I have been playing the game for three months now and I love it. I have gone through all the changes of the Global Trade HQ, and while some of them were hard to work with, I have always found ways to deal with it and find the products I was looking for eventually.
The new version makes that an almost impossible task. I understand there is a natural imbalance of products offered vs. those being looked for. However, with some extra effort, you could try again and again until you found someone offering the product you wanted to buy. Now it takes me five minutes to refresh the screen 10 times. And there is a good chance that on 10 refreshes I don't get to see any relevant items at all.
Even worse: When I finally find something of interest, travel to someone's city and the product is gone already. Then I'm stuck at someone else's place, have to wait for the countdown to run out or travel back home (with no advantage of doing so). It just makes a frustrating experience even more frustrating. To me, the current implementation is no longer a market, it is far more a lottery.
What I have not seen in all the changes so far is a try to change the fundamental imbalance of the products offered in the market: All changes have been made on the buyer side but those won't change the fact that it is easy to offer any kind of product, no matter if it is in demand or not. I would ask the development team to consider changes to the selling side of the market to address this imbalance.
My proposal is to introduce some kind of cost/effort connected to making an offer in the Global Market. This would make any seller consider if an offer addresses the market's need or if it isn't worth it to make that offer in the first place. One of the ideas I had was to make offers automatically run out and disappear from the market within a certain time frame - if the product wasn't sold within five minutes, it gets removed from advertising and the seller can decide to advertise again or not. This would make selling a popular product not more difficult than it is now but would require the seller to put it some extra effort for products that are in low demand.
A different idea would be to address the imbalance with automatic price reductions after a certain period of time (or when it is being re-advertised after the first advertising runs out). At the current market, there is no price adjustment possible, so even low-demand products stay in the market indefinitely until they are being bought by someone. A price reduction mechanism would make it less attractive to offer products that are not being sold quickly.
I hope there is something in these suggestions that developers find useful or they come up with a different idea. As long as the imbalance between supply and demand stays the way it is, no other implementation of the Global Trade HQ will make a major difference to the game, they will just change who gets lucky or not.
