hard time selling stuff....

i have an idea that will help people sell stuff. i used to play Ultima Online... and they had a feature in that game that was great. you could sell your item through a NPC. you put the items in your NPS's backpack and set the price. then people would go and buy from them. is there a way that that feature could be added to GW? let me know what you all think.
Syl

The problem with the seller setting the price is:

If its set lower than the market value, the item will be bought by someone then resold for a profit right away.
If you set the price too high, then you will get no buyers or feedback. So as you lower the price to find the market value you eaither risk the first problem, or you risk running out of inventory space.

The solution to this is an Auction House.

While it's true that an auction house would help a lot, the underlying issue is that Guildwars suffers from rampant mudflation. Guildwars PvE is in dire need of another item sink than customization.

I dont see that as a problem. Thats the way the real world works.

Yeah the auction house would be great

I'm not so convinced that an auction house would help. It would naturallly be flooded with any item people picked up. Don't believe me? Go to Kaineng and look for the people selling random worthless golds, like a non-max staff with +28 health and no mods. This will only get worse, and it will screw Anet's server load too.

Part of what gives items their value right now is that many people are just too lazy to sell, I know I am. It takes too much time and effort to be worth it. If people can sell easily whenever they want, that has the net effect of increasing supply. Increases supply = lower demand = lower prices.

It's a problem for Anet as they do want the game to have an active economy, but the most common idea of how to fix it has some pretty big drawbacks.

Me, I' in favor of a weapon and weapon mod trader. How the pricing would work on that is beyond me though.

anet could always limit the amount of stuff at one time you can sell

2 million people plus, oh, let's say 3 items each = 6 million items to wade through.

Simple solution: pair the auction listing with an item rating that actually follows what players are willing to pay for the item. That is, perfect items should be 5-10x the rating of a slightly imperfect item. Allow searches to filter by item/mods and by rating and it shouldn't be hard to narrow down the cruft. Furthermore, charge a small fee for each item auctioned (100g?) and people will be far less willing to dump everything onto the stage unless they were sure it would sell.

I've thought about a weapon mod trader before. Makes it easier to create your personal perfect weapon. Maybe they could use the baseline price guide for them that's on these forums to start the prices off then let them fall into place after while.
As for the Auction House, I'm not sure. I'm all for an easier way to sell my stuff without the "WTS blah blah blah" messages appearing from the same person hundreds of times in rapid succession, but, for every action there's an equal and opposite reaction and with a system like this there would be quite a lot of problems to think about.

Yeah, and in the real world, people always buy cheap *sarcasm*.

correction. 2 million copies sold, with 3 items each minus the probabilities of people actually selling them, which is alot less. Come now, 6 million items trading to 2 million copies will make the trade system redundant.

I'm still confident in the Auction System charging a fixed price rather than a percentage, this will filter out rediculously small items from being traded. But if the Auction house gets implemented... Say hello to GW Ebay...

An auction house isn't really the solution to the problems you said this idea would have...you know, people can still set the beginning price WAY too high, and oh you said that's a problem with this...or they could set it WAY too low and someone could get it for a steal, and yet again, you said that's a problem with this.


I dunno...I just want this POS "WTB/WTS" spam off my local chat, and NO, turning local chat off is NOT an option for me, and neither is ignoring everyone that spams, the ignore list is too limited.

Yes, it would be full with people trying to sell worthless junk. Name me one auction site that doesn't come with a search filter in order to only look at the stuff you want to look at.