ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

I used to play MUD's back in the days. Thats sortof... text MMORPGs.
Anyways, the point is that my favorite one, Medievia, (and countless others)
had this nice AUCTION feature.

If you found an item you didnt need, you simply typed:

"Auction <item> <price>"

and in chat (the auction channel), the item would show:

"Darkgod is selling <ITEM>. Starting bid: 500"

I would go "bid 700" and the game would wait a few moments for other bids. If none, the
item is teleported to my inventory. The fun aspect was trying to get hold of the freak
rolls, like the best "hammer of the deep bellow" with the highest dmg-roll, and then try
to get best-in-slot for all your gear.

Im not sure how this would work when it comes to grinding money, since mobs dont really
respawn... but I know it would finally give some value to money, as well as something fun
to do when bored - stalking the auction for that one eq. that is awesome for your build.

Maybe its not a good idea in roguelikes, where you character isnt persistant, but on the
other hand you have a finite amount of money, so purchases here would really have to be
well-thought - they matter a lot more when you cant grind infinite money somewhere.
Oh, and the game takes a fee to enlist auctions, to prevent crap from going up there spamming.

Your thoughts?

*Edit* I agree this would blow balance out of the water, and take away from the excitment of finally
getting a good drop. Now, if only I could find how to delete a topic...

I don't like it. Part of the game balance is that a large majority of the items you find are completely useless to you. For example, a high level character clearing out the Prides can easily get dozens of double-ego voratun weapons, with none of them being useful. Instead of just transmogging them, that player could sell them for 50 gold a piece, which is 2-3 times the transmog price, and around 1/10 the purchase price.

Those could then be bought by low level characters and drastically increase their power, making the early-game ridiculously easy, by using cast-off tier 4/5 equipment. The only ways I see of balancing this is to add more restrictions to item use, or else drop loot amounts a lot (which would cripple single-player characters).

I would really hate a feature like this personally :/ I'm not fond of the current item transfer between characters as is. It breaks immersion.

Yeah...at least with the Item Vault, it's your item, and you're storing it either at a loss to your current character, or because your current character literally can't use it. In either case, your current character doesn't net a gain. Just later ones.

So you're borrowing a little from your current character to get a lot, or a lot to get a lot, but either way it's far in the future and restricted only to things you, personally, have found.

This is just wide open and can net you tons of short term benefit. Kinda dull.

How about implementing this feature in Infinite Dungeons? Balance isn't much of a problem since you just have to go down few floors to find things challenging again, and money would be infinite to farm if you can live long enough.

Rather see something like that forge addon implemented, m'self. Or just said addon cleaned up a bit/updated and included in the ID campaign. Benefiting from other players efforts just seems a bit off for a RL, I guess. Information is one thing, outright loot a bit too far.