Guild Wars 2

It’s more then cosmetic when there are hundreds of some items for sale at less then the vendor trash price, since it prevents anyone from selling said items on the TP making the value of those items permanently tanked at vendor sale prices.

Rosella.9780:

It’s more then cosmetic when there are hundreds of some items for sale at less then the vendor trash price, since it prevents anyone from selling said items on the TP making the value of those items permanently tanked at vendor sale prices.

If they were worth more than 1c above vendor, there would be buy orders that could be filled. Unfillable buy orders is not what made those items worthless. They’re worthless because no-one wants to buy them.

Rosella.9780:

It’s more then cosmetic when there are hundreds of some items for sale at less then the vendor trash price, since it prevents anyone from selling said items on the TP making the value of those items permanently tanked at vendor sale prices.

Nothing prevents me from selling those items on the TP except, as noted above, people don’t want them. If I wanted to list those items, I could do so for vendor +1c.

There are 1,000s of other items that still have below-vendor offers, but are selling for 20% above vendor price or more. The issue isn’t the unfulfillable listings, it’s the lack of demand.

I currently use my 1c orders as a watchlist. I am kinda sad that I cannot make more 1c orders currently.

I would appreciate watchlists added to the BLTC before you guys remove all the 1c orders.
Also secondly you shouldnt increase the minimum to include the tax. I think it is valueable for players to be able to offload their items without visiting a merchant. Hiking the price of greens by 15% will make them harder to sell. Consider it a convinence fee.

John Smith.4610:

Prioritizing a bug fix that doesn’t actually affect the TP usage at all over any fix in the game that does affect players would be irresponsible.

I know it affects how I use the Trading Post.

Rajani Isa.6294:

John Smith.4610:

Prioritizing a bug fix that doesn’t actually affect the TP usage at all over any fix in the game that does affect players would be irresponsible.

I know it affects how I use the Trading Post.

I’m curious. Could you be more specific? The only thing I can think of is that you want to use the TP as a vendor, and that’s not really what it’s designed to be.

Draygo.9473:

I currently use my 1c orders as a watchlist.

Can you please be more specific on how 1c orders work as a “watch list?”

(I’m relatively new to the game so not familiar with this trick)

Rosella.9780:

Draygo.9473:

I currently use my 1c orders as a watchlist.

Can you please be more specific on how 1c orders work as a “watch list?”

(I’m relatively new to the game so not familiar with this trick)

If you put in a buy order that never gets filled, it’s very easy to go to specific items by looking at the list of items you’re buying. If you don’t do that, you have to search every time for the item. With the minimum buy order price, it can get expensive to keep up a large list of buy orders just so you can watch the price of something.

Some of the trader web sites allow you to favorite items so you can check the prices quickly, but it would really be more convenient to have it in game where you can act immediately on the information.

I guess he just places such an order and can then see the items in the transactions list without having to search for it first. It’s slightly annoying that the TP “forgets where you were” everytime you change tabs btw.

/e: what he said.

Iruwen.3164:

It’s slightly annoying that the TP “forgets where you were” everytime you change tabs btw.

More than slightly I know there’s a lot of higher priority work that needs to get done, but I struggle with the UI for the TP every day and I’m not a trader. Watch lists would be a nice upgrade. Being able to see more than the lowest sell order when I go to sell something would also be helpful to me.

Also the broken scaling was never fixed which makes everything ugly if you set the UI to anything else than normal size.

John Smith.4610:

Prioritizing a bug fix that doesn’t actually affect the TP usage at all over any fix in the game that does affect players would be irresponsible.

You’re correct that it doesn’t affect functionality and ‘omg-this-is-broken’ bugs should take precedence; however this issue does affect player usage/experience every time we open the TP. It contributes to general confusion for newer players and frustration/ misreading things for everyone.

I’m sure it also contributes to player perception that the game is ‘buggy’; after all, if you can’t open the TP without seeing tons of ‘bugs’ how much worse will the rest of the game be? That’s unfair of course, but in my experience customer perceptions are rarely fair.

John Smith.4610:

Prioritizing a bug fix that doesn’t actually affect the TP usage at all over any fix in the game that does affect players would be irresponsible.

Wha… you realize, that by that logic smaller bugs in the game will literally NEVER get fixed? There will ALWAYS be bigger problems, because even as you fix them you’ll just add new ones with updates.
Surely the difficulty in fixing a problem should be at least as important as the severity of the problem, and I can’t imagine this is a difficult fix.
And if you never fix smaller problems, they’ll keep piling up over time until you have a very, very big issue.

Grimwolf.7163:

Surely the difficulty in fixing a problem should be at least as important as the severity of the problem, and I can’t imagine this is a difficult fix.

I’d like to point out that you can’t imagine it because you don’t actually work for the company.

I’m pretty sure they take ease of fixes into account. Problem with judging that though is that we will never know what’s easy to fix and what’s hard to fix.

Lastly, putting less priority in fixing small bugs does not mean they are never fixing small bugs. That is a leap of logic that you’re making.

Ursan.7846:

Grimwolf.7163:

Surely the difficulty in fixing a problem should be at least as important as the severity of the problem, and I can’t imagine this is a difficult fix.

I’d like to point out that you can’t imagine it because you don’t actually work for the company.

I’m pretty sure they take ease of fixes into account. Problem with judging that though is that we will never know what’s easy to fix and what’s hard to fix.

Lastly, putting less priority in fixing small bugs does not mean they are never fixing small bugs. That is a leap of logic that you’re making.

Well and I’ll tell you as a developer, not only do you prioritize by big/small easy/hard you also take a look at risky/not-risky.

What if someone has a typo and clears out a bunch of valid buy orders along with the invalid ones? And don’t forget, you have to make sure everyone’s 1C gets refunded to them properly. What if you mess that up and accidentally dump thousands of gold into the economy? Try taking free money back from folks… it will get ugly.

When you’re touching sensitive systems, it makes sense to aggregate changes and test the crap out of them instead of doing a bunch of minor changes onesy twosy. You need to be as sure as you can be that you aren’t going to create a problem worse than the one you’re fixing.

Pandemoniac.4739:

Rajani Isa.6294:

John Smith.4610:

Prioritizing a bug fix that doesn’t actually affect the TP usage at all over any fix in the game that does affect players would be irresponsible.

I know it affects how I use the Trading Post.

I’m curious. Could you be more specific? The only thing I can think of is that you want to use the TP as a vendor, and that’s not really what it’s designed to be.

I know. Outside of Orr, vendors are everywhere. Once a Renown Heart is filled, it’s a vendor. I like trying to make some extra though, and it gets to be quite the hassle when you try to sell and everything lists as “1 copper” when you know the vendor price is higher. If its one or two I’ll usually mess with figuring out the real values but when you have a large amount, it’s not worth my time to deal with it.

John Smith.4610:

Prioritizing a bug fix that doesn’t actually affect the TP usage at all over any fix in the game that does affect players would be irresponsible.

At the beginning of the thread you stated that this wasn’t a bug so much as an issue of cleaning up.
I’m guessing that the trading post items are all in some sort of database, and along those lines I’m guessing that the number of orders on the TP can, on a small level, affect the performance of the database when people are performing however many searches they do per minute.
Cleaning up the garbage out of that system would be a step forward in preventing future problems, I would think.

Neural.1824:

John Smith.4610:

Prioritizing a bug fix that doesn’t actually affect the TP usage at all over any fix in the game that does affect players would be irresponsible.

At the beginning of the thread you stated that this wasn’t a bug so much as an issue of cleaning up.
I’m guessing that the trading post items are all in some sort of database, and along those lines I’m guessing that the number of orders on the TP can, on a small level, affect the performance of the database when people are performing however many searches they do per minute.
Cleaning up the garbage out of that system would be a step forward in preventing future problems, I would think.

I would imagine most of the unfillable buy orders are by individuals who have not logged into the game in some time. If you knew that you had 5 gold sunk into buy orders that will never be filled, you’d cancel them and get your gold back, right? So the vast majority of these orders are by individuals who are not presently playing the game.

So in order to clean it up Arenanet needs to cancel these orders without the knowledge or permission of the players who made them. While they can do that, it could open a big can of worms should those players return at some point – which is likely to happen in the case of an expansion because the only thing you need to do to start playing the game again is log in.

Also, the money refunded has to be claimed from the BLTC rep, it’s not automatically added to any of your toons cash total or bank. What happens if a crash deletes some or all of these pending refunds? It’s bad enough if current listings get deleted, but try explaining to someone who left the game for three months due to an illness that the 20 gold he had tied up in buy orders is gone because they had to reset the “waiting for pickup” database, when he didn’t actually cancel the orders, Anet did it for him…

TL:DR The issue is a lot more complicated than you think, and as it is now there isn’t a problem except for a few individuals who don’t like to see red text. This is very very low priority on the list of things to fix.

tolunart.2095:

Neural.1824:

John Smith.4610:

Prioritizing a bug fix that doesn’t actually affect the TP usage at all over any fix in the game that does affect players would be irresponsible.

At the beginning of the thread you stated that this wasn’t a bug so much as an issue of cleaning up.
I’m guessing that the trading post items are all in some sort of database, and along those lines I’m guessing that the number of orders on the TP can, on a small level, affect the performance of the database when people are performing however many searches they do per minute.
Cleaning up the garbage out of that system would be a step forward in preventing future problems, I would think.

I would imagine most of the unfillable buy orders are by individuals who have not logged into the game in some time. If you knew that you had 5 gold sunk into buy orders that will never be filled, you’d cancel them and get your gold back, right? So the vast majority of these orders are by individuals who are not presently playing the game.

So in order to clean it up Arenanet needs to cancel these orders without the knowledge or permission of the players who made them. While they can do that, it could open a big can of worms should those players return at some point – which is likely to happen in the case of an expansion because the only thing you need to do to start playing the game again is log in.

Also, the money refunded has to be claimed from the BLTC rep, it’s not automatically added to any of your toons cash total or bank. What happens if a crash deletes some or all of these pending refunds? It’s bad enough if current listings get deleted, but try explaining to someone who left the game for three months due to an illness that the 20 gold he had tied up in buy orders is gone because they had to reset the “waiting for pickup” database, when he didn’t actually cancel the orders, Anet did it for him…

TL:DR The issue is a lot more complicated than you think, and as it is now there isn’t a problem except for a few individuals who don’t like to see red text. This is very very low priority on the list of things to fix.

Incoming TOS fix :P

Although I think this is already covered in that several page, scary worded document, they could give players warning vie forums/in game/email, and then purge them. Since we have no rights or claim to items in game anyway.

Geotherma.2395:

Incoming TOS fix :P

Although I think this is already covered in that several page, scary worded document, they could give players warning vie forums/in game/email, and then purge them. Since we have no rights or claim to items in game anyway.

Yes they could. The thing is, why create a kittenstorm over the complaints of a handful of people about an issue that doesn’t actually affect the game at all, it simply offends those few individuals when they see it.

It’s like Ford repainting every green Ford in the world because ten people don’t like the color – the question is not whether they can, but why should they bother?

What hurts is these under priced bids skew the impression of demand. It can make a low demand item appear to be in high demand. I don’t know about you all but I feel better posting an item for sale when it’s supply is noticeably less than it’s demand. Now if a large chunk of that demand can never be filled ever, it changes my opinion as well as the price I’m likely to post it at. However I do understand that if the highest bid is less than the vendor price that it’s the same as no bids at all.

I would assume if ANet were concerned about the sort of oddball event tolunart described, they could very easy just inject the refunds into the account’s bank and send them an in-game email regarding the subject. Case closed. All done. Win/Win.

The thing is you don’t want to muck with a database without first knowing all the problems and scenerios. Plus we don’t know how the player database is weaved into the TC database. What’s the best way to do this?

Do you look at every player’s character, see if they have any bids in, check to see if those bids are too low and if they are to low cancel them.

Or is it better to look at each item on the market, check to see if the bids are too low and then access the character to cancel the bid. If the character’s been deleted, too bad (but I suspect that deleting a character will clean up any pending bids or sales on the market beforehand).

And you can’t make a mistake. Ever. Whatever the process is it has to be bulletproof eight ways to Sunday. Problem is it’s not going to be quick. The safest way is to take the market off line and that’s not going to be fun. Okay you do it during a scheduled server downtime and you may have to do it piecemeal like first doing mats one day, weapons (or blues) the next, etc.

There’s a lot of potential downside for something that only affects demand perception.