Curse

bilateralrope · May 03, 2007, 11:21 PM // 23:21

Quote:

Originally Posted by rohara

I think you're expecting too much. Its not the AH/NPC/Whatever's job to inform you of "street" prices or dictate what is "fair". If Anet dictated the street price of loot (other than things that can already be bought at an NPC, of course), well...people would not be happy, and not to mention...prices fluctuate often and greatly, so keeping track of it would be an uphill battle. Not worth the trouble, seeing as street prices of items are what they've always been - whatever the buyer is willing to pay to acquire the item based on its usefulness, appearance, quality, and rarity.

Selling/buying already requires some research - so nothing would change, and imo, nothing needs to change in that respect. Street prices are and should be dictated by the players - not Anet, and certainly not an NPC.

A good feedback system isn't one where ANET dictates the price of items. Its one where players can easily see what everyone else is buying and selling similar items for so that they can get an idea about the market value (the market value is the price where there are a similar number of buyers to sellers). Any time something changes the feedback system responds.

Quote:

Besides, looking at other auctions from the Trade NPC would/should give you a good enough idea of an item's worth. And the potential buyers are still free to haggle with you on the price if it isn't reasonable.

Any system that allows you to search for similar items to see their price across the game gives enough feedback. However my complaint about feedback was mainly aimed at separate player stalls which don't give any way to compare the prices between them because they lack a means to search them quickly. In fact because stalls don't allow other people in the district to complain publicly when they see an obscene price (thus warning others) I'd say that unsearchable stalls give less feedback than our current trade system.

I'll happily settle for a system with a searching feature. But if the stalls have a search feature then people will use that instead of looking at the individual stalls, so why bother with the stall part ?
Just have one NPC that allows people to search and trade with anyone with items up for trade, even if they are offline (the only performance difference would be that since people don't have to stay online to trade, they won't use the server resources required to keep them online).
And if you don't have the stall part, why should the trade system be linked to any location ?
The trade NPCjust needs two sections. The first is the items you have up for sale, the second is the search function which will allow you to find and then buy the items your after.

Quote:

I'd sign for this if some tweaks were made

Ideally, I'd like to see a trade system that does not require any interaction on the seller's part. Buyers know what they want and usually know how much they're willing to pay for it, so all that needs done for them is making it easy to find what they want - which would be the job of a designer.

That would be an auction system where the buyer starts the bidding of at a low price, then players bid the price up to what they are willing to buy it for. Any other system will require the seller to at least do a search to a search for the item they are selling so they know what price to set, meaning that the search function will be used more (at least once before an item is put up for sale), and if the item is rare enough the search won't give enough information unless it also includes information about trades that have already taken place.

Then again, once you have the offline selling and search setup, the only thing left to make an auction system is the bidding code.

Quote:

I like to spend my time online playing, not selling the crap i acquired whilst playing. I'd like to be able to leave my loot with an NPC, name my prices, and be on my merry way to go play.

Same here, though the reason I'd prefer the auction "house" is because it makes it easier for me to decide what price to set.

To conclude:
- To get the stalls giving enough feedback to keep prices fair across the game they will need a searching feature.
- Once we have a search feature, browsing individual stalls serves no real purpose. So keeping people logged in to trade no longer makes much sense when we can have the search function access the items that offline players have up for trade. And unlike the stalls, the trade NPC doesn't have to be linked to any location.
- Once we have the trade NPC running, the only change needed to make this an auctioning NPC is allowing bids on the items up for sale.

Personally I'll sign any trade improvements with a search function, but I won't sign any systems without one.

rohara · May 04, 2007, 02:02 AM // 02:02

I still think feedback is a trivial issue, no matter how the trade system is setup. WoW's elaborate auction system doesn't even have that feature - you have to download a mod for it.

Not to mention...that functionality could easily be exploited. Example: Person A posts a bunch of worthless junk for sale at 100k, then Person A's friend/guildie Person B buys it all at that incredibly overinflated price - rinse, repeat - thus inflating the price margin for those items and making the feedback completely unreliable.

Never underestimate one's willingness to muck up things for other people, especially in the world of online gaming! Griefers come out of the woodwork at the slightest hint of an exploitable act.

And I don't know why you're on about stalls - the OP didn't suggest stalls, but suggested a centralized means of trading through the party search feature, via links to personal trade vaults within the party search window. IE: open party search, click a link to view the items. No stalls and no stall visiting to do - click, view, click, view. I'd never sign off on a stall system, as that's hardly an improvement at all.

Item searching just ain't gonna happen - not in GW1 anyway, and I wouldn't bet on it for GW2 either. Like I said - item searches can easily cause bandwidth and server stability problems. I'd like to see that functionality in GW, hell yes...but I can't imagine Anet doing it.

MithranArkanere · May 04, 2007, 11:09 AM // 11:09

Worldwide auctioned selling should be anonimous.

That way you prevent people from inflating prices.

Non-anonimous selling should be instant, like when you set a shop with fixed prices.

Enix · May 04, 2007, 06:14 PM // 18:14

/signed

Would be nice to not HAVE to spam WTS messages. Xunlai would be an appropriate agent to arrange trades between continents and towns.

foo · May 04, 2007, 06:30 PM // 18:30

had a very similar idea in the wiki page, but the item calling in trade chat sounds really great.

/signed.

bilateralrope · May 05, 2007, 12:14 AM // 00:14

Quote:

Originally Posted by rohara

I still think feedback is a trivial issue, no matter how the trade system is setup. WoW's elaborate auction system doesn't even have that feature - you have to download a mod for it.

Does the WoW auction house have a search feature that can be set to only display items your after ?
If yes, does its table of results display the current minimum bid for each auction result ?

If yes to both then it does provide the feedback.

Quote:

Not to mention...that functionality could easily be exploited. Example: Person A posts a bunch of worthless junk for sale at 100k, then Person A's friend/guildie Person B buys it all at that incredibly overinflated price - rinse, repeat - thus inflating the price margin for those items and making the feedback completely unreliable.

Yes that is a problem. But if a tax is put on all transactions (like a gold sink) then every time they do that they lose gold, and most buyers would buy the items being sold for less by other players so the inflater's are likely to lose out as the only way they can maintain the inflated prices is to buy up all of that item being sold for less.

But without the feedback (search) system, if someone is inflating prices then you might spend 10 minutes to only find their stall. You don't even know of the lower prices, so all they need to inflate prices is a good stall location.

Quote:

Never underestimate one's willingness to muck up things for other people, especially in the world of online gaming! Griefers come out of the woodwork at the slightest hint of an exploitable act.

In Eve Online doing exploits like this is permitted by the GM's. But the only place it happens on a regular basis are the T2 cartels (only a limited number of people ingame can produce a specific T2 item) where they can control a vast majority of the items supply to prevent people selling it for cheaper. But when I left Eve Online the devs had recently introduced a way for players to produce T2 items, and prices for T2 items were dropping as the cartels lost control of the supply.

Whenever it happened for a non-T2 item then people traders it wouldn't last long before the price was restored to normal by people supplying new items (to that market) and eating up the inflater's ISK.

Quote:

And I don't know why you're on about stalls - the OP didn't suggest stalls, but suggested a centralized means of trading through the party search feature, via links to personal trade vaults within the party search window. IE: open party search, click a link to view the items. No stalls and no stall visiting to do - click, view, click, view. I'd never sign off on a stall system, as that's hardly an improvement at all.

I only see two differences between the OP's idea and a stall:
- Instead of the stall having a location in a town, its an entry listing in the party search window.
- Instead of going to the stalls location to open its trading window, you click its entry in the party list to open its trading window.

So really the only difference is the reduced walking time between stalls.

Quote:

Originally Posted by MithranArkanere

Worldwide auctioned selling should be anonimous.

That way you prevent people from inflating prices.

Non-anonimous selling should be instant, like when you set a shop with fixed prices.

If you have a search function that displays the price of all items that you are after, then it doesn't matter if the system is anonymous or not as most people wouldn't know any of the sellers. But anonymity won't hurt.

savage vapor 33 · May 05, 2007, 08:25 AM // 08:25

/signed

Doubtful it could ever happen, but why not.

Yawgmoth · May 19, 2007, 04:27 PM // 16:27

We know we won't get a full centralized trade system probably until they design it for GW2 first.
But something really has to be done and we, the community, should suggest here the simpliest, easiest to do and still effective and helpful means to improve the trading in GW.

dts720666 · Jun 11, 2007, 05:06 PM // 17:06

/signed

I don't really care how Anet does it. We just need something that makes selling things less annoying than spamming, and more profitable than merching.

dts720666 · Jun 11, 2007, 05:09 PM // 17:09

/signed

I don't really care how Anet does it. We just need something that makes selling things less annoying than spamming, and more profitable than merching.

bilateralrope · Jun 13, 2007, 04:14 AM // 04:14

Of the various AFK stall ideas, having the party search window (or any other menu window) is the best place to actually place the stalls.

All of my objections here fall into 4 categories:

1 - Possible server load/bandwidth usage. But since ANET will consider this, I see no reason to bring it up apart as a warning as to why ANET might not like this idea.

2 - Problems with people not being able to setup a stall because the computer is wanted for other stuff. But if your able to have your stall running while offline then this problem vanishes, and the bandwidth requirements should go down considerably as people don't have to stay online to run the stall, though server memory and CPU load might then go up compared to requiring people to stay online to operate their stalls.

3 - Issues of scale. Guild wars is basically unsharded, but most MMO's split their population across many shards that don't interact with each other. So guild wars will probably have a huge number of stalls running at any one time, making it take a while to find things your looking for. But if this is actually a problem, a search function can always be added at a later date to fix it.

4 - There is nothing to help the casual sellers decide what prices to set. But that will also be fixed by a search function.

So I withdraw all my objections, with the intent to request ANET add a search function if this idea is implemented without one (I will only /sign if a search is included). I also propose the following changes to the basic idea:

- Because having multiple markets will make the scaling issue more problematic as smaller market sizes, I propose that the stalls are only ever listed on a single list. For stalls with a presence in towns, this would be the equivalent of restricting the stalls to the international districts of a single town, though since this idea is using a menu window it might be possible to setup stalls from any town since we don't actually require an in-game location.

- If the store only has a few items (with the cutoff point chosen by ANET), have its name auto-generated to reflect those items and their price so as to prevent misleading store names.

- If players are allowed to set their store names, do not allow sorting by that name. Otherwise we will get stores with names like "aaaaaa <real name>" because that gets them to the top of the list.

- Automatically close any stall as soon as it runs out of items to sell, so that players don't waste their time looking at empty stalls.

My Green Storage · Jun 13, 2007, 05:53 AM // 05:53

Reset the party window every hour.
As mentioned, if people just go AFK and there's 800 listings, they'd need to a way for it to reset and clean up.

I get what the idea is about the NPC, but I hope to hell they don't tie it in together with the storage, I can just sense the feeling there'll be a bug and people will gain access to your storage freely.

Along the same lines, "Money + Ectos will be automatically placed in your storage" ... right there turns me away.

Just put the received gold/ecto on your character and have a message pop up in chat that says "Item # such and such has been sold, please view your Inventory (I) screen to make any gold/item deposits into your storage to free up space for future sales."
Preferably in maybe red or yellow text?
So it isn't the white, blue, green, orange, pink or purple (GW employees, right?) as there already is.

Maybe add a 15-20 sec confirmation?
"A sale has been queued, please click accept to confirm the sale"

So that when people DO go AFK, knowing this will cause them to not do it for long periods of time and it'll cut down on the "Selling Elemental Sword for 20k --PM-AFK" like there is in the party window.
Then you come back 8 hours later and the same message is STILL THERE --- WTF?

What would also be needed is a "You are unable to make a new announcement in the party window for 53 minutes" (Example)

So *IF* new sales are sent to the top of the party window, you don't get dumbasses making and deleting new ones every 10 minutes to get it to the top. With the "Every hour reset" it'd fall right into place.

Same with the uber1337 [email protected] .. I see enough of that in chat:

@@@@@@@@---Selling really rare 1337 Good Sword---@@@@@@@@

Keep it like the character names, no numbers, icons and the such.
Clean, Professional and Presentable

All in all it's a really good idea .. BUT with as much work as would need to be implemented and tested so that there are no crazy bugs that could screw someone over, I doubt it would be put in anytime soon.
Probably be near a year and that's if they put it into their "To-Do" list right now.
--I know, I know, all those CNN Tech TV viewers will be leaving replies "z0mg it doesn't take that long, it's easy I could do it with 1 arm behind my back"

bilateralrope · Jun 14, 2007, 11:13 AM // 11:13

Quote:

Originally Posted by My Green Storage

Reset the party window every hour.
As mentioned, if people just go AFK and there's 800 listings, they'd need to a way for it to reset and clean up.

Why ?
A listing thats been there for 1 minute is just as accessible as one thats been there for 24 hours because you don't need the seller to have any input after you decide to buy from him. You just click buy and the item becomes yours.

Quote:

I get what the idea is about the NPC, but I hope to hell they don't tie it in together with the storage, I can just sense the feeling there'll be a bug and people will gain access to your storage freely.

This could be a problem. Though ANET should test for bugs like that, so we don't need to think about them. If your really worried I'd suggest staying away from the stalls for a month or two to give such bugs time to surface.

Quote:

Along the same lines, "Money + Ectos will be automatically placed in your storage" ... right there turns me away.
<snip>

What wrong with moving the gold and ecto automatically ?

Quote:

Maybe add a 15-20 sec confirmation?
"A sale has been queued, please click accept to confirm the sale"

And what happens if the 15-20 seconds expires without any input from the seller ? (which is what will be happening the vast majority of the time)

Quote:

So that when people DO go AFK, knowing this will cause them to not do it for long periods of time and it'll cut down on the "Selling Elemental Sword for 20k --PM-AFK" like there is in the party window.
Then you come back 8 hours later and the same message is STILL THERE --- WTF?

And when you see such a method all you need to do is click it, open up that players stall, then click buy to get the sword. The fact that the seller has been AFK for a few hours doesn't mean anything. In fact allowing the players to sell without having to be there waiting for a buyer is the actual point of all the trade improvement ideas I've seen, as it allows them to trade with players with other playing times to them.

Quote:

What would also be needed is a "You are unable to make a new announcement in the party window for 53 minutes" (Example)

So *IF* new sales are sent to the top of the party window, you don't get dumbasses making and deleting new ones every 10 minutes to get it to the top. With the "Every hour reset" it'd fall right into place.

Same with the uber1337 [email protected] .. I see enough of that in chat:

@@@@@@@@---Selling really rare 1337 Good Sword---@@@@@@@@

Keep it like the character names, no numbers, icons and the such.
Clean, Professional and Presentable

Yes, deciding how to sort the stalls will be difficult. Currently the party search window puts the oldest entries to the top, so people who keep closing and reopening their stall keep getting dropped to the bottom. But this gives an advantage to the people who are able to keep a stall up 24/7, probably because of extra accounts (eg botters).

The best one I can come up with is completely randomizing the stall order every hour or so.

Though if a search function is added, the ordering of the stalls won't actually matter as most people will just hit search.

Quote:

All in all it's a really good idea .. BUT with as much work as would need to be implemented and tested so that there are no crazy bugs that could screw someone over, I doubt it would be put in anytime soon.
Probably be near a year and that's if they put it into their "To-Do" list right now.
--I know, I know, all those CNN Tech TV viewers will be leaving replies "z0mg it doesn't take that long, it's easy I could do it with 1 arm behind my back"

Yawgmoth · Jun 20, 2007, 07:17 AM // 07:17

Based on the latest comments and suggestions i present:

## Update 1 ##

*Issue: Too long afk'ing and too much cluttered list
*Solution: The shop should have a timeout limit and after that time it gets removed from the list and closed. The same should happen to empty stores after selling last item.

*Issue: Store names
In my opinion special characters and numbers should be allowed. There are many possible uses for them that could help describe items sold in a very short message. Remember that 31 characters is indeed very short, and any excess @#$@?>*& stuff greatly limits your space. The less informative the name, the less people will view that offer, I think.

*Issue: Store advertisments order and potential abuse by bots.
*Solution: All messages in trade section of Party Search should be displayed in a random order, randomization done client-side at the time the window gets opened. Any new messages getting added while the window is opened appear at the bottom of the list (just like it is now).

*Search!
Client-side processing of the standard party search data provided by the server could allow some basic searching. The searches could be done only in those short, up to 31 letters Party Search messages, as no item data may get transfered before actually entering a store.
So it could be possible to search single short keywords that may appear in stores names, for example 'dye' or 'sword' or 'green', and all the messages would get filtered and only those containing the typed string of characters would get displayed. Searching done this way should be very easy to implement and would require zero changes in how the server-side of party search engine works.

*New thing: WTB in Party Search*
Making the Trade section work as links to shops shouldn't obviously stop people from being able to advertise that they want to buy (WTB) something.
While the initial idea was that typing a message in Party Search Trade section should open your Xunlai Selling Tab or another interface to set up the shop, it doesn't mean that you have to do it. Just don't clock that [Start] button, and your message doesn't link to any items for sale.
As the Trade section could get cluttered with dozens of messages, a client-side sorting function could be made, that would make it possible to display the messages not linking to a store separately.

*New Thing: Selling things more expensive than 100k
It's not as simple as 100k+some ectos. A system with more than 1 currency type would be far more complicated than just gold. And it incudes certain design choices... just see:
Option 1. Most simple: Trades above 100k for 1 item just aren't supported by the automated system, instead an item could be displayed in store with no price set, so it can be viewed but to do the trade you have to use the old [Whisper] button and finish the trade manually.
Option 2. Storage to Storage: This would require some bigger changes in the game, and the idea is to be able to pay higher prices in gold by simply transfering the gold from your storage (or your character+some additional needed gold from storage) to the seller's storage. There may be some technical difficulties to doing that or it may even be impossible.
Option 3. 100k+something: This complicates the system alot, and may be not even worth it. A secondary currency should be chosen, this is an important design decision, as it should be accepted by players and not change in the future. The problem is Ectos don't have to remain a currency forever, and the devs can't simply force that choice to everyone. As there's no better option, a new currency should be created (items with the same buy and sale prices)... The currency issue was discussed lots of times before, and the general opinion was it's not needed, thus I don't consider Option 3. to be viable.

bilateralrope · Jun 20, 2007, 10:07 AM // 10:07

I've snipped out the things I have no issue with.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Yawgmoth

*Issue: Store names
In my opinion special characters and numbers should be allowed. There are many possible uses for them that could help describe items sold in a very short message. Remember that 31 characters is indeed very short, and any excess @#$@?>*& stuff greatly limits your space. The less informative the name, the less people will view that offer, I think.

*Search!
Client-side processing of the standard party search data provided by the server could allow some basic searching. The searches could be done only in those short, up to 31 letters Party Search messages, as no item data may get transfered before actually entering a store.
So it could be possible to search single short keywords that may appear in stores names, for example 'dye' or 'sword' or 'green', and all the messages would get filtered and only those containing the typed string of characters would get displayed. Searching done this way should be very easy to implement and would require zero changes in how the server-side of party search engine works.

Because of the limited store name people will use various abbreviation's to get across what they want to sell. But these are likely to be non-standard, for instance sword might get swrd, sord, srd, etc. Not really a problem when your browsing the list, but when you want to run a search its a problem.
And this is without thinking about people that don't speak english, or people using abbreviation's of the language they run GW in for the skin names. Or the player that, knowing that most people are looking for swords (for example) puts sword in his store name despite not selling a single sword just to get people into his shop.

A better option might be to include, alongside the name the player set, a few characters representing what kind of items the store sells. Have them invisible to the people browsing the list, but looked at by the search function. Though even then ANET might decide due, to bandwidth costs, that its cheaper for them to run the search server side which means the search function is likely to be able to filter for specific skins in specific stat ranges.

Yawgmoth · Jun 25, 2007, 02:32 AM // 02:32

Players using strange abbreviations in the 31 char wouldn't help themselves by doing so. The more strange it is the less chance of being found in a text string based search. Thats why i think players would quickly develop common short names for all the usually sold stuff.

But bilateralrope just suggested something I really like, which I'll expand and post detailed solution on how it should be done. And this is having information about what the store sells coded in a few characters of data, to be used by a search function. This is brilliant, sir, and realistic.

My early vision on it:
We know there's no possibility for any search engine to exist in GW1 able to search through items.
The only thing that could be searched in is the 31 characters, short message that any player can broadcast through the PartySearch engine.
The most reasonable way of doing any searches seem to be client-side filtering of all PartySeach posts.
The idea is, to sacrifice a couple of those characters to have some information about what kinds of items the store sells.
This would be done automatically upon starting the store.

Possible filters - Show only shops which contain at least one:
*Item for a given Profession - 10 bits of data
*Gold item
*Green item
*Upgrade component
*Rare Material
*Miniature
*Event Item

It's just 16bits=2bytes, so the message length would decrease only 2 characters (from 31 to 29) and maybe only 1. (1 character in GW chat is definately more than 1 byte)

This list is by no means final, and the whole searching by filtering certain cathegories is up for discussion here as a possible upgrade to the original idea.

BTW, Do those huge walls of text scare people off this thread? ;p

pamelf · Jun 25, 2007, 02:36 AM // 02:36

/signed. Sounds like a good way to make everyone happy.

phoenixtech · Jun 25, 2007, 01:11 PM // 13:11

Quote:

Originally Posted by Yawgmoth

Players using strange abbreviations in the 31 char wouldn't help themselves by doing so. The more strange it is the less chance of being found in a text string based search. Thats why i think players would quickly develop common short names for all the usually sold stuff.

But bilateralrope just suggested something I really like, which I'll expand and post detailed solution on how it should be done. And this is having information about what the store sells coded in a few characters of data, to be used by a search function. This is brilliant, sir, and realistic.

My early vision on it:
We know there's no possibility for any search engine to exist in GW1 able to search through items.
The only thing that could be searched in is the 31 characters, short message that any player can broadcast through the PartySearch engine.
The most reasonable way of doing any searches seem to be client-side filtering of all PartySeach posts.
The idea is, to sacrifice a couple of those characters to have some information about what kinds of items the store sells.
This would be done automatically upon starting the store.

Possible filters - Show only shops which contain at least one:
*Item for a given Profession - 10 bits of data
*Gold item
*Green item
*Upgrade component
*Rare Material
*Miniature
*Event Item

It's just 16bits=2bytes, so the message length would decrease only 2 characters (from 31 to 29) and maybe only 1. (1 character in GW chat is definately more than 1 byte)

This list is by no means final, and the whole searching by filtering certain cathegories is up for discussion here as a possible upgrade to the original idea.

BTW, Do those huge walls of text scare people off this thread? ;p

Signed for the idea in principle. Actual implementation might take more work though.

MithranArkanere · Jun 25, 2007, 02:19 PM // 14:19

So this will basically be AFK shops?

Do this at once!

Cale Roughstar · Jun 25, 2007, 04:06 PM // 16:06

/signed a million times!
Anything to ease the monotony of selling things....

BTW I really like how you saw what the major problem was with all other AH ideas and suggested something different. Great Idea! Lets just hope Anet reads this and likes it!