Guild Wars 2

Might be that this question has been asked before, and if not, why not? And yes, I tried to use the search function of the Forum, but it seems to be broken. At least to me.

Question: Why is there no means for direct trade/exchange of items amongst players? Even in a group you can’t simply pass on items from one to another. But it’s still impossible to balance items against each other and decline handing out your part if you think you get the short end of the stick.

Actual reason is that a friend of mine regarded that as a showstopper and would pass over GW2 entirely.

You cna use the trading post for secure trading.
You can still trade via mail or guild vault with your friends.
This discussion has been raised many times, most threads (and Dev responses) are in the BLTC Forum

Because in Guild Wars 1, it was used to scam pretty frequently. Right now, trading is a gold sink in the game, since it’s done through the auction house. Taking gold out of the system slows inflation.

Curtis Johnson

Hey guys,

The no face-to-face trade is a real decision and it’s primarily a question of trust (as many of you have noted). But it’s also a decision to protect players from scamming and protect the economy from black-markets. Let’s run through some quick examples.

1) Give something to my friend. – As several of you noted, target your friend, right click the item and select ‘mail-to…’. Done, this works in contact list, guild list, or in world anywhere without having to ‘meet’ them or ‘catch’ them.

2) Get a fair price for an item (anti-scam). – Because ALL trading goes through the trading post we can guarantee that highest bidder meets lowest seller and we can give every player the benefit of current market information.

3) Barter item-for-item. This is the grey area and also the most risky kind of trade because even with UI many items look alike in icon and many social engineering scams take place in this kind of system. It’s a risky trade environment which is why when you support it you have to have these multi-stage UI’s where everyone double-checks everything, and then eventually get’s lazy and stops double-checking and gets scammed anyways.

In the end we decided with super easy access to mail for trusted trades and trading post for untrusted trades that such a system wasn’t worth the risk, complication, and fragmenting the player market off of the trading post..

In testing we’ve found that mail is easier 90% of the time we’d want trade and the other 10% trading post is far safer and avoids drama and thing like random trade windows being thrown at you and lots of other unsavory hawking in game.

Hope that all makes sense.

… was the response in beta.

Healix.5819:

Curtis Johnson

Hey guys,

The no face-to-face trade is a real decision and it’s primarily a question of trust (as many of you have noted). But it’s also a decision to protect players from scamming and protect the economy from black-markets. Let’s run through some quick examples.

1) Give something to my friend. – As several of you noted, target your friend, right click the item and select ‘mail-to…’. Done, this works in contact list, guild list, or in world anywhere without having to ‘meet’ them or ‘catch’ them.

2) Get a fair price for an item (anti-scam). – Because ALL trading goes through the trading post we can guarantee that highest bidder meets lowest seller and we can give every player the benefit of current market information.

3) Barter item-for-item. This is the grey area and also the most risky kind of trade because even with UI many items look alike in icon and many social engineering scams take place in this kind of system. It’s a risky trade environment which is why when you support it you have to have these multi-stage UI’s where everyone double-checks everything, and then eventually get’s lazy and stops double-checking and gets scammed anyways.

In the end we decided with super easy access to mail for trusted trades and trading post for untrusted trades that such a system wasn’t worth the risk, complication, and fragmenting the player market off of the trading post..

In testing we’ve found that mail is easier 90% of the time we’d want trade and the other 10% trading post is far safer and avoids drama and thing like random trade windows being thrown at you and lots of other unsavory hawking in game.

Hope that all makes sense.

… was the response in beta.

And a darn good response at that, nice post IMO.

And then suppression came along.

Ah. Thanks for clarification. We actually got some of the reasoning as well figured out (making the lack of trading an annoyance rather than a showstopper, but the rationale behind it a big boon), but to have it in writing definitely clears up things.

Maybe that’s something for the FAQ?

I think this is one of the things that show how ArenaNet think out of the box. They knew this decision would get a lot of negative criticism, but it’s simply an awesome decision in the end.

flyingcats.6194:

I think this is one of the things that show how ArenaNet think out of the box. They knew this decision would get a lot of negative criticism, but it’s simply an awesome decision in the end.

Is it? I find it mostly inconvenient. So imagine you’re gold poor, and loot a very expensive item you don’t need… you don’t have the money to put it up for sale on the TP. So you’re now forced to either save it in your bank, or sell it at bid value, which is usually a depressing amount lower than what putting it up for sale yourself would get you. Cause yeah, can’t trade player to player and using e-mail to transfer items? Eeew…

There’s tons of games out there that have inter-player trading without having scam issues. Mutual confirmation of trade (with item inspection windows), player owned vendors where you can take your time to look before buying, contracts with content inspection… seriously, what’s hard about it.

Broom.2561:

flyingcats.6194:

I think this is one of the things that show how ArenaNet think out of the box. They knew this decision would get a lot of negative criticism, but it’s simply an awesome decision in the end.

Is it? I find it mostly inconvenient. So imagine you’re gold poor, and loot a very expensive item you don’t need… you don’t have the money to put it up for sale on the TP. So you’re now forced to either save it in your bank, or sell it at bid value, which is usually a depressing amount lower than what putting it up for sale yourself would get you. Cause yeah, can’t trade player to player and using e-mail to transfer items? Eeew…

There’s tons of games out there that have inter-player trading without having scam issues. Mutual confirmation of trade (with item inspection windows), player owned vendors where you can take your time to look before buying, contracts with content inspection… seriously, what’s hard about it.

To your first paragraph: I think that in this one-in-a-million situation, the lack of direct trading does indeed have its drawbacks.

To your second paragraph: moot point, since trading through a trading post still requires less effort than finding a person who will want to trade with you through direct trade. Just look at WoW, where both systems exist: hardly anyone uses the direct trading, as it is simply obsolete. And in case you really want to trade directly, you can simply use mail, granted that you trust the other person.

Healix.5819:

Curtis Johnson

Hey guys,

The no face-to-face trade is a real decision and it’s primarily a question of trust (as many of you have noted). But it’s also a decision to protect players from scamming and protect the economy from black-markets. Let’s run through some quick examples.

1) Give something to my friend. – As several of you noted, target your friend, right click the item and select ‘mail-to…’. Done, this works in contact list, guild list, or in world anywhere without having to ‘meet’ them or ‘catch’ them.

2) Get a fair price for an item (anti-scam). – Because ALL trading goes through the trading post we can guarantee that highest bidder meets lowest seller and we can give every player the benefit of current market information.

3) Barter item-for-item. This is the grey area and also the most risky kind of trade because even with UI many items look alike in icon and many social engineering scams take place in this kind of system. It’s a risky trade environment which is why when you support it you have to have these multi-stage UI’s where everyone double-checks everything, and then eventually get’s lazy and stops double-checking and gets scammed anyways.

In the end we decided with super easy access to mail for trusted trades and trading post for untrusted trades that such a system wasn’t worth the risk, complication, and fragmenting the player market off of the trading post..

In testing we’ve found that mail is easier 90% of the time we’d want trade and the other 10% trading post is far safer and avoids drama and thing like random trade windows being thrown at you and lots of other unsavory hawking in game.

Hope that all makes sense.

… was the response in beta.

And they didn’t want a Spamadan redux, as they had when gw2 launched…just saying