Guild Wars 2

When selling items in the trading post, I often run into " error attempting to sell " Am I doing something wrong when selling items on the trading post to cause this ? Is there a way around this error ?

Thanks.

you are doing nothing wrong.
I consider GW2 in fault here.
in a failed attempt to fight botting, they implemented a ~10 items/minute limit on TP sales, and if you go over that, it says “error” instead of “you reached your selling limit”.
So many things about this I would change… I posted suggestions that have gone ignored.
As it currently is, the only thing you can do about it is sit there staring at the screen for 10-20 seconds then try again. oh, and after you try again, you’ll likely have to sit there staring at the screen for another 10 seconds.
please +1 my suggestion to have this changed to 500 items/day: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Do-away-with-Error-attempting-to-sell/first#post2049248

It’s not to fight botting, it’s to keep database ops/s under control.

When you but something up for sale they have to remove it from your character’s inventory, but it in the market inventory under your market’s player inventory. That is a costly operation. Since the TP is being accessed by every world they simply put a speed limit on everyone so the database is unduly strained when lots of players are selling at the same time. Stopping automated systems is just a happy benefit.

Buy orders are different since it’s only gold and a request of an item, not the actual item itself. Having the buy order fulfilled doesn’t have to happen in front of prying eyes immediately, the TP code can take it’s time based on load to transfer the item from the selling player’s market inventory to your market inventory. No need to access the character’s inventory database either.

It’s a matter of cost. I’m sure you could build a DB server cluster than could handle everyone selling as fast as they can click but it’s much cheaper to simply but at speed limit on it than have an Amazon like server cluster.

do you realize how much cross-server data transferring is happening during a wvw zerg battle? every character sending every other character status updates on their actions several times per second. then there’s updates on everyone’s conditions, plus persistent ground-targeted skills, then other stuff I’m sure I don’t know about.
2 database queries is nothing to them. sure, 1 less than selling to a vendor, but still next to nothing. If it had anything to do with server load, selling stuff would take longer (meaning you would be forced to wait for the queries to go through when you do successfully sell).
let’s assume next-to-nothing adds up: if someone wants to sell 50 things, they are going to sell 50 things. difference is that it currently takes >5 minutes to do it. If it didn’t take so long, the server wouldn’t be used for as long, and could be available for someone else to be selling stuff. basically, everyone is not going to be selling at the same time, so stretching out how long it takes doesn’t reduce how much it is used in total.

It’s not queries, it’s a removal from an inventory database from a character (character DB) and an insertion into a player’s market inventory database (market DB) when posting an item for sale. Now multiply that by thousands or tens of thousands per second during peak playing hours. Now imagine the cumulative database fragmentation in the market database caused by all of the sell orders and pick ups throughout the day across all worlds.

So instead of getting a DB timeout when trying to sell or pick up a single item due to peak DB manipulation, they decided to put a speed limit on every player so only those who are selling a ton of different items at once are affected.

It’s timeouts due to insertion performance and DB fragmentation reducing overall performance that they are trying to mask with the delay.

Also the limit isn’t as low as 10/min, it’s closer to 15-20/min or one every 3-4 seconds. Sure that’s a lot slower than the 2 per second you can get once you get the rhythm down but it’s not as slow as 10 per minute. I routinely sell a dozen or more runes I’ve salvaged only using a 3 beat between sells.

It doesn’t really matter what it is, this is a problem for many users that have complained about it ever since implementation. It needs to be fixed. Which means they need to find a way to handle that much transaction. Speaking as a dev myself, it is entirely possible, if a bit more costly. The question is, how much are they willing to spend on keeping their players happy, and more importantly, in the game?

constantLogic.3486:

It doesn’t really matter what it is, this is a problem for many users that have complained about it ever since implementation. It needs to be fixed. Which means they need to find a way to handle that much transaction. Speaking as a dev myself, it is entirely possible, if a bit more costly. The question is, how much are they willing to spend on keeping their players happy, and more importantly, in the game?

Actually the bigger question is how many people would benefit from such a ‘fix’ if we are willing to spend the time and money to investigate it?

And no, this is not a problem. It’s a limitation. Not only are you going to hammer the outpost with many requests but you are going to lag the TP for everyone.

Unless you’re a power trader and all you do is sit there 24/7 conducting transactions, the majority of the playerbase doesn’t care about this error.

Not only that, but this error goes away after 20-30 seconds.

This isn’t a gamebreaking inconvenience we’re talking about here.

tldr:
It’s simply not worth the devs time to handle this issue since
a.) Not many people care about it
b.) It’s a very minor inconvenience
c.) It’s in there for a good reason

i think there is also another situation when this error message occurs:

IF you for example want sell a stack of items, lets say 250, to the highest buy order of 10 silver.
If there are 260 buy orders for that item for 10 silver but before you click the sell button, someone else already fills 20 of those buy orders for 10s. When your sale is being proccessed, the system realizes that there are only 240 buy orders left for 10 silver, so a message comes up that there was an error. In that case, ou will still sell 240 items for 10s but have to confirm again that you want to sell the remaining 10 items to the next highest buy order.

Vol.5241:

tldr:
It’s simply not worth the devs time to handle this issue since
a.) Not many people care about it
b.) It’s a very minor inconvenience
c.) It’s in there for a good reason

a) Wrong, a simple Google will tell you that.

b) A matter of opinion, a simple Google will tell you that but while I’m here I’ll tell you I’ve run into many threads where it is more than a “minor inconvenience” and feel the same. Oh, and yes, I do consider it a problem when something prohibits me from wanting to buy or craft larger bags which is something I consider part of the game.

Why have them if you can’t actually use them?

c) A matter of opinion. There are many more worthwhile things to pursue if it’s a matter of functionality and design but this “functionality” causes many people problems so much that some consider it a bug worth coming to post in bug reports, which I also found by a simple search on the issue.

with this Problem a play 30min/day on TP. Without this Problem I would play 15min TP/day (for the same By/Sells) and will more enjoy the open world.