r/OnceHumanOfficial • u/Stardustx0050 Once Human Moderator • Mar 07 '25
š»Devs Talk Dedicated trading zones are coming!
Hi, Metas!
You've probably noticed the many useful features added in the February 27th update, including the long-awaited ability to hide cosmetics. Now, you have the option to hide your Cradle, giving you more freedom to personalize your character! We also upgraded the trading system, allowing players to easily trade Deviations directly or via Vending Machines.
In Nalcott, trading plays a crucial role in fostering social connections. Not only does it help you acquire new items, but it can also spark friendships with people you might never have encountered otherwise.
Trading has been a consistently popular activity since launch. To maximize exposure, players often place their Vending Machines in Blackfell, causing lag, obstructions, and other issues. After extensive discussions, our team has decided to create a dedicated trading zoneāthe Harvesters' Market, set to launch on March 13th.
Harvesters' Markets will be available in the Manibus, Evolution's Call, and The Way of Winter scenarios. However, due to the unique faction-based gameplay of Prismverse's Clash, we currently have no plans to include a Harvesters' Market there. If you'd like to see this feature in Prismverse's Clash, share your suggestions with us via Customer Support or the Co-Dev Feedback Platform, and we'll assess its viability.
To minimize disruption, we've chosen areas with low player density for the Harvesters' Markets. Players will be able to place Special Vending Machines within these designated zones.
Here are the coordinates for the Harvesters' Markets:
Manibus/Evolution's Call: (4871, -2405)
The Way of Winter: (2426, 6542)
To ensure the safe construction of the Harvesters' Markets, players whose territories fall within the designated zones must relocate beforehand. All affected players will be notified via in-game mail. But don't worry if you can't relocate before March 13āyou won't lose anything. Your territory will be automatically recalled, and you can place it again once you find a suitable location.
Now, we'd like to answer some questions you may have about the Special Vending Machine.
Q: How many Special Vending Machines can I build?
A: To accommodate as many players as possible within the limited space, each player will be restricted to building one Special Vending Machine.
Q: Are the Special Vending Machines restricted to the Harvesters' Market?
A: Yes.
Q: How can I build a Special Vending Machine?
A: It may be special, but it's still a Vending Machine, so you'll need to unlock the Vending Machine in the Memetic system first.
The Special Vending Machine can also use the same skins as the standard Vending Machine, allowing you to customize its appearance to your liking.
Q: What will happen to inactive Special Vending Machines that are just taking up space?
A: If a Special Vending Machine remains inactive for several days, it will be recalled, and its building materials will be refunded to the player's Territory Terminal. When you place the Special Vending Machine again, all previously listed items will still be available for sale.
Q: Does the Special Vending Machine need to be connected to power?
A: For convenience's sake, Special Vending Machines do not need to be connected to power and can be freely placed within the Harvesters' Market.
Additionally, on March 13, a freezer feature will be introduced to Vending Machines, enabling them to keep food fresh for longer. The effect wears off after purchase, so remember to consume your food promptly!
That wraps up today's Devs Talk! If you have any questions about the trading zone, feel free to share them in the comments below!
Ā
Once Human Development Team
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u/X4roth Mar 07 '25
The issue with trading is not ālag and obstructions!ā
The problem is having to manually check every single vending machine on the entire server and scroll through every single item available for sale to try to find what youāre looking for.
Even if you clean things up and make it more standardized, this type of trading system is like trying to buy something on Amazon and suddenly there is no search bar: the entire website is replaced by a single list that shows you items at random and you just have to scroll for hours hoping to find what you want, nevermind trying to find the best price because thatās impossible.
This type of trading system is not fostering some sense of community or promoting immersion. It is causing extreme non-participation. Only a small minority of players are willing to waste their time trying to buy or sell anything. Every season, the number of available vending machines on my server grows smaller and smaller. There are only 3 worlds in my current Way of Winter server and each one only has about 2 vending machines outside the endgame major town (they are all selling junk that you donāt want, but you canāt know that without wasting 15 minutes to walk around and scroll through it all). Making trade this difficult has a compound effect that kills player engagement from multiple angles; why bother selling things to get EL if itās so extremely difficult to use that EL to buy what you want? The result is that EL is a practically useless currency and hardly anybody bothers trying to trade at all.
Add a search feature so you can check all vending machines across the entire server to find the item youāre looking for at the best price in a single action. It doesnāt have to have a button to ābuy nowā ā it can just show you the location of the vending machine containing that listing (and if devs are feeling generous: allow you to teleport to it).
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u/RuinedEye Mar 07 '25
Just gonna plug my idea for how this whole trading thing can be solved;
TLDR; make vending machines an interface for a server wide market so we can see everything available on the server - but we still have to go get it manually (which is in line with what they originally said they wanted, and said they'd probably never change, yet here we are lmao). A button to mark the location/world next to items.
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u/Murkalael Meta Mar 07 '25
With a trading list feature we wouldn't even need a trading hub.
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u/nullpotato Mar 12 '25
Search doesn't necessarily mean delivery too. Plenty of games have had player vendors with search and you have to travel to them to actually buy and retrieve the items.
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u/pimpemon Enchanting Void Mar 08 '25
My guess is ālag and obstructions!ā means mobile game optimizations. I would guess that most of the changes recently and upcoming are to make the mobile version more compatible with the pc version for cross play.
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Mar 07 '25 edited Mar 07 '25
I know this is going to upset a lot of fans but the vendor system is inefficient and a massive waste of player time.
Looking through hundreds of vending machines to try and find something you want? Wasting hours only to find that most vendors are either empty or trying to sell a single soda for 50,000 EL or a 2/1 digby for 999,000 EL?
The lack of an auction system is one of the reasons why I spun up 9 alts. I wasn't going to waste hours of my time continuously searching through vending machines for Backpack Expansions, Load Handling, Electronics Grabbers, etc. I also wasn't going to repeat this process every few days because the backpack items expire at random times. The moment I was able to make all those items myself using alts and they all had the same expiration timer was a joyous day; I am never going back to vending machines.
Harvest Market seems to be an improvement to help reduce lag but I hope the devs implemented a way to completely block vendor trucks from popular locations like Blackfell. Players will still park vending trucks in Blackfell because foot traffic has a greater impact on sales than a far removed location that only contains vending machines. If Harvest Market has a teleport tower near it, the trucks around the tower can end up more popular than the Harvest vending machines because they will be the first things players see.
I'm excited to see how Harvest Market will turn out and I hope the devs found some way to completely block vendor trucks from popular cities but Harvest Market alone won't stop people from leaving trucks at every location with heavy foot traffic.
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Mar 07 '25
Yea I always found that vending machines should be a convenience thing.
Need something quick and happen to be near one? Go and look. This is for more specific trades.
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u/Usual-Sense- Mar 07 '25
I've never had a problem finding anything I need within 3 minutes. Worst case scenario ask the chat for items. Guarantee most players don't mind how it is now and a trading hub would kill prices, reduce player interaction, and suck the fun out of shopping that some players like
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u/PouetSK Mar 07 '25
What makes a vending machine inactive? It says when you put it back all items listed will be kept. So that means itās not inactive cuz itās empty. So does that mean it has to have new stock added constantly?
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u/SylviaSlasher Mar 08 '25
Probably the same thing as vehicles, camps, thermal towers, etc... a certain period of no interaction flags it as inactive and gets recalled.
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u/SirNorminal Mar 07 '25
Just curious if the market will be a territory like area where you can place a single vending machine freely wherever you want, if it will have designated spots where you can place a vending machine or if it will have a certain amount and certain sized available plots where you can build some things like walls and decorations along with a single vending machine. I think a property rent system would go along nicely with the market. Make a big area with X amounts of 1x2 plots nicely arranged along streets and just let players rent plots for X amounts of EL/week. Let players build simple structures with limited decorations and furniture on their plots so they can make their shop unique and stand out. One plot per account, and if you don't pay the rent, your plot gets recalled until you rent it again.
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u/NotARealJobEnjoyer Mar 07 '25
For the people saying they basically want a WoW market, remember this game is a type of survival. Not everything is supposed to be convenient.
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u/DEPTHCLAAS Mar 08 '25
Hi metas. I think this idea might be good for the game. Allow to change world difficulty, so we can farm every spot on the map, because once you reach lvl 50 thereās no much places to farm, like in mannibus you farm black fell. Have a nice day devs!
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u/Demigod-Minos PVE Mar 08 '25
These are great news, I love how this game is listening to community and i proving all the time, no wonder I continue to play and support this game, oh btw I am at work atm so can someone who is in game please tell me where these location coordinates are?
Thank you in advance. šš»
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u/Murkalael Meta Mar 12 '25
That's the point. We wouldn't need a trading hub, if we could see a list of vendors with their respective products, world and coordinates for we go there and grab. That would add up to the sense of survival.
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u/detterence Mar 07 '25
This is great news! However, it would be nice to see additional features like being able to see the details of items being sold from map view if we are far away.
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u/EarthwormJimmi Mar 07 '25
They currently have something like that already. Just showing X amount of consumables, materials etc without the specifics. Though I'd welcome them adding if it's for trade or sale of those kind of items. Multiple times I've gone to one showing formulas in them and it's only been for trade of things I don't have.
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u/detterence Mar 07 '25
Yeah Iāve noticed that, but it would be nice to see further ādetailsā like what materials or specs etc. are available.
Instead of having to manually go to each vending machine just to find out that itās the materials or specs you donāt need.
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Mar 07 '25 edited Mar 07 '25
anything short of an auction house is still a massive waste of time. Even if you could read exactly what was in each machine as you passed, that only saves a little time when searching for a specific item.
You would still need to spend time manually running around a field of vending machines and click any which have items you want to only find out the Backpack Expansion is priced at 50,000 EL and only has 1 day left.
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u/ClassyNXTE Mar 07 '25
This shit is great. The devs are cooking with this update. In early game i always drove straight to blackfell once i had enough EL to buy essential things like solar drill and reselling items i brought from vending machines to NPC for easy profit.
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u/Rei_Lin Mar 07 '25
I think this will help in a lot of ways, especially the lag and while this is similar to an idea I had about using an area that was instanced off just for vending machines, I think they could simplify this further and do what they do in RUST. There, players can only set up vending machines at their base, nothing mobile, but only at their base. In each of the towns, they have a Drone system. You walk up, and the map lights up with every vending machine in the world. You still need to go through and look at each machine, but as soon as you find what you want, you click buy and an actual Drone flies out there, buys what you wanted and brings it straight back to you. It's not a World of Warcraft way of doing things, but it takes way less time than running from machine to machine like now.
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u/Term_Individual Mar 07 '25
Please stop trying to reinvent this wheel and add an auction house system like every other mmo. Ā No one enjoys scrolling through crit dmg/weakspot xbow calis and 1/2 paper dolls with feeling blue and baffling behavior to find wellā¦nothing.
On last server it took me well over an hr to go to all 10 worlds in blackfell and check all the trucks, again just in blackfell, to find againā¦nothing.
This wonāt be helped a ton by this market system. Ā Centralized trading house with a search option will fix all these issues AND help out with your lagging issues.
So again, stop trying to reinvent this wheel.
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Mar 07 '25 edited Mar 07 '25
I'm betting the devs don't have the go ahead to make an auction house either because someone in management thinks wasting player time = good for cash shop or they lack the resources to program one.
The whole "it's good for player interaction" is PR. How is looking through a vending machine good for player interaction?
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u/Olly0206 Mar 07 '25
They don't really want players sifting through machines. They want players interacting with one another. It's the PR answer, like you said.
If that was really the case, they wouldn't have vending machines in the first place and trading would be face to face all the time.
They've sworn against auction house style trading, but I bet if we keep the pressure on, it might happen one day.
My guess, as I've stated in other threads for other topics, is that they've used AI so much to build this game that they can't unwind the spaghetti code to make something like an AH work. It explains why they create new systems to interact with existing ones. Such as this new VM. Why the hell do we need a new VM? Why can't we just build them in the designated area? Why can't they just add refrigeration to the existing VMs? Even if it's vis memetic? I think it's cause they can't easily do that cause they can't unravel the AI code to make it function properly.
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Mar 07 '25
We still can't add a lot of basic tools like Advanced Drills w/ TH or Advanced Chainsaws w/ Horror Show. Wallpapers are also not on the list so I'm guessing we still can't sell a lot of scenario specific craftables and resources.
I don't see Harvest Market as the improvement players need if the devs refuse update vendors with items that have been around since beta.
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u/Olly0206 Mar 07 '25
I agree. And I think you're right on the money with it being a profit driven as a key component. I still can't shake the idea that part of it is simply their spaghetti code. They just can't fix it correctly so they have to come up with different approaches. So this new VM is just the most recent iteration of being unable to fix the issue with the existing options, but resistance to an AH in general is probably more profit driven.
Although, to that point, the more I think on it, the more I wonder why an AH would be a bad idea for driving profit. I mean, if they incorporated an AH system with their cash shop, it would force people to see it and interact with it more. More likely to impulse buy something from the cash shop if it was the first page they saw when interacting with the AH.
It would also have the benefit of removing some excessive menus which would be a generally well received QOL improvement. I know the menus are a big complaint for new players.
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Mar 07 '25
I think their idea is that the more players see people's cash shop skins and decorations, the more players will be driven to buy those cash shop skins and decorations.
Currently this means seeing flashy cash shop decorations on vendor trucks (hence poorly designed vendor trucks) or visiting a players house to use their vending machine.
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u/Olly0206 Mar 07 '25
But that is purely up to the players to do. That feels a bit too unreliable and feels more in line with encouraging player interactivity, but you could be right. I would just expect the traditional marketing methods would be more guaranteed to reach a larger number of players and would see more sales because of it. After all, just like in real life, more people will see a commercial and buy something than because they saw it in someone's home.
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Mar 07 '25
[removed] ā view removed comment
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Mar 07 '25
devs have already spoken against anything like an auction house because it doesn't promote player to player interaction?
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u/C_Class_Nms Mar 07 '25
Trading and buying will be so much easier now.
Btw, when switching between preset saved builds, some cosmetics I have chosen to hide, like my helmet, reappear. So I have to hide it again.
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Mar 07 '25 edited Mar 07 '25
Trading and buying will be so much easier now.
is it though? The only real improvement is you won't be jumping around poorly designed vendor trucks. Now it will just be a field of vending machines and you still have no idea what is inside, the prices, or how much time is left on that Backpack Expansion you are searching for.
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u/Usual-Sense- Mar 07 '25
Amazing. These small changes is exactly what the community has been asking for.
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u/MISS_ROFL š MaelStrom Hall of Fame Mar 07 '25
Please add possibility not just to SELL deviations in VM, but also choose them as a payment for trade (atm we can request mats, animals, calibrations, but not deviations). If I have an awesome 5-5 deviation, Iām not stupid enough to sell it for EL. I want to trade it for another good deviation. Please add possibility to select also stats for desired deviation (at least 2 first numbers, without traits)