Introducing the Trade-House Idea (Offline Trading)

- Major benefits of a trade-house –

-Players don’t have to wade through a large player base to find the right trade.

-Reduces trade-spam in general.

-Makes it easier for newer players to gauge the economy.

-Players can trade even while being offline, so they can spend more time playing the game.

-Since players have an in-game localized trading spot, players don’t need to go to other websites for items.

-Traditional trading can still take place.

This game mechanic would also require an in-game mailing system.

Here’s the idea.

- Create a trade-house where NPC’s take player’s items and put them up for trade for specified currency-items.

- The player gets to decide what currency items they want to trade their item for.

- Items can have either a buy-out currency-item price and or a bid currency-item price.

- The player chooses which currency-items they want to trade the gem or gear-item for, and the number of currency-items they want to trade the item for.

- Items get set up for 12, 24, and 48 hours.

- Sold items get sent to the player who bought it in the mail.

Essentially, currency-items are required to buy items off of the trade house, mainly because they are a base-medium to work with.

Consider limiting the # of currency-items a player is allowed to choose to trade with. However, any currency-item could be used to set up a buy-out or bid price.

Actually i would like to have an auction house in the game, however i think that it won't work with the currency system. I think that a lot of trades will involve many different currency items because they are really rare.

So you have to give the player not only the possibility to choose between the currency items and set a number... You have to give him the possiblity to say i give you one of this, two of these, and so on... Thats really hard to implement ingame i think.

And then there is the problem of judging the value of the bid... That can not be done by just picking a favorite currency item... What will happen if no one bids one of the chosen currency item but a lot of others? Will there be a trade or no trade? What happens if someone bids one of the desired currency item but nothing else and other persons are bidding lots and lots of other even rarer currency items?

So, on the one hand i think it would be nice but there are a lot of problems...
On the other hand i think that an auction house won't be needed because of the awesome "verified item system" of the forum... So you can do everything which you would do in the auction house in the forum... The only problem i see with that is that you have to meet the other guy online to execute the trade

For the forum trading, the person in question would also have to frequent the forum.

I agree that an auction house would be nice, but I don't really see how it would work with currency items.

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Rhesos wrote:

And then there is the problem of judging the value of the bid... That can not be done by just picking a favorite currency item... What will happen if no one bids one of the chosen currency item but a lot of others? Will there be a trade or no trade? What happens if someone bids one of the desired currency item but nothing else and other persons are bidding lots and lots of other even rarer currency items?

This won’t be a problem. It doesn’t matter how rare or easily obtainable a currency-item is. All bids have to be matched by the player.

Also, the player will be able to set a base bid number for each currency-item.

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resira wrote:

For the forum trading, the person in question would also have to frequent the forum.

You can have auctions at the forum as well => The best offer after "random deadline" will win. => So, ok even with that method you have to look twice with the forum and only once with the auction house method.

Of course there is the meeting problem too...

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Silver wrote:

This won’t be a problem. It doesn’t matter how rare or easily obtainable a currency-item is. All bids have to be matched by the player.

Also, the player will be able to set a base bid number for each currency-item.

If you do it that way the player has to look frequently in the auction house too, if i understand it right.

If you mean that a player can set that he wants to have at least x of that type and y of that type of currency item and everybody is only able to bid the ones that were chose by the player then there are two more problems:
1) What happens if a player wants to have the item really badly and would offer you a even rarer currency item => You want that currency item as well but never thought that someone really consider giving it to you => You haven't chosen it in the first place
2) What happens if two players bid the same amount of currency items but with different distribution? Which one would win?

=> You have to choose which currency item is more important as well... Maybe you should have the possibility to set the other currency items to 0 for the beginning, but that wouldn't solve the first problem...


Maybe it is easier to find a way to trade items over the forum... For example a button "except trade" and the items will be traded automatically ingame... Don't know if that is possible though :)

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Rhesos wrote:

If you do it that way the player has to look frequently in the auction house too, if i understand it right.

The player can visit the AH as often as they like, there's no restrictions on that. They are not required to stay there. Once an item is put up for bid, or an item is bid on they can leave.

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Rhesos wrote:

If you mean that a player can set that he wants to have at least x of that type and y of that type of currency item and everybody is only able to bid the ones that were chose by the player then there are two more problems:
1) What happens if a player wants to have the item really badly and would offer you a even rarer currency item => You want that currency item as well but never thought that someone really consider giving it to you => You haven't chosen it in the first place

This is why people can cancel Auctions if they want to. If someone whispers you and says "Hey I'll give you Y currency for your X item" then you can cancel the auction and trade the item like normal. It's up to the player. Though, I presume the main reason to use the trade house is to get the currency items one wants to get.

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Rhesos wrote:

2) What happens if two players bid the same amount of currency items but with different distribution? Which one would win?

This wouldn't happen. Period. All bids must be matched. Therefore there will never be different distributions of currency-item bids. If you bid 5 whetstones and 4 scrolls of wisdom, I must bid at least 6 whetstones and 4 scrolls of wisdom. Or, I must bid at least 5 whetstones and 5 scrolls of wisdom.

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Rhesos wrote:

=> You have to choose which currency item is more important as well... Maybe you should have the possibility to set the other currency items to 0 for the beginning, but that wouldn't solve the first problem...

I imagine a player being able to pick something like 5 different currency-items and setting their base value.

So, you could choose a really rare item and set its value to 0, thus a player could bid using that item, but other players would have to match that bid in order to win the item.

There's still a problem with this, and it's that bids would only be taken in the currency. It's not really a trade-house then (in the sense of trading non-currency items), it's an auction house.

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GGG wrote:

Some players immediately use all their currency items on the spot to improve their character. These players generally have quite powerful characters and items, but are always low on actual currency items to trade. They’re often seen trading powerful upgraded items for currency, in an attempt to reroll/upgrade other items and fuel their addiction.

Other players prefer to save up all their currency items and rely on trading them for specific desired items. These risk-averse players often have several weak items on their character, but a powerful amount of disposable currency for purchasing great items when they crop up in trade. They can also perform substantial spot-rerolling if they really need something in a hurry.

GGG talks about this issue more here.

Essentially, this is the problem with that: If someone has wealth (plenty of currency items) on hand, trading in terms of these is no problem. However, if someone doesn't (and I see this being a good chunk if not the majority of players), then you're stuck. You might have great items (so power) to trade that you've found or even used currency items to help build up, but without these currency items, you can't trade (in the current proposed auction-styled trade-house).

However, what about if there was an in game trading house, but rather than just listing items and the currency items for it only, why not also have listings of items you would be willing to look at to consider trading for, like trading forums, in game as well? So you could have some items listed for auctioning off, while others you want to trade items for items. So if person A is interested in your item, they can post what they're willing to trade (this post would only be visible to the person who started the thread). GGG has shown that you can link items to the post and show that they're verified, so you don't have to type out all of the stats or anything. This allows you to orchestrate mass tradings of items as well as dealing with the buying/selling of items in the currency? You will still need the in game mailing system (NPC holds one envelope of items till it has both parties envelopes of items, and then trades them) to actually swap the items though.

The only alternative I see otherwise is having some NPC who will turn items into currency (and I think you'd be hard pressed to try and figure out how many scroll of wisdom and armor shards awesome sword of radness is worth......)

Thoughts?

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kungfooe wrote:

There's still a problem with this, and it's that bids would only be taken in the currency.

That quote doesn't explain any particular issue. They are just trading habits.

The reason the trade-house would use currency-items as bids are because... they are currency.

It's as simple as that. People will still be able to trade normally (item-for-item). The trade-house is to allow people to spend less time trading and more time doing anything else they could want to do.

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Silver wrote:

It's as simple as that. People will still be able to trade normally (item-for-item). The trade-house is to allow people to spend less time trading and more time doing anything else they could want to do.

And that works out well if someone has a lot of currency items. What do you do if you don't? You can have great items, but aside from looking at a trade-channel in game (and really, who wants to sit in a trade channel for 30 min trying to trade item X?) Since there are no announced NPC's who turn items to currency, just a traditional auction doesn't seem to fit the bill here (in my opinion). That's really the issue I see with the proposed "trade-house."

However, the idea of in-game trade forums is that you can post an item you have and items you're looking to trade for, and then go about your business from there. Within these in-game trade forums, there could be search features in these listings or you could just browse by item type (swords, maces, gloves, gauntlets, etc.) I'm not saying auctions shouldn't be used, I think they still could be. I think that there could also be an alternative, the trade forums. They would be like the For Sale/Wanted part of the paper.

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kungfooe wrote:

And that works out well if someone has a lot of currency items. What do you do if you don't?

Players will be able to set up any item for bid without any costs. So I really don't see the issue. If someone doesn't have enough currency-items to buy a particular piece of gear then they just don't have what they need to buy the gear. That's why it's a trade-house; you're trading for specified currency.