Guild Wars 2

This has been bothering me for a while now, but is it possible to do conditional searches on the TP? By that I mean searches in which you get ONLY the things you ask for? Like right now, if you type in “mithril plate leggings” (which I’m not positive is an actual thing, but roll with me on this), then you’ll get every item with “mithril” in it, every item with “plate” in it, AND every item with “leggings” in it, giving you probably a thousand or more entries, when there are only maybe a couple dozen with all three words. “Mithril plate leggings” of some sort are likely to top that list as originally sorted, but if you then sort by price or whatever then all varieties of mithril plate leggings will likely end up inside the middle somewhere, and if you’re just looking for the cheapest or most expensive “mithril plate leggings” then the result is likely useless.

I get that there are some methods of refining your searches, like limiting to specific rarities, categories, and level ranges, but ideally you should be able to do this through the type field alone. In Google, you can search using quotes around a phrase to ensure that only results featuring the entire phrase as written show up, or using [+word] to ensure that you definitely get that word, or [-word] to exclude all items with that word, but as near as I can tell, none of this works in the TP search. Is there some way to do this that I’m not finding, and if not, why not?

It would be extra ideal if you could add search criteria through the chat field, like maybe you could type something like “+berserker *heavy *79-80 *exotic” into the search field, and it would only turn up heavy, exotic, level 79-80 armor with “berserker” in the name, without having to click through all the options to activate each criteria.

Unfortunately, conditional expressions (+ * -, etc.) may be considered to be too much overhead, if not too difficult for average users to understand.

Perhaps less of a problem would be to add a tickbox to the right of or below the input field to select “exact matches only”, “all words must match”, “any word must match” and have it set so those choices STICK until changed by the user. At least this method would be easier/more obvious for users not familiar with conditional symbols and regexp style expressions.