In depth look at Auction House feasibility

When I started writing this it was a reply to a thread but somewhere around page 3 I decided that it may be better as a stand alone thread. I know this is long and drawn out but I think it may shed some light on the ideas and preconceptions about an auction house held by many

I see a lot of people saying that an auction would be easy to create and would use minimal system resources. Well that is just silly to assume I personally haven't seen the source code for guild wars I don't know what systems are in place and what aren't I haven't seen usage stats. and I highly doubt many of you have either.

first off look at the acution right here on this site currently there are 5508 items availible. and the auction only has 68051 users. That is .081 auctions per person. Now for some fun math 3 million copies sold 3 million users times the ratio here alone .081 gives us 243000 items availible for auction. good luck sorting through that...

but wait lets devide it into catagories like on this auction
5508 total
Axes (416) .075 of total
Bows (489) .089 of total
Daggers (137) .025 of total
Focus items (219) .04 of total
Hammers (218) .04 of total
Inscriptions (359) .065 of total
Miscellaneous (325) .06 of total
Rods and wands (233) .042 of total
Runes and insignias (7) .001 of total
Scythes (88) .016 of total
Services (16) .003 of total
Shields (392) .071 of total
Spears (101) .002 of total
Staffs (476) .086 of total
Supplies (35) .006 of total
Swords (516) .094 of total
Tomes (123) .022 of total
Upgrades (1358) .247 of total

due to rounding my totals only come up to .984 instead of one so in fairness Ill reduce my figure to match

239112 auctions
Axes (17933)
Bows (21281)
Daggers (5978)
Focus items (9564)
Hammers (9564)
Inscriptions (15542)
Miscellaneous (14347)
Rods and wands (10043)
Runes and insignias (239)
Scythes (3826)
Services (717)
Shields (16977)
Spears (478)
Staffs (20564)
Supplies (1435)l
Swords (22477)
Tomes (5260)
Upgrades (59061)

I for one don't think I would enjoy searching through that pile with out more catagories so lets break it up further Ill use axes for my example since they are top of the list

*Alright I just looked at the sub catagories. I don't mind a bit of math but I am NOT doing all that so we are just going to look at greens and non greens*

total axes 416 of then 33 are green

so our model shows that at 17933 axes 1450 of them would be green
that leaves 16483 axes with random mods and skins to sift through

lets use the axe as a model as a ratio for the entire auction if .081 are green over all there are 19334 greens up for sale that leaves 219778 items up for auction with random stats two hundred nineteen thousand seven hundred seventy eight individual items each with a unique instance. go ahead try to keep track of that.

how about taking this a step further and see how much disk space this would take up

now I have no idea how GW's coding for weapons works so I am going to invent a way that seems to be the smallest availible

Im going to use an sword fron nightfall since all the attributes are removeable for an example

first we have to tell it its an sword there are 10 different weapon types so lets just give it a number 1-10

so we have 00-

now lets add for the req req can be from 0 - 13 at least so we will need 2 more digits

so we now have 00-00

now the sword has a hilt right there are 12 different hilts availible so we need 2 more spaces

so we have 00-00-00

but wait the hilt could be sundering 20/10 or 20/20 or somthing in between so lets make that a 4 digit entry first to for type of hilt and 2nd 2 for stats of hilt

so we have 00-00-0000

now on to the pommel here we only have 7 so only need one digit for that and to for stats of pommel

so now we are up to 00-00-0000-000

alright on to inscriptions there are 52 possible inscriptions for all weapons so lets go with a 2 digit here as well and since it could be 10^50 or 15^50 we are going to need 4 more spaces

now we are up to 00-00-0000-000-000000

now we need the skin there are more than 10 skins so we need another 2 digits

so we have 00-00-0000-000-000000-00

and we need to know what color it is white blue purple or gold. better add another 0

so we have 00-00-0000-000-000000-00-0

and now value I don't know how it figures value but I have had two identical items with different values so Ill guess that we are going to need 3 more spaces for the value.

so in the end we have 00-00-0000-000-000000-00-0-000
and Im sure we can safely remove the "-" because it should be able to have coded in there somewhere to read it without the dashes

00000000000000000000000 = 23 digits

but an auction is more than a list it has amounts and names and bids so we need to add to it

first who owns it well with 3 million people the easiest way to identify each person would be simply by registration number so we need 7 more digits to identify who owns it

so we have 00000000000000000000000 is owned by 0000000

now how much does he want for it better put in 7 more digits for bids starting at 1 mil but wait we can only hold 100k on us so some other code will have to change either pay from storage or increase the amount we can hold or something and this alone enters an whole new set of issues but lets assume that gets worked out and go ahead and add the other 7 digits for amount

so we have 00000000000000000000000 is owned by 0000000 who wants to start the bidding at 0000000

alright now we have to add in who bid and how much so again we need 7 more digits for user and another 7 for amount bid

so we have 00000000000000000000000 is owned by 0000000 who wants to start the bidding at 0000000. 0000000 has bid 0000000

now one last thing start and end time now going with simplicity we can just say all auctions are 3 days from start time so we could just add 3 more digits to signify the day of the year and 4 digits to give the time in a 24 hr clock format and let the coding figure out the rest

so we have 00000000000000000000000 is owned by 0000000 who wants to start the bidding at 0000000. 0000000 has bid 0000000 auction started on day 000 at 0000

to keep things simple lets drop the lower bidder and keep no record of them so every time we get a new bid the auction size stays the same

now lets just program it to count the places so we can remove all the other info

so we get an auction that looks like this

so we have
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000
and this represents all the data that should be needed to send the auction data to us so now they just need to code the system to function right but look at what we just did 58 digits per auction 58 bytes each how many sword auctions did I say total *I had to scroll up* 22477

so lets try an experiment create a txt file and paste the 56 digit auction information code (txt files are raw data 1 charactor in a txt file = 1 byte file 56 charactors = 56 bytes) now save taht file and duplicate it 22477 times
(this is slightly difficult and time consuming I know as I tried it) when you get done ad all the files to a zip file because surely we can implement some form of compression .... when I did this I ended up with a 3 meg zip file 3 megs for just me to look at the swords .....

now staffs have in energy mod built in and shields and focuses and wands are shy a mod so Im gonna guess it all evens out so lets figure 56bytes for each auction roughly 13 megs to list the entire auction who wants to download that? well if 100,000 people do only once you are looking at an added transfer of over a TB I'd guess that could be part of the reason it isnt in the near future.

Also look at the other issues that arouse in the design of this system

1. transfer of funds since we cant deal in numbers higher than 100k.

possible solutions
1. increase our ability to hold money
1.a increase the amount of gold we can hold
1.b add something like Titanium 1t 245p 540g = (1,245,540g)

2. Create auction house credit system you goto the auction and buy auction credits. auction increment could be limited to 100g so we could have 100g 500g and 1000g 10k 50k credits (kinda like poker chips). if a storage agent was present in the auction house this would allow for quick purchase of large amounts. this would also act as a replacement for the ecto that we now use in normal trades.

2 Notification of outcome

possible solutions
1 implement a email/message system I beleive a system is already availible for some country but it would have to be implemented internationally while this would be the most convient way for the user it may also be the most elaborate and resource expencive way for the dev team

2 talk to an npc to find out if you won/sold/got out bid on anything this way while less convient for the user would most likely be easiest on resources in that it may only require a serch input and result output function

3. in game notification in real time such that in perhaps blue text or red it would say something to the effect of auction message you have won (insert item here) or you have been outbid this could also be used for other ingame announcements from A-net perhaps attached to an emote /news would tell you the news from the login page and if you have any info on auctions (and forgive me please but I have to say it it could also tell who has favor)

3. Payment and item transfer

possible solutions

1. When item is put up for auction it is given to an npc and the npc holds it until the auction is over at wich time he will return it to the seller if it was not sold or the buyer after payment is made. This idea seems logical however it would require a totally new npc design I beleive. most game systems use the same rules of existance for players and npcs alike it is just a matter of changing their actions to determine what they do. this means that they are told to stand in one spot and when you talk to them they excecute a certain script a merchant executes the merchant script wich removes gold from your account and generates an item in your inventory. and if you sell an item it adds gold to your account and the item is deleted. a skill trainer executes a trainer script wich removes gold and a skill point and adds a skill to your availible skills. In cases where items are concerend such as henchmen getting drops. I would venture a guess that the game has a formula in place where it desides from the availible party members who will get the item. if it comes up a henchman the item is simply deleted from existance.

however in this case the nps would have to retain the exact item wich means he would have to have a greatly increased storage capacity I make no claims at understanding what this would entail but I do know that it would require something different from normal.

2. The player retains the item and is responcible for being honest about the item and making an honest trade. We have seen that this system works in large part via the fan site auctions. however there is risk involved here but also the load on the dev team and servers would be reduced.


When I started writing this I was not sure what my findings would be weather I would deside at the end that it would be easy or hard to impliment now that I have reached the end I can say that I do beleive that this may be the simplist way I can think of to impliment a auction house but even so it woudl be a resource hog and alot of work on the dev team. I do still think it would be a nice addition but after working through this I do beleive that I have an understanding of one possible reason why it is noted as to why auction houses have been moved to the not in the near future status.

Far too many people just think "Oh X game has it so it can't be hard to put into Guild Wars! ".

I'm not sure how many people will actually read your post, Darkie, but hopefully some of those people will. They may not understand it, but at least it's one step up the stairs.

Do you download names of every single logged-in person with their location when you enter game? no.

If anets programers are beyond 101 programing, you would download only what you can see, and nothing more. Seach of auctions would be done server side, trader seeing only relevant data.

How come we cant deal with numbers beyond 100k?

In player-to player its true, but hypothetical storage-to-storage transfer does not need to have 100k limit at all.

Same gui that allows you to enter item to be sold/buy item should incorporate it.

Who cares if you have to check for item status and not being spoon fed that info, chat message if you are online would luxury imho.

Or you can just put item to special panel in storage box reserved for auctioned items, when trade is done that item is transfered to bidders storage and gold to yours.

no clowning with npcs needed, if there is problem (buyer has no space for item, seller no space for gold), they are gently notified and auction is put on-hold till they fix it or choose to cancel it.

---

You see, there are simple no-brainer ways to implement it if you do not artificially create broblems where there were none.

You could expect the amount of people in game using the AH to be significantly higher than what you see in a forum as well. Everyone with a moderately decent gold will be putting them in there hoping to get 500g more than the merchant will provide.

Then consider the database, accessing it from everywhere in the world at every point in time and having to keep every user up to date as every change is made.

Fugeddaboutit.

yes, part of the reason so many (myself included) dont use one like the one of this wesite because its slow and quite inconvienent, in game i think there would be at least double as many (to scale ofc)

Question is, does this flood of lowend items plague other mmogs with AH?

Anet could limit amount of concurent auctions per account. limiting them to 3 would severely limit its usefullness as item dump, limiting it as hashly as one auctioned item per account would mean that everyone will put in there only their best item they want to sell, making AH quite self policied by selers (why hope for r13 whatver to sell for 500 gold if you can put better item in that precious slot?). Add fact that users wont notice sale immediatelly thus wont put next item on auction immediatelly...

So while people use forums to sell 20+ items at same time with maxi posts, they would be seling them one-by-one in ah, and wont flood game at all. Casuals wont notice for a while, thus you are looking at quite low amount of high quality items. Ideally, you wouldnt notice when inital rush passed as amount and quality would be the same. Ofc, you will still see dump stuff being acutioned, but it would be because seller wont have anything better.

(this would give multi accout people at least something to use their extra accs that were gathering dust ever since purchaseable slots were offered.)

How soon do you think people would start complaining if those limits were put in place? Seriously. You think it's bad now without one?

actually there would have to be a limit like in most mmo's because the server has to keep track ove everything in it

you could divide every single mod and inscription and it would be no hassle, have you never played any game with an AH?

QFT. Unless there was a way to keep non max everything off the auction house and only allow r8-r10.



You could have one database per region (america, europe, korea, etc) to ease things up.

First, you assume ALL 3,000,000 people will be using an AH on the same server... Incase you've never played this game, there are diferent servers for different regions.

Second, you say you'd have to sort through a huge list of items, and you use GWGURU auctions as a model in your crappy post, yet don't even acknowledge the fact that with only 3-4 layers of sub-categories, there is only a few items listed under any specific category..

Weapons>
Axes>
Skin>
Requirement>

and thus you've reduced from a total of 22477 to a list of around maybe 50 items? And you can further have sorting options by price, ending soon, B/O ect...

Futher, you would only have to transfer data from one specific page you were looking at. You select all your categories and sub categories, and it displays a page of items (probably 10 items per page). So by using categories, you not only make it extremely easy to find what you want, but also reduce the amount of data you need to transfer from "TB" as you claim, to what, 560 bytes per page?

Anet aren't gonna make an AH for Guild Wars 1. Why? Because pretty soon Guild Wars is gone, old hat, 'old skool' and while they do want to keep people happy, everyone has lived without an AH for 2 years already, and with a completely new Guild Wars out soon, it takes a lot of effort away from that for something that will be used for a fairly short period of time.

Overall i don't think Guild Wars 1 will ever have an AH. However i bet they will have something better for trading in Guild Wars 2.

They haven't said if they will or not have something better for GW2.

first to the guy who posted the pic ..... never mind

Faer I agree

I dont know what all data my computer downloads I havent hacked the client to see exactly what goes on but I do know that I have 8 chars to shop for so Ill be looking at swords axes hammers sythes staffs wands you know just about everything ... and I always keep my eye out for a good deal so I would probably want to search through most everything wouldnt you?

also weather it has to come to my computer or if the server processes it it is still using resources taht A-net has to pay for.

it does have a limit of 9999k 999g tho thats the most you can hold in your storage. goto the auctions here and you will find things for 1 mil gold
isnt that EXACTLY what I said in my possible solution section the point was that an issue had showed in in the idea and would require a fix
again a possible solution to a problam that could arise that would require a fix your last two statements have done nothing but expand on my intented point that there is more involved than just the auction itself

simple yes but still required items to address wich was the intent of the section


really lets just count them

Inscriptions

"Vengeance is Mine" - 11 possible
"Don't Fear the Reaper" - 11 possible
"Dance with Death" - 6 possible
"Guided by Fate" - 6 possible
"Strength and Honor" -6 possible
"To the Pain!" 2 possible
"Brawn Over Brains" 2 possible
"Too Much Information" 5 possible
"I have the power!" 1 possible
"Don't call it a comeback!" 3 possible
"I am Sorrow." 3 possible
"Have Faith" 2 possible
"Hale and Hearty" 2 possible
"Seize the Day" 5 possible
"Live for Today" 5 possible
"Down But Not Out" 6 possible
"Be Just and Fear Not" 6 possible
"Faith is My Shield" 2 possible
"Hail to the King" 2 possible
Might Makes Right" 2 possible
"Knowing is Half the Battle." 2 possible
"Ignorance is Bliss" 2 possible
"Life is Pain" 2 possible
"Man for All Seasons"2 possible
"Survival of the Fittest"2 possible
"Leaf on the Wind" 6 possible
"Like a Rolling Stone"6 possible
"Not the face!"6 possible
"Riders On The Storm"6 possible
"The Riddle of Steel"6 possible
"Sleep Now in the Fire"6 possible
"Through Thick and Thin"6 possible
"Cast Out the Unclean"1 possible
"Fear Cuts Deeper"1 possible
"I Can See Clearly Now"1 possible
"Only the Strong Survive"1 possible
"Pure of Heart"1 possible
"Soundness of Mind"1 possible
"Swift as the Wind"1 possible
"Strength of Body"1 possible
"Run for your Life!"2 possible
"Sheltered by Faith"2 possible
"Nothing to Fear"2 possible
"Luck of the Draw" 11 possible
"Aptitude not Attitude" 11 possible
"Forget Me Not" 6 possible
"Serenity Now"4 possible
"Let the Memory Live Again" 6 possible
"Don't Think Twice" 6 possible
"Master of My Domain" 10 possible

"Measure for Measure"
"Show me the money!"

I think that is 211 inscriptions someone check my math please

prefix mods

Adept 11 possible
Barbed 1 possible
Crippling 1 possible
Cruel 1 possible
Defencive 2 possible
Ebon 1 possible
Fiery 1 possible
Furious 9 possible
Hale 22 possible
Heavy 1 possible
Icy 1 possible
Insightful 5 possible
Poisonous 1 possible
Shocking 1 possible
Silencing 1 possible
1Sundering 6 possible
2Sundering 11 possible
Swift 9 possible
1Vampiric 3 possible
2Vampiric 5 possible
Zealous 1 possible
total 94 possible

suffix
Aptitude 11 per attribute 20 attributes 220 possible
Defense 2 possible
Devotion 16 possible
Enchanting 11 possible
Endurance 16 possible
Forititude 11 possible
Mastery 11 per attrib 42 attribs 462 possible
Memory 11 per attrib 20 attribs 220 possible
Quickening 6 per attrib 20 attribs 120
Shelter 4 possible
Slaying 11 per species guild wiki lists 11 species 121 possible
Swiftness 6 possible
Valor 16 possible
Warding 4 possible
1229 total

mods = 1534 in total so even if each one was identified by an individual number that is still 4 digitis same as what I stated at first

I agree also auction houses in int dsts could allow for international trade. however this would be somehting to be descided on by the dev team wich in itself poses another reason for the delay in the arrival of the auction house descisions must be made to determine how best to deal with all such issues and right now they are focusing on other things and perhaps they know that after xx update something will be implemtnted to make it easier but until then they arent going to work on it.

please keep in mind the point of this thread was to address the issues of the type of things that could feasibily slow or impeed the arrival of an Auction system by adding in other problams most of you are doing quite a good job of pointing out further reasons for the delay

first please dont start a post by insulting it normally I would disregaurd your statements but in this case you are trying to make a valid point so I will ignore your insults and address your pointspersonally I would like to trade with people everywhere not just with those in my regon but again a descision must be made on how to address thisactually I did point that out I just didnt feel like doing even more math to determine exact numbers so I just went with greens and with the green axes alone there was 1450 with only 14 different green axes in the game that is more than 100 each I think the rest can be guessed from there.I never said it would be unmanageable I just said that there would be alot there and it would take a bit to get through it plus alot of data transfered again with the insults please keep in mind that this is the third time in one post I feel this is excessive and ask you to refrain from including personal attacks in further debates it appears you missread something I was not suggesting that each person would download 1 tb I was stating that overall there could be a matter of TBs downlaoded I do agree that each individual page could only be 560bytes 56 bytes per entry (thank you by the way for agreeing with my system of transfering the information) 10 entrys per page. however who is only going to look at one page ... I'd guess probably about 15 pages per person and lets give it 100,000 per day 15 pages x 560 bytes per page=8400 bytes or 8.4kb 8.4kb per person x 100,000 people 840000kb (1024kb =1 mb so a little more math and we get 820 mb per day. I do beleive these numbers to be low but surely you can see where this would add up in a hurry. I have attempted to clairify my points and show that it is not in fact baseless and flawed. please feel free to rubuttle my comments however please leave the insults out.

I got wall of text'd.

All I know is I try to use the Auction here and its so slow I quickly decide not to bother (though I have used it on some occasions with good results for higher end items).

I then think about in game lag experienced currently without an Auction House.

I then think about how I would at any given time have easily 50-100 items for sale in all price categories, and ponder about how many search hits and how many items that would be, and then wonder how slow or fast that would be when some 750,000-1.5 million or so other current users are doing the same thing with as many or more items.

Sure, it can be done, but Anet has already said it wont be at least for GW, so its a non-issue anyway. We might see it in GW2. Might.

Hmmm.... seems to me there are a few problems with your math here (as well as how your breaking down the data to determine its size) Simply converting your 56 digit number to hex brings it down to 49 bytes per entry. Even then its still oversized by quite a bit, basically all the information there can easily be stored in a 36 byte entry (I suspect even that is a little oversized, but i dont feel like taking the time to refine it).

Also why did you have to create a text file to represent each auction? Wouldn't 56 x 22477 been much easier (This comes out to a little over 1.2 MB before compression btw, dunno how you managed to get over 3 MB after compression)

At any rate your doing your numbers assuming the people at Anet don't know how to use a database at all. With even a basic database and search implementation you should never have to send data for every sword to the person doing the searching.

Edit:

Incase your curious as to how I reached 36 bytes per entry. (keep in mind a single byte can store 255 values)

Type and Requirment - 1 byte
Required Attribute - 1 byte
Prefix - 2 bytes
Suffix - 2 bytes
Inscription - 1 byte
Graphic - 1 byte
Owner - 4 bytes
High Bidder - 4 bytes
Current Bid - 4 bytes
Start Date - 8 bytes
End Date - 8 bytes

Total - 36 bytes

Edit Again.....
Bah, now I'm not thinking strait. Taking your original 56 digit number, converting it to hex THEN saving it in binary format as opposed to a text format gives a 25 byte entry, 27 bytes if we add a proper end date.

I did considder converting to hex to reduce size for transfer but at 7 bytes of space saved I wondered if the space saved would be a lager savings than the cpu usage to convert it back the answere to this was no because in a conversion at some pooint both the 56 byte and the 49 byte version would exist and nearly double the usage the text file creation was an experiment to show something tangeble to someone so they could see exactly what it would be
no I do not assume that I fully assumed that they would use a serchable system and only provide specific information however if you search for swords and only swords it will return all the swords reguardless of how well built and structured the system is it will not make the assumption that you personally dont like a certain skin and not show it to you my figures were based on the catagory as a whole and if it is on the auction at some point it is hoped that it will get looked at so that figure is the amount to transfer the entire catagory one time weather it be to one person or 10000 people makes no difference it is still transfered

Well, check my edit above. I forgot to take into account that the data would be saved in binary. So it actually halves the size of each entry.

Also the 36 bit version I posted above would parse just as quickly as your version and would save quite a bit of space as well. And your text file technique is still flawed as there is no way you would ever save each individual auction seperatly.

Alright I apologize for the insults, but it really makes me mad when someone gives Anet opportunities to dance around issues and sets up polarizing arguments for Anet to choose sides on...

The fact of the matter is, whatever problems one may initially realize when looking at a theoretical AH on paper, there are plenty of viable and effective solutions for those problems.

And I really can't imagine bandwidth being an issue... Consider ALL the models and textures you have to load when entering a city like Kamadan AD1... And that's just one city on the server, there are hundreds of districts spread out across all the cities in the game, each one having people constantly going in and out, and needing the server to send data on all the people in those cities - Their names, their professions, their armor (which is on low-quality), and their constantly changing positions in town. Not to mention the data being transfered each time people buy/sell things from the material/rune traders. All that data is being sent constantly to thousands of computers... and there is no problem.

A server dedicated specifically to just an AH, should have no problem handling the loads.

Im not arguing that it is not possible and Im not saying that I dont wish they woudl do soemthing about it I was making a point that there are alot of factors to considder when implementing such an item

than you for the removal of the insults

as far as loading the models and textures those all come from your gw.dat file

the servers send you info probably something akin to what I stated for the weapons (wich by the way I took the idea from the template code system) your char is reduced to something that may look like {lk1a4m2ns234dof234aisfd5al3kjn0} then it tells the x and y coordinates and only has to worry about name if you select them ever notice sometimes it takes a bit (fraction of a second) for the name to pop up then it tells you where they moved too again I have no idea how the actual system works I just have some experiance with coding and such so Im inventing a system as I go that may not be accurite but it gives an example of how things could work.

also you may be right a dedicated server might just be the perfect answer but Ill bet just about anything that the people at A-net are going to simply give the programmer a funny look when he comes to them and says alright here you go I programmed an auction system we need to pruchase a new dedicated server for each region for it to function.

my whole point was to make people aware of the magnitude of possiblities of things that A-net could be facing when determining how to / when to / or even if they put in a new system. with the release of GW:EN only a matter of months away Im sure that they are focusing as many resources as possible to get it ready and I for one do not blame them for putting this off maybe GWEN will introduce new systems that will make an auction easier for them to implement.
gwen release date is not yet released but 3rd quarter - july - september so lets play a happy medium and go with august and then 2 months after that they are able to utilize the new systems to make the auction house wich makes auction house in october wich by all counts is NOT in the near future but that makes an understandable arguement wich could either be totally correct or so wrong that it isnt even funny. either way its a statement based on the feasibility of the situation

Okay, for one, selling 3,000,000 copies does not mean that all 3,000,000 players are on at once. Moreoever, a lot of these copies are also probably linked accounts, with up to 3 copies constituting a single account.
Two, text compression is amazing. The 3MB file that OP quoted could easily be reduced by several orders of magnitude. Also, a single number does not take an entire byte. If you do a little math, a single number should take up no more than log(base 2)(that number + 1) bits rounded up (note that 8 bits make a byte). (The 1 is there as a special null value). With actual compressing, that 3MB file could turn into a mere kilobyte or two because a lot of the mods will be the same. On the technical side, there is nothing that would be unfeasible to implement an auction house.
On the other hand, concerns with intellectual property from previous developers of blizzard are the larger matter. I doubt that anet wants to get their ass sued.
In general, load issues and even search issues aren't a very large matter. Technical issues could easily be solved. A testament to this is just how guild war runs now. If you notice, guildwars at most takes up 5kb/s while playing, even when mapping from different areas. When you sign on, it has to read the contents of your character's storage, your storage bank, characters names, armor sets, hair styles, NPC direction and more. Surely if they are able to do something like that with a minimum of bandwidth, an AH is possible. (Oh, and the models and textures that are being loaded arn't being loaded from the servers, they're being loaded your computer using what are probably identifiers that link to that armor set)
I think an auction house would be a great idea, if they could do it without being owned by blizzard.

Of course it is possible to make an auction house, WoW has one. An auction house is simply a database, and there are databases that are capable of serving a large number of users (and if there are bandwidth and computational issues, you can always solve them by limiting the number of items players can post, limiting search results to the 10 cheapest items that match, etc).

The biggest problem is making the auction house work with the game. Depending on how the game was programmed, that might or might not be feasible. Making an auction house might require many existing modules to be changed, and it simply would take too much work to change those modules and retest everything.

Think about it this way. Many games have a z-axis. Guild Wars right now is essentially a 2D game that looks 3D, you can't really jump or climb, etc. So is it easy to make a game with a z-axis? Yes, many of them exist already. Can you just add the ability to jump (the z-axis) into Guild Wars? That would probably require most of the code to be rewritten from scratch.

The problem might not be a technological limitation (with bandwidth, storage, etc), but with feasibility instead. You can't just rewrite the entire game (well you could, it's called Guild Wars 2).

I hate to tell you, but some of the computer science analysis is WAY off. You really should go read some database architecture books and packet technology books. I know you mean well, but the analysis from a technical standard point is amateurish.

You made a lot of assumptions, but many of them flaw your analysis. I won't be detailing every one of them but the most glaring is:

Assumptions such as 3mil active users ... is WAY off. I will wager the max number of active users is closer to 1% to 2% of the 3mil users.

updates on bids is only essential when u actually look at your bids, so a "get" function will only be performed when bidder will be checking wares, not wehn someone else starts bidding at it. The assumtion by the OP that 0.081% of 3 miljon copies would result in that many items is ungrounded. Many people have multiple copies, so will use only one account for trade, many accounts are just hopelesly abandonded, and many have been permanently terminated.
if the amount active would reach 400.000 to 500.000 I would still be surprised.

As to that people would use actively an in game auction system to get that bit more golfd from scrap goldens then yeah then I probably agree with that. You could limit the amount of space that can be used for auction, maybe opnly one or two items at the time, scrap will be low on the priority list, and probably just merched.

I realize that it will take quite a database, but saying its near impossible is well nonsense as well. Not all people do simultaneously querry the base and a good architecture will stream the process. Together with a limitation on the amount of auctions it can be feasable.

I never said any of this was possible and I never said that this would be the best way to do it I said it was a simple way I came up with on the supr of the moment to show the magnitude of things that would need to be considdered when implementing such a thing. and just about every last person who has replied has done nothing but support my statement that there is much to think about and considder when doing such a thing no matter what system they implement there is always going to be someone who says lets do it this way or could we change this wich is EXACTLY what most of the replys here are looking at the system I set forth and stated how it could ber changed improved or altered ALL of wich would have to be done by A-net themselves when designing an AH for us in game perhaps you can now see the point of this thread wich was to display the many things involved with implementing the AH alone

Even though I am a member of the Guru Auction site, I would use an in-game auction more readily because of convienience and automation.

Wow.. that was.. Well researched and informative.
Telling him that he's doing an amature job then making a guess on %s doesn't help your argument.

This is a repost of what I said in a previous thread. Using binary storage instead of just "digits" dramatically reduces storage requirements. And don't fall into the trap of wasting bits by storing discreet data into separate "bytes". That's not how programming is done.

Here's my original post:

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.

-Forjo

rofl


Anyway, although I like the concept behind WoW's Auction House, I think that a private store system would work so much better in Guild Wars. Not only very convenient, but easy to implement. Of course I'm not assuming anything with full certainty, but darkorical's post proves it in a way. There's no need to create a fancy database, or huge traffic transfers. You would simply open up a small shop with 4/5 items in a designated area for that purpose.

The problem of overcrowding would be countered with the district system.

One other thing, someone here said that if an improvement implied a rewrite of a complete game, that would be GW2.
Although you are right, we shouldn't look at things this way, for the sake of the consumer. What I'm trying to say is that, as long as I see Guild Wars chapters for sale in video games stores, I consider the game alive and well. If it "dies" let A.Net remove every box out of every store. Ridiculous, right? So why should they dump the support for a game that is still being bought?

I don't think they have any excuse whatsoever to say that they have bigger priorities now. As the good company they are, they should be prepared to support their current titles, *and* work on their future releases.

Cheers.

Seeing how ANet messed up something as simple as PvP skin unlocks by making them char based, I now think that an auction house is completely infeasable, not only in GW1 but in GW2 and probably GW3 as well.

1% to 2% of 3 mil active users is much much closer to the truth of 3mil active users. It is an assumption, you are right.

Anyone worth his salt in packet and database design will see that there are numerous errors in his original article. The OP meant good with the post so I'm not here to blast him.

1% of 3mil users is obviously wrong. Thats only 30,000 players, and you'll see that many if you pop to Lions Arch.

Forjo's Post makes the most sense to me. Since there are already item identifiers present when we see our storage, it makes sense that the only things you'd have to add is an auction interface and a restructuring of the item object's structure, as well as code to transfer the item to the bidder and money to the biddee.

A full district only contains about 250-300 users... 30,000 sounds right to me.

I think u cannot see 30000 people pop up in one region as they fix the amount of users in one region to much less 100-200 maybe.2-5% isn't so bad for an estimate maybe, considering that there are a number of world regions, and in those region the three main cities harbor some 5 districts. I dont have the exact numbers, 30000 maybe a bit on the low side, but if u would guess 50000-100000 I would totally not be surprised

That math is wrong. There are not anywhere near 3 million users. Most of the 3 million copies sold are the same people who bought Chapter 1 and then linked Chapters 2 and 3 to that.

I highly doubt there would be any legal issue with an auction house. Many other MMOs already have them (and WoW was not the first) without any legal problems. The only possible issue would be if ArenaNet literally copied code from Blizzard, which has almost no chance of happening.
Most of the infrastructure is already in place with the NPC trader system. The underlying design would need to be fleshed out quite a bit, but we already know it's possible for the game to query a database when you interact with an NPC and return a list of items for sale. It's not nearly as large of an engine change as the addition of a z-axis would be.
To add to this point, the recent Xunlai storage update increased the data representing our storage by a factor of four, whereas adding 8 bytes probably wouldn't even double it.


Also, I was surprised to see resistance to the idea of having non-perfect items in the auction house. Sales of near-perfect items would be a great benefit to casual players, who could quickly and easily get +28 or 18/20 mods for very low prices. It would benefit casual sellers as well, who normally would have a hard time finding buyers for their "worthless" items... they could at least get something better than merchant price.

And it's not like the junk items would bother hardcore players... it would be trivially easy to implement a filter so players could choose whether they want to see only perfect items.

1% is actually a good estimate. Even if there are 300,000 users playing (vastly overestimating) at any given time, not all of them will be using the auction house. Maybe only 10% of the 300,000 is searching/posting on the auction house. Storing and transmitting the items on the database is very cheap. Having large number of people query the database at the same time is not.


I'm not so sure that the NPC trader system uses a database. The NPCs only keep track of a very small number of items, so they only have to keep track of quantity, price, and some sort of variable for demand (which controls how prices change). A true database has many other options, primarily sorting and filtering (i.e. Out of the 50,000 listed items, give me all Chaos Axes. Or give me all Chaos Axes with +5 energy. Give me all the items listed by user X. Sort by price. Etc.) I don't think the NPC trader system uses all the functions of a database.

Alternatively, ANet could make a market town with more specialized NPCs, such as an inscription trader for weapons, tomes, etc. It would at least make trading for some items easier, and it would make a more centralized place for trading.

Well Im gonna be away for a few weeks. you guys keep right on debating this tho and we'll just see who can perfect the auction house sytem first you or A-net remember you guys will have to find a system that fits exactly into EVERYONE'S needs will work PERFECTLY on EVERY POSSIBLE SYSTEM does not leave anyone out and does not change the existing econemy, game play or other wise impact the game itself.

good luck

on another note If A-net is too slow to make an auction house why don't we make a live auction. Wednesdays and Saturdays at Great Temple of Baltazar ID1 X person will be designated as auctioneer use local chat and hold live bidding. Item entry from X time till X time all items given to auctioneer and money paid to auctioneer. Auctioneers could post all IGNs here along with contact info. they would screenshot all transactions that way if anyone complained of scamming they could defend myself with the shots and if they really did scam A-net wouldn't have trouble tracking them down to ban them

A recent interview was done with ANet Execs, and they talked about the feasability of an auction house. See it here:

http://www.dbms2.com/2007/06/09/the-...of-guild-wars/

I've read through most of this post, and though I admit I don't understand everything written, I have a possible solution that might allow for an auction house. The problem (even here on GWguru) seems to be the sheer number of items up for sale.

It seems this could be significantly reduced in an auction house setting if ANet "charged" 10% or 1 platinum (whichever is more) to post an item in the auction house for sale. This would keep people from posting all chalk, grapes, and most golds. An item would only be worth posting for sale if it were worth more than 1 platinum.

Also, there should be a time limit on items, maybe one week. If it didn't sell in a week, the original owner got it back. If they wanted to re-list it, it would be another 1k or 10% of list price.

The auction house could further be simplified by not allowing competing bids. In such a case, it is no longer an "auction" house, but simply a "store" but this would still allow a place for people to sell stuff.

One drawback to this is that it would probably not cut down on the amount of spam in game. People would still be spamming "W T S 34 wood planks 500g."