Wanted Auction

[jurzey]

We have a standard auction house right now where you can list items and people bid on them. Generally people complain all the time about how the prices are crazy and do not reflect the actual going rate.

We also have a lot of people looking to remove the recent plat influx from the economy.

Well i am into added functionality so i have a suggestion that may fix all three problems. A "Wanted" Auction.

Here is how it works.

Example. I want 4 LDS. I am willing to pay 400k plat each.

I post up the item i am looking for and deposit the amount i am willing to pay and the number i am looking to buy.

This ad will stay up for a week or so where anyone can browse the directory of what people are looking for. If someone has what i want and they like the price i am offering they deposit the item and collect the money minus the auction fee.

Finding buyers and sellers would be easier than ever and the seller would get instant gratification.

Short on cash? Find someone looking for something you have and sell it to them. No need to spam the trade channel or try to find each other in stormreach. No cheating or swindling people.

Everyone is happy.

[jurzey]

No love for my idea? Well fine...

/ragequitthread.

=)

[Wrendd]

I think it would be a nice feature. City of Heroes had a similar feature and it worked very well. I would love to be able to place my offer for LDS and wait for someone to fill it.

Unfortunately I do not think this is something that will come to DDO in the near future. I would expect that it would require a MAJOR re-write of the AH code, and that it would be very prone to serious bugs immediately after activation. If this is something that the Devs would like to add (and I hope it is) I would bet that we would not see it untill late next year.

But if they said it was something that they were working on I would be happy to wait.

[donfilibuster]

It shouldn't require as much as a total rewrite, altough the ah code don't seem particularily modular.
I can recall at least one other game having this. What it needs maybe is a clean idea.

The problem with a wanted list is that it will keep records of potentialy millions of players that want the item, as opposed to a few entries of available items.
And if you make it a plat sink then you defeat its original purpose of getting the item for cheaper.

What can work is having a button to show the 'best offer' bid show on every item.
That way the game only stores one amount per item and only loads it upon request.
The sellers will look up the item to find the suggested price and raise or lower accordingly.

[Brennie]

Eve Online did this, and it seemed to work well there. However, EVE online was a much more economy-based game, and also didn't have randomrolled items.

Would this be an automatic system, like the AH? If so, how would input a desire for items that you didn't already have? The only way i see this being possible is having a dropdown list, or multiple subsectioend dropdown lists, with every static item in the game (Dragon scales, shroud ingredients, collectables, potions, etc) to select from, as well as a multi-dropdown list section for randomrolled items (+/every possible prefix/every possible material/every possible weapon, armor, or accessory/every possible suffix). Frankly, this sounds like a nightmare to code, and seriously crazy to try to use.

The other options would be a non-automated system that works more or less like classified (Or the trade forums). You get a box similar to the "Compose Mail" box where you *type out* what you want, a small box for quantity, and another small box for price range. Sellers can then surf through the want-ads, search by keywords, and sort those keyword search by price/quantity/etc. Then they send an in-game mail or tell and manually transact the trade. OR the seller could attach an item to the want-ad, and when the buyer checks-in he can examine the item, determine whether any meets his standards, and if so he selects "Accept" to detach the item and the listed want-ad price is automatically deducted and sent to the seller via mail (minus transaction fee). If the buyer declines, the item is returned to the seller via mail.

There are a few obvious problems with the second system. The first is that items with charges, or items that stack do not properly display in mail or the AH (And this would need to be fixed to make sur ethe buyer is getting as many as he advertised for). Secondly, buyers could potentially be "griefed" by having innumerable unrelated items proposed in response to their want-ad. Unless some system coudl be put in place to check the item against the ad for "sameness" (So someone looking for a +5 Metalline of Pure Good rapier could get responses for a +4 metalline of PG rapier, or perhaps a +5 metalline of PG shortsword, but a +1 flametouched light mace would be rejected outright). I don't know how this would work, but given the multitude of items in DDO, and adding the randomrolled nature ontop of that, it seems like the best solution i can think of.

[Lord_kNiels]

The only issue id see here is the amount of requests for rare useful random generates. But i guess if the time you can be looking for a specific item is limited like the auctions and you only have a limit of requests for items it would turn out well and it should prevent too many requests for the same items.

The only downside would be the lack of thrill from browsing the far corners of the auction house