It would be great if there were a way to conduct trades in a more asynchronous way than trade chat. Trade chat is intimidating for new players, it's tough to get your message seen when you can only post once every five minutes, and on mobile you basically have to sit and camp chat to make trades and can't play the rest of the game. This leads to a frustrating experience where smaller traders can feel drowned out by messages full of icons and trade jargon when they really just want to buy something quickly and go play the game more.
An auction house would let people post and buy items for gold (which could be converted back into OJ/LN/etc by spending that gold on other auctions) on their own time without requiring them to sit in chat and try to shout over the noise. This would free up trade chat for more complex transactions, bargaining, and other exchanges.
There are obvious concerns with e.g. the value of mailbox size, but trade chat will only continue to become a less fun experience as the player base grows and the signal to noise ratio for each individual player drops. Asynchronous trades scale better and give players more freedom in how they spend their time in the game, and players who enjoy the bargaining aspect of trading will still get use out of trade chat.
Comments
I can tell you we would like to add something like this down the road. There's no ETA on when this will become a priority though.
Submitted on Mar 24th 2024 by firestream