and the less they'll pay. The fewer they have in stock, the higher the price is to you and the less they'll pay.
BUY BUTTON: If there are more or less at the time you click "Buy", the price will update accordingly on your confirmation screen. If they're all gone (e.g. if somebody else has already bought all of them), you'll get a "Your transaction is not successful" message.
CONFIRM BUTTON: When you click "Confirm", you still aren't guaranteed to get one/any. If somebody else buys what's left in stock before you click on Confirm, you'll get an error message and won't receive any items or be charged any gold. If you're buying multiple items (e.g. Reagents), and there are fewer than you asked for when you click Confirm, you'll get a message telling you how many you bought and how much it cost.
All well and good, for young and naive players, however I'm a lot older. I know clicking on product tabs refreshes the stock and will show if the item is still available and how much is left. I did that very thing on several other items I purchased. Like I stated in my original post yesterday, I tend to purchase single items. I then do a refresh and noticed several times that the price did not change in the Price List, the amount available for sale only decreased by one, since I had just purchase one item.
Please realize that many of your players are older in age and do know how to properly add, subtract, multiply, and divide numbers. When there are a hundred items being sold for 10 gold pieces and someone purchases 1 item, then does a "refresh" and can see that there are 99 items left to be sold, and the price is still 10 gold pieces.; please do not state that it is proper that the 1 item that was purchase was properly sold at 25 gold pieces. It was not, the players gold account should have only been docked 10 gold pieces.
By your description of how the Bazaar changes prices, is an admittance that the Bazaar is not set up in a fair sale for your players. If the price changes then the player should be notified better, if your programmers were more ambitious regarding their jobs and rewrote the Bazaar math programming. For instance, if there are 100 tiger lilies being sold for 20 gold pieces, and a player wants to purchase say 10, if the price changes in between the 10 lilies, the the player should be notified. The Confirm Sale box could like something like:
4 Tiger Lilies sold at 20 gold pieces 6 Tiger Lilies sold at 30 gold pieces
Grand Total of Sale = 50 gold pieces
For further player fairness there should also "+/- check boxes" next to each item being sold, so if the player has the second chance to change their mind on how much they want to purchase. If the player decides that they do not want to be charges 30 gold pieces for 6 of the Tiger Lilies, then he or she can then check (or change) the boxes next to the changed price items they are about to confirm. If the player only wants to purchase 4 Tiger Lilies they have a last chance to do so, and thereby changing the Grand Total and only purchase 4 Tiger Lilies at 20 gold pieces. (Maybe the player does not mind the price change, but may want to purchase 4 items at 20 gold pieces, and only 3 additional items (instead of 6) at the price change of 30 gold pieces. This is where the small "=/-" boxes will be beneficial to your players!) This way the player has the fair opportunity to budget his or her gold or crown accounts for other items in the game.
The brown Confirm Sale box is huge, please do not state that it would be too hard to add better math wording inside that huge brown box. As the Bazaar stands now without the options I proposed above, the players are at an unfair disadvantage, and the only ones benefiting is the gaming company Wizard 101 and/or KingsIsle Entertainment, Inc. There is not even Yes or No buttons in the Confirm Sale boxes as it stands now, which can be interpreted as a forced confirmation, since the player does not have the true option of backing out of the deal, when he or she sees a huge difference in the Grand Total price then what they really wanted or thought they were going to spend. (Clicking the upper right corner "x" box in the Confirm Sale box does not always guarantee that the sale will be canceled if the player wants to back out of the deal.)
Please do the right thing and play fair, by fixing and eliminating the unfair sales disadvantage in the Bazaar. When it comes to business, putting your customers at a large and blatant financial disadvantage, only serves to discourage the loyalty of your customers; which leads them to decide not to continue or renew their paid memberships. This game is good, but like any company, greed by the gaming manufacturer(s) is a bad business decision.
There are thousands of games being produced at relatively fast rates that are willing to produce better 'fair-play" options for their members. Do not let your greed mistakenly play into the hands of your competitors! Just like in any business market, eventually your competitors could get the upper-financial advantage, by welcoming many of your paying members that have become tired of being taken advantage of, due to your greed!
There are thousands of games being produced at relatively fast rates that are willing to produce better 'fair-play" options for their members. Do not let your greed mistakenly play into the hands of your competitors! Just like in any business market, eventually your competitors could get the upper-financial advantage, by welcoming many of your paying members that have become tired of being taken advantage of, due to your greed!
Greed? How does KI benefit by taking more of your gold? You already pay a monthly fee no matter how much time is spent farming for more gold. The accusations are not even large amounts of gold at that. The bazaar is not broken, nor is it rigged to "steal" your gold from you. There is a communication latency in transactions that most MMOs have when hundreds of transactions are occurring in a span of a few seconds, especially in-demand items. That latency is dependent upon multiple factors including the users computer and internet speed, factors that have nothing to do with KI at all!
I for one, am a wizard that was around before the bazaar was. Even if the bazaar was taking a cut off my gold transactions it is well worth it. I remember the days when you could only get items by doing the work yourself. You could only trade treasure cards and your junk was sold at regular merchants for chump change. Now I get gold at fluctuating prices, but always greater than merchants offers. I also have a selection of gear and reagents that I don't have to spend hours on end farming or collecting myself.
Maybe KI should remove the bazaar for awhile so some wizards can appreciate a very valuable service.
It seems that the opening poster is accusing KingsIsle of deliberately cheating players out of gold, and in the process is somehow benefiting financially from it. How they profit from the taking of gold is a mystery to me and probably to others.
I am also an older person, with considerable (30+ years) experience in statistical analysis, probability, game theory, etc. I spent about an hour and about 20,000 gold in the Bazaar, trying to replicate any of the problems that were claimed to exist. If there was a blatant bug there, I would have found it. I found none of the problems that the opening poster complained about. Everything worked as it was supposed to, down to the last gold piece.
