Forums » General Pantheon Discussion

Crafting, economics, and materials

    • 1428 posts
    September 16, 2019 8:29 AM PDT

    Manouk said:

    thankyuothankyouthankyou! 

    :D  very good sir.  any emergent play promoting pvp is great ^______^  the silk road wouldn't be a silk road if it were not fraught with danger.  survive the robbers, fear the competition.

    • 2752 posts
    September 16, 2019 9:54 AM PDT

    dorotea said:

    If there are just two or three markets - which may or may not be *your* assumption - I come a large way to your emphasis. Why bother in the first place? Anyone serious will have a "market toon" at each of them and the travel time is likely to be short between them at their closest points. If they are continental markets, it will be as simple as go from market in a port town, take a ship, arrive at market in a port town on another continent.

    That also assumes that players have access to their money across all their characters when it could only be bank item slots (or nothing at all) that are shared between alts. Doesn't matter if you can see all the markets with alts if your money is stuck on a character across the world and possibly lacking the faction to even enter whichever regions cities. 

    • 1921 posts
    September 16, 2019 10:20 AM PDT

    It actually does matter.  The knowledge that you gain from seeing all those markets with all those alts is what makes arbitrage impossible.
    Arbitrage only works if your customers are ignorant of the pricing disparity.
    By having the alts there, so they can see the prices (in the most inefficient, unrealistic implementation), that exact thing makes arbitrage impossible.
    Why? Because the ignorance that it relies on? It's gone.

    I say inefficient and unrealistic because each player wouldn't need to rely on parking an alt at each market. 
    Today, (and at any point in the future) a single set of accounts would monitor all the prices in real time and post them to a globally shared web site.
    And provide history and searchable prices.
    Just like tlpauctions.com does for every EQ1 TLP server, and has for years.

    • 1428 posts
    September 16, 2019 11:01 AM PDT

    vjek said:

    It actually does matter.  The knowledge that you gain from seeing all those markets with all those alts is what makes arbitrage impossible.
    Arbitrage only works if your customers are ignorant of the pricing disparity.
    By having the alts there, so they can see the prices (in the most inefficient, unrealistic implementation), that exact thing makes arbitrage impossible.
    Why? Because the ignorance that it relies on? It's gone.

    I say inefficient and unrealistic because each player wouldn't need to rely on parking an alt at each market. 
    Today, (and at any point in the future) a single set of accounts would monitor all the prices in real time and post them to a globally shared web site.
    And provide history and searchable prices.
    Just like tlpauctions.com does for every EQ1 TLP server, and has for years.

    i agree that arbitrage is outdated now that information is accessible to all.

    sharing thoughts here:

    regional markets is going to be better for pve players

    continental markets is going to be better for pvp players

     

    what's that meme?  change my mind.

    • 1785 posts
    September 16, 2019 11:50 AM PDT

    Just going to throw this out there.  What if:

    1) Each major home city operates an "Exchange", which is essentially an auction house.

    - Players can sell items on this exchange up to a certain value (let's say 100 gold just for example purposes).  The exchange will not allow you to list anything higher than that.

    - Players can place orders to buy items on the exchange as well (for example, buy 50 wolf pelts at 10 silver each).

    - The exchange charges a listing fee for both types of transactions.  These fees are influenced by faction.  Players may only have up to 10 transactions (of any type) active on a single exchange at a time.  There are minimum faction requirements for using a particular race's exchange, so if the Dark Myr don't like you, you're not buying or selling on their exchange.  

    - Players browsing the exchange can see all current items available for sale, as well as all available purchase contracts, within THAT exchange only.  To see a different exchange, they would need to travel.

    - Each exchange covers the major city it originates in as well as exchange sites in nearby towns associated with that player race.  For example, there might be an exchange broker in Avendyr's Pass, affiliated with the Thronefast exchange.

     

    2) In each major home city as well as in outlying towns and villages there are markets with a number of stalls available.  Players may rent one of these stalls to spawn an NPC who will act as a broker to sell their wares.  This NPC broker allows items to be listed for any price the game will support - so you could use it to try and sell that super rare item for 10k platinum if you so desired.

    - Rent for the stall is changed on a weekly basis.  NPC vendors take a percentage of each item's sale price when the sale occurs as well.  Selling via NPCs is more expensive than using the Exchange, but the NPC may list up to 50 items for sale

    - A character may only operate one NPC anywhere in the world at a time.

    - The number of stalls available varies - small villages may only have a dozen, cities may have a hundred scattered around.  Fees for renting a stall increase are however less expensive in smaller towns/villages, and more expensive in cities.  Also, as the number of available stalls decreases, the rental fees for all stalls in that city/town/village increase.

    - NPCs/stalls can be customized to some degree by the player to better reflect what they're selling (for example, you could give your NPC broker a "Weapons Dealer" title).

     

     

    3) Players are of course free to use local or global chat channels, discord, or whatever to sell things to each other without fees.

     

    Will players likely use bots/scripting/whatever to populate a website or discord with information about who is selling what, where?  Yes.  There is no way to prevent this and still allow currency-based transactions, even if a blind auction system were to be used (although I do hope that anyone running a market bot will get their account banned in very short order).

    Will it matter for the vast majority of things that people buy and sell, assuming that travel is "meaningful" enough to be inconvenient?  That's the question.

    My experience tells me that "average" MMORPG players are not going to travel to get a better price unless it's an extremely high value item, or travel is easy/non-meaningful.  Most people have limited time available and aren't going to cross half the world just to pay 10 silver less for that cloak they were after, especially if they're focused on other things (like vertical or horizontal progression) as well.  They will pay for convenience as long as prices are reasonable.

    My experience also tells me that people selling very high-value items (the stuff that people would be most likely to travel for) won't want to pay a percentage-based fee on the sale and would much rather negotiate with their buyers via chat and do the transaction face to face.


    This post was edited by Nephele at September 16, 2019 11:50 AM PDT
    • 1428 posts
    September 16, 2019 12:09 PM PDT

    @nephele

     

    system one is very similar to bdo economy, however it is 'continental'.  under this system it favors pvp contesting of resources, but pve when it comes to selling.  even it it were regionalized, the most profitable areas will be under contention.

     

    system two sounds like final fantasy 14 economy.  this setup is pretty favorable for players engaging more into the lifeskill/profession.  it's more pve favored since two players in different regions making the same product won't be directly cut into each other's profit margins ~edit:  as much~.  so pve for contesting resources, more pvp when it comes to selling.

     

    system three is is pure full on pvp on all levels, (marketing, gathering, information, sabotage, subetefuge, etc)  i personally like all three.  they all have their pros and cons.

    now if i was a brad and my vision is to create a more pve friendly experience, i'd go with a regional market.

    if i wanted savages running amuck i'd go with a continental market.

     


    This post was edited by NoJuiceViscosity at September 16, 2019 12:42 PM PDT
    • 1785 posts
    September 16, 2019 12:44 PM PDT

    Just in case it wasn't clear, it was my intent that all three of those things are implemented/available side-by-side within the game. :)

    • 1428 posts
    September 16, 2019 1:05 PM PDT

    Nephele said:

    Just in case it wasn't clear, it was my intent that all three of those things are implemented/available side-by-side within the game. :)

    oh i gotcha.

    system 1 global market place with taxes and a fixed price for goods

    system 2 local market place with rental fee with adjustable prices

    system 3 is player to player transaction

     

    hm... system 1 and 2 are pretty bandwidth intensive.  (i'm just thinking about how bdo, wow, ff14 markets work and they lag quite a bit from time to time.)  i'm not sure how well it'll do if i put both systems in place.  3 is fine to throw in there with 1 or 2.

     

    i mean it would be cool to have all 3 then you cater to everyone.  i think it'll take too much money to have resources in order to run both 1 and 2.

    (disclaimer i'm not an expert in networking and making a statement based on a personal observation.  feel free to share any information if you know more about the matter than i.)


    This post was edited by NoJuiceViscosity at September 16, 2019 1:15 PM PDT
    • 1785 posts
    September 16, 2019 1:47 PM PDT

    I don't claim to know VR's available resources, but as far as I know, implementing a regional consignment (auction house) system isn't any harder from a technical perspective than implementing a global one.  Everything else being equal, you still have to plan for the same level of transactional volume, I/O operations, and so on.  The only real difference is that instead of one big monolithic database for the system you're working with 9-10 smaller ones, but they're all structurally identical, so there's not really a significant amount of development time there that I can see.  From an implementation point of view, it just means that when a world builder drops an exchange broker in the world they have to designate which exchange that broker connects to.

    As far as an NPC vendor system, there is obviously dev time associated with making that work.  From a database perspective, each NPC would get an ID, that links to a table in a master database that says "here's what NPC 7714398 has for sale".  The rest of the plumbing from a database perspective is fairly straightforward since most of your interactions would be "add this line item" or "delete this line item" or potentially "change one of these three values associated with this line item" in the table.

    Database I/O might get tricky depending on how many vendors there are globally, but given that any MMORPG is all about database I/O already, and given that you'd likely be talking about numbers in the low-mid thousands in total, that's probably not a significant cost burden.  To put it in human terms:  In a fully populated Pantheon, millions of combat interactions happen every minute.  A few thousand NPC vendors getting used for purchases is a drop in the bucket compared to that :)

    So anyway, I don't think that technical resources would be an issue.  Developer time, maybe, but not any more so than anything else.  The only people in a position to tell us, either way, would be VR themselves.

    I had two points with posting the "sytems" by the way - first, to show that it should be possible to mitigate the problems that vjek calls out and achieve working regional markets by simply understanding what drives players to build and use out-of-game websites to find better market deals, and to account for that.  Second, to point out that the best answer here is probably a multi-level approach so that you're not trying to design a solution to be one-size-fits-all.

    I'm going to go back to pretending that I am not technical now :)

    • 287 posts
    September 16, 2019 2:07 PM PDT

    stellarmind said:

    Manouk said:

    thankyuothankyouthankyou! 

    :D  very good sir.  any emergent play promoting pvp is great ^______^  the silk road wouldn't be a silk road if it were not fraught with danger.  survive the robbers, fear the competition.

    The trouble with a "silk road" in a game like this is in the risk vs reward.  IRL, the risk is death and the reward is some added wealth.  In-game the risk is respawn/rez sickness/corpse run and the reward is moderate wealth.  It's not anywhere close to the same.  To balance this the caravan would have to only be lootable to 10% or some small number.  Otherwise this would become the single most profitable venture in the game and everyone would become robber barons.

    • 1428 posts
    September 16, 2019 2:08 PM PDT

    Nephele said:

    I had two points with posting the "sytems" by the way - first, to show that it should be possible to mitigate the problems that vjek calls out and achieve working regional markets by simply understanding what drives players to build and use out-of-game websites to find better market deals, and to account for that.  Second, to point out that the best answer here is probably a multi-level approach so that you're not trying to design a solution to be one-size-fits-all.

    I'm going to go back to pretending that I am not technical now :)

     

    forgive my pedestrian visualization here:

    system 1 is like mega grocery store

    system 2 is like a french market

    system 3 is a guy selling goods on the back of his truck

     

    assuming it is no biggie on the tech side, system 1 and 2 must be isolated from one another (if i want both of them in game put system 1 in major cities put 2 in smaller more out the way towns).  i have a vague idea of why, but i know french markets never set up next to a mega grocery store.

     

    oh i forget to add that mailing in items also need to be restricted or control in some way or else vandraad will come in and abuse (probably crash) both systems.


    This post was edited by NoJuiceViscosity at September 16, 2019 2:35 PM PDT
    • 1428 posts
    September 16, 2019 2:26 PM PDT

    Akilae said:

    stellarmind said:

    Manouk said:

    thankyuothankyouthankyou! 

    :D  very good sir.  any emergent play promoting pvp is great ^______^  the silk road wouldn't be a silk road if it were not fraught with danger.  survive the robbers, fear the competition.

    The trouble with a "silk road" in a game like this is in the risk vs reward.  IRL, the risk is death and the reward is some added wealth.  In-game the risk is respawn/rez sickness/corpse run and the reward is moderate wealth.  It's not anywhere close to the same.  To balance this the caravan would have to only be lootable to 10% or some small number.  Otherwise this would become the single most profitable venture in the game and everyone would become robber barons.

    oh i was thinking about it differently.  now this really isn't going to matter on pve servers as far as transportation is concerned... everyone is going to be busy arguing at the resource, spots taken and i was here first and dadada, da da~

    this really only is a pvp thing and most likely players can't loot players.  the whole act of killing someone on the silk road is more or less.... sending a message.  fellow savages know what i'm talking about ;)


    This post was edited by NoJuiceViscosity at September 16, 2019 2:27 PM PDT
    • 2138 posts
    September 16, 2019 2:32 PM PDT

    stellarmind said:

    Manouk said:

    thankyuothankyouthankyou! 

    :D  very good sir.  any emergent play promoting pvp is great ^______^  the silk road wouldn't be a silk road if it were not fraught with danger.  survive the robbers, fear the competition.

    to be clear, I was saying thankyouthankyouthankyou to my imaginary PuG members who decided in RL to come back the next day to help me get to the geode so I could smith in the special forge for which I gave them acclimation stuffs I was hauling all that time, instead of quitting and heading out for that game session.

    but your thing is good, too :)

    • 1428 posts
    September 16, 2019 2:38 PM PDT

    Manouk said:

    stellarmind said:

    Manouk said:

    thankyuothankyouthankyou! 

    :D  very good sir.  any emergent play promoting pvp is great ^______^  the silk road wouldn't be a silk road if it were not fraught with danger.  survive the robbers, fear the competition.

    to be clear, I was saying thankyouthankyouthankyou to my imaginary PuG members who decided in RL to come back the next day to help me get to the geode so I could smith in the special forge for which I gave them acclimation stuffs I was hauling all that time, instead of quitting and heading out for that game session.

    but your thing is good, too :)

    you have voices in your head to huh?  sniff sniff someone else understands me.

    • 1921 posts
    September 16, 2019 3:19 PM PDT

    Nephele said:

    Just going to throw this out there.  What if: ...
    1) I agree in principle with a commodities vs. non-commodities market.  I believe they should be treated separately.
    I also believe currency should not be involved, but rather trade only.  I have, I want.  I have 10 wood, I want 10 ore.  You give me 10 ore, I give you 10 wood, via escrow NPC's. Done.
    I don't think racial restrictions would provide a solution, as outlined.  Players would simply pick a race (like Humans) and everyone would only use the Human market for everything.  There is a convenience expectation here; customers paying for 'fun'.  If it's not fun, they'll make their own fun. (see #2 below)
    I agree with limits, both concurrency and temporal, and non-refundable listing fees based on a percentage of price.
    Transactions without unavoidable temporal delays facilitate HFT, so that's something to consider.

    2) is what Shroud tried.  Didn't work there, either.  The reasons are many, but the biggest one?  No-one used it.
    And I don't mean people didn't go to vendors, or have NPC vendors on their property.  I mean, the average player simply didn't check the 50, 100, or more vendors in every zone.  They certainly didn't travel to 40 different zones looking for something.  The economy stalled. (if it ever started)
    This is what drives players to /join auction and simply use tlpauctions.  It's what drives it in EQ1 TLP servers.
    Global.  Searchable.  Historical.  It has to be at least some of that, or players will simply join the global chat channel and use an external web site.
    See Project Gorgon for other issues with stalls. (that were resolved by making stalls irrelevent)

    3) I appreciate the optimism that players won't do this in Pantheon.  Yet, they do it, every time a TLP server launches, right until the Bazaar is launched, and the in-game solution has global and searchable.  It's just so incredibly easy now, there is no reason not to.  It's elegant, instant, and requires almost nothing in the way of infrastructure or cost.  It's literally the 'cost' of parsing one log file and inserting rows in a table.
    The other points re-inforce the convenience of a player-made solution.  You can sell anything, anywhere, at any time, for free.  Just ' WTS Submerged Steel Spear, 10p ' in the global auction channel, and the buyer /tells you, and all you have to do is both meet at a druid/wizard destination, and you're done.

    In general, for a few tens of thousands of dollars, you can get millions of IOPS (as in, 20M+ for less than $50k) with NVMe SSD RAID.  It's no longer an issue.  I have personally seen this hardware in action.  It's real, today, and VR can afford it. (and it's hundreds of TB, as well)

    I don't disagree with trying to find better solutions, I think they just have to be at least as good as what a single python script and a global chat channel can accomplish, or it's.. not really worth the effort.

    • 1315 posts
    September 17, 2019 5:26 AM PDT

    The more I read this thread and think about it the more I want wizard and druid ports to die in a fire.  The only exception would be if they were some form of point to point portal that you needed to go to one entrance in order to access another exit.  The ability to just go from anywhere in the world to one of the exit points is where a lot of this localization falls apart.

    Over all I like both Neph and Vjek's idea and would combine them with killing off free form teleports and any sort of item mailing.

    I think there should be item brokerage offices that track all the vendors on the continent so you can search for an item easily but you still need to go to the vendors location to get it.

    Likewise some form of bulletin board where trades can be posted and replied to would hopefully remove the need for a 3rd party hosting of the trade channel tracker.

    The biggest issue with making the commodities exchanges not cash based is encouraging adventurers and harvested to use them. Crafters will have no problems with using them. There could be some form of exchange credits that crafters can also put up items desired by the community to buy with their exchange credits.  I wrote up an extensive floating value cash exchange that should given a little time reflect the true market value of raw materials.

    Where that falls apart is when raw materials are more value-able than any manufactured product. One of my big worries about making the crafting economy work in general.

     

     

     

    • 1921 posts
    September 17, 2019 7:22 AM PDT

    Agreed on all the market points.
    If you have un-avoidable temporal delays in the market process, then teleportation isn't that bad.

    Donations can provide faction credits, which are usable at the normal NPC faction guilds.
    Either to buy fuel for crafting, or services and products from the respective guilds for adventurers.
    If PC's are stocking NPC's in those guilds, that handles part of the "player driven" economy, while still providing the fallback of NPCs for certain baseline goods, if desired.
    Similarly, if all NPCs in the world desire a particular crafted or repaired-with-faction-fuel item from both crafters and/or adventurers, and provide non-currency rewards, that handles the infinite source of raw materials. (via donation, sacrifice, and similar loops)
    In my mind, the ideal environment for crafting is that other players (as customers) are considered secondary to supplying the game world NPCs, continuously. 
    It's one of the few viable ways you can have infinite taps of certain things, and still not vaporize the economy.

    • 3852 posts
    September 17, 2019 7:46 AM PDT

    ((The more I read this thread and think about it the more I want wizard and druid ports to die in a fire))

    In my mind wizard and druid ports are generally inconsistant with core principles of the game and would never even have been considered in development if not for the desire to take many gameplay approaches from Everquest. Basically what they represent is "Slow travel helping to create a large and challenging world - other than for two classes and anyone else that they provide services for".

    Assuming for the sake of argument that VR is not going to reverse this decision - how can its adverse impact be minimized?  And the answer, of course, is this

    ((if they were some form of point to point portal that you needed to go to one entrance in order to access another exit.))

    Simply, and not at all originally, you have a limited number of druid circles or mage arcane relics or whatever VR wishes to use. Some of them duplicate other means of transportation but are a bit quicker and easier so they do add value. Thus a transport point near a port on continent A and another near a port on continent B. Ports that have ship transportation between each other.

    Some of them are in out of the way locations (so they do not allow easy transportation between markets) but near useful things so, again, the ability adds value to the mage or druid. So the teleport ability isn't gutted but just prevented from excessively undercutting the large world paradigm. Thus, some of the points near ruins with useful things or maybe in spots that reduce the time it takes to get to an important city to 10 minutes instead of 15 minutes.

    Note - and significantly - there is no compelling logic behind having any transport point give access to any other transport point available to that class. Points can easily be paired, for instance, like the two termini of a hypothetical faster-than-light transportation network often used in science fiction literature. The wormhole types where entering one terminus *always* sends you to the other. Not warp drives as in Foundation or, far later, Star Wars, where you have a choice of emergence points. Thus, looking up two paragraphs, the terminus near port A leads *only* to port B and the vice versa.


    This post was edited by dorotea at September 17, 2019 7:51 AM PDT
    • 1921 posts
    September 17, 2019 7:53 AM PDT

    Unfortunately, VR has created Wizards and Druids to fill this teleportation role, and will balance their class/out-of-combat "value" by the inclusion of their ability to teleport groups from where they are to an exit point.
    Without that, both classes would have to be redesigned & rebalanced entirely.
    I'm not saying it couldn't be done, it's just.. teleportation (ala EQ1) by those two classes has likely been a design goal since 2014. 
    The size and shape of the game world is also likely predicated on these two classes being able to fill this role.
    Personally?  I don't see it changing, but I've been wrong before. :)

    • 1428 posts
    September 17, 2019 8:40 AM PDT

    vjek said:

    Unfortunately, VR has created Wizards and Druids to fill this teleportation role, and will balance their class/out-of-combat "value" by the inclusion of their ability to teleport groups from where they are to an exit point.
    Without that, both classes would have to be redesigned & rebalanced entirely.
    I'm not saying it couldn't be done, it's just.. teleportation (ala EQ1) by those two classes has likely been a design goal since 2014. 
    The size and shape of the game world is also likely predicated on these two classes being able to fill this role.
    Personally?  I don't see it changing, but I've been wrong before. :)

    assume:

       system 1 only exist in major cities.

       system 2 only exist in towns.

       there is quite some travel time between them.

       that we can't mail items.

    druids and wizards can only teleport with a reagent by craft only(get that pvp economy monay) with a very long(hours) cd.

    i'm not sure if inventory will be limited by weight(skyrim), bag space(wow), or a combination(bdo).  i'd recommend a bdo limitation.

    banks function as localized space(not linked together).

    allow the transfer of items from major city bank to major city bank(time gated).

    if i want to move inventory to a town bank, i got to do it manually.

    i think it's fine for wizards to be teleporting from major city to major city.  if the continental market is in play, it doesn't make a difference.  druids can only go from town to town (this will make a difference and will have an emergent arbitrage gameplay).  reason i'd do this is to distinguish differences between the 'nature' of the class.

    there's probably other things to work out, but i'd take the issues as they arise.


    This post was edited by NoJuiceViscosity at September 17, 2019 8:42 AM PDT
    • 239 posts
    September 17, 2019 9:34 AM PDT
    I'm not sure how this thread moved to player brokers, but has that not already been established that there will be no player broker selling goods or auction houses with list of items?
    Or did I miss something completely?
    • 1428 posts
    September 17, 2019 9:47 AM PDT

    SoWplz said: I'm not sure how this thread moved to player brokers, but has that not already been established that there will be no player broker selling goods or auction houses with list of items? Or did I miss something completely?

    summary:

    everyone-regional market, continental market, player to player transaction?

    vandraad-economy pvp

    nephele-why not all three?

    everyone-oh yea why not?

    ~filler talk~

    vjek-arbitrage

    trajek-gut druids and wizards tp

    stellarmind-consider the following

    sowplz-lol wut?

     

    sounds to me like you have some information we are lacking.  so we aren't going to be able to do player to player transaction or a marketplace/auction house?

     


    This post was edited by NoJuiceViscosity at September 17, 2019 9:53 AM PDT
    • 168 posts
    September 17, 2019 9:55 AM PDT

    stellarmind said:

    sounds to me like you have some information we are lacking.  so we aren't going to be able to do player to player transaction or a marketplace/auction house?

    I'm pretty sure what sowplz meant by player brokers are either NPCs setup by the player to sell the players goods, or a state in which a player can go (similar to AFK) that would allow them to interact with other players as if they were an NPC merchant, buying/selling goods at a set price with inventory limited to what they hold or quantity chosen to buy of specific items.  I am pretty sure I heard in a stream one time that this was most likely not going to be in the game because they want the community to interact in a way that builds a meaningful relationship (good or bad).

    • 1428 posts
    September 17, 2019 10:05 AM PDT

    Kargen said:

    stellarmind said:

    sounds to me like you have some information we are lacking.  so we aren't going to be able to do player to player transaction or a marketplace/auction house?

    I'm pretty sure what sowplz meant by player brokers are either NPCs setup by the player to sell the players goods, or a state in which a player can go (similar to AFK) that would allow them to interact with other players as if they were an NPC merchant, buying/selling goods at a set price with inventory limited to what they hold or quantity chosen to buy of specific items.  I am pretty sure I heard in a stream one time that this was most likely not going to be in the game because they want the community to interact in a way that builds a meaningful relationship (good or bad).

    -kargen casts clarity on stellar-

    oooooooo.  uhh not player brokers.  they are established npcs if i understand nephele properly.  i think there might be some confusion with system 2 being like a broker, but i'm thinking more like a just a marketplace/auction house for that town.  apologize for the multiple terms.  different games have different names essentially being the same thing.

    • 1315 posts
    September 17, 2019 10:36 AM PDT

    And they have said that there will be an auction house of some sort, just the how linked they are or the exacts of how they function is still up for balancing after ingame testing.