Curse

William Stark · May 25, 2006, 08:10 AM // 08:10

For reasons posted elsewhere, I am not 100% convinced that an auction house would make a significant dent in the WTS spam in cities. The spammers are deliberately going to where they see potential customers, rather than waiting for customers to come to them, and I cannto see this changing.

As a possible alternative solution, how hard would it be to introduce a new trader type specialising in weapon upgrades? It could use the same mechanics as the existing dye/rune/material traders to modify prices according to supply and demand.

Due to the variety of items and quality sold, it might require more than one type of trader (swords, bows etc), since otherwise there would be a very long list of all the various qualities of each mod. Alternatively, this could be simplified if the trader only dealt in moderate to high quality mods (all anyone is likely to want to buy anyway).

This would not resolve the entire problem, but it might bring it back to manageable levels.

fiery · May 25, 2006, 01:40 PM // 13:40

I disagree, IF an auction house was added I would imagine a ton of people using it. Who wouldn't use a system they can leave an item and a price tag on it and just walk away. Than spamming in districts "WTS" over and over.

As to your idea, a trader just for weapon mods? Um, people will buy them out and sell them, mod all weapons to perfect(which is not a bad idea), but than people will stick to prices via trader, with crazy prices to start with.

Spam is nothing, turn off all chat, turn off trade chat, and Ta-Da unless your in a trading guild, turn off guild chat. Or stay out of the major cities to avoid the spam.

quickmonty · May 25, 2006, 02:05 PM // 14:05

Turning off local chat is great, unless you are looking for a PuG to team with. Staying out of major cities is only viable if your guild has the resources to purchase all the NPC's. Otherwise you have to go into a major city if you want to deal with material traders, rune traders, etc.

Since I don't usually PuG, my local (and trade) chat is almost always off.

Verlas Ho'Esta · May 25, 2006, 07:28 PM // 19:28

First of all, the "mod trader" idea is brilliant, and I have been hoping for it for quite some time.

I do think that an auction house-ish system would benefit the game immensely, however, keeping track of each individual's business would consume a great deal of server power. So, consolodate the players by groups. Only guilds can be given charters to interact with auctioneers. So auctioneers can be accessed via guild hall (which would still grant PvP characters access), as well as in major cities. Also, any profit from said auctions is placed into a communal "pot" from which all guild members draw a weekly percentage stipend (as determined by the guild leader). That increases community activity across the board.

I still say a simple text-scanning system like a spell-check should be implemented with an updateable database. It would scan general chat for "WTS" "WTB" "WTT" and any other slang-words used by spammers (updated weekly), and automatically bumps them to the trade channel. Eventually the retards will get the message and use the trade channel.

BrotherGilburt · May 25, 2006, 09:30 PM // 21:30

I agree with fiery. If an auction house, or trader was added I think everyone would use it. who would sit in a city for hours trying to sell stuff when they could be farming, questing, PvPing, and GvGing? I personally hate waiting in a city for hours trying to sell stuff.

Brother Gilburt

bilateralrope · May 25, 2006, 10:42 PM // 22:42

People have been suggesting adding trader NPC's for the fixed stat items (mainly greens and weapon upgrades) for some time. The only problem I can see is that it would take a while to get the traders up and running (sword pommel of fortitude +30 is listed at 100k+, would you sell it to the trader for 100 ?), but that can be lessened by setting the starting value to about 10k for all of them. The ones worth more than that would still be placed into the trader by people with no clue about their value, or those too lazy to trade with players.

Though if the traders were implemented at the same time as an auction house, I'm confident that it will work fine even with the strating price of 100 at traders. Cheap items stock up in the trader, expensive ones go into the auction house.

However, once the trader is stocked and running, I feel it would be a better way to handle these items than the auction house for these reasons:

- Items will only be on the auction house for a limited ammount of time. Items sold to a trader will stay in stock until purchased. This means that you will always be able to get the cheap upgrades from the trader, but almost no-one will ever put these items up for auction meaning you will be lucky to get the worthless ones.

- The trader looks like it will be less hassle for people buying the items, and it will be quicker for both buyers and sellers to complete the transaction on it.

- For each auction ANET will need to have an entry for sellers account, current bid, current bidders account and item type for each copy of the item there. And thats just with the minimum for an auction house without things like min bids, proxy bid or reserve bids. For a trader they will need to store current price, stock, and some other variables for the supply/demand code to let it know when to change price. To me it looks like the trader will require less storage (and probably less processing power to search) if there are 10 identical items, the breakeven is probably as low as 3 or 4 items.

- The supply and demand code already exists and is reasonably bug-free. This means it will be much less work to implement the traders than to write the auction house code from scratch.

But for items with randomly generated stats, an auction house is really the best solution.

Arx Baron · May 25, 2006, 11:47 PM // 23:47

[QUOTE=BrotherGilburt]I agree with fiery. If an auction house, or trader was added I think everyone would use it. who would sit in a city for hours trying to sell stuff when they could be farming, questing, PvPing, and GvGing? I personally hate waiting in a city for hours trying to sell stuff.
QUOTE]

True enough, all the more so that it would be a lot simpler for the customer to just check on the AH to see whether yes or no his item would be in sale or not, and it would benefit the casual customer who doesn't know the current prices as he would be able to compare directly the prices.