Trade between players in MMO's varies greatly from one game to another. Now I do like GW's trading system, sometimes... the fact that it's an active system means you can keep your eye on what other people are WTB'ing and WTS'ing in real time, and you can haggle with people, too.
But there are other times where it's just so time consuming trying find a buyer for a worthwhile item that an NPC will only pay you pennies for. Example: A perfect 20/20 sundering mod for a sword can fetch 7k - 9k easy, sometimes more. But an NPC will only give you 25g? Now 20/20 for a sword isn't usually hard to find a buyer for, but lots of other good items that are valuable to players but almost worthless when merched don't sell quite as fast.
I was thinking, how about adding a passive trade system? Keep the one that already exists, too, since it's an active system; but also have another one. Anyone ever played Lineage 2? That's sort of the idea I had in mind. You gather everything you would like to sell into your inventory, and then have an option like "set up shop" which allows you to temorarily make an official sell-bot out of your character. You tell the game which items in your inventory you want to sell and type in the prices for each item. When you're done, you hit the go command and your character sits down and opens shop. From that point on, until you specify otherwise, other players can walk up to your character and interact with you; this alows them to view your wares and prices at their leisure, as though you were an NPC. If they like something, they click that item and click "buy" just like with an NPC. The item will be transfered to them and the appropriate ammount of digi gold is transfered to you.
A system like this would allow people to sell without having to spam trade messages for a long time and wait for "I'll buy it" PM's. In fact, you could even sell while AFK, which would be nice. (go to work or school or sleep or whatever and still be selling, lol). You would want to include a clause in the code that states that, while in this mode, if your character gets completely bought out and has nothing left to sell, they automatically exit this NPC style shop mode. This would prevent them from being an open shop with nothing to sell.
Only problem with such a system I can think of off the bat is if your character reaches the 100 platinum limit and people can't buy.
Thoughts?
S

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