Infinite Bazaar: Immersive, Personal, Automated Trading

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.

I very much like the idea, but as I recall GGG staff have stated previously that one of the things they prefer (and want to preserve) about trading is the interaction between people. That's already undermined by the existence of buyout prices on poe.trade, and I think it's a little unrealistic at this point to expect much in the way of communicating/negotiating on low-value items from the PoE community, but I can't see them taking steps to ingrain that sort of no-contact (outside of hideout browsing, which is very neat, but not terribly communicative) in the game. And as much as I look forward to and enjoy the kind of quick, seamless "Can I buy this at your listed price? Great, thanks," process that's the ideal supported by poe.trade and buyouts and all that, I would agree that the times I've tried to honestly barter and it's gone well (a 5L Voll's for a Greed's Embrace, or what have you, where negotiating works instead of turning into a stream of "omfg u suck ignored") have felt pretty rewarding. I don't know. I'd love to see this sort of bazaar. But as long as it includes fixed prices without communication (even asynchronous), I don't think they'll do it.

"

FeepingCreature wrote:

- 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.

I like the idea, but the suggestion above would take stash-tabs from the (admittedly grey-area) convenience realm to straight pay2win, in my opinion. (you can't rename the default tabs, hence you can't run a shop without buying fancy tabs)

I agree that it would be kinda pay2win, but note that if you're interested in this, you're probably already paying for stash tabs anyways.

I think this would, in aggregate, add interaction to the game instead of removing it. The main mode of trading nowadays is via item search engines; trade chat is basically unusable for specific purchases. Then you have to hope the person is online - most trade searches don't end in interaction but in failure. At least this way, there's some interaction. Also, shop instances are just regular zones, which means people can meet in them. Hell, guilds could create combined shop instances which might be big enough to function like actual bazaars.

Furthermore, this does not destroy trade chat or forum trade. In fact, it integrates fluidly with forum trade as it is compatible with the tools used for that. The only parts of trade it replaces are those that are already the most impersonal - item searches and buyouts - and those it makes, if anything, more personal.

I really like the idea! Things like that deepen the immersion of the trade system, promote creativity in setting up your shop (pretty much like the hideouts do), and allow players to build their reputation following good trades, instead of them being just another name on poe.trade.

Only thing I would change is that you should have to talk to the seller in order to make the traditional trade instead of doing it automatically through npc vendors. You do have to put some effort into social skills when you want to be a successful trader after all, right? ;) (at least I wouldnt want to see wraeclast shops turn into supermarkets).

Amazing thing would be to be able to set up stands and cabinets showcasing gear for sale, with or without a price, at which any visiting player could see item for sale by scrolling over it with mouse cursor.

Overall, a very nice idea!

Very Interesting, I would be thrilled to get ANY in game system from GGG. I love the community tools... they work at the moment ... but a real solution as part of the game has been needed for three years.

Sounds f'n great to me! +2

The problem I see with this is that it will reduce the players concentration in towns rapidly.
Which means a random player passing by wont see my cool, shiny and fancy MTX which might lead him to buy them. Everything would become more private and players would be moving from hideouts to hideouts.

It's easy - if it is automated, then it is not personal. And that's something that GGG dislikes. Also having to buy enhanced stash tabs to set up a shop would be borderline p2w. (and there's really no reason to assume that everyone who would be interested in trading would also buy those tabs anyway)

"

Shaileen wrote:

It's easy - if it is automated, then it is not personal. And that's something that GGG dislikes. Also having to buy enhanced stash tabs to set up a shop would be borderline p2w. (and there's really no reason to assume that everyone who would be interested in trading would also buy those tabs anyway)

Umm.... stash tabs are considered p2w for a long time now by a loooot of players, me included. How can you list tons of items on poe.trade without having stash tabs ? Or even a better question, how do you store em ? Create new mule toons ? Well, there is a "buy new character slots" option for a reason and the inventory is very small. So whats the difference ?