AFK Shop - The answer to WTB/WTS spam?

Lag? Lol, now that's funny. A shop sitting there just to appear will take next to no bandwidth. Now, when someone starts to browse it, they will take up about as much bandwidth as the NPC merchants, etc. There would be more lag from people running around than for a player merchant to sit there selling things. If there would be any lag at all, it would be minimalistic. All you people who are going around crying about "lag" should go take Networking 101 (Haha Replicant, great minds think alike!).

Search? The in game Search feature sucks terribly for trading, you can only enter a VERY LIMITED amount of text (which is why people still spam). There should either be a special merchant town where you can buy a merchant/store to sell your wares (call it a Barter Town) and/or add the Auction House that has been requested since day one.

/signed, btw.

/not signed, just chek Kal Online and tell me if afk shop is a good idea.

No no no no no, towns are too small. and no no no no no no no to lag.
Been suggested before. If this will be introduced you will have up to 20 + dictricts in which ppl will only sell and the whole game will lag.

/not signed

Same conclusion as pyro just 2 much lag towns 2 small.
And Kalonline is a good example.
look a the game @ towns like temp fort and COP (kalonline).
And beware of scams bugs that can come like buy a item and the shop owner doesn't get it's money. Or like a trade Bug/hack

An auction house like in FF XI that whould be nice with a simulair system can work

I agree with Maxiemonster, almost everyone standing in a district afk'ing isn't going to help speed selling up much, but at least I can see where you're coming from when you say it would help battle trade spam (and the general chat channel spam too). However, I think the simplest solution, of which I am a great believer of, is to reintroduce message suppression. I will admit the problems of that were that the easiest way to overcome it was to just add another exclamation mark on the end of your trade message, making it a 'different' message in a way, thus nullifying the suppression. What it boils down to though is that it means people can come and go as they please, buy what they want when they want and without having to swim through masses and masses of retarded spam. Does anyone else agree with this method?

Ever played Lineage 2 thread starter?

There is afk shops, they create masses of lag. You can hardly move in town it's like a puzzle maze everytime you go back there. Not to mention ppl still spam the wts/wtb.

I'd rather see a 100 gold penalty for every WTS OR WTB or W T S W T B Selling Buying S E L L I NG B U Y I NG etc you get my point done in local chat.

/notsigned
I can already see the entire population of LA dist1 afk. Thats kind of depressing,,,

smells like lineage 2, giran was perpetually AFK.

The biggest problem with this is that you'd have entire districts full of afk sellers, good luck getting into LA d1 ever again.

/notsigned.

An auction house would be *far* better.

Well i'm not really fan of the afk personal shop system for a trading system, played with it in a lot of games like Rappelz, Flyff and SRO more recently. Truth is it brings huge lag into the areas where ppl sell. But still its a better system than the current party window one or even the spamming on the trade channel.

If i had a choice in between an auction house like th one woking in WoW or project entropia or eveonline and this system i would defenely choose the auction house.

If a solution like this is implemented i would like at least to b created in a separate zone like a marketplace with limit shops per district.

/signed

It´s still better than what we have though i like the auction house system better.

/not signed

Did ANYONE even remember the limit to every district? Imagine all the slots of District 1 in every major town taken by AFK shops. Noone would even be able to see your shop!

An auction house is a much better option, or a improved system of the current Party search system.

Just no.

Someone sets up a shop, 20 other people set up a shop around them. Someone wants to buy something for a certain price, but they don't know if any of the 20+ people have it, nor do they know that anyone if offering the right price. So they have to look at every single shop to see if someone has it, and if someone else has it for cheaper.

Many people who set up shops would still spam all chat, trying to get people to look at their shop. The shops would just add unnecessary graphics to process, and thus, lag.

You must have never played Silkroad Online or Kal Online (both free Korean MMOs). The towns are by far the most laggy places in those games.

Are you the same person?

So you think that it isn't a problem if they add something that would serve to cause a large increase in lag? I think you forgot to listen to your own words. If ArenaNet is supposed to "fix" the lag, then they should try to avoid adding something that would only serve to make it worse.

Ever heard of the fact that not all servers run on the same hardware? Basic Networking 101.

Ok so while your 5 items are being sold you have to stay online to empty your cash to storage otherwise you can't sell when 100k is reached, this will encourage ppl to not afk.

For the districts being full, make the trade window cross-district like the party seach option so if LA dis1 English is full you can go to LA dis30 German and buy from LA dis1 English.

A lot of ppl won't/can't buy from other districts because of the language barrier(weapons have other names too), with items displayed with prices buying from others will be much easyer.

No lag clutter from ppl with shop-signs over their head, just the opened trade window like party search. which you can close at will.

As for the spamming "check out my shop blabla", while your shop is open the "All" and "Trade" channels are automaticly shut off.

Sure the system needs good testing to prevent scamming but to be sure (although the damage has been done) add a buy sell log to your trade window.

I've played Global MU Online, also a free Korean MMO. The towns were full of afkers, there was absolutely no lag, and the people who were afk did not talk. If poeple are going to spam anyway, then they must be at the keyboard and then there is absolutely no point in them having a shop open when they might as well trade normally.

Once again, some excellent idea, Odinius. Thank you.

/not signed

I do not like the idea of rewarding someone for doing nothing but sitting there.

At least AFKers going for the lucky title are spending money.....

No Tarun and I are different people, but it is simple common sense that no additional lag would result from this... IF people are forced to go to a "Market Place" district... or... could only have 10 people AFK with Stores per district.

and the "networking 101" thing is just a term we both used without noticing... ever heard of the term "Biology 101" "Chemistry 101" etc... it's basically us saying, if you don't know the fundamentals of networking, don't complain.

I say:
"WTS Victo's Battle Axe 10k or 1 ecto" = 36 bytes..
say theres 150 people in the district... = 5400 bytes or 5.27kb for just my 1 message.
but.. i would spam this... say 10 times... = 54000 bytes or 52.7kilobytes
(that is excluding extra data such as name, header to the message, and any extra data they throw on each packet..)
so everytime i spam my message it's generating 52.7kb of traffic on the server comp. (not to mention other people spamming)

now..... say I open a Shop:
Shop Title: "WTS Victo's Battle Axe 10k or 1 ecto" = 36 bytes..
say theres the same 150 people in the district when i open my shop... = 5400 bytes.. or 5.27kilobytes.
no other data has to be sent to the client until i close my shop.
and... every time someone loads in the district they receive my 36 bytes for the name of my shop...
but.... let me take this a step further... say theres 9 other people with the same name of their shop..
36 * 9 = 324bytes whenever someone loads in from the 10 shops.

now... simple logic.... which do you think would be better on a server...
52.7kb from 1 person spamming a message 10 times to 150 people..
or
5.27kb for sending the message to 150 people getting the name of the shop, and not having to send out additional data until shop is closed, or people load in (in which case it's 324 bytes, and distributed slower)

oh.. and since i know this may be coming... turning off the checkbox for trade/normal chat does NOT change the amount... you're still receiving the packets, the client just doesn't display it.

oh.. and i played Knight online and RYL (Risk Your Life) both had player shops, and both had very little lag, even with around 100 shops open.

To help with the market district thing, As you said, the afk thing would work, and you could set it up as a bazaar and interact with the sign or whatnot.
But, have a town specifically for that (another thing you mentioned) But! each district has a max of XX traders and the rest have to be players, afk for 5+ mins without a shop, they are booted to last town, kind of like the leave guild hall feature ( just explaining thatd be easy)

You played Knight Online, and you said it had very little lag? You're definately on crack.

OK, you've proved you can do math, based on your 36 byte line, big whoop.

I load into LA D1.
That server has to send me everyones 36 byte line, plus the inventory from their store.

36 * X + (X * Y[number of items in store, byte equivalent, say 10 for a full store])

You say 150 people. I say way more, because when AFK sales happens tons of people pack rat everything to sell while they're asleep or at work.

36 * 250 +( 250 * 8)
74k.
Big whoop, even on my DSL that's like 3 seconds downloading.

Now, on D1 LA, every 3-4 seconds(and I'm being generous, it's less time) Someone enters the town. Anet then has to send 74k to each and every one of them, on top of all the info already needed(what people, what armors, what color for armors, all that jazz, what minipet is out, and where each person and minipet are moving to, in adition to NPC's if there happen to be roamers there.)

Anet is suddenly having to send out megabytes worth of info per server(each district is not run on it's own server, in case someone wants to go there).
That creates lag, period.

Yes, you can do some simple math, but you're not counting the massive amount of people that anet has to relay that 36 bytes to AND from(plus how often), not to mention every inventory change and new store, in addition to what's there already.

Yeah, the bandwidth issue is definitely something to consider. The real problem is, this wouldn't cut back on the spam. People would still be WTSpam all day long because unless there is a search function, nobody's gonna know what they're selling.
I agree ANet needs to address the issue of lag, but to say that the issue shouldn't be considered when making suggestions is just stupid. The idea is to put suggestions that ANet could use to make Guild Wars better. If you make suggestions ignoring a financial aspect that ANet must seriously weigh and consider before implementing, then what's the point? If you bog down the servers, that costs ANet money. If you suggest something that is not financialy feasible, then the idea is pointless as there is no way ANet could or will possibly use it. One of the reasons Blizzard can have so many things like the auction house and super-huge inventory is because people pay every month. With Guild Wars, you pay your one-time fee and that's it. There is a huge difference. Even buying both expansions each year (@ $50) is cheaper than a year of WoW without even purchasing the game. ($180 monthly, $156 6-month plan)



Anyways....
/notsigned

I like the idea. Heck, I like any idea that intends to cut out all of that WTSpam crap. But I don't think people will use it. Reason is, no one is gonna want to check each and every "booth" for what they want. Escpecially when chars have such limited inventory to sell items with. Add on that it promotes AFKers, which is a bandwidth strain, and there's another problem. I really thought a lot of people would stop WTSpamming and start using the trade section in the Search Window. But a lot of them aren't. And it drives me bonkers.

Which reminds me... ANet should automatically block any message that is sent exact (verbatim) within 3 seconds of each other. That would frustrate a lot of spammers and make them consider a new way to advertise. (Party Search maybe? Finally? PLease? For the love of god... )

I agree with what you say. I, like yourself, agree that it is much easier to find something when someone is trying to sell a particular item and is spamming it rather than spamming the whole "come check out my shop" thing. But if in this proposed shop idea you are able to put up multiple items (we'll say 10 or whatever), you aren't going to have enough room in local chat to spam all the stats and prices for each item. Also, from what you just said, it still isn't going to solve the WTB/WTS spam. I'm definitely not trying to argue any point because I totally agree with you and everyone that the spamming thing is annoying and something has got to do about it. Like I said, before, I like your intuitive idea, but we need to come up with something that will close all of the "go arounds" and "loop holes"

I personally wouldn't mind having the entire Trade button thing disabled in certain districts.
Lions Arch District 1 (trading disabled)
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v
Lions Arch District x

Lions Arch Trade District 1 (trading enabled)
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v
Lions Arch Trade District x

I don't think lag will be any more than what it normally is.

Since they can't trade in those actual districts, maybe...JUST maybe...they may refrain from spamming.

OK people, thans for all the feedback. I'm not a techie, but I'm kind of getting the fact that there is a lot of work to be done, if this is going to be even considered. Now my shop has definately been pooh-poohed due to this and that, so now I ask: Has anybody got a reasonable idea that can solve the spamming?

Your idea is fine, do not become deterred by those who lack the knowledge of programming and networking. Replicant is 100% correct that an idle shop will take up far less bandwidth and hardware resources.

Idea isn't bad, but if you're looking for 1 item, you have to browse through 100s of shops before you find it. Unless every item is indexed, it's going to be a pain to find the item you want. Result = Auction house..

I think that's the biggest crux of the matter. I think the shop idea is good, but without a search feature for it, it's just another function that people won't use.

Really, if ANet made the spam blocker function more stringent, (ie: a verbatim post is blocked if posted within 3 seconds) This would make spamming much more difficult and might actually force traders to use the Search menu.

I've actually enforced my own form of passive influence by refusing to deal with spam posters and buying solely from Search posters.

The Search feature sucks for selling. You cannot enter enough descriptive text.

Town lag in silkroad had *zero* to do with server hardware and everything to do with the client machine choking on the amount of graphical crap it had to display.

If you really wanted to fix lag in one of those games you'd go to a crappy LOD on all of the avatars' models when in town, which is exactly what guildwars does...

/signed

I played ROSE before here when it was in Beta and I liked that ability even with lag. Perhaps a way to help avoid lag though would be to have a seperate area dedicated to this?

Like open the map area and click the ship and where theres LA, Kamadan, Kaineng and Temple of Balthazar they add "Merchant Isle" or some such stuff like that? And thats where you have the option to open shop or simply browse?

or perhaps it can be found when we open the map in the Battle Isles section.

I'ave alrady posted mine several times(dont't know if I did here), but here it goes again, for posterity or something, and since you asked.

1. Increase "Search" character limit to that of normal chat.

2. Seperate whisper from normal chat, so that it does not scroll up with everything else.

3. Get Excessive messages WAY more easily, and flat out block WTS, WT$
W T S, W_T_S(my personal favorite), and all other very common variations of that and WTB, or atleast send them ALL to trade channel, like WTS is now.

4. Mute abusers. If you get Excessive messaging more than once in one minute, you're muted on public/trade channel for 2 minutes.


The other reasons I don't sign for, People already will spend an hour selling junk, when in that time they could have farmed that much worth of gold alone(or way more), not to mention drops. The ability to AFK sell, the number of people in a given place would skyrocket, because it's not only the active people, it's the number of people that play the game. People will packrat and sell more total crap, and do it 24/7. Alot of your "stop whining about bandwidth" people really don't get the potentially massive amount of information that gets to be. They lack the ability to grasp the big picture.

Where do megabytes come from? Lots of kb and single bytes. It all adds up.

I could care less about the spare change in just my couch, let it rot there, bit if someone were to offer me all the spare change in every GW players couch, I'd have some extra money to upgrade my computer with, ram and hard drives at the very least.
(probably more because hardcore gamers tend to not clean house as much as normal people with a life.....but then again maybe that equals out with dark basement gamers that never leave the house and hence do not aquire alot of pocket change.)

I can see a few things wrong with your idea.
Firstly, making your own personal store with set prices would pretty much eliminate all bargaining. i cant tell you how many times ive gone to sell someting and spammed for 25k when i really intended to sell it for 20k or less. Most people find an item they want, and make a lower offer, then they go back and forth untill a price is settled.
Second, this system would make district 1 and 2 of lions arch, kamadan, kaening, and other major selling cities unusable for everyone without a 50000 dollar alieware or some other ridiculous setup
dont get me wrong, Im all for a way to stop the WTB/WTS spams, but I feel that we should think everything through and work out every kink we can find so we dont fix one thing only to bring up a bigger problem or annoyence.

This idea would still require people to be standing around to sell stuff. My main complaint about the current system is that I'd prefer to be out actually playing guild wars instead of attempting to trade, and since my computer has a loud fan I prefer to turn it off at night, so AFKing overnight isn't really an option either (especially for people with monthly bandwidth limits). Though if you instead set the price and a single NPC took the item and operated as the shop for everyone across all of Guild Wars it would solve this and many of the other problems people mentioned, as long as the NPC had a decent searching system to filter out the stuff you don't currently want to buy.

The only problem I still see with this is how much work it will be for inexperienced traders to decide what price to sell for. Now there are two solutions for this:
1 - Provide a history showing how much similar items have sold for in the past, and have the seller to look it up. This would involve the seller having to search for the stats of various items with similar stats, then having to estimate how much the weapons mods added to the unmodded price of those variants, then estimate how much the mods on his weapon will alter its price. Then decide on the price and hope its not either too low (someone will buy his cheap weapon, then resell it at a higher price) or too high (it simply won't sell).
2 - Implement an Auction House where, as long as the starting bid is set at or below the actual value with a decent auction duration, the seller will get a fair price for the weapon as the buyers bid the price up.

/unsigned in favor of an Auction house.

I really hate to keep de-railing this thread. but i had to say this..

Aeon_Xin, go back to my post and read..... "IF people are forced to go to a "Market Place" district... or... could only have 10 people AFK with Stores per district."

now.. 10 is a really low number in my opinion... and would hope anet if they added this would make it atleast 50 or so.

now... where exactly do you get the idea that you HAVE to receive the data for what every store has.... why not call a function when you open the store to get the data then... oh wait.. that would destroy your argument..

Anet already does this too btw, open a rune merchant and what happens? oh.. thats right, you start receiving the data for whats on the merchant then.. you can see this especially on the rune traders, when as soon as you open you get the data for the 50 or so runes, the price, and what icon to use.

i'm too tired to continue (stayed up all night and all day working on my remote administration tool) but feel free to throw up more random numbers and excuses, cause i already bet any of you people whining about "lag" would use this system anyways.

Limiting ten player ran "shops" to a district? Freaking lol, great way to reduce the lag that would be there. Even 50 would be ridiculously low.
Now in addition to having to sort through the crap people think they deserve my coin for, I have to district jump like crazy to do it too.


ok, to boil it down so even you can understand it.

Anet now deals with X amount of info, the current state of the game.
When you add information that needs to go to any user, you take up more bandwidth, unless Anet and GW players are magically gifted with clairvoyance of course. We all know that's a distinct possibility.

I'm not saying Lag is guaranteed, but that it's highly possible. GW has an edge on many games by not having much lag at all that I've noticed, and I'm on a semi-crappy "broadband". I'd rather keep it the efficient machine that it is.

That being said.


"Anet already does this too btw, open a rune merchant and what happens? oh.. thats right, you start receiving the data for whats on the merchant then.."

[[[As if the list of runes changes daily. This code is likely sent in a few bytes. A yes/no (1/0) for each rune to see if it's in stock and that's all you get, but the list is ALWAYS the same(exception of expansion/chapter and other applicable updates)]]]]

"you can see this especially on the rune traders, when as soon as you open you get the data for the 50 or so runes, the price, and what icon to use."

You don't get the current price, you get a price guide, that sometimes doesn't change all day if you don't get a quote(sometimes doesn't even change if you get a quote, close, then reopen)
I think the price list is downloaded once daily(or at city loading time) for a rough estimate. You get the real price when you get a buy/sell quote.

What icon to use? Now I know you're BS'n your way through this. As if the icons for runes and dyes change, ever.....(see above exception on updates)

I suppose Merchants send out all sorts of data and what icons to use too right? Lets See Player X wants to use the Merchant, well, "I have A salvage kit, oh, it looks like this, and it costs this much, I also have....."

Most Icons have nothing to do with what data is transmitted. They're tied to an action, or a line of code. The Icon for Red Dye shows up in my inventory, because my client was told that I have a red dye, not because my client was told I have a red dye AND the red dye uses this Icon.( FOW armor, whatever runes or items, that's how it works)


If a person's "store" were to emulate the vendors that exist, they'd have to send out their inventory to everyone ahead of time, IE, when I enter the city.

Why do I know this? Because very time there's a change in what a vendor carries or doesn't carry, there's an update before you even get into the game.
The lists are stored client side, even runes. The only thing that changes is weather or not a Rune/Dye vendors have it in stock. Very simple 1/0 lists are asked for/sent upon opening a vendor and that's all.(or should be if it's not that simple)

Unless you know better of course, and are actually involved with writing the code for GW. Judging from the way you talk I'd assume you aren't, and thank god for that, or this would be another Knight Online or worse, likely much worse.

Every one else: Sorry to rant/flame, but I'm not one for saying "This is the way it is because you don't know better" and it really irks me when people pretty much shoot stuff out their bung and call it "something 101"

Let's get back on the subject of fine-tuning the suggestion rather than picking each other's arguements apart and flaming, shall we?

Ah, thank you.

/signed

I'd personally rather see it similar to the current "looking for party" screen. Drag the item you want to sell, it's description goes into a global "trying to sell" system broken down by sword, bow, mini-pet, crafting supplies, dye, etc. When you enter an item it asks how much you're selling for.

If there's 100 Eternal Bows, obviously the lowest bid will sell first, you let you item sit around until it eventually sells - or doesn't. It's one slot, who cares if someone uses it as storage.

If the item sells, the buyer gets the item, the seller gets the gold, items, whatever. Obviously, ecto will have to be programmed as an acceptable means of currency unless the store will allow larger than 100k transactions.

I've always thought we should be allowed to report people for trying to buy or sell in the Local channel.

Policing the situation and inciting fear in the morons that keep spamming Local would be effective, in my opinion.

Personally, I plan on trying to reduce these bad traders as much as possible using in-game techniques and limitations. Lately I've been humoring people who are selling things via the Local channel, wasting their time saying "Whoops, let me just go get my 100k+ectos!" then when I get back to them, I pretend to have a revelation, and say "Wait, weren't you spamming this in the Local channel? Sorry, I don't buy from Local spammers."

Thereby setting an example for them. :P

But I'm a very blunt person and it's easy for me to do that to people. Not that they don't deserve it. There are new people in this game who are trying to get questions answered and trying to speak to others in a district, and it's impossible to do so with all those inconsiderate Runescape kiddies screaming about wanting to sell their Kuunavangs. There's a reason we turned off Trade - We're not buying anything.

So you played MU global huh, well then you should remember Server 1/2 (iirc) Lorencia where most of the afk shopkeepers/sellers were 24/7. You should recall the HORRIBLE LAG too and when people set up shop right in front of yours effectively blocking the view. I still favor WoW's auction house because with MU I got really sick of leaving the comp on, wasting power, etc just to sell crap.

It often happens that I have to turn the Local Channel off in towns because the spam is unbearable. Having shops and shopping areas will be as useful in stopping the spam as the Trade Channel. There is a facility there, but the spammers don't use because they can't believe nobody wants to buy their Victo's Sword for 35k. You know what? I really don"t want it! And if I did want it, I'd look in Trade.

My suggestion is an antispammer command that ordinary people can use. When someone starts spamming, you send him an antispam message and he gets sent off to watch a one minute noskip video of how to use the Trade Channel.

Of course, to stop this being abused by the underage idiots with a stupid sense of humour, the antispam command would only take effect once a certain number have been received, say ten or so, each from different people.

They could combine the new party seach featur with AFK shops.

1. Limit number of shops per district.
2. Limit the places where shops can be set. For example, in kaineng city, they'll have to be set in the always empty Back alley, not in the middle.
3. Make impossible to set the shop over another shop (with a message, not by bodybloking: "You can't set your shop so near another shop"). The distance should be enough so models do not overlap, not more.
4. When settting a shop, the description will show in the Search Party Window too. They will have another icon showing that.
5. When inviting a character with a shop set, instead of moving the character to you, you'll move to the character.
6. Each shop would have a limited ammount of slots to sell. So people will put their stock in the shop name. Additional slots could be purchased to Xunlai Representatives or in the GW Shop.

Pros?
- AFK selling, an AFK player will not spam, if he does he's using any kind of bot or automated system to, thus breaking rules.
- People will try to use descriptive names in order to get more sells, people would check first 'Ectos, Greens, Trophies' instead of 'look at this'.
- No haggling (pro for the seller).

Cons
- No haggling (con for the buyer).

Another idea could be...
Instead of trading districts, they should put trading outposts, the market in Kaineng, Lion's Arch in Kryta, the Bazaar in Vabbi...
THey could be the only places with Trade chat, and trading in outposts out of thouse would mean warnings, temporal bannings, etc..

I think it is a good. A few things I can think of is ( I have only read the 1st page so sorry for anything that has already been said)...

When the shop is up, you cant move, talk, look around. This will stop spaming, trying to get people looking at ur shop ect.

Have a Dist just for this, eg, Droks dis 1 - Droks trading Dis 1 (Or something like that.)

Let people make a shop in any town - Let them make one in Yaks for e.g, for the lowler level players, then they can work there way up. (Maybe not in Coop's, like RoF ect ect.

Bad points I can think of is,This will kill places like LA, Droks and other "Trading" towns.

Will take a while of looking around to find what wep you want, maybe having a search for what you want. E.G - Sword, Req 9 - max dmg - gold - 15^50, ect ect. (Although, this is going more into the WoW Auction Houses imo, It will still be good for all GW Players.)



/Signed