My story of market building

[Fostik]

I decided to write a kind of essay about my experience with market hosting, and answer some questions about it.

Who am I and what was my team?
You may know me as zunzon, usually my village is called Aperture Science. Here in Aperture Science we always experimented in village structure, and on world 13 I decided to try to spread over some area of our continent with smaller villages. There are always pros and cons in different architecture of village organization, this particular one led us to the need of having a central hub for everyone, and also brought to us the ability to rise: every village found new friends and unique resources that we would not have living in mono-village, but also we moved away from each other.
The main village Aperture Science was only for 3 people: me, my girlfriend, and friend of mine Scorn (may also be called Imba or Imbascorn in chats).

I wasn’t planning to build a market in this world, but Scorn found a pretty decent leaf ore patch on level 5 mine, with a final outcome of 25 gold bars. First we traded 10 of them for tokens, but then I decided to build a market instead of public hub and use the rest of them as a kickstart.

I planned it by myself, and built it with the help of my girlfriend, that’s why the market was quite small: everything you saw was supported by just two players. This indeed affected my development in the game, so I was totally behind even average qualities and stats.

Linch Market?
Been thinking a lot about market name with my gf, and we decided to name it after thingwall. Thingwall named Linchik formed a name Linch Market, we also decided to use styles of David Lynch for discord channel as a reference.
Coins were named Linchik Coins, in russian/ukrainian language we have word ending ‘ik’ to form diminutive version of word, akin to small part of Linch Market - Linchik Coin.
Gold and silver have been used as main currencies since metals are valuable, not invented bicycle here.

What was the purpose of the market?
As a mediocre player I am not focused on quality or being in the list of top players, but instead I’m keen on community hubs in this game, and other social projects.
I decided to create a platform where any player will have access to trading, and provide any quality goods for a price they find affordable.
People often criticized market for having pretty mediocre quality goods being sold, but since I’m not at the party of players who continuously spiraling quality, and my aim was to have spread of offers for different level player, whether it’s newbie sprucecap or developing player, I am happy when market has q100, q200, and q300 pickaxes being offered for different scale prices.
This approach paid off, since market worked for 95% of players that are enough with average quality stuff for available prices, rather than work on other 5% who wants top items to be sold for feet pics or beyond.

How was it planned?
First of all I contacted Tuz and Axucs to receive their thoughts about things they would change or do better in previous projects.
One of the most important insight was to go with smaller houses - players usually struggle to fill all the barter stands, so that I decided that this is just excess work to build large plots, and decided to create more plots for 2 barter stands.
I decided that I will not be able to build a big project, I was low on cloth that time, so I won't extend village either, hence market was designed to be 100x100, and I started to plan this space effectively.
I’ve used draw.io to create a plan, where 1 pixel of the tool equals one tile. I prepared templates of 2, 4, 8 and 12 barter stands figure presets and started to plan how to place them effectively on available territory.

Market plan looked like this:

There even was a plan for market extension. I draw it when market hit maximum numbers of traders, and I was close to run out of space.

However there was other active markets, adding charter stones had to wait another 5 months, and online were actively declining by the middle of summer, so I decided to leave it as it is.

Charter stone impact for market
Since charter stone were revamped to the game, market popularity grown significantly.
Previously market used it’s closest thingwall Linchik to jump into, and traveling here were quite unsafe - it was always been camped by someone.
Since charters added, in 3 days more people joined discord server than 3 months before it. Little after all inactive trading plots were replaced with active traders, and soon after that market touched it’s limit of traders, there was a queue for free barter stands.
My personal take is that charters significantly increased popularity of market.


Some summaries of market
Total Gold Linchik Coins printed: 100900
Total Silver Linchik Coins printed: 25500
Total discord server dwellers: 200+
Total vendors traded on market: 52

Gold stonks:


Silver stonks:


Kudos!
Thanks to yoda#3763 for helping with swaggy market weekly reports, and also helping me to compile market parser.
Thanks to Kerath#8367 for creating a service to display market offerings and client parser for market.
Thanks to Tuz and Axucs#0055 for providing me insights of market management on examples of Community Fair.

Thanks to everyone who were first traders on this market, this was a leap of trust for you, but was decisive for the market to receive trust and attract players.

Thanks to every player participating in this project, you took part in a quite interesting and unintuitive way to play this game. It was a lot of fun for me to manage such project.

[Pommfritz]

Cool that your idea turned into a market, thanks for hosting it!

[shubla]

1009 gold bars? Thats a lot of gold!
Did you sell coins with 1:1 ratio? Interesting that currency based in gold works.

[Fostik]

1009 gold bars? Thats a lot of gold!
Did you sell coins with 1:1 ratio? Interesting that currency based in gold works.

At the first place it was 90 coins per bar, i.e. 10% fee on new currency that comes to the market, initially I wanted to make my own profit of owning market from it, but it only worked to partially cover silver coin exchange, which is a big sink for gold by design - people are easier to farm gold with selling silver, and not much people needed silver that time to buy it.
On Dec 03 I've removed all fees as well as coin exchange, and all coins to bar ratios were just 100:1.

[Pommfritz]

I liked the version where 1 bar is 100 coins much better you'll probably also make more coins for yourself if you make it easier for people to trade (for example without fees).
I didn't know the silver to gold exchange would cost you gold tho but doesn't that mean the ratio was wrong if you made a loss doing that? xd

[Fostik]

I didn't know the silver to gold exchange would cost you gold tho but doesn't that mean the ratio was wrong if you made a loss doing that? xd

That's a good point, but I'd say whatever exchange rate is, it'll work in one side only most of the times.

[MagicManICT]

Thanks for sharing! I'm impressed it was just you and your gf building it.

As far as the gold:silver ratio, it brings up more than a few questions jorb and loftar would have to answer.

[shubla]

At the first place it was 90 coins per bar, i.e. 10% fee on new currency that comes to the market,

Interesting that people will take such deals. I would rather build my own market than pay 10%.

[Phaen]

Thanks for the write up.

Do you plan on running a market in the future?

Did anyone try to get you to pay for "protection"?

Were there any stall-seekers you turned away for reasons not related to the stands being full?

[Fostik]

Thanks for the write up.

Do you plan on running a market in the future?

Did anyone try to get you to pay for "protection"?

Were there any stall-seekers you turned away for reasons not related to the stands being full?

Not sure about future plans, definitely will not do this again with same people capacity - it was a second job to manage and support everything

Never received racket attempts

There was a cases when I regretted that gave place to someone who were not trading good enough on this space (i.e. requested a lot of stalls, but not using all of them), there even was cases when people take stalls but never use it, nevertheless never rejected anyone since I followed my own agreement. The only reason I released stalls from traders is long inactivity.