Guild Wars 2

Alongside BLTC, there’s another company that does auctions strictly (White Moa Auction House?). No buyouts or anything, just pure bids on items and bulk items. I think with an auction house, you can try to get items for cheap, depending on how the bids go out. And if you get it for cheap, you can either sell it back through BLTC. Also, this would help out special items like exotics, rares and legendaries that don’t have a lot of volume on them.

Thoughts? Or would this new auction house destroy Tyria’s economy?

PS: What they can do is not charge a listing fee upfront so it encourages people to post rares, exotics, etc. They do get charged for the tax and fees on the back-end once it sells.

I think an auction house would achieve very little. Prices would be driven up to the level of the lowest buy orders in short order, and past that point it would be the same old 1 copper bidding wars that you get on buy orders.

Basically, it would provide very little functionality compared to the TP, but ArenaNet would have to spend a lot of extra effort implementing a second trade system.

Placing buy orders is not much different from bidding on something, at least in a MMO where most of those somethings are always being introduced into the game.

So basically it would just create a mostly redundant (and mostly worse, for the purposes of this game) system. The cases where it would be more useful are few and far between. I think the negatives of splitting things into two different markets would outweigh the slight benefits.

Thinking about the handful of other MMOs I know of that have buy orders, they don’t have auctions, either. The most notable is Eve Online. There is really little need for both, and I think the buy order system is far superior, personally. I realize that sort of contradicts me saying that there isn’t much difference, but one difference is that sellers can easily see what people who aren’t paying the current sell prices are willing to pay up front, instead of just having to guess.