Add a PawnBroker system to the merchants and traders!

Some people will see a similarity with competing MMOs, but i'm trying to avoid that.

There are times when you sell stuff to the merchant and wish you hadnt. Either because you werent paying attention, or didnt see the value of the item until it was too late.

Its been suggested before that you be able to take back an item you sell, but most suggestions I have seen have asked it to be a free service.

I suggest we have a system similar to how a PawnBroker works. But this system would only work on items which the merchant doesnt sell himself/herself.

Materials, dyes, certain scrolls, keys, salvage and ident kits you couldnt buy-back.

But unique weapons (purple, gold and green), certain scrolls and tomes you can buy-back. Basically anything that drops, which the merchant or traders dont sell.

This service would span all merchants and traders.

You would be charged a set price to buy those items back. This price would be fairly high and depend on the items colour and type. The price wouldnt exceed 5k though.

It means we have another gold-sink and people are being charged for making mistakes in the first place.

The storage of these items would also be perminant or at the least 1 month. You can then can save up and re-buy the item back when you can afford to.

Hmm i kinda like it make it so for weapons you would have to pay
1K for the basic weapon
1K for each mod on it

So a fiery sword of fortitude would cost you 3K to buy back.
Any other stuff, scrolls/tomes etc would have to have a certain prices.
Also we cant have the items being stored forever/1 month, gotta think about Anets bandwidth here,items are stored until you log out, switching to another character to get money would not clear the items of course.

The issue with wiping anything that you pawn after logging out, is how much it costs to rebuy back. If the total is around 5k and you dont have 5k, then you need to earn it.

You might not have time to do that before logging out.

You might even sell an item, log out and THEN realise "oops".

Its best to store these items for a few days just incase. Just as a pawnbroker would keep an item for a set amount of time and then sell it on.

not gonna work or be implemented imo

So, ANet needs to start keeping track of loads of items that are being sold by all players with een more characters. Can you imagine how much database space and computing power this will need? Searching through big databases requires a lot of processor and memory resources.

Hmmm I hadnt realised that. Funny really, since all I do at work is maintain in-house software which retrieves and amends data from an SQL database, continually for 8 hours of the day.

I was wondering why when I run large queries, the staff ring up saying "why is the network going slow!".

Dang... now I know why!!

(Im not suggesting im the best programmer ever, Im not! Ive only been doing this 12 months on a work placement. But I do handle database information!)

I have to assume Anet has some pretty tallented database handlers, who know their SQL and how to read and write data at a decent speed. The amount of data shouldnt be an issue, aslong as you have enough space to store it.

The problem is sending that information back and forth from the game, and amending it live. Something which good database management should be able to handle.

But if we put a limit on how many items the PawnBroker system stored, then it shouldnt be an issue of storage space and access times.

It would be like adding another 5-10 slots into storage, except this storage works within the merchant.

If you assume that GW:EN will probably add another 20 slots of storage anyway (heres hoping), then its not impossible.