Talk: Suggestions/Trade namespace

I think this would be useful. It's the best hope for meaningful price checks and could potentially be an alternative to spamming Lion's Arch and Kamadan endlessly. Quizzical 02:09, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

I strongly oppose this suggestion. The amount of work required just to keep this section decent would be enormous, and our userbase is dwindling. Isn't that why the builds section was removed? If this is intended to be a buy/sell namespace... look, someone beat us to it. If this is intended to be an ever changing price-check list... see my second/third sentence. AND guru has a price check forum. --Shadowcrest 02:24, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

Your link doesn't work. Quizzical 02:49, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

A mere price check list with no actual buy or sell offers isn't terribly useful. Even if someone thought an item was worth 5k a year ago, you may spend hours spamming Kamadan trying to sell one at that price and get no takers. An offer to buy the item for 5k, in contrast, is meaningful information.

As far as the trade forum on Guild Wars Guru, that's way, way too awkward to navigate. To take an example from another game, the forums for A Tale in the Desert have had a trade forum for years. It hasn't gotten all that much use. Even if it did get that much use (as Guild Wars Guru does), it would have been far too hard to navigate. If someone wanted to buy glass pipes, sifting through hundreds of forum threads to find the three that had somenoe selling glass pipes is a huge hassle. One is certain to skim over information, and likely miss what one is looking for.

In the first telling, a web site had a way for players to post price lists. Instead of having to sift through hundreds of offers to find the few that might interest you, you could go straight to those few, and compare prices among the few sellers of glass pipes. It was, in practice, dramatically more useful than the trade forum, and facilitated at least dozens of times as many trades, and possibly hundreds of times as many. A wiki can do things that a forum can't.

Regarding the amount of work required, it would be orders of magnitude less than for builds. PvXwiki, for example, has many hundreds of builds. To determine whether just one build is useful, a number of people must try it for a considerable amount of time. Even then, it might become useless with a subsequent skill rebalancing patch.

The problem is that there, someone might say, I think this build is useful, and others might disagree. If someone wants to sell an elite elementalist tome for 10k and announces that he's selling at that price, well then, it's true, and not a matter of opinion. There's no need for someone else to come in and filter it.

What would be the analogous maintenance time required for a trade section? If someone wants to sell an elite elementalist tome for 10k, he can go to the page for it and post his offer. Either the buyer or seller could remove it once the trade is made, and if neither bother to do so, someone else who wants to sell an elite elementalist tome a week later to clear out the now-obsolete offer (as indicated by a timestamp when it was first posted), to avoid cluttering his own. Where is the need for anyone not personally involved in buying or selling elite elementalist tomes to touch the page? Quizzical 03:49, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

There would be enormous degrees of traffic, due to the fact that the wiki is already famous and it would be a nightmare to keep up with. Look how convoluted guru is, and how quickly the forums go up and down. Plus, here, it'd be harder to regulate "bump spam" and RC would be flooded to the point of uselessness.

As far as it being hard to find things on the forums, just go to google, type site:<address of the forum> "<name of item>", and it will pick out each time that word is used on that forum. Also, you could get more specific and type "10k b/o" and get results closer to your budget. — Powersurge360Violencia 04:05, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

My link works fine for me. If you're referring to the fact it doesn't link to the trade forum, I typed the link out and didn't remember the trade forum URL. A link is on the left on the page I linked to.

Guru has a search that worked fine for me, always found what I wanted within a few minutes. Why would it be any different here? You'd be able to search for a single item better... but it'd be a pain in the ass to make dozens of pages if you have various items you'd like to sell. So it'd be a little easier on the buyer, but a pain for sellers who have a multitude of items.

I'll give you the point on opinions on builds and opinion, but managing this would still require loads more effort from our active userbase than we use now.

When you're dealing with elementalist tomes, fine. But what about things with fluctuating prices? Ecto, high end/rare skinned weapons, black dye, anguish stones... those aren't going to be xK for long. This sentence is strictly on principle, but what if ANet were to release a new campaign? All the items would go for 100k+xy(z) ecto.. and drop. Same with holiday/special items- mini polar bear, new minis. What do we do to clean out the old trades? We can't just leave them there. I have a good computer, and I'm lagging typing this. Having hundreds of old unused pages won't help load times. So what do we do with them? I know I don't have time to sit and delete hundreds of pages. We have 15 active admins, including the semi-active listed ones. We can't do things with our minds (though that would rock). A bot could solve it, but...

Lastly, I can not see the possible benefits of hosting a trade channel on the wiki outweighing not only our new minimum of activity but in duplicating the effort. Why would people leave Guru to come here? Why leave the thousands of sellers/buyers there to come to the miniscule amount by comparison here? The way I see it, this is like GWW setting up another wiki when there's a fine one a click away. And they even had a reason, so they could link to it in game and because it was (supposedly) illegal to buy the wiki from Gravewit. GWW even says they couldn't have. We don't have a reason- and this time, unlike with GWW, we don't have a year's head start. -Shadowcrest 04:59, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

(Reset indent) The PRO for a trade namespace is eloquently argued by Quizzical: it has the potential to be easier to use than a forum solution. Counter: using a dedicated database site that tracks bids and provides a history (a sort of GW-ebay) would be even better. Re-Counter: that would be more effort to set up.

The CONS:

1. might not attract enough users to be worth it. Counter: so what have we got to lose? We can just try it and see.
2. floods RC. Counter: If it was a namespace, you could filter it out. Should we make another wikia wiki just for trading? Pro for that: could be international
3. old unused pages affect load times. Counter: untrue. Your load times are affected by monaco, with its 500kB of Javascript executing on every page; have you ever looked at the source of a page? For an article to exceed the size of its wrapper, it must be fairly huge. Push has 21.499 bytes of HTML on Monobook and 38.310 bytes on Monaco, not counting included files. The article by itself has 2109 bytes. Unused pages sitting on the server make the database slightly bigger, but if you oppose that, you have to oppose the wiki growing at all. Other than that, unused pages don't affect performance at all - there is no point in deleting them! (A reason why GWW has a very open redirect policy).
4. there would be enormous degrees of traffic, a nightmare to keep up. Counter: with enormous traffic, there come more potential editors and admins. And the traffic wouldn't all arrive overnight.

I've made some comments on the Pricing Guide how we could set something like this up in a way that is easy to patrol. In short: let users place offers and bids in their user space and collect them automatically on a subpage for each item. This would affect performance, but be very simple to maintain. --◄mendel► 07:52, 31 July 2008 (UTC) (edited 08:18, 31 July 2008 (UTC))

Please add pros and cons to the page not just the talk—♥Jedi♥Rogue♥ 09:39, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

Feel free to do it - all my contributions are CC BY-NC-SA. --◄mendel► 15:46, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

I also oppose this entire concept, Quizzical. You may be right that a price list would drive more traffic to the site, but that may not be such a good idea seeing as how this site already bogs down rather frequently. Unless we're footing the bill for server upgrades and bandwidth, we shouldn't be discussing our roles in increasing visitors - that's not something we get to provide input on. Additionally, I do feel like the task of maintaining a price list, even when spread across many, many users, would be a grueling one. Not only does it invite price manipulation and require an entirely new set of not-yet-existing policies to function correctly, but GW players have a hard enough time coming to a consensus on trivial matters as is. I remember that when builds were hosted here (and it's still this way on PvX), there would be endless squabbling and bicker matches over whether or not Healing Signet belonged in a build or not. But that wouldn't be nearly as bad as people arguing whether an Elite Monk Tome should be 9K or 10K. Shadowcrest is right - Guildwars Guru is way ahead on this task. Their live marketwatch applet, when working, gives good, up-to-date pricing info on anything you need. I trust that system more than a bunch of 15 year olds typing on discussion pages for pricing. Everyone wants access to accurate pricing ASAP, but this isn't the method nor the medium to provide it. Ninjatek 14:44, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Wikia is financed via ads, they'd love more visitors. --◄mendel► 23:53, 18 October 2008 (UTC)