Trying to Solve the Trade Problem

The trade channel has become a major problem in Guild Wars. As you may well know, the spamming of trade channel has made buying and selling from others a nightmare. No human can comprehend what comes scrolling down their screen in any major outpost/city. Because of this, I have formulated three suggestions that would greatly improve the current system. These are merely rough ideas and can be added to or modified as seen fit.


1.) Create a filter: When accessing the chat window, let there be a filter where you can sort through all of the spamming by searching for one specific word or phrase such as "axe" or "fiery dragon sword." Also, this filter could utilize a Boolean search tool that would simplify and further narrow down the filter, i.e. "staff NOT fire" would indicate a non-fire staff. Then, only messages with these specific words in it would be displayed. This would also force potential buyers and sellers to correctly spell what they are advertising, which would be a small but pleasant improvement. If one cannot correctly spell "sword," they probably should not be playing this game anyway.

2.) Toggle between Buying/Selling/Trading: When someone wants to advertise in the trade channel, that person will have to choose from a drop-down menu and select whether he/she wants to Sell, Buy, or Trade. Therefore, when filtering for what you want to find, you can also toggle, via a button or menu, between people who are buying, selling, or trading. The filter would recognize messages that are either buying, selling, or trading and tag the messages as such, which would eliminate the need to type "WTB" or "WTS" in your message.

3.) Auction House: Although this has been mentioned many times before, I will say it again: an NPC acting as an auctioneer would make auctioning off items much less stressful and would legitimize offers. There would no longer be doubts if the person who is auctioning is betting against would-be buyers because the auction house would clearly show who is betting and how much. To eliminate the problem of not having enought space in your inventory for gold, payments should be able to be forewarded to your storage account or vice versa.

These are just rough ideas and my personal opinion. Although they do not completely solve the problem, they could potentially make the buying and selling experience in any town much more pleasant. Additional comments and suggestions would be appreciated.

Like them all. Maybe change the text colors for Buying, Selling and trading (Bright Red = Sell, Black = Buy, Yellow = Trade) this way if you are just viewing the trade channel in town while running around doing errands you can quickly tell if someone is buying or selling without any search option needee.

Also make it so that anything and everything starting with WTS/WTB either gets filtered out or automaticaly sent to Trade when entered into main channel and I'll be happy.

I'm tired of telling people to use Trade instead and have them argue that they do it because everyone blocks Trade.

Both good ideas. I hope someone from ArenaNet will start to take such ideas into considerations for the next update.

All you need is an Auction House. It would solve every single trading problem in the game.