Towns
Don't have shops in major cities unless they're in 'shop districts'. Here's a sample shop town:
Dancing Chameleon (I'm having fun with names)
-10 districts
-50 shops available per district to rent out
-500 gc/day rent fee for a shop with 20 inventory room (another 500 gold per every 10 more inventory space purchased (with a downpayment for expanding)).
-Storeclerk NPC Purple Monkey Dishwasher functions like other NPCs, displaying a price for their goods.
-Storeclerks are willing to haggle.
-The owner of the store inputs a 'display price' that is shown for what the NPC will accept for the commodity, and a 'minimum price' that the NPC will accept (but not tell while haggling).
-Records kept of what items are sold for what, and either a till that the gold people bought stuff for, or the gold goes directly to the vault.
You could have 500 people selling stuff in that city. With the ease it is and the fact you can sell stuff while you're away, the prices shouldn't be so high, as buyers can simply find someone who sells for less.
Have ten or so of these towns, and you can have 5,000 shops. Elliminating half the "WTS/WTB" @#$% that goes on in cities. You should probably require something like a celestial sigil to get one of these.
Having 5,000 shops per server would be great.
Problems with this:
How do you remember where your shop is?
Will the space disappear too fast?
Can you go internationally to get prices from another server?
Strong suggestion: Have an island for these towns with a boat leading to a port on the island departing from Lion's Arch upon request (immediate teleportation). From there you have to explore to get to the different selling towns.
Second strong suggestion: Don't do this until at least the next expansion, unless you can do it for cheap and without updating in such a way that you have to end someone's run in HoH because it's imperative they restart the program

Ideas anyone?
Please do not flame, it is not constructive. If you don't have anything useful to add, don't bother hitting the 'reply' button (or 'quote' button for you smartasses out there who will just quote a post to flame it). If you disagree with an idea, it's likely the dev's will too and they will ignore it, so don't waste your precious time.
