Global Trade HQ [2022]

The current Global Trade HQ is far from useful as of this writing, so the proposal is to make it an actual market. It currently works as an auction house, which tied to the lack of filtering, is basically what infuriates most of the players. So, here are a couple of "simple" tweaks that could potentially make our lives easier.

Sorting

which is a must, and the "unfairness" claims are just empty (https://answers.ea.com/t5/SimCity-BuildIt-General/FAQ-about-the-Global-Trade-HQ/m-p/4379437#M1599); it doesn't matter that you show me ALL those burgers or pizza slices, I won't buy them, I'm looking for chemicals, that I MIGHT find after 3 refreshes and ~15 depot visits (just visiting, buying nothing). The solution could be as simple as having a slot in the Global Trade HQ UI for each type of item. You would have queues in the back for each item type instead of a "global pool of items", and you'd feed an item from the queue on every refresh (you would make a circular queue, so when you hit the last item you'd feed the first one again). So, you would open your GTHQ and you'll see an offer for every item; maybe it's not the price point that you'll like, maybe the stack is too large (or too small), and maybe the queue is too small, someone got the same offer and now that's gone. Either way you're just 30 seconds away of getting a new offer (the current GTHQ refresh time). You could group all "loot" items together, items that can't be "produced", into a single "lost&found" category to make their queues larger: inventory expansion, area/beach/mountain expansion, and Vu; you could even throw in the "overseas" stuff (Paris, London, and Tokyo items).

Market driven price

Once the queue system is implemented, you could use their numbers to establish a pricing system. Based on the average queue length for a time period (offer), the amount of items sold in that period (demand), and a base price (the current "default" item price) you could drive the pricing of each item. You would basically have the current system automated, since you already set a price range for every item in the game. You could also add a "crisis range": when a queue size drops below certain number (nobody is selling nails) you increase the max price to 2x or 5x or 10x, giving a very good incentive for players to produce such item. You would make these price adjustments every X period of time (to be determined empirically) to avoid issues:
- too short the time and the pricing would become too volatile since a single transaction could potentially alter the price
- too long would incentivize tweaking. Someone with enough resources (money and storage space) could hoard a lot of X item, driving its price up, then dump all that product at the higher price. From the buyer's perspective it would take too much time for that price to come down, forcing you to buy at high prices.
This way we could have a "real" market in the game, driven by offer and demand.

Auctions

Then you could introduce a REAL auction house, for "things" that can't be produced. You could move the "lost&found" stuff here (inventory expansion, area/beach/mountain expansion, and Vu) but you could also add buildings. I might want to trade a special building, which was an event prize, that only people that won the event were able to get. You would have to allow any kind of payment, which would make it more complex (simoleons, simcash, neo simoleons, golden keys, platinum keys, regional simoleons). You could allow the sell of "any" building, I could sell a couple epic buildings for some platinum keys and buy that expensive park or casino...

Hopefully this makes sense and we're able to see it in 2022