Guild Wars 2

As a usability engineer in the making, I’ve had a really bad run in with the BLTP.

Whether you’re trying to check prices on an item, see where your current offer stands in the line, know when you’re outbid in an offer and making a new one for 2 more copper than the last, browsing for full sets of light/medium/heavy armor etc, there’s a silly amout of steps/clicks you must make to acomplish either of these tasks. It would be less of a hassle if it wasnt for the slugish nature of each click and the fact you must wait for your Items I’m Selling screen to load each time you want to check one of the other 3 tabs.

This is becoming more of a problem since i’ve started trading items for profit. It takes a silly amout of time to check if the 5 buy offers i made are still the 1st in line and if not, make a second one (but i repeat myself). The same goes for the Items I’m Selling (though it’s not as bad, since you have the 5% post fee, people rarelly remove an item).

Meh, guess i’m frustrated!
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Hope my english is enough, non-native speaker and all that.

Well the TP UI is really just a browser displaying pages formatted on their end. Plus the TP is a separate server the game needs to connect to and it’s handling the entire TP for all the servers in that region. That’s a lot of transactions going on.

It’s functional but definitely needs a usability overhaul. I spend a fair bit of time messing with the TP and a good 10-15% of my time is spent clicking around in circles trying to get back to pages I was just looking at before I clicked through to another (not having back options on all pages mystifies me to no end). Some of that wasted time is couched in having to watch the Items Sold and Items Bought lists repeatedly show me “NO RESULTS”

I get the impression there aren’t many people working on this aspect. Too many basic, obvious points remain missing or poorly implemented to be receiving major focus.

You can write your own app to interface with the TP, so I don’t really care about the in-game interface.

I’ll tell you how it’d go down: if the UI was easier to check if you were undercut, it’d be easier for the person undercutting you as well. Then you’d have to spend the same amount of time in an undercut war with them until one is called down for dinner or you reach a point where it’s no longer profitable to buy it.
basically, ease of use just increases the turnover rate, not your profits.

DarkSpirit.7046:

You can write your own app to interface with the TP, so I don’t really care about the in-game interface.

As I understand it, this is against the ToS. I thought there needs to be an actual human entering the commands, otherwise it’s just a bot. Not likely to get caught, but still a bot and possible to get banned.

Mystic.5934:

DarkSpirit.7046:

You can write your own app to interface with the TP, so I don’t really care about the in-game interface.

As I understand it, this is against the ToS. I thought there needs to be an actual human entering the commands, otherwise it’s just a bot. Not likely to get caught, but still a bot and possible to get banned.

That is a common myth. ArenaNet has plans to release an API to their TP which is why their TP goes through a web interface by design. There are other non-web based encrypted channels from the GW2 client to their server, which they could have used if they wanted to.

Furthermore, many players have created and advertised their tools on this very forum without getting banned so obviously they allow it. For example:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Zicore-s-Trading-Post-Notifier-Open-Source/page/2#post1605970

So until ArenaNet has an official statement about such tools, we are free to use their web API which has not been officially released yet. In other words, everyone knows that they have an API and they can easily block us if they want to but obviously they choose not to at the moment. It is not like we are hiding our actions in the shadows or anything.

that tool and things like spidy, sure. those just tell you when something is a good buy, then you go buy it. it’s the automated buying and selling I thought was bannable.
like have it set to monitor the price of all items, and when the buy order price gets below 50% of the sell listing price, it places a buy order for the current buy order + 1. no human need play.
that’s what it sounded like to me he is suggesting
what Zicore takes advantage of is just the knowledge of the current market price and reports it to the player when certain criteria are met, then it’s up to the player to act on it.
with a bot, you could place 1000 buy orders per minute. a human can only do maybe 10.

Mystic.5934:

that tool and things like spidy, sure. those just tell you when something is a good buy, then you go buy it. it’s the automated buying and selling I thought was bannable.
like have it set to monitor the price of all items, and when the buy order price gets below 50% of the sell listing price, it places a buy order for the current buy order + 1. no human need play.
that’s what it sounded like to me he is suggesting
what Zicore takes advantage of is just the knowledge of the current market price and reports it to the player when certain criteria are met, then it’s up to the player to act on it.
with a bot, you could place 1000 buy orders per minute. a human can only do maybe 10.

Look at the title of this thread, are we talking about using a bot now or have we been talking about making a better user interface for the TP? I want to make sure that you are not suddenly changing the topic on me.

I guess we are in agreement then. Until we have an official statement from ArenaNet stating otherwise, it is not a bannable offense to use their web API to interface with their TP.

DarkSpirit.7046:

You can write your own app to interface with the TP, so I don’t really care about the in-game interface.

I suppose this doesn’t have to be a bot. But that’s not how I read it at first. It sounded like you were suggesting to the OP to use a bot to side-step the trading post’s UI. Sorry for the confusion
It’s possible to write your own interface to the TP that can place buy and sell orders???
I would trade my Asura’s left ear for the ability to modify that UI.

Mystic.5934:

DarkSpirit.7046:

You can write your own app to interface with the TP, so I don’t really care about the in-game interface.

I suppose this doesn’t have to be a bot. But that’s not how I read it at first. It sounded like you were suggesting to the OP to use a bot to side-step the trading post’s UI. Sorry for the confusion
It’s possible to write your own interface to the TP that can place buy and sell orders???
I would trade my Asura’s left ear for the ability to modify that UI.

Then your mind has totally gone out-of-topic. I have only been talking about how to create a better user interface for the TP all that time. It is you who suddenly brought up bots. I am not going to discuss bots on this thread because that is completely out of topic and I don’t wish to hijack a worthy thread on improving the TP user interface.

You can write an app to use ArenaNet’s TP web api and improve the user interface that way. I would welcome any feedback on how to improve the TP UI.

The current UI appears as if it’s tab based but in reality those tabs are just bookmarks. What we need are real tabs with their own states so if you check out the price at the gem store for something and then switch to the gold→gem tab to buy gems that when we return to the store we don’t have to look up that item again to buy it. Same is true with the search in the buy tab if we switched to the sell/history one or what’s pending for pickup tab.

Agree. Also it would be nice if we can search by back pieces, skins, armor weight or stats too as a search filter.

When I view the sell or buy listings and if I have a pending buy or sell request, then I would like the line with my buy/sell price to be highlighted so it would be clear to me how many orders have undercut mine and by how much.

I would also prefer 2 separate buttons per items to view the buy and sell listings of the item, so I don’t have to pretend to buy or sell just to view the listings.

Also having a column for minimum crafting cost or profit (like in gw2spidy), if it is a craftable item, would be nice. Adding mystic forge recipes into the mix too would be even better.