Improving ingame trading

Hi,

I have 3 little ideas to make ingame trading easier and more enjoyable.

1) In party search, trade offers are cut at 31 characters. This makes party search more clean and forces people to write short messages. But having all information in 31 chars isn't always possible (sometimes the price is missing for example).
When I put my mouse pointer over a message, there is a little tooltip displayed on the right of the party search window. This tooltip has the exact same information than the party search window. It should be used to display the whole message.
So that the party search windows is still as clean as before, but we can mouseover the lines in order to get full information.

2) When we change district, the message in party search windows disappears. Ususaly in Kamadan, the result is
•"how much xxx ?"
• "10k"
• "ok, where are you?"
• "d1"
• "d1 is full, plz come d4"
• "I can't come d4, I'm not selling only this item, and moving to d4 would make me lose 3 hours of getting higher in party search. Plz try harder"
• "d1 is still full"
Idea : we stay in party search window when we change district.

1+2) 1+2 combined would make many people stop wanting to be in the "main" district, since (1) having the whole message available makes the trade channel reading less usefull (2) we can change district as we want so there is no need to be in the district which has the most potential buyers/sellers.
---> Kamadan d1 isn't full anymore. (this isn't the purpose for 1 or 2, this is just a result from implementing both of them)

3) Implement a search tool. In Lions Arch or Kamadan, it is sometimes hard to find what we are searching for (either someone selling what we WTB, or someone buying what we WTS) because the list in party search windows is big. A little search tool would be great.

3bis) Cross-town search tool : I'm in Kaineng Center, I type "unids", and discover 2 guys are selling unids in Kamadan, 1 guy is buying them in Lion's Arch, and 1 guy is selling them in Kodash.

Feel free to add 4th, 5th [...] ideas :-)

4) Simple split of buy and sell

WTB YYYY
WTS XXXX
WTS OOOO
WTB NNNN
visit www.mescamunot.doh for cheapest ingame gold

is changed to;

WTB YYYY
WTB NNNN
WTS XXXX
WTS OOOO
banned moron

This makes it easier to find buyers and sellers for particular items. If you dont want to sell stuff you ignore the top WTB listings and can fully concentrate on the bottom WTS listings and vice versa if you are buying.

It would be great to see all those ideas implemented in game. I hate scrolling & scrolling & scrolling through hundreds of WTB's and WTS's and hoping to notice something I'm after, so I'm totally for a search tool.

think it would be an good idea to be able to set your search to buy/sell instead of only trade, or what roulette mentioned.

also agreeing with the plans in the first post, although i think a search tool can be quite frustrating, because of the way people name their items (i.e. you are looking for a crystalline, people posting, crysta, cryst, crystalline or other stupid names and abbreviations) not needed imo

It would be a good idea if people realized that coding is focused on other things, and like the millions of times people have moaned about "trade" related stuff, now more than ever, this is going nowhere.

True but if we grind away at them long enough they might have a rethink on trading.
Personally if they added Ai traders paying market prices I wouldn't bother spending my life trying to trade to players.
As long as the traders give 10 gold and players give thousands we will feel cheated and continue spamming the game with wtb wts.

I guess in anets eyes player driven prices are just plain wrong when they get to extreme numbers.

Several solutions have been suggested and not thought worthy enough for inclusion.
I don't think its a time problem I think its an area they just don't want to mess with.

Camping out in Kamadan d1 has less to do with selling and more to do with see-and-be-seen (think Cash here). I stay in 2/3 and never have issues facilitating trades. It comes down to patience and a little bit of luck on both ends.

I'd offer another solution though it's beyond the scope of this game. Phantasy Star Universe had player stores you could trade through once you placed items inside and priced them.

Trade is very difficult nowadays with the vast majority of the Guild Wars population being long-time players. Lower end items are nearly impossible to sell simply because people do not want to take the time to search for such items. A search tool could GREATLY effect the way people buy and sell things. An almost auction house. Interesting idea.

Hmmmm

1) I don't like the idea. Some people sell more than 1 item and cut the character count would mean having to mouse-over every line.

2) Never really had a problem with meeting up with a buyer/seller in a different district. Sometimes a message at the top will be ignored thinking the person is afk or the message is no longer valid. Sometimes bringing the message to the bottom gets a better response. It seems dependent on the person reading.

3)The search feature could be of use depending on how smart it is. Does it allow wildcards? Does it provide alternate spelling? How much information does it provide and how does it sort it etc? This idea might take a lot of work but if done well could be of great use.

So for Part 3....
/3 Stars (I support with some features I mentioned)

GW needed a AH, no matter what you say or do this system=failure.

I said it before and I will say it again, Guild Wars needs a market mode type system like PWI. This system allows you to go afk to sell items. While afk ppl come up to you and see what you have to offer in your store and can buy stuff while you are taking a dump, shaving your neighbors cat or w/e your doing.

I agree with Roulette's idea (4).

Message are already cut, and we already have that issue if people are selling more than 1 item.
The idea isn't to cut messages (since they already are), but to add full-lenght message to mouse-over tooltip so that we can at least see it somewhere.
(I didn't say "remove that message cut thing" because I think there must be a reason why they made it, so they won't change it. I think the reason is just that they want to keep the party search windows clean, and dont want people to have to extend this windows to the full-screen size)

I don't personally powertrade on the regular, but when I have a handful of items I need to sell, or a handful I need to buy, I rarely experience any inconveniences, other than the random Asian person in Kamadan AD's who doesn't actually know how to type English every once in a while.

But anyway, Kamadan isn't nearly the thriving metropolis it once was. I've personally never been locked out of AD1 or ID1 because it was full for the past few months, and I play during prime American hours usually. And I've never experienced someone who didn't want to move from AD1 because of his position in the Party Window.

I feel that this whole trading problem is a nonissue. The game is too dead to warrant an overhaul on the trade system like this, especially since there's only been one overhaul for the past 6 years the game has been active (referring to the Party Window addition).