MMO Actuon houses/Marketplaces

[Deleted]

Hi,

I recently started playing some Neverwinter, and quickly got very annoyed with the auction house. For those who haven't tried Neverwinter, the auctionhouse works pretty much the same as the WoW auction house, except no addons allowed to make it more usable.

The thing is, lately I have mainly been playing Eve Online and Guild Wars 2, which both use a system of buy and sell orders.
If you want to buy an item, instead of clicking the exact auction you want, and often having to buyout several different auctions to get what you want, you place a buy order, example:
"I want to buy 5 Small rocks and i'm willing to pay 3 copper per small rock"

If someone is selling any small rocks for 3 copper or less, you will buy it, if not, you will have an order that people can fill.
Same thing for selling.

This kind of system is just a million and one times easier then the system WoW and also Neverwinter uses. Today I needed to buy some stuff for a profession, rock salt to be exact, and I decided to buy 20 of them.
Now, as people tend to sell single items in this system (as you don't want to risk people passing over your auction if they only need one item) I had to buy 20 separate rock salts.

One might think that it's not a big deal, but it's just annoying. Even worse is if I want to buy something that currently doesn't exist on the auction house. If I want to buy say 50 of some rarer item, often there won't be any on the marketplace, as people are unwilling to sell slow moving items if they don't know for sure that they have a buyer. If I could then place a buy order instead, potential sellers could see it and fill it.


Basically, my question is this, the marketplace concept in Eve Online and Guild Wars 2 is so much superior to the traditional auction house in every sense, so why is it not implamented in all new MMO's?

[Dilbon]

Basically, my question is this, the marketplace concept in Eve Online and Guild Wars 2 is so much superior to the traditional auction house in every sense, so why is it not implamented in all new MMO's?

The same reason all other great features aren't: they don't exist in WoW.

[Stir]

Because it's an added amount of complexity a lot of game designers simply don't think is worth the hassle.

However, Neverwinter does have a similar system in place for Zen/Astral Diamonds trade, so I think it should be relatively easy to implement...

[Deleted]

Order system is really good mechanics, it would be nice to have that instead of classic AH system.

[Deleted]

Because it's an added amount of complexity a lot of game designers simply don't think is worth the hassle.

However, Neverwinter does have a similar system in place for Zen/Astral Diamonds trade, so I think it should be relatively easy to implement...

On the large scale, I can't see how it can really be that much more work.
While I'm a hobby coder and I assume that on a project this size, everything get more complicated, if I were to code just an auction house/marketplace simulator, making it the Eve/GW2 way wouldn't be much more work at all. Different, but not more difficult.

It just offer so many great advantages. Apart from what I mentioned before, I almost forgot the most important part, it helps stabilize the economy, because you are not forced to sell stuff quick (when was the last time you "Bid" on something in WoW AH?), so you get a much more stable market without the extreme fluctuations.