Black Market

@ravenclaw214 said in Black Market:

@fiow-shot
This would create something similar to account buying. People would make you pay actual money to meet up and sell a rare item. This could also lead to people getting scammed by people who claim to have it.

I dunno, I kinda like the idea if safeguards were built in to avoid it.

Suppose we had a hybrid version of the quest board that was shared across all servers.

Pirate A has a "Golden Sailor Wheel" he earned from one of the many anniversary events the game has put on. He doesn't care for it, it's just gathering dust in his customization chest and he'd rather have doubloons for it to buy some of those sweet recently released seasonal cosmetics he missed. He decides a good cost for it would be 1,400 doubloons. A subjective quantity, but hey, the only two people who care about the monetary value of the item are the pirate selling it and the prospective buyer.

So with a value and currency selected, Pirate A posts it to the 'black market' board (this could also theoretically breathe new life into the quest board if the devs decide to use it for both purposes).

There are safeguards built into this system to avoid bad faith dealers or trolls:

You cannot use Ancient Coins (as this would involve real life currency and quickly become like account boosters/sellers), only Gold or Doubloons earned in-game.

When Pirate A posts this item to the 'black market' board, it is instantly removed from his cosmetics inventory at that point. He cannot pull it during a sale or back out midway through to somehow get paid and avoid giving it up.

Like an eBay listing, any items you post to a 'black market' board stay active for a set period of time (10 days, 15 days, 30, days etc. however long Rare decides a listing should last). Pirate A is unable to change, raise, lower, adjust or remove the listing once it has been posted.

If the listing ends without another pirate making that purchase, the item is returned to Pirate A's inventory, no harm no foul. He is then able to repost it with the same or different value or currency for another 10/15/30/however many days.

If Pitate B decides he's got doubloons out the yin-yang and wants the "Golden Sailor Wheel", he selects it and purchases it. The item is immediately transferred into his inventory, the 1,400 doubloons are immediately removed from his inventory and the next time Pirate A logs into Sea of Thieves his account is credited the 1,400 doubloons like when you complete an hour of Insiders or when someone digs up a treasure you posted.

First come, first serve; no haggling or trying to beat someone's bid like you're at an auction. If you sell something at 500 gold and then they turn around and sell it for 5,000 to someone else, too bad for you. You don't want to miss something cool, you better check the black market board once every few days.

The only people who would be upset at this idea are the gatekeeping 'Day 1' or 'veteran' pirates who seem to think the word 'devalue' is a magically valid argument to every post involving re-releasing cosmetics because they've conferred an imaginary and entirely arbitrary value on something in-game due to it being awarded to someone else in a way they don't approve of.