Guild Wars 2

A few days ago, I went in to purchase a single Raven Mail carrier from the Black Lion Trading Post. After clicking buy, I noticed that it had purchased 233 of them for various prices ranging from 60 sp to 90 sp each. I did not move the bar over to purchase multiple of them, yet it did. I was upset with this as it is a 1 per account item and contacted CS to see if they could help me out with this. I was informed that there were no reports of this issue and that I should be more careful when making purchases on the trading post. They suggested that I place the items on the trading post and get my money back that way. I will end up losing a lot of in game money this way, but oh well. Today some poor player purchased 200 of them in one chunk. I cannot believe that this is NOT a big or glitch as it appears to have happened twice.

There are a couple of mechanics going on that could cause this to happen. Right now, I recommend proceeding extremely carefully or at least looking at the total cost amount (the biggest set of numbers in the middle of the screen) before confirming a sale or purchase.

Part of it is a result of the TP deciding for us how to make it more convenient to purchase large quantities and part of it might be one or more unrelated UI quirks and/or glitches. Frequent TP users (such as myself) have learned to deal with both “issues,” which might be why the support person hasn’t heard much about them.

The non-glitch part is that if you want to buy a stack of items and some are already offered at your desired price, the TP will assume you want to buy the entire stack instantly. More likely, you want to buy the currently available items at that price and put in an offer for a partial stack at the same price.

So for example, you want to buy 250 Raven Mail carriers at 50 silver and 10 are available at that price and 600 are available at 51 silver, more than you want to spend. The TP will first assume you want to buy 10 at 50s and 240 (of the 600) at 51s and that’s what would happen if you press the OK button. To make the purchase the way you want, you’d have adjust your initial purchase to just 10 items, by typing in the “count” field, moving the slider, or unchecking the boxes next to the higher prices. Then you’d have to remember how many you bought, subtract the number you just got, and put in a new custom offer for 240 at the 50s price you want.

But, I hear you say, you had no intention of purchasing a stack!

Well, there are a couple of UI glitches that could have causes that. The first is that, unlike every other website built since 1992, the TP automatically adjusts the focus when your cursor moves over a field, instead of when you click in the field. That means if you start to type in “25” in the copper field as you move the mouse towards the quantity field, you’d end up typing “25” as the amount to purchase. Near as I can tell, this was the intended design, but I can’t even guess as to what UI designer would intend to do this nor why.

The second glitch is that the graphical overlay on the TP UI don’t match the location of the fields and buttons right now. Further, when the focus is on one of the four fields, the UI tries to highlight by emboldening and italicizing the fonts a little, moving them “behind” the overlay sometimes or worse, to where you don’t expect them. This means that you can sometimes click on an arrow to try to increase the number and you’ll end up decreasing it instead. You can also end up increasing amounts that you meant to decrease (although that’s less common).

That’s an extremely long story to say that:

tl;dr you’re not crazy, it is easily possible (at the moment) for you to have accidentally put in an order for 250 units of an item, at higher prices that you meant to spend on the single unit you wanted.

I would recommend escalating the ticket (i.e. asking for a supervisor to review it). I don’t know that they can do anything for you, but at the very least, the Customer Service team should be aware that this can happen and offer an apology for misunderstanding the situation. (My hope is that with enough of these reports, the UI team will prioritize reverting the TP to how it was a couple of months ago — it had some issues, but nothing like this.)

I appreciate the information. Thank you!