I was just wondering why there is no time limit for auctions? Other then server side optimizations.
There are few reasons to add such a limit with combination of listing price:
1. Removes trash from TP.
2. Informs people when they have overpriced something.
3. Removes your own pocket trash merchant.
Why should there be a time limit? To address your 3 points:
1. Why is this an issue? Technically every item on the TP has a use. Assuming the game will experience some sort of inflation, eventually every item on the TP will have a use whose value is greater than that of the vendor price because of how the mystic forge works. “Trash” on the TP doesn’t have a legitimate downside, so removing it from the TP does not add value.
2. People are already informed when they overprice something because it doesn’t sell. Forcibly removing the listing doesn’t add any value. If a person believes an item that doesn’t sell in 48 hours is “overpriced” they just have to go to their “Items I’m Selling” page and see which things have been up for that long.
3. I assume you’re referencing this as a method of “storing” vendor trash items until you can get to a merchant? I’ve never heard of anyone actually doing that (though it’s certainly possible). That’s just one of a few ways (and certainly not the most convenient) to circumvent storage limitations. If this were extremely widespread, I might agree that it’s something worth addressing, but it would take a lot of convincing to get me to believe there’s more than maybe a few hundred or few thousand players who have ever deliberately done that.
I don’t believe you’ve established a case for a change, even if there were no downsides to adding such limits. However, there are reasons not to forcibly remove auctions as well.
1. The posting fee for auctions. Since simply posting an item for sale costs money, market fluctuations would cost sellers very large amounts of currency if their items are forcibly removed. Prices fluctuate, and sometimes they fall dramatically for a few days, then rebound back. Sometimes it’ll take a week or more for an item I posted to sell just because of timing and market pressures, why should that item be forcibly removed if it eventually sells?
2. Persistent supply. Adding on to the previous point, if items are forcibly removed after a period of time, the available supply on the trading post will fall. For items like lodestones, supply could easily fall to the point where one or two people deciding to make the same legendary might buy out all of the existing supply on the market. Since there’s no time limit to sales, players are encouraged to keep supply levels high, which is a very good thing for the economic health of the game.
3. Manipulation protection. Still continuing with that thread, by encouraging persistent supply, it becomes far more difficult for genuine market manipulation to occur. The backlog of supply “just in case” of a price spike makes it far more costly to corner a market. That backlog forces any potential manipulator to make a much higher margin just to break even, which reduces the incentive to manipulate.
4. Volatility. Tying in again to #2, the TP right now is fairly stable, but still cyclical and subject to spikes. Look at the chart for Charged Cores or Lodestones for an example. Without time limits, sellers will post goods for the value they’re willing to sell for, so the items are always available. With forced removal, this behavior would likely stop, as players would hold their items in storage until they were certain their items would sell for the values they want within the time limit. This leads to much more volatile markets as prices are likely to move in much larger increments.
5. Low volume – high value items. Items like precursors, destroyer weapons, and the like are extremely high value, but also extremely low volume. They could easily take significant periods of time to sell, and their posting fees are extremely high. Forced removal of these items would greatly encourage gray market trading. On top of that, even amongst those who would continue to use the TP, there would be incentive to line up a buyer (via extremely annoying WTS type spam) prior to posting these items on the TP.
) i suppose that it would be the cause of some serious outrages of the community