I've faced many global trade problems being reported here, and I'm also very tired of this. I promised myself to not spend a penny anymore with the game until the trade center starts to work in a acceptable way.
Here are the problems and how I think it could be resolved:
- Difficulty to find items: Let the people search for stuffs, rather than just displaying random useless things.
- Difficulty to buy items: this happens mainly when I'm using my mobile carrier connection. I get inside the user's storage, and get the message that the item have been already sold. Why the hell I have to enter into someone's city to buy their things? It would be a lot easier if I could just buy things by clicking them into the trade center. If miss-clicking would be a problem, just prompt an confirmation message and them is all good. Also... Why you guys don't use the full screen space for this? Nobody need to see its own city on the background while buying stuffs... We need a decent user interface for this, not a simple box filled with random things.
- Trading with friends: it would be very useful if friends had some easier way to trade stuffs. Something like, I could send items for a friend of mine for some price, and my friend would be prompted to accept the trade or reject. As simple as this.
- The option to buy (passive purchase) things, rather than only sell things: I mean, what if I could put into my storage that I'd like to buy something by some determined price (or range of prices), and people interested in selling things could also actively sell things than just passively sell things by putting them into the storage and praying for the right people to see it?
- Economy: why all things have prices fixed inside some range? Why to not let the economy be set free by the law of supply and demand? I've seen things becoming rare inside the game, and had their prices stuck into its upper limit. Why this? People are losing opportunities!
I feel like EA games had failed into turning Sim City a multiplayer game by not giving the proper attention to the most important connection point between players: the open market!
