User talk:Xxovercastxx

Fix the damn trade system!
Way back in 2005 I participated in a Frog chat. One of the topics was the inadequacy of the trade channel. Several players mentioned the auction house system in WoW. As I understand it, the WoW auction house allows you to sell items, even while you are offline, by simply "giving" them to the auction house. Whenever the item is sold, you find the cash in your inventory. This is probably ideal, but I also recognized how much work this would be for ANet, and so I made a proposal that would be nearly as useful and yet far less programming.

I proposed allowing people to tag items in their inventory 'for sale' and indicate a price. Visiting an NPC would allow you to browse all items for sale in that town in an interface like merchants and traders use. Add some filtering/sorting/searching options and you'd have a pretty useful system. You might even be able to see your whole screen while walking around Lion's Arch. The Frog seemed to like this idea and assured us that the trade problem would be addressed "soon".

A year and a half later, and all we have is the trade option in the new party search. Don't get me wrong; I like the party search, but the 20-something characters that you can enter there means it's really not very useful for selling items. Additionally, you still have to stand around and manually handle the transaction. At least my proposed system would allow you to sign in and go AFK even if you can't sell offline like WoW. I don't see much talk about this. Am I really the only person who's completely fed up with the broken trade system? Would some sort of petition help get ANet's attention? Would anyone even sign it? xxovercastxx 17:44, 15 February 2007 (CST)


 * No, no and yes, but it wouldn't make a differance. ANet has it in the works and will most likely make it the selling point of an upcoming chapter, it won't be a free upgrade for sure. Just be patient or forget about it, there is nothing else you can do. &mdash; Skuld 17:48, 15 February 2007 (CST)


 * If you want to get their attention you should probably put the suggestion on one of the 'elite' sites, that's what they told me to do when I had a suggestion. Ghost1 18:03, 15 February 2007 (CST)


 * Speaking for guru - don't, there are a zillion threads of suggestions, whines and rants already, use one of them &mdash; Skuld 19:18, 15 February 2007 (CST)


 * Have a look here: User:Gem/Guild_Wars_suggestions .--Phoenix [[Image:Phoenix_Benu.png]] 13:32, 17 February 2007 (CST)


 * I read that anything that involves UI changes is difficult, so maybe just an automated way to sell items all through chat commands, like /autosell or something. --CannibalBob
 * I do not agree on "Broken trade system" I’ve seen my fair share of trade systems in all other mmorpgs that I’ve played and trade system in GW is just average fairly well working one. As for Trade in Party Search, its as good as it gets IF every one starts using it (just about no1 is right now), you can announce whit abbreviations most of the items and price right there, yes trades will be manual otherwise you wont be able to trade items above 100k in value =D.
 * My personal thought is that there should be an NPC "Enhancements Trader" who, in a manner simular to materials and runes, will buy mods. Maybe using an interface similar to the Unlock screens. That would help tremendously. Then we just have to worry about some way of buying the right base weapon. ;o) ---JP

But still imagine how every one on will just keep their character online in a town how much more it will cost for ANet in bandwidth, not to mention lower quality of service for rest of the bunch who are happy to trade manually. Biz 03:24, 19 February 2007 (CST)


 * As a network tech, I don't feel the bandwidth would be a significant problem. If it were, it would not be much of a stretch to adjust the system to minimize.  A "half-online" setting where you neither send or receive traffic that isn't relevant to advertising and selling your wares and your character is not drawn in the town would minimize any traffic increase.  Of course you're getting closer and closer to an auction house, which I do think is the ideal solution.  My proposal was simply to get something in place quicker so we don't go mad while the auction house is developed.  "Lower quality of service" would seem a reasonable concern, except we just finished Canthan New Year -- an event that had district numbers pushed into the high 100's (I "celebrated" in District 187 at one point).  It's rare to see even 2-digit districts normally, so that we were well into the triple-digits and saw minimal performance hit (and that was in towns only) tells me that a trade system isn't going to impact performance.


 * To those who say the trade system is not broken/inadequate, I do not understand how you can feel this way. I want to spend my connected time playing Guild Wars, not repeatedly typing "WTS Vokur's Staff - 12k" in the chat window for 2-3 hours.  15 minutes has me ready to scream in frustration.  As a buyer, trying to scan the rapidly scrolling text for an item I may want is no less frustrating.  And if you're neither buyer nor seller, you can't even filter out the chatter by unchecking the trade channel because idiots insist on posting sales in the local channel.


 * I also think a better system would expand the market. It's very rare to see any non-perfect items being sold.  These items aren't always worthless, and may have a good market for lower level players albeit at a much lower price, yet still more than the merchant pays.


 * Party Search Trade is reasonable now provided you're only selling one or two items. I'd still rather see something that shows the item's name and stats directly instead of whatever the seller feels like typing.  Some sorting and filtering options would round things out nicely.  The 100k limit would still pose a problem for an automated system and of course any literal trading (items for items) would have to be done manually.  I'm not saying ban all manual trading; I'm saying give us a nice automated system so that the majority of the transactions can be handled with little effort. xxovercastxx 20:55, 20 February 2007 (CST)