Why was LA the trade hub before factions ?

Currently the main trade hubs are Kamadan, Kaineng center and Lions Arch because those are the first towns you see when you map between continents, so they have a higher thoroughfare. So that makes sense now.

However before factions (or the battle isles) came out I still remember Lions Arch being the main trade hub (if I remember wrongly let me know). But as there was no second continent to travel to I recently started wondering why it was the major trade hub then.

Does anyone have any ideas ?

First major town without level 1 nubs.

It was in the middle of the map and thus all trade?

It was the biggest town in beta,LA of GW,nough said.

Well, Ammoon and Hedge were often skipped by runners and are kinda out of the way. Before Factions came out, Droks was also a major trading town (as the only city with max 1.5k armor). Droks used to have all the materials trade and a lot more people trading. Augury rock used to have all the farm bots in INT D1, but that transfered to Droks with the troll caves.

(In Europe) Droknar's Forge was at least equal to Lion's Arch when it came to trade.
High-lvl items (ectos, shards, weapons) where more often traded in Droknar's, where you already were through a large part of the game and thus had a reasonable amont of money.
But sadly Droknar's lost that purpose with the release of Factions. It's now "too far off".

And I think LA was one of the main hubs because it was naturally one of the most populated major cities. Denravi never really had more than one district per region/language. Same goes for Amnoon. Ascalon was/is the first city after the tutorial and thus unsuitable for "high-lvl" trading.
So than left LA and Forge.

The 3 major outposts in the Betas were Ascalon, LA, and ToA. LA was the major trading place with all of the worthwhile NPCs/Crafters, and ToA was basically the same as it is today. The use of LA transfered over at release and stuck.

Ascalon was sort of a trade hub though on the lower end items. LA is the biggest town in prophecies, and i believe in all of the campaigns. Plus when mapping it's right down in the center how can you miss it lol.

Droknar's Forge and Deldrimor War Camp was the biggest trade hub actually...Lion's Arch was just full of overpriced junk, where you can see the guy spamming WTS WTS from a week ago doing the same thing a week later.

That's how I remeber it. Droks being the biggest trade area and Deldrimor pretty close. Then Factions came out and LA became the trade center because it was easiest for players with both Factions and proph to trade with players that only had Proph. I really don't remeber LA being that big of a trade center at all untill after Factions...

nicest looking major outpost?

Ascalon had to many guilds advertising, LA was the best place for selling because it was close to ToA, and semi close to droks to sell high end items.

i never traded in LA pre-factions, always did my selling/buying in droks. LA has almost always been spammer capital of GW. even through factions, droks was still a good place to shop. but by the time nightfall came along, the population in droks had dropped a good bit.

i found the breakdown was usually:

Ascalon -> Low End Items & Guild Recruitment
LA -> Spam Capital of GW
Denravi -> Dead
Amnoon -> Dead
Droks -> Material Central, High End Items, Second City of Spam
ToA -> Ectos & Shards
Deldimor -> Greens

QFT.

LA had mostly overpriced junk (wts perfect purple fiery gladius of pruning whisper offer!!! No noobs pls). For serious items you dropped in at Droks (I remeber the weekend Totem Axes where added, made quite a lot of money in Droks those days).

crap this thread is making me feel so old. Have over 3000 hrs and feel like the game is coming to an end. Im gonna go kill myself.

Droknars was the big trade centre pre-Factions. Ascalon was always pretty busy too but if you were buying anything of worth you usually went to Droknars to find it (on Euro-servers anyways). As other people have said, Lions Arch was pretty lame for trading before Factions came out. I guess because Lions Arch is a huge port, they had to choose it as the gateway into Tyria. Its not a place I would go to to buy anything right now though.

Agreed with above. Pre testing unided days were nice.

TOA used to be big for ecto and uw/fow items. Now I have to buy my ecto in Lions Arch which is waaay slower =(

Not sure about LA sucking before Factions came out. I made more nice trades than I ever have in that time. All my trades were in LA and I traded materials in Drok. I consistently had good deals there unlike after Factions when it got awful for power trading there. LA was great hence why virtually every old school power trader misses old days.

a few reasons...
its at the center of the map
its the city closest to the temple of ages
its a hub for runners to sanctum cay
its where you get signet of capture
it used to have a nice arena
and it used to be where you go to see guild halls
as well as being near the guild halls on the map.

Yeah back in the day, Drok was a place to be it was freaking nuts! Material selling, high end stuff, gold, green etc. 3-5 eng dis, of trade spam most night, and when you jump to int dis, man! the spams were so bad that it was funny.

Countless hours of freezing my butt off, from selling stuff there.

Hah, pre-Factions days...
I remember actually trading in towns then, mostly in Droks and Ascalon. Reading that fast scrolling trade spam, checking what I could buy and sell. Then I started using the auction here in Guru and haven't bothered with trades in game ever since.