Improvements of the Merchant

I'll cut to the chase. The system of player to NPC selling when it comes to everyday items that you want to get rid of could use a lot of improvement. I won't deny that it works, but I believe it could work better.

The main purpose I bring this up is for Guild Wars 2. I would like to see a better system implemented for the sake of testing its effectiveness in Guild Wars One. Guild Wars 2 is supposed to have improvements on all aspects of the game, and I feel that this is one aspect that requires some attention.


As it stands now, the merchant is very much comparable to a black hole. For those of you who are not familiar with the term, a black hole is a gap in the spacial plane that occurs in places with high gravitational pull that amounts to the point where the plane ruptures, and creates extreme gravity, pulling everything around it into the hole. What does all this have to do with the merchant? Simple. Things sucked into a black hole are broken down into oblivion and never seen again. The same happens to any item that you sell to the merchant. That item is totally wiped from the game never to be seen again. I don't feel that this is an effective system.


In other games, the merchant, trader, or what have you will retain items sold to them by players, even if only for a few minutes or hours. I feel a system like this would be a great alternative for the system now. I know that there are players that would be grateful to have a spot in town where they could simply purchase weapons or weapon mods, or even materials, collector items, or what have you that we sell to the merchant every time we come in. Instead of having to track them down and sell it, we sell it to the merchant.

I don't see any possible harm of putting in a similar retention system so that all items are retained for a certain amount of time when sold to the merchant. Yes, there are a lot of items in the game, and maybe the list would get long, but there are only so many items that drop in a given area where a merchant is close. People normally sell things to that merchant as soon as they are done with that area, so we would see quantity of the same items and not quantity of different items to a point where it would cause a real problem in the long run.

Another Pro-Improvement idea is that it will significantly reduce spam. People so often spam to buy things that we know we just sold to the merchant, or items that we know other people sell. If ther merchants had a retention setting, those people would have a faster, quieter way to obtain the items they need.

Lastly, it creates a much needed gold sink. People who buy things from the merchant naturally pay higher than whatever players are selling for. What's more, this gold is not transferred, but deleted, much like the black hole function of our current merchant. A gold sink like this, while not harming anyone, would greatly relieve a few pressures on our economy.


My stand is, implement this in Guild Wars one to test a similar system in Guild Wars 2. There are already things being "beta'd" for Guild Wars 2 now in the game. This one, while improving the game, would give Arenanet valuable input on how to handle the new system.

I /Sign this idea. How about you? Why? Why not? Tell all.

Until then, Thank you for reading.

I love this idea. And completely agree with it.

/sign

It's a nice idea but honestly why are you selling an item if you intended to keep it? I can see if you accidently sold an item and wanted it back but that could just be fixed by paying attention. I'm all for streamlining a game to get rid of frills that just really aren't needed and I would consider this kind of thing a frill. I wouldn't be against this idea but I wouldn't ask for it

/not signed

i never read the post fully but i think he means you can buy items other players sold to the merch. if so then i support it, only thing is when u tlk to merch there will a long list a crap items, maybe only a few good items. but i still like the idea so

/signed

Nono, you just sold an item to the merchant, and 5 mintues later you see someone shouting in town buying the item you just sold... so you can send him right to the merchant, get it?

anyways,,

/signed

It's not the fact that you have unintentionally sold an item, or that you will be able to direct players to the merchant. It's the fact that now these players will be able to look there automatically instead of standing for hours buying an icey axe haft or whatnot, aside from the other benefits.

But I think something needs to be cleared up. For all intents and purposes, my idea entailed a timed life of all things in the merchants of all districts, in which sold items that are not purchased within ten minutes will be wiped from the list. Perhaps not 10 minutes exactly, but depending.

/not signed they should just make a market system. also i hated this in da2 mainly because i would buy an item from the merchant and then a better item would appear for about the same i sept on it. and as it is right now 90% of items have no value because there not perfect.

Honestly, what's there to stop that from happening when buying from players? Not to mention there aren't really "better items" that would be such a pain to sell the item you just bought in exchange for the new item.

you can look at the item in question before you buy it.......................

I never said that the merchant would not have this option. Move your mouse over it, stats come up, just like weapon crafters do.

If you want to see the skin, www.guildwiki.org can help.

/signed

another good aspect of this would be being able to retreve items that were not intended to be sold the merchant, i know it has happened to m a few times wen i have been dumping all my stuff from a farming run and then accidently merching the very item i was farming >< lol

Why wouldn't you just buy it back from the merc, and then sell it to him at a higher price?

I think we can get 95% of the benefit from this suggestion, far more simply, by adding the remaining traders that are missing: Inscriptions, and prefix/suffix traders.

Wouldn't this be the same kind of thing as adding the Xunlai Market so many people hoped for? And in that regard items would be left up for longer periods of time. Like I said I'm not against your suggestion it's that i just think there's better ways of doing it. I think of all of the junk I merch in a single day. Then I think of that multiplied by at least a thousand people or more doing the same thing. And of course the way to fix that would be to seperate the items into categories to look through. Once again we're back to the market idea.

Hm... vultores waiting at merchants to see what they can get... hm...

No.

We need traders like the rune trader, and something like the Xunlai Market... not just a way to sell things for x and buy them for x*10.

Ask yourself. What's better? Having spamming vulteres or having silent ones?

Having the less possible of them.

The fact is, there's no way that merchant vultures hurt the game. Sure, they can buy the items, but those items were already in the game. They would have been destroyed otherwise. Extending the life of an item for a few more weeks, months, or hours makes no difference.

/notsigned. I agree with above. Unless you only play gw as the ever elusive trader class every day, you don't need such a feature.

terrible idea

If people would waste their time hanging out at the merchant every day in with this addition, what kind of things do you think they do now? Personally, I'd prefer to keep them busy looking for things to buy at the merchant than begging for gold in District One, or various other annoying habits.

Is it needed? No, but I believe it's comparable to toilet paper. While no one apreciates it, everyone uses it, and is forced to use it. If toilet paper was never improved, we'd still be using grass and leaves. The merchant is similar in my mind. Why settle on not improving one aspect that everyone uses and wouldn't take much effort to do so in the first place, while creating much needed facets like a small gold sink and a way that people who need items that we dispose of can get their hands on them without spamming?

This could be even harder to implement and would certainly require more server resources than the Xunlai Marketplace itself.

Every merchant in game would need to have a large database connected to him, with every merchant user generating network traffic by browsing them. Do you know how many items get sold to a merchant in a highly populated town or outpost, especially ones connected to popular farming areas? Thousands... If every merchant kept track of items sold to him with limits of 1 hour it would also need a limit of how many items it remembers, I wouldn't expect this number to be higher than 64 knowing how cheapway(tm) is GW network code done to make the game free, the data was publicly posted.

I know that nowadays so many high quality or even perfect gold items go straight to the merch. I sold large amounts of req9 gold max inscrib. items with decent mods to merchant myself. But I also sold 1000s of completely crappy items, whites, purples, golds. Just as everyone does.

What would be a real use of this feature? I know I'd like to check what people merch out of simple curiosity, but I don't see any utility in this. This is not how GW trading should be improved, wrong way man.
What would you expect to find scavenging the merchant inventory, going through all that junk? A tiny chance that some newbie just merch'ed a req13 mesmer focus which just happened to have a perfect -5/20% inscription you can resell to people for 10k?

A simple buyback function for merchants everywhere would be far far easier to do, a feature allowing you to buy back the items you sold, but just you, not anyone else. The game wouldn't even have to remember which merchant bought the thing - the sold item data would remain in your account or characters files, just like the other mmo games do.

You don't get it.

They will spam anyways, but instead of getting stuff, then spam, they will spam WHILE getting stuff from sold items.

So let's say hypothetically you're right. They spam while buying things from the merchant. Since people who still would like to see it added would still benefit from it, we still get slightly less spam from the people who just want an item, while just buying things people would have sold anyway.

If you're right, then all this idea does is create a small goldsink and give a small convenience to people who actually could use things people sell to the merchant.

I still don't see how that's bad?

/signed in a sense. -- WoW had a similar buyback option and retained items until either the slots filled up or you logged off. If the slots filled, the first of say twelve things would get removed, etc. It was very useful and cost you the same amount that the merchant gave you.

What about restricting a buyback option to gold items?

/signed

I like the idea of the gold that gets deleted from the game by buying stuff from merchant. You never spend or buy anything from the merchant (apart from some cheap id or salvage kit) atm...

You bring up good points. Game memory and storage would be a huge issue if this feature wasn't limited.

Normally, games put an item limit on the merchant to hold at one time to save memory, but this would be a huge inconveniance. I think the main instrument to combat this would be a five minute reset time to make sure items don't pile up and take up huge amounts of space.

However, since this idea is mianly designed for GW2, perhaps with a new system memory space could be dealt with.

/signed... for GW2, right? This might be too big of a change for the merchant of GW.

If added a 'buyback' option, I'll restrict it to party members, and to party members only.

I really don't mind having vultures. But I want MY vultures to get the stuff.

The idea is to beta the new system in GW1 to test it for GW2.

indeed, the dreaded misclick when selling junk to the merchant has effected most gw players over the years. Please let us get back our wrongly sold items!

/signed

While that's not the entire point, it's one of the many benefits.