AFK Shop - The answer to WTB/WTS spam?

Lag? Lol, now that's funny. A shop sitting there just to appear will take next to no bandwidth. Now, when someone starts to browse it, they will take up about as much bandwidth as the NPC merchants, etc. There would be more lag from people running around than for a player merchant to sit there selling things. If there would be any lag at all, it would be minimalistic. All you people who are going around crying about "lag" should go take Networking 101 (Haha Replicant, great minds think alike!).

Search? The in game Search feature sucks terribly for trading, you can only enter a VERY LIMITED amount of text (which is why people still spam). There should either be a special merchant town where you can buy a merchant/store to sell your wares (call it a Barter Town) and/or add the Auction House that has been requested since day one.

/signed, btw.

/not signed, just chek Kal Online and tell me if afk shop is a good idea.

No no no no no, towns are too small. and no no no no no no no to lag.
Been suggested before. If this will be introduced you will have up to 20 + dictricts in which ppl will only sell and the whole game will lag.

/not signed

Same conclusion as pyro just 2 much lag towns 2 small.
And Kalonline is a good example.
look a the game @ towns like temp fort and COP (kalonline).
And beware of scams bugs that can come like buy a item and the shop owner doesn't get it's money. Or like a trade Bug/hack

An auction house like in FF XI that whould be nice with a simulair system can work

I agree with Maxiemonster, almost everyone standing in a district afk'ing isn't going to help speed selling up much, but at least I can see where you're coming from when you say it would help battle trade spam (and the general chat channel spam too). However, I think the simplest solution, of which I am a great believer of, is to reintroduce message suppression. I will admit the problems of that were that the easiest way to overcome it was to just add another exclamation mark on the end of your trade message, making it a 'different' message in a way, thus nullifying the suppression. What it boils down to though is that it means people can come and go as they please, buy what they want when they want and without having to swim through masses and masses of retarded spam. Does anyone else agree with this method?

Ever played Lineage 2 thread starter?

There is afk shops, they create masses of lag. You can hardly move in town it's like a puzzle maze everytime you go back there. Not to mention ppl still spam the wts/wtb.

I'd rather see a 100 gold penalty for every WTS OR WTB or W T S W T B Selling Buying S E L L I NG B U Y I NG etc you get my point done in local chat.

/notsigned
I can already see the entire population of LA dist1 afk. Thats kind of depressing,,,

smells like lineage 2, giran was perpetually AFK.

The biggest problem with this is that you'd have entire districts full of afk sellers, good luck getting into LA d1 ever again.

/notsigned.

An auction house would be *far* better.

Well i'm not really fan of the afk personal shop system for a trading system, played with it in a lot of games like Rappelz, Flyff and SRO more recently. Truth is it brings huge lag into the areas where ppl sell. But still its a better system than the current party window one or even the spamming on the trade channel.

If i had a choice in between an auction house like th one woking in WoW or project entropia or eveonline and this system i would defenely choose the auction house.

If a solution like this is implemented i would like at least to b created in a separate zone like a marketplace with limit shops per district.

/signed

It´s still better than what we have though i like the auction house system better.

/not signed

Did ANYONE even remember the limit to every district? Imagine all the slots of District 1 in every major town taken by AFK shops. Noone would even be able to see your shop!

An auction house is a much better option, or a improved system of the current Party search system.

Just no.

Someone sets up a shop, 20 other people set up a shop around them. Someone wants to buy something for a certain price, but they don't know if any of the 20+ people have it, nor do they know that anyone if offering the right price. So they have to look at every single shop to see if someone has it, and if someone else has it for cheaper.

Many people who set up shops would still spam all chat, trying to get people to look at their shop. The shops would just add unnecessary graphics to process, and thus, lag.

You must have never played Silkroad Online or Kal Online (both free Korean MMOs). The towns are by far the most laggy places in those games.

Are you the same person?

So you think that it isn't a problem if they add something that would serve to cause a large increase in lag? I think you forgot to listen to your own words. If ArenaNet is supposed to "fix" the lag, then they should try to avoid adding something that would only serve to make it worse.

Ever heard of the fact that not all servers run on the same hardware? Basic Networking 101.

Ok so while your 5 items are being sold you have to stay online to empty your cash to storage otherwise you can't sell when 100k is reached, this will encourage ppl to not afk.

For the districts being full, make the trade window cross-district like the party seach option so if LA dis1 English is full you can go to LA dis30 German and buy from LA dis1 English.

A lot of ppl won't/can't buy from other districts because of the language barrier(weapons have other names too), with items displayed with prices buying from others will be much easyer.

No lag clutter from ppl with shop-signs over their head, just the opened trade window like party search. which you can close at will.

As for the spamming "check out my shop blabla", while your shop is open the "All" and "Trade" channels are automaticly shut off.

Sure the system needs good testing to prevent scamming but to be sure (although the damage has been done) add a buy sell log to your trade window.

I've played Global MU Online, also a free Korean MMO. The towns were full of afkers, there was absolutely no lag, and the people who were afk did not talk. If poeple are going to spam anyway, then they must be at the keyboard and then there is absolutely no point in them having a shop open when they might as well trade normally.

Once again, some excellent idea, Odinius. Thank you.

/not signed

I do not like the idea of rewarding someone for doing nothing but sitting there.

At least AFKers going for the lucky title are spending money.....

No Tarun and I are different people, but it is simple common sense that no additional lag would result from this... IF people are forced to go to a "Market Place" district... or... could only have 10 people AFK with Stores per district.

and the "networking 101" thing is just a term we both used without noticing... ever heard of the term "Biology 101" "Chemistry 101" etc... it's basically us saying, if you don't know the fundamentals of networking, don't complain.

I say:
"WTS Victo's Battle Axe 10k or 1 ecto" = 36 bytes..
say theres 150 people in the district... = 5400 bytes or 5.27kb for just my 1 message.
but.. i would spam this... say 10 times... = 54000 bytes or 52.7kilobytes
(that is excluding extra data such as name, header to the message, and any extra data they throw on each packet..)
so everytime i spam my message it's generating 52.7kb of traffic on the server comp. (not to mention other people spamming)

now..... say I open a Shop:
Shop Title: "WTS Victo's Battle Axe 10k or 1 ecto" = 36 bytes..
say theres the same 150 people in the district when i open my shop... = 5400 bytes.. or 5.27kilobytes.
no other data has to be sent to the client until i close my shop.
and... every time someone loads in the district they receive my 36 bytes for the name of my shop...
but.... let me take this a step further... say theres 9 other people with the same name of their shop..
36 * 9 = 324bytes whenever someone loads in from the 10 shops.

now... simple logic.... which do you think would be better on a server...
52.7kb from 1 person spamming a message 10 times to 150 people..
or
5.27kb for sending the message to 150 people getting the name of the shop, and not having to send out additional data until shop is closed, or people load in (in which case it's 324 bytes, and distributed slower)

oh.. and since i know this may be coming... turning off the checkbox for trade/normal chat does NOT change the amount... you're still receiving the packets, the client just doesn't display it.

oh.. and i played Knight online and RYL (Risk Your Life) both had player shops, and both had very little lag, even with around 100 shops open.

To help with the market district thing, As you said, the afk thing would work, and you could set it up as a bazaar and interact with the sign or whatnot.
But, have a town specifically for that (another thing you mentioned) But! each district has a max of XX traders and the rest have to be players, afk for 5+ mins without a shop, they are booted to last town, kind of like the leave guild hall feature ( just explaining thatd be easy)

You played Knight Online, and you said it had very little lag? You're definately on crack.

OK, you've proved you can do math, based on your 36 byte line, big whoop.

I load into LA D1.
That server has to send me everyones 36 byte line, plus the inventory from their store.

36 * X + (X * Y[number of items in store, byte equivalent, say 10 for a full store])

You say 150 people. I say way more, because when AFK sales happens tons of people pack rat everything to sell while they're asleep or at work.

36 * 250 +( 250 * 8)
74k.
Big whoop, even on my DSL that's like 3 seconds downloading.

Now, on D1 LA, every 3-4 seconds(and I'm being generous, it's less time) Someone enters the town. Anet then has to send 74k to each and every one of them, on top of all the info already needed(what people, what armors, what color for armors, all that jazz, what minipet is out, and where each person and minipet are moving to, in adition to NPC's if there happen to be roamers there.)

Anet is suddenly having to send out megabytes worth of info per server(each district is not run on it's own server, in case someone wants to go there).
That creates lag, period.

Yes, you can do some simple math, but you're not counting the massive amount of people that anet has to relay that 36 bytes to AND from(plus how often), not to mention every inventory change and new store, in addition to what's there already.

Yeah, the bandwidth issue is definitely something to consider. The real problem is, this wouldn't cut back on the spam. People would still be WTSpam all day long because unless there is a search function, nobody's gonna know what they're selling.
I agree ANet needs to address the issue of lag, but to say that the issue shouldn't be considered when making suggestions is just stupid. The idea is to put suggestions that ANet could use to make Guild Wars better. If you make suggestions ignoring a financial aspect that ANet must seriously weigh and consider before implementing, then what's the point? If you bog down the servers, that costs ANet money. If you suggest something that is not financialy feasible, then the idea is pointless as there is no way ANet could or will possibly use it. One of the reasons Blizzard can have so many things like the auction house and super-huge inventory is because people pay every month. With Guild Wars, you pay your one-time fee and that's it. There is a huge difference. Even buying both expansions each year (@ $50) is cheaper than a year of WoW without even purchasing the game. ($180 monthly, $156 6-month plan)



Anyways....
/notsigned

I like the idea. Heck, I like any idea that intends to cut out all of that WTSpam crap. But I don't think people will use it. Reason is, no one is gonna want to check each and every "booth" for what they want. Escpecially when chars have such limited inventory to sell items with. Add on that it promotes AFKers, which is a bandwidth strain, and there's another problem. I really thought a lot of people would stop WTSpamming and start using the trade section in the Search Window. But a lot of them aren't. And it drives me bonkers.

Which reminds me... ANet should automatically block any message that is sent exact (verbatim) within 3 seconds of each other. That would frustrate a lot of spammers and make them consider a new way to advertise. (Party Search maybe? Finally? PLease? For the love of god... )

I agree with what you say. I, like yourself, agree that it is much easier to find something when someone is trying to sell a particular item and is spamming it rather than spamming the whole "come check out my shop" thing. But if in this proposed shop idea you are able to put up multiple items (we'll say 10 or whatever), you aren't going to have enough room in local chat to spam all the stats and prices for each item. Also, from what you just said, it still isn't going to solve the WTB/WTS spam. I'm definitely not trying to argue any point because I totally agree with you and everyone that the spamming thing is annoying and something has got to do about it. Like I said, before, I like your intuitive idea, but we need to come up with something that will close all of the "go arounds" and "loop holes"

I personally wouldn't mind having the entire Trade button thing disabled in certain districts.
Lions Arch District 1 (trading disabled)
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Lions Arch District x

Lions Arch Trade District 1 (trading enabled)
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Lions Arch Trade District x

I don't think lag will be any more than what it normally is.

Since they can't trade in those actual districts, maybe...JUST maybe...they may refrain from spamming.