Guild Wars 2

Trading Post – I know everyone is all jazzed about the TP and how it currently is but I personally think it lacks character or fore thought.

Socialization – In other TP’s we are able to see who is selling an item and who purchased your items. As a crafter, this is very valuable because over time you can build up both a supply chain for raw materials and a customer base which translates into some really great relationships that can even transcend the game.

Supply vs Demand – Before people accuse me of wanting to “play the market” lets be frank. With the TP global, its near impossible for demand to exceed supply on basic materials which in turn keeps the cost of mid-tier items artificially low as well. As a result many items even some rares are available for 1cp more than vendor prices and likely will never come off that cost. That may sound good to the buyers but the sellers are eventually going to get tired of putting effort into crafting items for little to no profit and stop making them all together. Once that happens the TP will no longer be the Trading Post it will just be the Trash post.

Load Distribution – I’ve been a datacenter manager for over 16 years now. Lets face it whatever is running behind the global TP isnt cutting it. Whether its some fancy GRID DB, an Oracle RAC cluster or a giant monolithic DB, its puking daily. Here we are 3 weeks after release and I cant buy Iron Ore because the listings wont populate again. Thats silly. If we cant get it under control then make the TP world based and distribute the load

Item Expiration – I have items that have been up on the TP for over a week now. If we simply expired the items after 7 days the TP would be able to free up what is clearly needed resources to deal with more recent trades that have infinitely more potential to actually contribute to the economy.

PS. The TP went “down for maintenance” while I was drafting this. EXPIRE STUFF