Currently the interface is both cumbersome and ultimately unhelpful, this is due to a variety of poor design decisions that (while understandable for a rushed release) should have been fixed long before now.
Items I’ve Bought and Items I’ve Sold both display single unit transactions out of a stack transaction
This results in a stack taking up to 25 pages of results (often 10-15 for commodities in practice). All of this will be the same information repeated over and over again. This will happen even if you’re not buying two different stacks of items at the same time and the 25 pages are just the same item, at the same price, repeated again and again.
This morning I had to go through 75 pages of the same item repeated just to find my purchase price of an item I bought 6 hours ago.
Solution: Group items in the Items I’m Buying and Items I’m Selling that are the same item and the same price.
Even with the above change, finding a specific item in any of the transactions menus is a nightmare
I’m buying a Mini Snow Leopard at the moment. Trying to find it within my 120 pages of buy orders, and eventually trying to find it within my 34780 pages of buying history is not worth it.
I’m far more likely (as with the majority of items) just to place a new buy order at the market price and then resell the duplicate once the transaction goes through.
This is not the type of behavior players should be pushed in to.
Solution: Add a search feature, just like the inventory search feature, so item history of a particular item can be found immediately, and orders for a particular item can be located immediately.
Even with the above changes, knowing whether your orders are still relevant is a nightmare
So- I have an order for a Mini Snow Leopard since yesterday. It isn’t in my Receive Items tab, so it must be still up there. I open my Items I’m Buying tab and luckily it’s up the top and not 500 pages back. I see the price I listed it at. I click the item, see that someone has 1c overcut me, I go back to the transactions tab, change to Item’s I’m Buying, click cancel order. Go to the item pickup tab, click receive. Go to the Buy Items tab, type in Mini Snow Leopard, click the only result, click Place a Buy Order, type in the amount, click place order.
Solution: Multiple redundancies in this process, but the most obvious one is the fact that current highest listing price is not an available column in the Item’s I’m Buying tab. This information would remove the necessity for jumping between tabs and I’m always amazed it isn’t there. The decision to cancel an order shouldn’t require jumping away from the tab where the action to cancel is made, that’s just poor design.
My Transactions is a single button
This is a big one, but such a minor fix.
Currently there is tons of empty space on the TP sidebar, yet people are forced to go directly to Items I’m Selling when this option is unlikely to always be what people are after. Instead of wasting time the My Transaction should be 4 separate buttons on the TP sidebar, taking the user directly to whichever view they are after.
Moving 10 transactions at a time (as suggested by AirlineDlx.5203)
Allow people to type in the page number they wish to go to, if nothing else in this thread is done. That would at least allow people to guesstimate where in the thousands of transaction pages the relevant information is and jump right to it.
(edited by Risingashes.8694)