Kirenne Starfire [Merchant]

This might be a neat mechanic for GW2.

So suppose this. I have a load of things in my inventory and I don't want to bother with an auction system, NOR do I want to bother standing in town spamming WTS. So I propose this: Whenever I'm in a town or outpost, I can go into "Merchant Mode". I can go through my inventory and set up a small list of things for sale and their prices. Once I've set up my list, I then can go AFK (or hell, even sign out) and I'll be set up as a merchant for a designated amount of time, probably good to have a max. Maybe 1 hour or so.

People can look at your sale list just like any other merchant and buy your stuff just like any other merchant. Easy for everyone.

Money for transactions goes straight into your Xunlai box (since I'm hoping that by GW2 they'll have solved the annoying issue of having to open your vault box before interacting with it) and sales can be no more than 100k. Probably if you're selling for 100k+whatever, you should be negotiating in person.

There will need to be a cap to how many people can be Merchanting in a district at a given time, to prevent things from being retarded.

Give buyers the option of leaving a note for you with questions about the item, as in, "if you don't sell this in your hour will you sell to me for less?" or "do you have more than one of these?"

Once your hour is complete, or the next time you log in, you're presented with a sales report telling you what sold and how much total you made, and any notes people left you.

A tax will be levied on all your sales, I think 8% isn't really that bad. Of course, enterprising merchants will just raise their asking prices by about 8.696%, but it'll just be another one of those delightful quirks about GW that we can complain about.

I like it.

There's a similar system in Perfect World and I like it a lot.

But the option given to the buyers is a bad idea...

not a bad idea, but why would a tax be needed? And how is it better then an auction house. I have not played wow but I thought that was how it worked.

From what I can remember : An auction house is like ebay. When you put an item for bid, you must pay a fee. A seller puts an item for bid for 1 day or more and may include a buy out price ; the buyers either raise the bid or pay the buy out price. Each major towns have an auction house and all of them are connected. When the auction ends, the seller receive his gold in his mailbox and the winner of the bid receive his item in his mailbox.
Now I'm not sure but, if no one raised the bid, the item comes back in the seller's mailbox, but he doesn't get the gold he paid back.

An auction house is only good for the seller if there are many potential buyers out there, and the item being sold is scarce. Since demand is higher than supply the prices are driven up. The auction works.

Once supply is higher than demand, because of everybody farming items to earn money, auction houses are useless. Like ebay, they simply turn into large "instant buy" platforms with offers hitting rock bottom. This would be the most likely state of a auctionhouse in current GW.

In both scenarios, the players are seeking a method to distinguish themselves. They try to buy items showing their status. In my opinion it is better to link a reward for displaying one's status to an actual gaming achievement rather than a 10h, 100h, or 1000h farming effort. Players will often demand crafting, for its ability to create a non-transferable reward. Something that is earned not farmed like all other items in GW.

MStarfire's suggestion tries to reason that the emergence of personal webshops would lead to more money being earned. But even in a best case scenario, people would simply dump all drops on the market, therefore flooding it and crashing the prices in the process. Scarcity in GW is heavily reliant on people throwing away most drops. If the players start processing drops too efficiently, then all it would amount to is all players realizing that the merchant was right all along. A perfect gold weapon really is worth 300g and nothing more. The trade forums are an indication for that. Nothing drives down prices than a thread in which somebody is selling off 500 items from a big list.

Include a 500g fee to each item listed, and allow people to search and list results in-game, and you have a good start.

There's a free MMO called Cabal that uses the same mechanic. As long as they keep the gold sellers blocked, then I'd be for it.

Perfect World has this as already mentioned. Im all for it and an auction house :P Not so much for the buyer note though...

/signed x10

Silkroad online had the almost the same system, (haven't played in 2 years, so I don't know how it is now). Only without the tax. It looked like a big trade screen, with 10 slots. you could set your own price for an item. In GW2 should be the option to make the amount higher then 100k, or the possibility to add items to the b/o price.
The shopname should be changeable, otherwise no one would know what you are selling, and I don't think people will look in every store to find something they want.
And a chat box with the seller, to leave offers in(if seller is AFK).

But anyway, a system like this would be great.
/signed

Hmm...good idea.If it will be an Auction House then don't put fees.It'll be too stupid.If i register an item and pay a fee , and after <X> amount of hours / days it won't be sold, I won't get the money back, therefore it sux.
There's the same sistem with players using /sit in Kal Online too , just running around to see if anyone is selling items you need.No notes, no nothing, if you like it , you buy it.

/signed.

Just open an action house. Cost about the same server space then this.

Haven't played Lineage II since beta but looks like a exact copy of their system (if it didnt change)

/signed

like it

double post sorry.

/signed ofcourse

Anet should stop completely ignoring the problem of a complete lack of a trade system in game, it's a major flaw of GW1.

Nothing wrong with buyer notes, I think it's a very nice and useful option - but there's even no need to implement them as an extra feature - a buyer can just send you a whisp and you can read it anytime - maybe you just minimized game and go Merch mode while doing something else at comp, and you can hear the ping and react immediately.

It's quite hard to whisper an offline person though.

That.

Otherwise we would have everyone just merchanting random useless stuff.

A fee to list an item ensures that people would only list items that are worth something.

One of major advatages of good trade systems is that even items that are not worth couple of minutes of spam can be traded confortably.

As such, if you make trading anything under 10k unfesabile it is useless.

I was going to mention the stall system from Silkroad Online, but I noticed somebody else already did.
I really LOVE the idea of being able to sell items without spending five hours of sitting at the computer.

/signed
/signed
/signed

GW2 is supposed to have a companion that if you chose not to take you get a bonus to your stats, I propose that you should be able to leave your companion in town to dot he selling while you run around and you are denied the bonus. It would be awesome, while you're off getting killed by Charr you get to come back to find yourself slightly richer and add stuff to your companions stock.

cool idea...i really hope you're right in that anet would fix the vault so that you don't need to talk to it to activate it. what is this, pso?

btw, love the alchemy index avatar. thrice ftw

/signed

this might sound silly but with addition to the idea of the original idea, a certain area to do so. Like oh I dont know, by the merchants... add a couple carts or spots where people can pay their fee for the spot not for each item. kinda like renting the market cart for an hour or something. this would limit how many people were selling as merchants per district. and we could easily find them.... just a thought.