A market!

Basically, my idea is to get rid of the shouting in towns and abandon any idea of a auction house. What we need is a real market.

In every town there will be a new market agent (for the story's sake, they are allied with the Xunlai, you'll see why in a bit). You can talk to this agent and browse the market. You should be able to search by different criteria, such as for a Zealous Platinum Blade of Fortitude (my baby) you can search for "zealous," "platinum blade" or "fortitude" and get all the results that would fit that catergory. if you want to buy, the agent would take your money. It would be put directly into the seller's storage (hence the alliance with the xunlai) or if the storage was full of cash, it would be held in escrow until picked up by the seller.

The person that buys the sword would have to go to the point of origin (wherever the person was when they put it up for sell) to retrieve it. This is for Arena Net. People in Kamadan would have to get Factions to go to KC to get their sword. And n00bs wouldn't be able to get items that were in towns much farther along in the game.

When you are selling, the process would be slightly different, you give the weapon to the agent, and setting an asking price. The agent should show an average for similar items (such as all platinum swords or all fort. mod swords, etc.) When the item sells, the money is put in your storage. If after a week it doesn't sell, the agent should tell you, and reccomend lowering the price.

Also, players should be able to see market averages. That way they can track prices of certain objects (watch the price of ecto plummet). This will allow for greater transperency and encourage people that have great items to use the market and people will not worry about being ripped off all the time.

So, that was long. But if you got through it, leave a comment!!

ANET doesn't care about people using skins from other chapters. And because the droks run is still open, I doubt they care about low level characters in max armor. So I doubt they would care about low level characters in max stat weapons either.

So its easier to just program the system to deliver the item to wherever the buyer is and not record where the seller was when it was put up for sale.

About setting the price to sell: I'd say just have the agent ask what price you want to set. If the players want some advise, they can go run a search for similar items. Programming the agent to automatically decide which searches to run for a price check could be difficult, so I'd prefer letting the seller decide.

On average price: Most items in guild wars are randomly generated, so there will be maybe 1 or 2 with identical stats. So how do you propose to group them for price averaging ? (grouping them badly will make the average price useless)
Besides the search system will stop people being ripped off by showing the lowest price for any item.

Price tracking at the NPC traders might be useful, but thats a separate suggestion.

So I'd strip the system down to the following:

Buyers run a search so it only displays items they are after, then they pick the one from the results they want and click buy. Item and gold are instantly transfered (tax my be stuck on at this step). Something will need to be done about prices over 100k and the seller having max gold in storage.

Sellers take the item they want to sell. Run a search for similar items to help them decide what price to use. Then they place the item up for sale at their chosen price.

If an item has been up for too long (over a week at the minimum) then it will get removed from the trading system. This is only to reduce server load.

/signed

Though to be honest, when I compare your idea with an auction house I notice only the following changes:
- The seller sets the price instead of an auction system
- Price tracking that will be hard to implement, and probably won't get many people caring about it
- Limiting the buyers to people who can get to where the seller put the item up for sale. This would probably move all the sellers to Great Temple of Balthazar because anyone can reach there

From what I understand the problem with an auction house is creating the searchable item database, not the bidding to decide the final price. So don't get your hopes up.

Good idea, but it sounds just as complicated to implement as an auction house. I think at this point the problem is the amount of time that this would take the Dev's, when they are trying to focus, first on GWEN, and then on GW2.

That said, I do think it's a great idea, and I'd love to see it implemented. I actually prefer it to the idea of an auction house.