Idle Speculation: What stopped the Auction House?

nice post. makes a lot of sense. I'd just add motivation to time and resources as things anet lacks to get this off the ground

key to stop spamming... make everything customized!!

This is probably what happened, ANET was made and they probably had a limited bankroll, even after they were bought by NCSoft, and to save money they didnt bother to put one in. Now that they have three games out, working on a fourth and fifth, they would not only have to program in a large complex system in games four and five, they would have to alter games one, two and three and that is a lot of money and time invested into something that doesnt bring in the consistant revinue without the monthly fee.

the auction site here would be a much better option... if it wasn't so slow.... in general, I have to plan on spending 15+ minutes per item to post, much of that time is spent searching similar auctions, and then navigating the auction post page, all of which takes roughly 30 seconds per page to load..... when it works.

Alternatively, I'd say have item trade links, but only to the party search panel. Have it where people can post say 5 items there, with suggested price.

i would settle for a max mods/inscriptions trader like the current scroll trader. if they made it accept only max items, they'd just become commodities like all other trader items.

There is a HUGE difference between building basically static pages and a game streaming real time keeping synchronization between you and everyone else in a town. Monstrously huge. Very not small.

I like how you say all of this so certainly as if you are a member of aNet's programing team. We did not help in the encoding of the Guild Wars system. We do not know what is or is not reasonably available on the current design. The end.

Another part of this that I haven't seen anyone explore yet is that NCSoft could be holding it back?? I know that in Asheron's Call 2 they were handed down some strict guidelines (that ultimately made the game fail but that's a different topic) from their publisher Microsoft. Silly things such as: no entering buildings, no quest longer then 1 hour, no trap doors or complicated dungeons of that sort, etc. etc.

Maybe NCSoft plays a factor.

GWGuru isn't basically static pages. Every post and thread is stored in a database and pulled by (probably) php. All of the user data is in there too. Everything you're reading is stored as a number of entries in a database table, and it's pulled from there every time someone opens the page.

Download WAMP or some other webserver (if you run Windows), and install some forum software on it and see for yourself exactly how an application pulls data from a database.


What part do you disagree with? The bit where i applaud Anets sheer brilliance in technical game design and server setup?

We do know what is currently available on the current design.

Anet rolls out updates without kicking us offline. They allow people to play with multiple builds of the game at the same time. They dynamically adjust the number of instances to allow for overcrowding. That says a huge amount about their network setup.

A webserver can easily provide the function of an auction house - there's one as part of this forum. There is no way in hell that an auction house is beyond their abilty. The only assumption i'm making is that they're not incredibly inept idiots who just got lucky with Guild Wars.

I think it is has everything to do with the lack of advanced crafting in the game. Why bother with an Auction House when it is going to be mostly weapon mods , rare crafting materials, and weapons as the primary items? Armor is locked, so that is a non-starter. The traders handle the rare materials. The last few items sell ok if you can stand to spam the channel for a while. There is really is nothing to fuel an Auction system in terms of economy.

Still apples and oranges. I build pages that access data from a mainframe through a middleware product for display on the web. Sure, there's dynamic retrieval, but you wind up with static HTML when all's said and done. You have the difference between data being retrieved only on certain actions (clicks) compared to the continual updating across multiple systems (like everyone in your party or town). No comparison.

Thank you for your reply VitisVinifera. I actually liked the idea too. So much that i decided to post it in the suggestions forum

I don't want to hijack this one, but I would like to link my thread if it is okay:
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10160441

I doubt it is all just a matter of money, but that is surely a factor. Putting in an auction house is certainly possible. Anything is possible if you spend enough time and money on it. I wish people would stop talking about how easy and inexpensive it would be to put one in though. If it was cheap and easy, I'm sure they'd do it. Just like they've made all the other extras to keep their customers happy.

Please don't think they don't make an auction house out of laziness or spite. Happy gamers tell their friends about their great game. And then their friends buy it too. Global buy/sell ability is a long discussed subject that devs have taken notice of many times and commented on in every known forum. If they could do it they would.

It doesn't need to update continually. All it needs to do is pull data on refresh - the same way rune and material vendors already do.

Occasionally you would try to buy that last item only to find it's no longer there - exactly the same way that it occasionally happened with runes right after the release of Nightfall - which is hardly an auction house killing problem.

My guess is probably midway through the completion of Nightfall They decided the games engine wasn't up to the task to keep creating new content and have it still be fresh. So the decision was made to start on GW2, release 1 more expansion and move on. I don't think anyone came blame them. Not having the ablility to run, jump, swim, and climb means things can get pretty repetitive. Which is why many people have left the game for WoW or another MMO.

So maybe they had been working on an AH in or around that time. But realising that it would be a big investment.So it could have been moved over to GW2 instead. When you can implement something from the start it is much easier and less costly. Again, I can't blame them (if this was the case).

If GW2 doesn't have an AH or something similar then I might complain. But I'm going to enjoy my last months with GW and look on to GW2 when it is released. I'm not gonna waste my time missing something I never had.

Though maybe we will get something when GW:EN is released. But I'm not gonna get my hopes up.

It wont be worth anets time, effort etc.

honesty you can just use trade forums here or in other GW fansites, I alway get what I need in those, and sell some stuff through them too.

Wow, you allways have something to complain about.
Give it a break.

Not happy? Go do something else!

I doubt it.

You know? From the latest NCSoft's Financial report of this year, their income from Guild Wars is far more than that of City of Heroes. And that's BEFORE City of Heroes got a huge invention system AND a Consignment House system.

Why o why?

If it's because such system would result in reduced income from GW, wouldn't it mean that income from City of Heroes (which was low to begin with) would also be decreased with such system as well?

Also, I don't think it's because GW server is global. Why? Because the Consignment House of City of Heroes is also GLOBAL. It links all servers, those in US and those in EU, together in one system so you can buy stuff that were put on sell by any people from any servers.

So what's the reason? I think it's because GW item system is too complicated, as someone has suggested. No NCSoft conspiracy whatsoever.

I'm starting to lean towards that view, as well.

I used to think that an Auction House would totally help Guild Wars a lot. But it really wouldn't be much different. There would still be a large amount of overpriced and/or useless items.

One, if not the reason that the Guild Wars item system is so complicated is that the price is mostly dependent on the rarity of the skin.

To all you people saying it's technological, I think you are wrong. A number of other games have auction houses. Even GWG has an auction page.

It isn't a copyright thing either because games before WoW had an auction house as well. I seem to remember FFXI having one.

My guess is it is resources and a different priority. They listen to players on some things, but it took them a year and a half to add white dye and more storage. Players have asked for other things as well only to have things fall on deaf ears.

I think this was what ROSE Online had, and instead of a chat box full of spam, you had cities full of people with boxes all over their heads, and boy, was there lag.

people have wanted an AH since day one. something should have been implemented with the release of Factions. or Nightfall. or HM update. or EoTN. honestly, anet, why not? i've never seen a straight answer given. selling and buying through the in-game chat channels and/or party search is not practical, convenient, or any solution at all. MMO's need a good trade system, and its the one massive thing GW is missing. and since the HM update where we're being encouraged to trade rather than farm gold...i mean, c'mon. its downright lazy of a company to expect the fansites to take care of the auctions/trading.

at this point...i'd settle for a "trade improvement" of any kind, because its just ridiculous trying to sell things through in-game chat. i'd even pay for an AH upgrade from the online store, if it came down to it. even selling on the forums isn't ideal, since so many people are doing it...yr thread is bumped off the first page within an hour.

Id give every single rare item I had (thats one full inventory and about 1 and a 1/2 characters worth) and 1/2 the gold in my bank (not all of it cause of the way the eco is), just to be able to auction all the items I find from this point on.

Ive been running chests in HM for the unlucky points, and im on the verge of selling a perfect stat irdescent ageis to the merchant simply cause I don't feel like spamming WTS perfect req9 aegis 30k over and over. And I really dont feel like making a huge forum post for all my items.

Everyone notice how Anet avoids threads about the auction house like its the Black Plague? They know we are right...they just won't admit it. If Anet just came out and said "Look, we know everyone wants an auction house, and we think your right, this game would be better with it, but we can't do it for X, Y, and Z," I'd be happy. Or even if they just admitted that they were too lazy to do it, it would still be better than being ignored.

There is one big difference with "But a lot of other games have Auction Houses too" and GW. It's the structure of GW imo. Where else have you seen an online game structure as GW? Where a town has multiple servers/districts with travel possibilities and instanced area's once you move out of town? As far as I know the games with an Auction House are the ones that have one persistant world (WoW and probably GW2 like).

However, there should be 'plenty' of other game design options open to regulate selling besides the 'traditional' auction house setup.

I absolutely agree with Frantic-Sheep.

It is not the missing auction house that bothers me, the problem is that the trade mechanics are so rudimentary and almost non-functional, causing the horrible trade spam in major cities.

I'm rather disappointed that we aren't getting one. Yes, ANet have added other things the community has asked for, but this is arguably the most requested one. If it's server structure, then they should have thought about that first in my opinion. If people were complaining in beta and they listened, something could have been altered before release.

It's all very well and good spending your time on GW2, but forgetting the needs GW1 has is downright stupid. Is this how it's going to be with GW2 too? "You know what team...I don't think we should continue with GW2 anymore. Let's make GW3!" During the two years it's going to take to make GW2, you're going to have to keep the current customers' attention if you want them to purchase GW2. Currently I must admit I'm not leaning towards buying anything at this point in time :/

Aaaahh... Auction House. The Achilles heel of ArenaNet...
Players can rant all they want - they do have a point. And there’s not enough PR to cover this black hole.

At first, it might've been because it was just an experimental game with a very peculiar business plan: Let's not put too much effort on this and we have to be careful not to make it too similar to WOW.

Then, the time-absorbing campaigns: We don't even have time to scratch our backs, let alone think about an Auction House.

Campaigns were getting the game too bloated. Scratch that - new game version, new money injection, with everything nice and coherent that the players ever wanted: We better wait to implement the Auction House in GW2. It's going to be a major incentive for players to move on! Making GW1 too good might deter a great deal of players to buy the new version.

It might seem bad that the developers might think like this, but it's just the way things are. Any business needs to consider lure to maximize profit. In this cruel, hard world of making money, this would still be more benign than the monthly-fee games that will not bother to make new versions while the cow is still nice and ripe.

By the nature of its own business plan, ArenaNet has the actual incentive to make the game even better and create for us the "Ultimate" version.

Is the Auction House a sacrificial lamb in the midst of time constraints, profit making, marketing and better entertainment? I for one consider this a minor issue in the grand scheme of things.

For me, the problem will be if GW2 turns out to be a worthless effort and then it would really be a disappointment of epic proportions.

The game already has a database of all the items. How do you think it's able to keep track of our inventory and storage? How does it know which items each character has? There is already at least one database that has every item in the game.

What is needed is a schema update that adds several fields to the item database:

1. For sale or not (binary value)
2. Reserve price (24bit would allow up to more than 16million gold as a price)
3. Current bid (24bit again as above)
4. Auction duration (if auction is in hours, an 8bit value would allow 256 hours (or up to more than 10 days)

A couple of interfaces would need to be built:

1. a way of marking an inventory item as being for sale and setting fields 2 and 4. You could even mouse-over the item to view current auction status of that item.

2. an interface that filters and displays the entire player item database by the first field (whether an item is for sale), provides additional filtering and/or search options, and provides a way of entering bids (updating field 3)

Lastly, some code logic would be needed (probably the only part that would require any real effort) to close the auction and transfer the item to the inventory of the bidder. Adding bidder history or email would be more difficult (would require an entirely new database), but it not needed for a functional auction system.

It's not a question of technology -- most if it is already there.

Note that the additional fields would add 7 bytes and 1 bit to each item in the database. Let's say 8 bytes to make it easy. While adding 8 bytes to each item in the database scales up to hundreds of megabytes of additional storage space GLOBALLY, its a small fraction of the amount of information being stored about each item at present.

And this is probably not how items are stored. There are a finite number of item combinations, and it might be more efficient to manage them by assigning each possible combination a unique ID. Depending on the number of combinations, this ID might only be a few bytes (4 bytes gets you in the billions of combinations). If this is the case, the database storage requirements might even be lower.

I think it has to be a policy reason.

-Forjo

I'm SO surprised that YOU seem to know how GW works, despite the fact that you're not working for Anet.

What's the point of secret source code and NDA, right?

I didn't read all the posts on this thread... but I got most of them covered, and I have an idea. (puts on flame suit in case this was mentioned)

If anybody has played Ragnarok Online... I'm sure you are more than aware of the way they allow players to sell items. Personally, I think that is a good way to handle things - let me elaborate in case you have never played RO.

There is a merchant class (that has skills such as vend - this may have to be waived because there are good and bad points to only allowing one class to vend..) that is allowed to hold a cart, and then place items into that cart. If the player decides he/she wants to sell an item, or assortment of items - they just double click their "Vend" skill and do the following:

Name your shop
Drag the items from your cart into your shop that you want to sell
Enter a price that you want to try to sell your items at
Wait...

I think that system works fairly well, but there is one flaw (was changed in one of the servers I played RO in) - and that is... OVERCROWDING.

The overcrowding in main cites or "hot spots" was fixed by creating a special map, and having that be the only place where you could vend.

I hope I have layed out my idea clearly enough, and I think that the RO-shop system may be a good idea. I honestly have no idea how hard it would be to implement or whatever... but it could theoretically work.

Not at all. I disagree with the claim to knowing what it would take to implement an Auction House into the Guild Wars system without having first hand knowledge of that system.

I see. Or not, since i made no such claim; the entire thread is based around the question: "What do you think stopped the auction house?".

Unless you're suggesting that a hypothetical response to a hypothetical question asking an opinion must be based on insider knowledge, in which case the thread would perhaps be better titled: "Anet network employees: Why can't we have an auction house?", and not "Idle Speculation".

I don't know if Gaile or anyone from ANet is reading this thread and I never got a chance to buy that magazine that had the GW2 stuff in it (sold out by the time I got a chance to go looking for it), but if they haven't made a commitment to it there, I'd really like to see someone from ANet come out and commit to an ingame auction house or player stores or some vast improvement over the current system for GW2.

Meaning you will be able to sell anything in the game to another player in a few clicks without having to spam general or go to another site. I mean the only place in GW I feel comfortable selling stuff is GWG's auction because the buy/sell forums always seem to have your post dropped down to page 7 before you can bump it again.

My guess is that they really didn't want to be like other games that have them already. You also have to understand is that people try to promote Guild Wars as a pvp oriented game so why would we need an auction house to begin with ?

I think Anet has learned over 2 years that not everyone who plays GW is a pvp player and there is a huge group of people who are just into the pve aspect of the game more than some would like to admit to but have no fear GW2 is on the way and it should be more pve oriented with the option to pvp.

Thats just my take on the whole thing but hey who really knows ya know ?

You explained elaborately and with certainty why it was not a technical issue holding back the Auction House. I did not say that you are not entitled to your speculation... I only utilized my equal right to disagree (which I based on reasonable information) in the current open-debate.Last I recall, aNet said that an Auction House was not technically possible on the current Guild Wars engine design without rewriting the entire system.

ROSE has it, Ragnarok Online has it, Lineage 2 has it, etc, etc.

Yes, it's true those games suffer from overcrowding, but, think a little, think about the overcrowding we have in events like Wintersday. Wouldn't it be the same? Not to mention, we do have the district system which counters that factor.

I think a private store system would be perfect for GW, IMO. We have player cap in districts and we know they can limit an area to a certain function (eg. boardwalk games), so, the only thing stopping them is their own will.

As soon as they come and announce that GW1 is going to stay as it is, and that an improved trading system is only coming with GW2, I'm leaving Arena Net for good.

There are far too many good options nowadays, and I don't mind the fees if I get what I want.

Godzilla?

RAWR!

Seriously, its development cost and/or time. Didnt start with Prophecies as they were launching an MMO without monthly fees and simply continued from there with development going into SF and subsequent chapters.

It probably could be implemented, but they probably also have a cost analysis and time-based chart plotting GW2 deverlopment, GWEN and continued testing and balancing of the current game state. Looking at that, they probably shelved it for a potential GW2 feature.

That said, I would like to see them address the lag that raises its ugly head somtimes. Somthing so simple as that before implementing something like this which the non-tech oriented mind of mine believes could only increase lag, if anything.

With this in mind, I'd really like to know from them why don't they at least increase the description space in the party search feature. Or why it hasn't been done yet, with all the complaints and such. Pride?

Don't throw sand at my eyes and tell me it's a development cost or time issue, because it isn't. Unless the whole game depends on the small size of that string. (lol)

Well, I doubt pride is the reason. There might be a reason they dont wish to address. Who knows.

Party Search needs a complete and total reworking anyway. Its useless right now as implemented, and not just because of the short text string.