Guild Wars 2

Right now, the TP is completely unaffected by the concept of the limited storage which is present everywhere else in the game.

You have limited item space in your inventory, limited space in your bank, limited space in your guild bank and limited space in mailbox.

Only one thing in the game breaks with this concept, the TP. It allows you to place unlimited buy orders and to keep an unlimited number of item stacks in the pickup zone without actually picking them up.

This doesn’t affect regular players very much, as they will rarely have that many items to pick up that it would make a difference, but active TP traders are abusing this unlimited, free storage on a regular base.

By the lack of an limit, the throughput of an TP trader is virtually unlimited, he can place as many buy orders as he has money which leads to the strange situation, that a single player (or a few which had the same idea) can literally buy the whole market, hold several hundred to thousand stacks of an item in hold and manipulate the prices without any restrictions.

And it doesn’t even cost him inventory space or anything alike, as he uses then unlimited storage provided by the TP. It is only limited by his current wealth which follows an exponential curve. (Which also sounds like a bad thing, considering that wealth is supposed to follow a linear function in this game!)

A limit on the size of the pickup zone is therefore absolutely necessary in order to stabilize the market and protect it from the abusive price manipulations of a few traders. The limit must be applied to both, placed buy orders and items in the pickup zone, treating every buy order as if it was a new item.

It would only hit the bad power traders. The good power traders know that, in order to get the highest income, they need to get those items sold as quickly as possible. Selling items in multiples of 20 ensures they will have no rounding on the listing fee. So the optimum thing to do is to resell as soon as they have 20 of the item, maybe less if they find that some lower quantity rounds in their favor.

But there is one very important part of this suggestion you haven’t explained: What happens to someone when their pickup tab is full ?
Remember, the trading post doesn’t stack items in the pickup tab. So if I decide to fill your buy order for 250 Vicious Fangs by selling you the fangs one at a time*, you’ll now have 250 listings in your pickup tab. If filling someone else’s pickup tab likes this gives an advantage, less scrupulous players will do so.

*Or 250 players each sell you one fang.

The lack of stacking in the pickup tab sure is a problem, but a simple one to solve. It costs almost nothing, to perform some stacking in the pickup tab, or to compute the space requirement if it was stacked.

As for your objection, that only bad power traders would be hit: True, but thats only because there is a third zone i forgot about, which also acts as “unlimited space”, I’m talking about unsold items.

You usually won’t be able to sell an item right away after buying it, rarely with profit and it works only on very few items. So having a global (or distinct) storage limits for all 3 sections of the TP would limit the excessive power trading for sure.

A limit of 15-20 inventory slots should fit for all regular players. Buy offers and pickup zone “share stacks”, sell offers don’t stack with the previous two. 15-20 stacks is still sufficient for any regular player to have buy offers on a full armor set + runes as well as selling a complete set of T5 and T6 materials at the same time, but it makes it impossible for power traders to perform price manipulations on any item which is available in high quantities (over 3.000 units in market) or which is not stackable.

And to be honest: It’s necessary to introduce such a limit. Playing the TP is the only way to hoard such ridiculous amounts of wealth and it really damages the whole economy. Rare items have prices, which a regular player will NEVER be able to pay, not even if they saved every copper since the beginning just for that item. This kind of inflation, based on the wealth of a small group of players, must be stopped for good.

Otherwise the price for legendary items will be up to about 10.000 gold within the next 3 months, which equals around 3.000 hours of farming for a regular player, which means farming for almost 1 1/2 years, even if you farmed for 8 hours straight every single day.

I notice that you completely ignored the most important part in my post: What happens to someone when their pickup tab is full ?

If you can’t answer that, then it’s pointless disusing if the idea is a good one or not, because you haven’t proposed something that can be implemented.