In this post I'm going to outline a proposed design for a trading mechanic that will allow people to sell items while not logged in, in a way that is both thematically appropriate, personal, and automated, and integrates well with design mechanics that are already in the game.



How?



Hideouts.



Honestly, I half believe that GGG are already working on this, because the hideout mechanic is perfect for this purpose.



Here's how it works.



You want to sell items. You go to a waypoint and select "Shop" next to "Hideout". The game then takes you to your Shop map. Shops are places that function like your hideout, with a shared pool of decorative items. The major new mechanic is that you can hire NPCs that act like vendors, selling items you select from your stash for prices that you set.



- The easy, "no-new-UI-required" way to do this is for NPCs to sell items from a stash tab titled "[NPC name] [10 chaos]" or "[NPC name] [1 exa]". This would also drive sale of stash tabs. [edit] I want to clarify that I am not in favor of this option; it is included purely as a "cheapskate proposal" that requires little new UI work.



- If you want to be fancy, let us mark items in the stash as "reserved for sale", with a new widget to set the price.



You want to buy an item you found on the forums. Simply join a shop map by finding the player in the social UI and select "Enter Shop" in their menu. Then browse their offerings at your leisure. There is no risk of fraud or swapping items at the last second - what you see is what you buy.



Why the stash? This way, tools that read your stash to create and update forum threads will continue to work, and selling items manually will continue to work. When an item is sold, it's removed from the stash, so shop tools can update the thread automatically.



This approach is both personalized, allowing people to customize their shop map in order to give trading a personal look, and automated, allowing sales when the player is offline.



Want to make it even better? Each shop has four portals at predetermined points of the map. When a new shop is created, some of its portals are connected at random to existing shops. Instead of going from a player directly to their shop, interested buyers can now wander through an endless expanse of unique shop maps, looking for an item that strikes their fancy - no centralized Auction House, but an Infinite Bazaar.



[edit] Note that this does not destroy bartering. You could still just wait for the person to be around and message them. Hell, a person could leave helpful messages in their trade map, indicating icq numbers and when they'll be online. Last edited by FeepingCreature on Sep 1, 2015, 11:52:08 AM