Guild Wars 2

I am not a pro gamer by any means. Although I do enjoy playing GW2, and spend a majority of my time simply farming for gold to buy items in the Black Lion Trading Company. My favorite aspect of playing this game is to collect recipes, and materials. I am a former WoW player, and have been playing GW2 for the last 3 years now. For people such as myself, how well we can navigate the BLTC correlates directly to how much we enjoy the game. Right now, the BLTC needs some major improvements. This game is, in my opinion, a major improvement over WoW, except for the BLTC. My biggest gripe with the BLTC is not being able to exclude anything when doing a search. Yes, I know that if I already know a certain recipe, it will state “You already know this recipe!”. But why can’t we simply exclude the recipes that we already know in our search? Another option should be to somehow “mark” items we’ve already bid on in our search. I know that there is a separate area to show the items that I’m bidding on, but that doesn’t help me when I’m in the middle of looking for new recipes to bid on. Can you please put in a way to either exclude, or mark items already bid on? This would be a great help. One other thing that really bothers me is that when I go to pick up something from the BLTC, I cannot simply take one item. It’s all or nothing. Please give us option to only take out what we want at that time. If you feel that people will try to use this for free storage, then simply place a limit on the number of items that will display. This will force people to empty their storage until they get to the other items that they want, eliminating the free storage problem. I simply want to be able to take out a specific item because my bags are often full, and I have no room to take everything at once.

You guy’s are doing a great job with this game, and I wish you all continued success.

It’d be nice to be able to refine the search by things you already have unlocked like amors, dyes, recipes, minis, etc for the tp. would make things much better!

aandiarie.7195:

It’d be nice to be able to refine the search by things you already have unlocked like amors, dyes, recipes, minis, etc for the tp. would make things much better!

I second this, would be very useful to have this feature.

I would also quite like to be able to have a watch list / favourites feature as another tab, so I could add say 20-30 things I buy often, or things I can’t afford that I know I’ll buy later, that way I wouldn’t have to keep searching for them each time. I guess I could technically put in a 1 copper buy order on each so they are all under the orders bit, but an actual watch list would be better.

This will most likely be made available via the API at some point. I think i remember reading it is being worked on. Not sure if recipe unlocks are already exposed by the API or not but once they are, i would guess gw2efficiency will work on including that in their account statistics.

The API is an interesting approach to it. I’ve long thought that ANet can’t directly add a filter for locked-only items simply because that would mean that every time you load the TP it has to cross check every single item listed against your particular set of unlocks, thus slowing it to unusability (especially as it would be doing that simultaneously for hundreds of thousands of requests). But if that check can be done client-side through an API mod, that might alleviate the issue.

The API isn’t really sufficient for this purpose. TP searches are super primitive at this point:

• Each word in the string is treats as a logical “OR”, so “Black Lion” finds black dyes and (if we had them) green lions.
• To search for certain items, you have to navigate a multi-nested tree and if you make a mistake, you typically have to restart.
• You can’t filter out unlocked skins, dyes, or recipes.
• You can’t search for items by collection.
• You can’t search for stats by prefix; only by the stats, which requires 3 fields rather than 1. (If ANet insists on making us memorize prefix names, they should incorporate them into their UI.)

I am not suggesting that updating the TP UI (and especially search) should be a high priority. I do mean that it’s not enough to offer an API, unless we can also use the API to make offers.