Quite frankly, global trade should be completely shut down and revamped from the ground up.
If it took a couple weeks or even a month, I would be fine with that. It simply needs too much work as it stands.
I've perused the forums and found these most common suggestions /complaints that would make it better:
1. Searchable (for the love of god please!)
2. Getting rid of the necessity of having to travel to the town you're trying to purchase from.
3. Orders. The ability to submit an order of goods you want for x amount of Simoleons. Someone could then fill your order.
4. Caps.....I'm on the fence about this one, but I can see how removing caps might help.
5. Centralized auction house. WOW got that right.
6. Removing the dollar required to cancel an auction or making the price/amount editing possible after posting.
I used to play a game called city of heroes/villains. Their auction house included the ability to place orders as well as bidding on items. It was super easy to use.
These are not in any particular order, however, a simple search feature would get the most bang for the buck. If they were to do anything at all, that one feature would make trade tons easier.
Let's remember 1st and foremost the game is free. But secondly, and far more to the point, there are players who thrive on ruining everyone else's gaming experience. I worked in a university environment for more than 9 years and I saw and heard countless M&C fringe groups as they terrorized various online game sites with their wide array of cheats and hacks, but mostly their strategies for disrupting gameplay. This is something that will never change as today's over-empowered youth ( thanks to mommy and daddy's handouts for tuition, cars and electronics) feel the need to dominate a game, not actually to play it. When you have groups with unlimited cash and T1 serviced routers, they can decimate the global trade HQ (smash and grab). The only effective way to deal with this is to cut down on entries per IP into the trade HQ. A realistic number might be once every 40 or 45 seconds. This would **bleep** the trolling groups off to the point they might even abandon the game. HURRAY ... the average Joe wins! EA ... you have some work to do and this might be an easy fix. Good luck
@Krusty_Angel wrote:The only effective way to deal with this is to cut down on entries per IP into the trade HQ. A realistic number might be once every 40 or 45 seconds.
Actually not a bad idea in general. I know other online games who have spam controls in place to prevent too many transations on the marketplace from taking place over X time. At least with this game that might help with overwhelming demand on the marketplace. Theretically this would mean same amount of transactions take place globally but spread out to more players. Which would mean more people actually getting the items they seek rather than coming up empty handed. But in the long run the whole system needs to be replaced with a more viable market such as the types found in guild wars 2 and EVE. A simple single entry for each thing such as metal and the current lowest price. And if the lowest price has sold the next lowest and so on becomes what is bought so there is no "the item wasn't there any more" unless indeed globally there is no more up for sale. This could very well be done behind the scene using the current UI if they wanted to with slight modification to the UI to have a box for each kind of item. Hopefully I am making sense.
