Guild Wars 2

The BLTC needs previews of items

Armor and Weapon previews please. If I can do it at a vendor, I should be able to do it at the TP. How can I tell what the item I’m dropping big gold on is the one with the skin I want? This is really the big road block for many people to buy something because they’re uncertain of what it looks like since a large portion of the icons are identical. Look at pistols, for example. Maybe 10-15 different icons and many more skins.

Weigh in

Yep.

Best idea to sell all your named armor before this goes live as i believe they said they will implement it some time soon.

Like, the armor selling for 15g which has exactly the same cosmetic look as a different piece worth 1g.

I hope this gets implemented soon as it is a source of annoyance that you can’t preview what you buy.

I think preview feature will shake up the TP a bit. Right now alot of people dont know whats out there so they don’t want to take the risk on it.

Ah beat me to it x]
I really hope we’ll be able to preview armour soon. Armour for stats/looks are two completely different things (in the way I play the game atleast). But then again, I’m so vain that I refuse to continue with my story (and have to see a close up of my ugly character) until the ‘appearance change items’ permanently get into the shop.

The current issue of not being able to preview items in the BLTP results from the use of the Awesomium browser/interface for the UI of the entire thing. It seems that when you authenticate your account, the game starts the Awesomium process in the background by accessing files temporarily downloaded onto your hard drive, and connects to https://tradingpost-live.ncplatform.net/.

You can actually view the trading post from any browser by visiting that URL to view basic price values, but you cannot view or place orders since your account information is absent since there’s no authentication involved.

Chances are that with this setup there would need to be a fair amount of programming involved to add previewing as neither of their APIs are exactly simple to code when it comes to integrating them to existing applications. Then the existing UI would need to be redesigned and coded to make the changes and additions intuitive. A great amount of debugging and testing would be needed before the change went live, as badly bugging the TP this far into live isn’t much of an option.

Not impossible by any means, but just overly time and resource consuming when the result is displaying skins models of items you can likely already view at places like GW2 Database.

There could be other issues as well. The version of Awesomium that is currently used was released when they began working with the API. It may be necessary for them to use the 1.7 final candidate instead to get certain functionality. The Mac support isn’t exactly wonderful either.

By the way, if you have trouble viewing the TP sometimes; check stuff like Windows Firewall and your antivirus and make sure they’re allowing awesomium_process.exe the access it needs. Norton doesn’t trust the process in the first place. really.

Another thing to think about it the increase in bandwidth created by calls and packets between client, web ui, and the servers. Perhaps it would make the TP unstable or too costly.