Curse

Lyssa Antaris · Jun 16, 2007, 06:50 AM // 06:50

First of all, I would like to apologize if someone has already thought of this first at all. (In terms of Improving selling via party search) This idea is not an "auction house", "afk shop" or anything like that, its just a suggestion that could make trade in party search be actually used, instead of the spam that persists, by making it a more appealing option. If this is the case, then I ask the moderators to either lock, move or delete it.

The Idea
Based on other comments in these forums I have read, I believe players (and Arenanet with regard to local chat) are fed up with having to put up with spam in large cities in order to sell anything, and that the trade listings in party search go relatively unused or ignored. Certainly I find the spam required to even get people to notice your item and not have it fly past in under a second in some cases to be quite frustrating.
A simple to implement, yet potentially much better system than we have at present to advertise our items and at the same time to reduce a lot of the trade spam in major cities would be to have a linking system (like used for builds in team, guild, alliance and pm) in the party search window that enables when you select trade mode in party search.

How It Would Work
To "link" an item , like builds, there would be two methods; manually typing the item name, and dragging the item into a space beside the description field. This would not be like a standard inventory slot in that an item placed in it does not move there, rather it creates a link similar to the system used for build templates for the item. The items name (not cincluding prefixes or suffixes from mods) and 'colour' is shown in the link and when clicked on opens a small window with the inventory icon and the same item description you usually see when you mouse over the icon in your normal inventory. For buying, a player would list the items name if it was an item that is always the same like a green weapon or a rune, but for things that can be different like other weapons, they would have to either link one they have already as an example or type it like they do now.

Additional suggestions for making trade in Party Search better
Also increasing the text character cap in the party search description by a few characters couldnt hurt, and perhaps when using it for trade you could select an option for selling, buying or item trading so WTS/WTB/WTT does not have to be part of your message. The sell/buy/trade selector, linking and inventory box would grey out and be disabled when an option other than trade in party search is selected.

To discourage Spamming...
The linking system should be for party search trading only so as to encourage people to list their items because it is easier and less painstaking and annoying compared to WTS WTB spam (to them and others in the district).

Implementation into the game
As far as implementation in the game, party search is already there, so required elements would include coding another linking system similar to that created for builds using the same type requests of the game database your inventory uses for item statistics of a particular item you have (perhaps the record is temporarily dupliated in a field in the party search database). The players still have to actively pm each other to make a transaction and be in the town, so there is no auctioning or gold-related programming required at all, but this would make using trade in party search a much more attractive option than spamming (which Arenanet is discouraging anyway, but encourages player interaction in the trade system). I'll leave specifics to the devs, they made party search and build template links, and i'm confident they could make this work with a few tweaks here and there.

Lastly...
This change would make trading via party search a more attractive option, but of course those who like to "spam" trade chat would still be free to do so.. but the smart ones would save themselves a lot of hassle in the short run, and eventually even the spammers might just see this system as more worthwhile.

Just my two cents,
Guru newbie Lyssa

P.S. Thanks to Arenanet for the Sunspear Skills and many improvements in the update today, it must be tough to work to a deadline on a new expansion while fending off the angry people that seem to often post here about one thing or the other without upsetting the others who thought all was fine how it was.