Guild Wars 2

As everybody has surely noticed, if you try to sell too many items too quickly through the trading post you receive an error message. As far as it’s been explained to me, this is so that the servers aren’t taxed with too many transactions at once, causing a slow-down.

What I propose is that a column is added to the Sell tab of the trading post, which would allow the user to check a box, marking an item for sale, which places it in a global “sale queue”. At this point the server(s) will approve the sales in the order it receives them, at a set interval, thus eliminating slow down.

This would allow you to mark as many items in your inventory for sale as you’d like, without receiving an error message, and players would spend much less time trying to sell items on the trading post.

Now, obviously this would mean that you wouldn’t know the exact price your item sold for until it happened, and certain players definitely want the option to sell at a specific price. This should be easily solved with a Sell Now, Sell Later sort of option.

Any fundamental reason this wouldn’t work?
Anybody else find themselves wanting the same thing?

Too complicated & I don’t know if this would make any difference.

You’d have to design another TP interface that is both linked and separate to the current one (i.e. similar prices, but supply is separated from normal TP and sale queue). That’s tedious, and not worth the time/ $ invested.

The reason why we have that ‘error’ is to combat spam which would slow down the system.

And there is nothing stopping malicious players from spamming the new queue with constant entries.

i.e. if I were malicious and wanted to crash the TP, I would design a bot that would buy and relist thick leather at 9c at hundreds of transactions per minute.

The limitation has nothing to do with overloading servers but to attempt to thwart automated (bot) TP programs.

The interface itself already has delays that limits the server getting overloaded (thus the delay when you put in a sale order).

Except since it’s so easy to program bots to thwart that kind of limitation it must be tied to their TP server/DB infrastructure limitations so all have an equal chance posting items for sale even when the everyone is posting items for sale. Otherwise a large number of individuals clicking quickly would lock others out with constant timeouts. Force everyone to a “speed limit” that the “highway” can handle safely so everyone can use it equally.

I’m with you, OP. I’m completely in favor of making things difficult for bots, goldsellers, and Snidely Whiplash and yet avoiding creating a burden on the vast majority of the community that are honest. Unfortunately, there’s never going to be a good way to filter out the “cheaters.”