@Gothix
And you just described perfectly the reason why portal towns will be by default the trading hubs.
The reason why I dislike the auction system (the one with bids) is that you'll need to camp the market for the last few minutes because otherwise someone will outbid you by 1% or even 1 gold, plus often I'll want items instantly.
@GamerSeuss said in Item dropped from mobs:
I'm okay with these kinds of drops, but not dropping magic items or things the creature wouldn't be using is silly. A Troll goes at me with a huge Maul, then the Maul drops, I'm cool with that! Goblins dropping Goblin Armor suits and primative weapons and poisons is fine as well.
Well, as I said in the OP, some people think everything should be crafted by players, so we shouldn't have full item drops. It's not about if it makes sense for a bear to drop swords, but about how it affects the economy. In fact, I'm also in that camp. I just tried to offer a solution in which everything is crafted by the players, yet we have occasional item drops from mobs.
Awesome of you guys to share this! We should have a thread dedicated to these resources.
@Gothix
Hmm, that's how they said the marketplace will work? I thought it's just sell/buy orders, not an actual auction as you described.
@GamerSeuss
The towns with good positioning will become commercial hubs regardless because more people will visit them, which means they already get an economic boost from their crafting facilities fees. A hardly accessible town can't compete with that regardless of how they tax. If you ever played Albion, think about the days when Caerleon was the BZ portal -> everyone was complaining about Caerleon mafia, yet everyone still traded and crafted there.
We don't know everything about how powerful will the most expensive gear be in the release, how exactly sieges will work out or how the politics will pan out. The main reason why I don't want to boost the economies of these well-position towns is that if the sieges are tied to how powerful the economies are, they will steamroll and take over the other towns, or bully them into joining their alliance.
@GamerSeuss
You can go around that and also include realism. For example, these items can be distributed only to some groups of mobs (humanoids, zombies, skeletons - which, at least at this point, are abundant). Then they can create thematic areas in which these items don't drop per se from mobs, but are obtained from the environment. For example, there can be an area called "the cursed battlefield", where we fight ghosts and vultures and so on, but from time to time we can find corpses, which are basically thematic chests, which can drop coins, mats, and maybe such an item from the deity donation pool.
By the way, since all these items come from the donations pool, the full drops will be quite rare.
I know there was a lot of talk about this on the forums: some people say everything should be crafted by players, while others claimed that it's boring to never get full item drops from mobs. To my understanding, you can give offerings to gods in Fractured in order to change karma, gain a blessing, or start a divine quest. What if, instead of coins, we could donate items that go to a global item pool? Whenever a monster is killed, there's a chance they will drop one of the donated items. This way monsters can drop items from time to time, yet everything is still crafted by the players.
@Gothix
Why exactly do you dislike the listing fees and why is selling stacks a bad thing? If I farm a certain area or own a certain crafting station, of course I'm gonna sell a lot of a certain item because that's what I have...
That fixes everything, and still avoids having listing fees.
It only fixes the problems you listed, which imo are not critical in the first place. The more pressing issues which are not addressed by your suggestions are: having an initial listing fee makes it more difficult for groups of people to play the market and overprice items, as without these taxes they do it risk-free. An initial listing fee creates a bigger monetary sink than end of transaction taxes. Not being able to cancel your sales is terrible if you made a mistake or if we're able to list our items for a longer period of time (let's say 30days).
The more visited towns will generate a lot of money from crafting facilities anyway, so I don't think they should also have a marketplace fee that goes to the treasury as well since it will create too big of an economy boost compared to less visited towns.
@Ostaff said in Coinage and Monster Gold Loot:
Taxes should only be taken out at the end of the sale, and be based upon the amount the item actually sold for,
Yep, this. If you do it as Gothix said, people will try to play the market by putting ridiculous prices on less common stuff that are not actually valuable and hope they sell. In Albion, me and some friends used to buy in bulk all the low demand but rare items (as the first monthly mounts) and then put them again on the AH on 3x price (which would be now the minimum price and it looked like they were in demand). With AH taxes, people can still play the market, but instead of going the absurdly overpriced route, they'd pick something more reasonable to ensure the items actually sell.
Of course that ultimately there will only be a few central markets (located near the inter-planetary gates) and some small ones (located near popular farming areas), but unlike what some claim here I have absolutely no doubt people will prefer AH to trading channel in the vast majority of the time. The only time when this doesn't apply is when you have a very hard to sell and terribly expensive item.
Looks great! I'm glad we finally have horses, but this also means we can build and explore the new content a lot faster than in the previous tests.
Thanks and congratz everyone! 
PS: Over 20% of my points are from weekly drawings.
@TrueCrimsonFTW
The markets will be local. If you sell something in Zenith, only the people who travel physically to the marketplace of that town can buy it. Demand and supply will be different in different towns (or maybe even biomes), so most likely items will have different values in different towns.
^ The devs said towns are a big coin sink and the auction houses / markets will only work with coins, so they will be a big part of the game. As in any other game, everything will be very cheap at launch and will become progressively more expensive until the market stabilizes. Using the auction house is SO MUCH easier and sometimes safer than meeting with people and trading.
@gsun2866
"Successful MMO" is a very broad thing. This is a niche game inspired by Ultima, with a different focus from ESO. The main idea of losing gear when dying is to keep the economy alive without the need of adding new top tier items all the time.
@Jetah
It's october right now here, and so is in Italy. 
@Umbaalo human was the only playable race so far. If you farm bears and deer you can get their heads as drops and there are helmets that can be crafted from these. What you most likely saw was a human wearing one of these helmets.
@Ostaff we already know the races of Fractured and they are not the traditional ones. What I'm saying is that I hope they put more thought in the aesthetic of each race, so deerkin don't just look like human with deer horns and bearkin don't look like furry bodybuilders.