Detailed Proposal for an Auction House System

me and my friends used to play guild wars alot. Eventually I became the only one who plays GW and most of them went to WOW. When I saw my friend play it (trying to encourage me to buy it) and when he showed me the auction system that they had I felt sorry for myself and everyone who is playing GW.

Trading is a big part of any MMORPG, and if that part of the game sux then the game starts to suck too.

Fact: ppl are leaving GW because of the trading system. You think this is not true, watch me switch to any other MMORPG like my friends did while you guys continue to beg for such an option.

I mean omg, since 2005 and you are still begging. I have all three campaigns but nightfall will be the last one. No more GW until an auction system exists.

/Signed

P.S: notice that this is my first post ... and it might be my last ... gg all

m00t m00t m00t

/signed

Possitive :
1)I like the instant trade because it doesnt take hours or days to fulfill a trade plus scammers or people fake bidding in auction sites will be out of the game. Got the money the seller reguires ->get the item fast
2)You dont have to be online 2 days to find something you want. Instant notify when someone places what you looking for.
3)This results in more free storage slots!(while the price we set is astronomical *example sskais sword 300ectos* so that noone will buy it )

But:
1)Imagine 3 million accounts that each puts 1 roll of parchement for auction at the same price. Who would be the first to sell it? [Code benefits]
2)Auction site means placing bids. The only safe way is the bidder to place his bid (gold + ectos) and cant remove it untill the auction ends. Who would like to have his money reserved(100k+200e for example 5 days) and last minute someone else buys it for +1e more?
3)People buying gold from external sites(meaning not 100k but 100ectos) will take advantage of it and over bid anyone else. Act of Gold Recycling in order to create the false idea that value is bigger than demand.
4)Someone wants to sell 1 item for 2k and someone that has stock of items sells them for 1950gold. The result is that the +50gold guy is never gonna sell it. While the possible re-seller gets richer.
5)Advertising prices is bad. This will force people to follow a minimum line cost because re-sellers will buy everything cheaper so that their increased value becomes the base line. Stock market in a game usually ruins the poor and benefits the rich.

That's what i think.

/signed

Even though Arena Net clearly doesn't care about this subject one bit.

I didn't understand Alex Weekes' fairly recent post in which a poster asked if the "party search" screen was supposed to be the "trade improvements" or not. He said something to the effect of that the trade aspect of the party search screen was an afterthought, and they are still open to listen to players suggestions to improve trade.

What puzzles me about post is that is that Anet surely should know that there is only one suggestion that is given to improve trades, and it's been being suggested since the dawn of Guild Wars. That suggestion is an Auction House.

It makes me wonder if Anet has forgotten the importance of an Auction House. I think this thread should be Stickied, as no Auction House is and always has been the single biggest thing that is fundamentally wrong with Guild Wars and with it being stickied then Anet would not forget the importance of it.

/signed

Auction house is and always has been needed but it has been brought up here a lot and i doubt it will be introduced.

I'd like to see a consignment trader, not a dstraight auction thing, because there are too many games with auctions, consignment the price is static, you can find what you want, and it's instant <no waiting for the auction to close wondering if you got an item, and then finding out that you got screwed on it because the tides of the market changed in the time you were waiting for it>

/signed

Although the fact is it has become standard practice to treat D1 of the three major cities as our live auction areas. Perhaps we should force all traders to remain in D1 and not spam the remaining districts since 99% of chat window is filled with trade offers anyway.

D1's don't have to be very crowded to be absolutely impossible to read what ppl are SPAMMING in the talk channels. Forcing traders to stay in one place with the current system is only going to make things worse.

Please give us a trading system worth of the (real) money we're paying for the game.

What are you waiting for A-Net please make something like this happen

You know what GW needs?
Less idiots that have to type every message three times in a row...
If everyone would stop acting like complete tards it would be much better off
No Auction House can rule that out.

/signed, signed, and more signed for the Auction House. Hawking goods in the trade channel has to be the most unfun thing to do in a video game since Mad Dog McCree.

Plus, we may actually be able to talk to each other in towns and outposts rather than ignoring long streams of trade spam! ZOMG!

Good idea - this system works very well in FFXI:Online

/signed

Though frankly I think Silk Road has a much better system.

I'd prefer to see Green Dollar signs above players heads and go see what they have for sale.

And why do you think that so many games have auction system? Because it's good, it's effective and it makes the game less boring. Current shouting system is inefficient. This game absolutely needs improvement in this area. I have seen WOW auction system and must say that it's very good. When you give an item into auction, you specify two prices, one for minimal bidding and one for maximal, so when some1 bids max+, he instantly receives that item. You can swiftly search through auction for the item of your choice and you are not forced to run from town to town and trying to find a player that is selling something that you want. People want to play, not wait and stare into computer if there's some1 selling something interesting.That is auction and there isn't only 1 person in whole world who is selling that item , there will be more than 1 occurence of that item in the list believe me. If you want that item badly, so pay the max+ price and you get it instantly

/signed

/signed

Nice Idea

Ok guys, I found something on the web and if it's true, we are going to be very dissapointed When this is true, we need to find out something that is not an auction system but it realy improves trading, like upgrading search window with possibility to show your stuff that you are offering and at which prices.

best news of 2007 if its true

wont ever happen

wow has auction house yet has no cap on gold

guild wars has cap on gold so trading would be a nightmare unless they allow gold + ecto trades

i doubt anet would want to spend $$$ making auction house when spamming in a town is cheaper for them

anet have yet to implement it and i doubt they will as gw is already three chapters in

wow's auction house is the 1337sauce as you can just put all your items on a mule and load them into auction house then go off and play another char and when you come back you have a load of gold with no spamming required.

It's impossible to copyright an idea, ie the idea of having an auction house in a game. They can copyright the code but not the idea of having an auction house in a game. There fore if Anet really wanted to include one they could. They would just have to make sure it works differently to the WoW one.

Take it from this point of view: For so long, so many people wanted an auction house and it's not a big problem to implement one (I'm developer myself). Why isn't it here? Do you think that they are lazy? No. They want that new people buy their product so they can have bigger profit, but from some reason they can't do it. The question is ... why? And I'm not a lawyer so I don't know what can and is licenced by Blizzard. All we can do is wait if Anet will do something or it is going to be quiet.

there is not way in hell you can copyright the idea of an auction house in-game. it would be like copyrighting the idea of driving cars in a game, or betting in a game.

personally i think it wont happen now for two reason: -

too late into gw's history

cost as would eat up bandwidth and cost of desiging and maintaining it in a game with no fee per month

1 - Shouldn't there be a case number or something that allows me to go in and specify exactly which case I want to look up instead of searching through lots of cases I'm not interested in ? Even knowing which court this took place in would be a great help.

2 - Those of us not in the US would have to get someone who does live there to get that information. This might be doable for some of us if we knew exactly which case to look at, but I doubt any of us know someone thats willing to search for the exact case.

3 - You don't even provide a link to the website where you found the article you did quote meaning we don't know if its a credible source or one that makes stuff up for whatever reason. So I assume the latter as I do with all unreferenced articles.

4 - Copyrights cover the underlying code, not the overall process. As long as ANET doesn't use anyone who has looked at the WoW auction code then copyrights can't be used to block an auction house. Software patents are another matter however, and there is the possibility that ANET did agree to this as part of a settlement for something else though I can't see why blizzard would agree to that instead of just wanting more money to settle.

If you have hands you can find it in cca 30 secs just use your browser. As you can see it was posted on other forum. You can deduce it from the style and EDIT part.It was only cited post from other forum so there can be mistakes or it can be fake as well, it's not an official statement. Therefore I wrote that it's possible that it's not true , because I have doubts of it as well. The only one that knows where the thruth is is ANet and without official statements we can only speculate.

OK...I read that Anet is planning on making an auction house AND more storage. It was discussed in some developer meeting that I read on one of these fan sites. They stated that it is planned, but don't expect it within the next month.

Who the hell brought up copyright infringement on this idea? You have to be aweful dim-witted to even bring up the notion. Sure, it is possible that there could be something Blizzard set up to keep Anet from using their ideas, but I have a better chance of getting hit by a plane.

Puliver by putting what you quoted into google, I found this thread which links back to a post in this thread. But as I can only trace it to a forum post, I'm going to accuse that poster of making it up until I see further proof. I've seen too many people making outrageous claims both online and offline to do anything else.

Link please. At least Puliver gave enough information for me to track it down easily. However in the absence of a link to your source, I'm going to accuse you of making it while hoping its true.

Hmmmm....well, I have a link...right here. But I don't think I will be posting it. I am not 100% in love with your tone right now

I tell ya what, I will post a scrambled version of the link. If you really wanna see it, then put the words back into the right place(did not change the numbers)

//www.showthread.com/guildwarsguru/forum.php?p=2504402#post2504402

Read Billiard's post on page 2.

I dunno if this has been mentioned before, cuz looking at how there is 20+ pages, that's a nightmare for me to read on, BUT

Does this mean that prices for high selling items will be limited to the 100k limit a character may carry? Surely with ecto prices unstable, steadily rising and falling, they won't use ectos as a secondary monetary settlement method. Perhaps they could have a fund bank for the item. Example: a Icy Dragon Sword (lol) goes for 350k. The person will make 4 trips to the auction NPC and take 100k, 100k, 100k, and then the final 50k? That would probably work.

I want auction houses however I want them on the battle isles too/have access to them with my PvP chars.
Who of course can't got o individual auction houses and would never be able to buy a item that has not been offered up for sale in the battle isles.

And to extend on that, I think people(not only PvP chars) should be able to pay in Balthazar faction and/or money.
Faction and gold are different currencies and would have different values in the eyes for different people, and you would thus get offered a list of people that have bid on your item and could chose which offer to take(even if it is not a max one, perhaps it is a offer made by your guildy)
That has the added effect of not exactly matching World of Warcrack where the max bid is automatically accepted

Why not just allow the auction house to be accessed from any xunlai agent ?

The point of an auction is that the highest bid takes it, so letting people chose to accept a bid other than the wining one doesn't really make any sense. Also as there is no need for you to know who your trading with I'd say that the auctions should be completely anonymous simply so no-one can advertise their own auctions.

This would mean that having a system where your guildies receive a discount would be difficult as they would be unable to find your auction. If you want to trade with guildies, you can't use the auction house.

Though allowing bids in Balthazar faction could be interesting, if you figure out how to implement it by an automatic system, since if it requires the sellers input after the auction ends then you could reach the situation where multiple people have their gold/faction locked up in the auction (so that if they win, they will be able to pay) and a seller that isn't going to be playing guild wars for a while.

Would you like it if you have a large amount of your gold locked up for months after an auction ends, only to be told that you didn't win because the seller preferred the bid that included another bid ?

More than anything else in Guild Wars, I want an auction house. We need it badly!

GWs needs an auction House since last year...

One thing I can see being a problem with the auction house is when lots of people put up auctions for identical items (greens, weapon upgrades, etc) as you can only bid on one, and if the other ends a few minutes after the one you bid on, chances are you will miss it even if you can afford it (I haven't read through this thread to see if a solution has been proposed yet). Heres my solution to this problem:

Whenever there are multiple auctions for identical items, they are all combined and only show up as one entry when you search for them, but this entry will be marked with the number of copies inside it and the range of max bids on them. To place a bid on these items you place your bid on the whole block, but you also set an expiry time for your bid. Your bid is then placed on the first of those auctions to end that has the current bid below your bid price. If you are overbid then your bid will be moved to the next auction that it can be placed on, unless that auction ends after your expiry time in which case your bid is removed and anything held in escrow for the bid is returned to you.

In the case of a proxy bidding system I'm not so sure how this would work though. I'm thinking have the bid increase on the first auction to end up to when it exceeds the proxy limit, then jump to the next auction and place the minimum required bid on that one.

Um....why would you only be able to bid on one? Why should all identical items be grouped together to only show up as one entry? I am not understanding your logic on this...

WoW did an auction house just fine, with a much more complicated loot table than Guild Wars. There should be no reason why Anet can't design an auction house that is just as good, or better.

wow doesnt group them and that auction house works fine as i have used it alot and never had any probs with it

Lets say there are two auctions for the same thing that are going to end overnight and your bidding on the first one. If you get outbid after you log out for the night, then the second one will end before you get a chance to bid on it, unless you had bid on both of them for some reason.

Though I was thinking in terms of the number of people at the guru auctions, not the entire guild wars population, so this probably isn't an issue.

There are some problems that I can see.
1. Rip-off of FFXI's Auction House/Delivery System/ FFXI's Intellectual Property
2. Items for Over 100k: a Character can hold only 100k. This would have to be increased if wanting to purchase elite items/skins.
3. The inflation rates in game for FFXI are insane. Items that are regulated through the auction house could rise in prices unheard of.

I believe Anet tried to solve the spam selling in the search panel update. Which is great but people are lazy, so I believe some improvements are needed for the in-game buying and selling of items.


IGN: Darkian Black

Well..instead of an auction house (cost fansites do a good job with auctions), why not install a market where players can put their goods up for sale for whomever wishes to pay that price. To help limit people from pricing stuff outrageously just so they can use the market as storage...limit the number of transactions PER ACCOUNT to 5 and have a time limit of 7-10 days. This way after 7-10 days the item is auto returned to the inventory of the toon that placed it up for sale. Gold could be deposited directly into the player's bank (not their on hand cash).

anyhow just me 3 1/2 cents

/unsigned, even though I may have already

Would I like a better trade system? Yes, who wouldn't? But that's not the reason for signing.

1. An auction house wouldn't really fit into GW. You're an adventurer on the move, not a merchant. When they add Industrious Merchant to the class options at character creation, I'll sign. I'm already pushing the limits of my tolerance with some guy who can store our 100k + ecto's worth of golds and greens, and not get robbed/killed.

2. Amount of total and utter crap people save to sell would rise signifigantly, it's already bad enough. Scurvey Schiester Bastards. If you sold worthwhile stuff it'd take you 5 minutes per item, max in LA(or comparable city), providing you ask a decent price.

3. An open market induces prices to go up. It makes it so easy for everyone to know the going rate, so all prices will level out, no more extreme high and extreme low prices. With that noted, there will always be the guy asking for just a bit more and he'll get it, then since he got it, lots of other people will try to get it, and eventually will. Rinse and repeat. Over time prices rise.

4. Bandwidth. You get what you pay for, and a 1 time minimum of 50$(or less now I hear for earlier chapters) isn't enough to impliment something that will end up straining the servers. People do die from lag(anet side) occasionally and this would only increase.

5. The way it is, it's up to the player to balance farming/XPing/StoryProgression/PvP/Farming/Trades to their taste.(Similar to managing attacks/healing/speed, etc in battle) It's currently possible, and fairly easy, to make vast amounts of money, with a minimum time spent in LA.



I guess, all in all, the only reason for people to really want an auction house is total greed, possibly combined with lack of skill at time management and research.

And I think it would encourage people to save every piece of non max +12% while hexed crap they see and try to sell it.

My suggested solution:
1. Scrap Auction house Idea.
2. Use Party search: Expand that amount we can type in it.
3. Seperate Whisper from the rest of the scroll so that PM's do not vanish within minutes in a fast scrolling city.

Combination of # 2 and 3 would enable people to advertise and advertise AFK, while taking up no more bandwidth than before, and they could sell in ten minutes when done with the cigarette or crap break, because the interested buyers PM would still be there.

No reason to overcomplicate things, with an auction NPC. Everyone wants increased storage and the ability to sell every little thing they pick up, but it would not end up benifitting the game in the long run.

Go play the game. There is a place to sell almost everything, it's called a merchant. Sell him your junk, and stop trying to push it on everyone else like cocaine cut with sawdust(yes sawdust, not even a white powder like baking soda), you dirty greedy scurvey schiester bastards!!!

/Signed 100x times. This could really help