[Xunlai Trade Center] - a simple, realistic Trade System for GW1 (detailed)

A good feedback system isn't one where ANET dictates the price of items. Its one where players can easily see what everyone else is buying and selling similar items for so that they can get an idea about the market value (the market value is the price where there are a similar number of buyers to sellers). Any time something changes the feedback system responds.

Any system that allows you to search for similar items to see their price across the game gives enough feedback. However my complaint about feedback was mainly aimed at separate player stalls which don't give any way to compare the prices between them because they lack a means to search them quickly. In fact because stalls don't allow other people in the district to complain publicly when they see an obscene price (thus warning others) I'd say that unsearchable stalls give less feedback than our current trade system.

I'll happily settle for a system with a searching feature. But if the stalls have a search feature then people will use that instead of looking at the individual stalls, so why bother with the stall part ?
Just have one NPC that allows people to search and trade with anyone with items up for trade, even if they are offline (the only performance difference would be that since people don't have to stay online to trade, they won't use the server resources required to keep them online).
And if you don't have the stall part, why should the trade system be linked to any location ?
The trade NPCjust needs two sections. The first is the items you have up for sale, the second is the search function which will allow you to find and then buy the items your after.

That would be an auction system where the buyer starts the bidding of at a low price, then players bid the price up to what they are willing to buy it for. Any other system will require the seller to at least do a search to a search for the item they are selling so they know what price to set, meaning that the search function will be used more (at least once before an item is put up for sale), and if the item is rare enough the search won't give enough information unless it also includes information about trades that have already taken place.

Then again, once you have the offline selling and search setup, the only thing left to make an auction system is the bidding code.

Same here, though the reason I'd prefer the auction "house" is because it makes it easier for me to decide what price to set.

To conclude:
- To get the stalls giving enough feedback to keep prices fair across the game they will need a searching feature.
- Once we have a search feature, browsing individual stalls serves no real purpose. So keeping people logged in to trade no longer makes much sense when we can have the search function access the items that offline players have up for trade. And unlike the stalls, the trade NPC doesn't have to be linked to any location.
- Once we have the trade NPC running, the only change needed to make this an auctioning NPC is allowing bids on the items up for sale.

Personally I'll sign any trade improvements with a search function, but I won't sign any systems without one.

I still think feedback is a trivial issue, no matter how the trade system is setup. WoW's elaborate auction system doesn't even have that feature - you have to download a mod for it.

Not to mention...that functionality could easily be exploited. Example: Person A posts a bunch of worthless junk for sale at 100k, then Person A's friend/guildie Person B buys it all at that incredibly overinflated price - rinse, repeat - thus inflating the price margin for those items and making the feedback completely unreliable.

Never underestimate one's willingness to muck up things for other people, especially in the world of online gaming! Griefers come out of the woodwork at the slightest hint of an exploitable act.

And I don't know why you're on about stalls - the OP didn't suggest stalls, but suggested a centralized means of trading through the party search feature, via links to personal trade vaults within the party search window. IE: open party search, click a link to view the items. No stalls and no stall visiting to do - click, view, click, view. I'd never sign off on a stall system, as that's hardly an improvement at all.

Item searching just ain't gonna happen - not in GW1 anyway, and I wouldn't bet on it for GW2 either. Like I said - item searches can easily cause bandwidth and server stability problems. I'd like to see that functionality in GW, hell yes...but I can't imagine Anet doing it.

Worldwide auctioned selling should be anonimous.

That way you prevent people from inflating prices.

Non-anonimous selling should be instant, like when you set a shop with fixed prices.

/signed

Would be nice to not HAVE to spam WTS messages. Xunlai would be an appropriate agent to arrange trades between continents and towns.

had a very similar idea in the wiki page, but the item calling in trade chat sounds really great.

/signed.

Does the WoW auction house have a search feature that can be set to only display items your after ?
If yes, does its table of results display the current minimum bid for each auction result ?

If yes to both then it does provide the feedback.

Yes that is a problem. But if a tax is put on all transactions (like a gold sink) then every time they do that they lose gold, and most buyers would buy the items being sold for less by other players so the inflater's are likely to lose out as the only way they can maintain the inflated prices is to buy up all of that item being sold for less.

But without the feedback (search) system, if someone is inflating prices then you might spend 10 minutes to only find their stall. You don't even know of the lower prices, so all they need to inflate prices is a good stall location.

In Eve Online doing exploits like this is permitted by the GM's. But the only place it happens on a regular basis are the T2 cartels (only a limited number of people ingame can produce a specific T2 item) where they can control a vast majority of the items supply to prevent people selling it for cheaper. But when I left Eve Online the devs had recently introduced a way for players to produce T2 items, and prices for T2 items were dropping as the cartels lost control of the supply.

Whenever it happened for a non-T2 item then people traders it wouldn't last long before the price was restored to normal by people supplying new items (to that market) and eating up the inflater's ISK.

I only see two differences between the OP's idea and a stall:
- Instead of the stall having a location in a town, its an entry listing in the party search window.
- Instead of going to the stalls location to open its trading window, you click its entry in the party list to open its trading window.

So really the only difference is the reduced walking time between stalls.

If you have a search function that displays the price of all items that you are after, then it doesn't matter if the system is anonymous or not as most people wouldn't know any of the sellers. But anonymity won't hurt.

/signed

Doubtful it could ever happen, but why not.

We know we won't get a full centralized trade system probably until they design it for GW2 first.
But something really has to be done and we, the community, should suggest here the simpliest, easiest to do and still effective and helpful means to improve the trading in GW.

/signed

I don't really care how Anet does it. We just need something that makes selling things less annoying than spamming, and more profitable than merching.

/signed

I don't really care how Anet does it. We just need something that makes selling things less annoying than spamming, and more profitable than merching.

Of the various AFK stall ideas, having the party search window (or any other menu window) is the best place to actually place the stalls.

All of my objections here fall into 4 categories:

1 - Possible server load/bandwidth usage. But since ANET will consider this, I see no reason to bring it up apart as a warning as to why ANET might not like this idea.

2 - Problems with people not being able to setup a stall because the computer is wanted for other stuff. But if your able to have your stall running while offline then this problem vanishes, and the bandwidth requirements should go down considerably as people don't have to stay online to run the stall, though server memory and CPU load might then go up compared to requiring people to stay online to operate their stalls.

3 - Issues of scale. Guild wars is basically unsharded, but most MMO's split their population across many shards that don't interact with each other. So guild wars will probably have a huge number of stalls running at any one time, making it take a while to find things your looking for. But if this is actually a problem, a search function can always be added at a later date to fix it.

4 - There is nothing to help the casual sellers decide what prices to set. But that will also be fixed by a search function.

So I withdraw all my objections, with the intent to request ANET add a search function if this idea is implemented without one (I will only /sign if a search is included). I also propose the following changes to the basic idea:

- Because having multiple markets will make the scaling issue more problematic as smaller market sizes, I propose that the stalls are only ever listed on a single list. For stalls with a presence in towns, this would be the equivalent of restricting the stalls to the international districts of a single town, though since this idea is using a menu window it might be possible to setup stalls from any town since we don't actually require an in-game location.

- If the store only has a few items (with the cutoff point chosen by ANET), have its name auto-generated to reflect those items and their price so as to prevent misleading store names.

- If players are allowed to set their store names, do not allow sorting by that name. Otherwise we will get stores with names like "aaaaaa <real name>" because that gets them to the top of the list.

- Automatically close any stall as soon as it runs out of items to sell, so that players don't waste their time looking at empty stalls.

Reset the party window every hour.
As mentioned, if people just go AFK and there's 800 listings, they'd need to a way for it to reset and clean up.

I get what the idea is about the NPC, but I hope to hell they don't tie it in together with the storage, I can just sense the feeling there'll be a bug and people will gain access to your storage freely.

Along the same lines, "Money + Ectos will be automatically placed in your storage" ... right there turns me away.

Just put the received gold/ecto on your character and have a message pop up in chat that says "Item # such and such has been sold, please view your Inventory (I) screen to make any gold/item deposits into your storage to free up space for future sales."
Preferably in maybe red or yellow text?
So it isn't the white, blue, green, orange, pink or purple (GW employees, right?) as there already is.

Maybe add a 15-20 sec confirmation?
"A sale has been queued, please click accept to confirm the sale"

So that when people DO go AFK, knowing this will cause them to not do it for long periods of time and it'll cut down on the "Selling Elemental Sword for 20k --PM-AFK" like there is in the party window.
Then you come back 8 hours later and the same message is STILL THERE --- WTF?

What would also be needed is a "You are unable to make a new announcement in the party window for 53 minutes" (Example)

So *IF* new sales are sent to the top of the party window, you don't get dumbasses making and deleting new ones every 10 minutes to get it to the top. With the "Every hour reset" it'd fall right into place.

Same with the uber1337 [email protected] .. I see enough of that in chat:

@@@@@@@@---Selling really rare 1337 Good Sword---@@@@@@@@

Keep it like the character names, no numbers, icons and the such.
Clean, Professional and Presentable


All in all it's a really good idea .. BUT with as much work as would need to be implemented and tested so that there are no crazy bugs that could screw someone over, I doubt it would be put in anytime soon.
Probably be near a year and that's if they put it into their "To-Do" list right now.
--I know, I know, all those CNN Tech TV viewers will be leaving replies "z0mg it doesn't take that long, it's easy I could do it with 1 arm behind my back"

Why ?
A listing thats been there for 1 minute is just as accessible as one thats been there for 24 hours because you don't need the seller to have any input after you decide to buy from him. You just click buy and the item becomes yours.

This could be a problem. Though ANET should test for bugs like that, so we don't need to think about them. If your really worried I'd suggest staying away from the stalls for a month or two to give such bugs time to surface.

What wrong with moving the gold and ecto automatically ?

And what happens if the 15-20 seconds expires without any input from the seller ? (which is what will be happening the vast majority of the time)

And when you see such a method all you need to do is click it, open up that players stall, then click buy to get the sword. The fact that the seller has been AFK for a few hours doesn't mean anything. In fact allowing the players to sell without having to be there waiting for a buyer is the actual point of all the trade improvement ideas I've seen, as it allows them to trade with players with other playing times to them.

Yes, deciding how to sort the stalls will be difficult. Currently the party search window puts the oldest entries to the top, so people who keep closing and reopening their stall keep getting dropped to the bottom. But this gives an advantage to the people who are able to keep a stall up 24/7, probably because of extra accounts (eg botters).

The best one I can come up with is completely randomizing the stall order every hour or so.

Though if a search function is added, the ordering of the stalls won't actually matter as most people will just hit search.

Based on the latest comments and suggestions i present:

## Update 1 ##

*Issue: Too long afk'ing and too much cluttered list
*Solution: The shop should have a timeout limit and after that time it gets removed from the list and closed. The same should happen to empty stores after selling last item.

*Issue: Store names
In my opinion special characters and numbers should be allowed. There are many possible uses for them that could help describe items sold in a very short message. Remember that 31 characters is indeed very short, and any excess @#$@?>*& stuff greatly limits your space. The less informative the name, the less people will view that offer, I think.

*Issue: Store advertisments order and potential abuse by bots.
*Solution: All messages in trade section of Party Search should be displayed in a random order, randomization done client-side at the time the window gets opened. Any new messages getting added while the window is opened appear at the bottom of the list (just like it is now).

*Search!
Client-side processing of the standard party search data provided by the server could allow some basic searching. The searches could be done only in those short, up to 31 letters Party Search messages, as no item data may get transfered before actually entering a store.
So it could be possible to search single short keywords that may appear in stores names, for example 'dye' or 'sword' or 'green', and all the messages would get filtered and only those containing the typed string of characters would get displayed. Searching done this way should be very easy to implement and would require zero changes in how the server-side of party search engine works.

*New thing: WTB in Party Search*
Making the Trade section work as links to shops shouldn't obviously stop people from being able to advertise that they want to buy (WTB) something.
While the initial idea was that typing a message in Party Search Trade section should open your Xunlai Selling Tab or another interface to set up the shop, it doesn't mean that you have to do it. Just don't clock that [Start] button, and your message doesn't link to any items for sale.
As the Trade section could get cluttered with dozens of messages, a client-side sorting function could be made, that would make it possible to display the messages not linking to a store separately.

*New Thing: Selling things more expensive than 100k
It's not as simple as 100k+some ectos. A system with more than 1 currency type would be far more complicated than just gold. And it incudes certain design choices... just see:
Option 1. Most simple: Trades above 100k for 1 item just aren't supported by the automated system, instead an item could be displayed in store with no price set, so it can be viewed but to do the trade you have to use the old [Whisper] button and finish the trade manually.
Option 2. Storage to Storage: This would require some bigger changes in the game, and the idea is to be able to pay higher prices in gold by simply transfering the gold from your storage (or your character+some additional needed gold from storage) to the seller's storage. There may be some technical difficulties to doing that or it may even be impossible.
Option 3. 100k+something: This complicates the system alot, and may be not even worth it. A secondary currency should be chosen, this is an important design decision, as it should be accepted by players and not change in the future. The problem is Ectos don't have to remain a currency forever, and the devs can't simply force that choice to everyone. As there's no better option, a new currency should be created (items with the same buy and sale prices)... The currency issue was discussed lots of times before, and the general opinion was it's not needed, thus I don't consider Option 3. to be viable.

I've snipped out the things I have no issue with.

Because of the limited store name people will use various abbreviation's to get across what they want to sell. But these are likely to be non-standard, for instance sword might get swrd, sord, srd, etc. Not really a problem when your browsing the list, but when you want to run a search its a problem.
And this is without thinking about people that don't speak english, or people using abbreviation's of the language they run GW in for the skin names. Or the player that, knowing that most people are looking for swords (for example) puts sword in his store name despite not selling a single sword just to get people into his shop.

A better option might be to include, alongside the name the player set, a few characters representing what kind of items the store sells. Have them invisible to the people browsing the list, but looked at by the search function. Though even then ANET might decide due, to bandwidth costs, that its cheaper for them to run the search server side which means the search function is likely to be able to filter for specific skins in specific stat ranges.

Players using strange abbreviations in the 31 char wouldn't help themselves by doing so. The more strange it is the less chance of being found in a text string based search. Thats why i think players would quickly develop common short names for all the usually sold stuff.

But bilateralrope just suggested something I really like, which I'll expand and post detailed solution on how it should be done. And this is having information about what the store sells coded in a few characters of data, to be used by a search function. This is brilliant, sir, and realistic.

My early vision on it:
We know there's no possibility for any search engine to exist in GW1 able to search through items.
The only thing that could be searched in is the 31 characters, short message that any player can broadcast through the PartySearch engine.
The most reasonable way of doing any searches seem to be client-side filtering of all PartySeach posts.
The idea is, to sacrifice a couple of those characters to have some information about what kinds of items the store sells.
This would be done automatically upon starting the store.

Possible filters - Show only shops which contain at least one:
*Item for a given Profession - 10 bits of data
*Gold item
*Green item
*Upgrade component
*Rare Material
*Miniature
*Event Item

It's just 16bits=2bytes, so the message length would decrease only 2 characters (from 31 to 29) and maybe only 1. (1 character in GW chat is definately more than 1 byte)

This list is by no means final, and the whole searching by filtering certain cathegories is up for discussion here as a possible upgrade to the original idea.

BTW, Do those huge walls of text scare people off this thread? ;p

/signed. Sounds like a good way to make everyone happy.

Signed for the idea in principle. Actual implementation might take more work though.

So this will basically be AFK shops?

Do this at once!

/signed a million times!
Anything to ease the monotony of selling things....

BTW I really like how you saw what the major problem was with all other AH ideas and suggested something different. Great Idea! Lets just hope Anet reads this and likes it!

/signed... sort of

Seems too complicated. They just need to add a trading town to the battle isles map where you can spam to your heart's content.

And the other characters in the store title would still be the player generated name. Why don't we just completely remove the ability for the players to set their own store name and use all the characters for representing whats in the store ?

When browsing stores, the buyers will probably only care about what items are being sold and at what price. Now while a custom title can work, having it auto generated with a search filter system would be better.

Though to reduce server load and prevent people trying to use junk items to be flagged as having decent stuff, I propose that the following items are disallowed from being in stalls:

1 - Anything a trader NPC can handle (dyes, runes, materials, etc).
2 - With the exception of certain specialty weapons (the -50hp cesta is the only one I can think of) weapons with their base stat (+energy for foci, +armor for shields, damage for weapons) below max will be disallowed.
3 - All white weapons.
4 - All weapons that aren't either inscribable or have their inherent mod at maximum should be blocked with the exception of some rare skins with near max mods (eg crystalline swords).
5 - Any items sold by merchants, unless they are stocked at the discount merchants in factions.

I suggest blocking 1 because the trader handles them very well so putting them in stalls would be a waste of server resources. 2,3 and 4 are blocked because I don't see anyone buying them. 5 is because people would just go to the merchant instead, but I'm allowing stuff from the discount merchant so that people who own a town can resell stuff from it.

Basically yes. Though I'm hoping ANET doesn't force us to stay logged in to run the store because I can't see any reason why thats needed, yet I can easily see how it would cause problems for both the players and ANET.

/signed
I haven't read all replies i reallly like the idea just theres a few flaws to it

with that whole Buy Item thing, people could just go click on that , than just not buy the item, thus making you redo it and could get really annoying

Huh ?

When a player clicks the buy item button the trade happens instantly with no further interaction from the seller. So how could someone click the button then not go through with the trade ?

/signed but im skipping to the last page and going to add two parts to this.

1) How do you suggest they work with Ectos since an Ecto is considered currency.

2) Look at lyra Songs Central Idea. That would go well with this idea putting all the merchants into one city.

I'm assuming that it will just transfer gold + ecto (from the material storage) to the seller. Only allow setting ecto as part of the price if the 100k of gold is also there. Though this still will have problems if the seller doesn't have room for the gold and/or the ecto. Maybe require that the seller has enough free space in his storage for him to receive all the gold and ecto from any items he has on sale.

Though it might just be easier to remove the gold limit and deal with the crash in the price of ecto because we just killed a major portion of its demand. Note that because of how easy ecto makes it for people to trade at prices above 100k, I don't see removing the limit having any effect on prices for anything else, except maybe some people using as an excuse to try and inflate prices in the short term (if the search works well enough they won't be able to).

Because the search on this forum doesn't work, can you give me a link please.

@ scrinner
1) see my post #60 on page 3 of this thread.
2) i know i did read that idea before but i don't remember it exactly so a link could help.

@ bilateralrope

Remember that the original idea was to make the system as simple as possible, and all the searching improvements based on coding some information into the data that gets broadcasted by PartySearch may be more complicated than the rest of the system to design and implement. It may be just going too far while it's not necessarily needed. The simpliest possible idea was to not change anything in the PartySearch at all except for adding that [View Items] button. And it would be ages ahead of what we got now.

However some kind of searching would be a nice improvement and your idea of completely abandoning store names set by users to use all the space for automated coding information about the sold items for searching purposes could be fine if designed right. But it's really not an easy task, and after some serious thought I know that I wouldn't be able to plan a design for it.

The problem is designing an efficient way to use all the space and selecting the most important data to be encrypted there. As the only way of actually finding something there would be through these searches, it may become a barrier for the more casual players/buyers. Also it may be hard to find the most important qualities of items to be used there which would apply to any kind of item someone might want to sell, so that the new search engine could find any item existing in game. Even the new searching interface would have to be pretty massive to include all the options and filters.

Apart from that, I see no reason of disallowing any items from being sold there (maybe with an exception of customized items to prevent scamming). If people want to sell crap, let them do it. There would still be 1 shop and a limited number of items to be sold per player, so no difference what is being sold. I'm sure nobody at Anet would want to work on a detailed list of allowed and disallowed items when there's no need for that.

We also have to remember that the whole thing should be easy to use by anyone, even the most casual players. That and the difficulty to design are the reasons I think a simple text string based filtering + possible several filtering checkboxes, like those presented in my post #62

Yawgmoth have you thought about Emailing this directly to Anet? because i recommend you do, this is one of the best ideas EVER about selling and buying stuff and its just brilliant, sure youve got an Gaile Grey browsing up here but an email goes directly to anet and im sure they read it.

As such you would have to copy your first post, explain everything and provide them with a link to this thread, why? well Anet likes listening to their community so having that much good responces from here will certainly add up to considering this. I for sure hope they do consider this and implent it.

Cheers, oh and

/SIGNED.

Have you noticed that they have moved all thexunlai chests and agents. leaving a lot of empty unused space?

That empty space could be use for this.

/signed, but it doesn't seem any less compliacted than an Auction House.

If it is less complicated, I'd like to add the addition of Party Search being a watermark bound to your normal town scree. If anyone has observed a PvP match, they will probably say they know of the party list watermark in the corner of the screen. That's what we need for party Search.

The reason being: Party Search isn't used because for it to be effective it has to take up a good portion of the screen, and it has to be opened anyway. Why would people open a window that does pretty much the same thing as the chat function, but takes up more room and is only limited to [31 characters]? They wouldn't, accept in major towns where people use it to find sanity amongst the spam.

My suggestion: Allow Party Search to have the ability to be a watermark in the corner of the screen like the heads up display in observer mode, and allow it to be toggled between the normal view and the smaller, watermark view. ALSO IMPORTANT- Increase the character lmit from 31 to say... 50 and allow item links like the skill and equipment template ones.

A change to make the interface less bulky, more streamline, and fancier looking would do well with this. They did last for factions. Now lets get another UI graphics change for EotN.

'Nuff said.

/Signed

Not even a single, valid argument for this upgrade to be impossible. People just like to, proudly, disagree, even though this would benefit them too. Sigh...



Guild Wars free to play? Sorry, but I payed my copy(s). Haven't you payed yours?

Bilateral your rant is nothing more than a rant. It's your own view or taste. You don't like AFK'ers, fine. I myself hate instanced zones, but I have fun in GW nonetheless. The game will never please everyone, so why should your rant be taken serious?

And comparing GW to Maple Story? Get real... ^^

Okay Guru is REALLY slow right now so ill just describe how to get to the topic. Go to the List of ideas King symeon made (Its pinned). There you will find his/her thread on the Central island you will find it was well recieved (Its in the title as well lolz)

I've never believed your claim about this being as simple to implement as you claim. And while it will be better than what we have now, we can still propose tweaks to make it better. So lets give ANET various options under the same basic idea to work with, and let them decide which is better to implement.

I'm also operating under the assumption that, because of the number of stores, the stall window will be separate from the party search window to save bandwidth for ANET.

[quote[However some kind of searching would be a nice improvement and your idea of completely abandoning store names set by users to use all the space for automated coding information about the sold items for searching purposes could be fine if designed right. But it's really not an easy task, and after some serious thought I know that I wouldn't be able to plan a design for it.[/quote]

Here is a rather inefficient way to do it:

- 1 byte for the item type (sword, staff, shield, etc), including the items attribute for things with multiple attributes (wands, shields, etc). The remaining number will be used to indicate non-weapon items (in which case the following bytes will be used for other data).
- 1 byte for the skin. If we assume an 8-bit byte, we can have up to 256 skins to chose from. So make one skin number mean a green and there will be lots of room to add new items later.
- 1 byte for the weapon req. If the skin number says a green weapon, this will say which green.
- 1 byte to specify the inherent mod type. An inscription slot (empty or full) will count as an inherent mod.

So thats 4 8-bit bytes for each item. With 31 bytes we get 7 items and 3 extra bytes. But because GW supports non-english characters, I think we are dealing with more than 8 bits for each character in the party search window. So with 16 or 32 bit bytes, or a more efficient algorithm, we can either have more items or include other data (price is the only other one I can think of).

For sellers placing an item in the stall, they will go through the following steps:
1 - Decide items price
2 - Place item in stall
3 - Decide stall name
4 - Wait for sale

Step 3 is removed by auto-generated names.

For buyers its just a matter of selecting checkboxes at each step, then browsing the stalls to find the item he wants to buy. I don't see these steps being misunderstood easily. But if we remove a step, it means the list of stalls will display more stalls with no items the buyer wants.

Though once the search is completed, it might be possible to have your GW client automatically open up each stall to get the info on the item, then display them into a list (sorted by price) while hiding all the other items being sold. This would ruin the stall feel, but will probably make the trading easier for players.

Disallowing items does the following:
- Reduces the amount of crap a player would have to skip to find the items they want to buy. Even with the exclusions I proposed a lot of crap will still get in.
- Makes it easier to design a filtering system.
- Reduces the server load of the stalls, meaning less lag. Even if they don't cause enough load to cause lag, more crap means more stalls, meaning higher bandwidth costs for ANET.
- Lets people know that their non-max white FDS is worthless, so they don't get their hopes up.
- For items that the traders can handle, the more that go via the trader the better its price reflects market value. The trader probably will use a lot less server resources to do so.

A fully auto-generated name means the entire filtering can be done with checkboxes, which should be easier to use than a text string search.

My intent is for the stall name generation and the entire filtering system to be handled clientside, meaning that at worst it takes a while to do on slower machines. If ANET decides that running the search serverside is a better idea than transferring the entire store list to the clients then I expect that they will optimize the database for the search. This will make it hard to view all the items any particular player is selling (I'll elaborate on this if asked), so the search will only return the items we specify in the search.

Excellent idea!

Sheer brilliance!

Love the simplicity and potential effectiveness at making trading so much easier.

So, so much easier.

So, so, so much easier.





/notsigned





Too easy.

The Guild Wars servers are fast and reliable for playing the game.

Let's keep it that way.

This will only encourage more afk'ers and bots to idle trying to sell loads of (worthless) items, soaking up bandwidth, slowing down servers.

At least trade spammers get bored after a while and spambots can get banned.





So great idea, seriously, but not worth the price to pay for it.

Yes this was an objection of mine. However when I actually thought about it, I realized that I can't think of a single good reason why the player needs to remain online at the stall while its running. So my solution here is to let all players run their stalls while they are offline or doing something else in-game.

Yes this was an objection of mine. However when I actually thought about it, I realized that I can't think of a single good reason why the player needs to remain online at the stall while its running. So my solution here is to let all players run their stalls while they are offline or doing something else in-game.

economics 101 = the more moey moving and changing hands in an economy bodes well for the market prices of everything. helps establish actual market prices, and happier people.

How can afk sellers use bandwidth? If done right, the system should work in a way that an afk seller doesn't receive ANY packets of data except for the whisper messages to him. He doesn't need to see what's going on in the district he's in, he doesn't need to read the trade spam because he's freakin' a f k !. And it should be obvious that an afk client doesn't send ANY data aswell (want proof? press shift+f10 in game and Tab to the bandwidth chart, then stop doing anything). The only time data would be sent would be if a transaction actually happened, so that the seller might get informed about it. So it's almost like selling while being completely offline, but better! (whispers and notices about sold items).

So there's no possible way my system would slow down servers, it's not the matter of how many people would use it and completely not the matter of how crappy the items they sell. And there's nothing wrong with allowing newbies to sell their crap, there will always be others who would want to buy them. And a simple solution for those who don't want to look at that crap :: automated coding of 1 bit of data in the PartySearch header meaning "This store contains low level / nonmax item(s)" and one checkbox allowing to filter them all and not show on the list.

For him to be able to receive whispers or the transaction message, the servers would need to know if he still has GW running. This means that regular "I'm still here" messages need to be sent every so often. Once you add them up over a 24/7 period and several hundred thousand people, it becomes a bandwidth use worth caring about no matter how few signals. And don't forget any chat happening in that district or people wandering around there.

However you haven't given a reason as to why the client has any need to stay online:
- Whispers: Hes AFK, he won't be there to read them. And if he reads them later, the person who sent it will probably be offline. Besides, what kind of useful things might actually be said over it.
- Transaction notification: Just wait till he next logs in to tell him.

And even if the bandwidth is negligible for ANET, the CPU usage of guild wars while its just waiting for something to happen prevents you doing other things on the computer.

So why should the seller have to remain online again ?

Server storage space is limited. Each item in a store needs to be recorded somewhere.
CPU capability is limited. Data in stores will need some precessing.
Bandwidth is probably charged per amount transfered. More items = higher costs for ANET.

Sure the amounts used per item will be tiny. But they will add up once you consider the size of the GW population (all we know is that there have been over 3 million copies sold).
The only people I'm aware of who are willing to buy the crap are the people who don't know how cheap the decent items are. But with this idea either they will learn of the decent items prices, or this idea doesn't work well as a trading system. If the former then we are just wasting server resources, if the latter then removing them will improve the quality of this idea as a trading system.
More data to process and move around (using up limited server resources) vs a simple client side check (which won't use up anything noticeable).

Just remember that only ANET knows how close the GW servers are to full capacity.

But as long as I can filter them out easily I don't care too much. There is always the option of implementing this without blocking the crap items, then disallow items later once it becomes a problem. I say we leave the decision on if any items should be disallowed at first up to ANET.

/signed

A better trade system is needed, one where I can sell while AFK would be ideal.