Guild Wars 2

Astral Projections.7320:

Behellagh.1468:

No, that’s NCSoft. There are a few official posts that say don’t worry about it. However search here is almost useless.

<searching with Google>

Here’s one.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Constant-attempts-to-hack/2844255

You are wrong about search here being almost useless. Search here is COMPLETELY useless, not almost useless. :P

No the results it list are for all practical purposes useless. It does display posts containing one or more of the words you are searching for.

No, that’s NCSoft. There are a few official posts that say don’t worry about it. However search here is almost useless.

<searching with Google>

Here’s one.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Constant-attempts-to-hack/2844255

azizul.8469:

yeah… even the old LOTRO has option to use either dx9 or dx 11….

come on ANET, this is 2013 already……..

Yes but over three years after it first came out, just before it went hybrid/F2P. It also officially supported Dx10 6 months after it’s release. But this was back when the game was subscription only (as well as $200 lifetime subscriptions) with paid expansions.

Then there’s the question about how much exclusive Dx10 and 11 they are using over Dx9. Did they just use more complex shaders and graphics memory management or did they use more? They could use just one exclusive feature from Dx11 and say they have Dx11 support.

yungwizud.1827:

Behellagh.1468:

Because Bloom is one of those graphic features you have on your game engine checklist like hard shadows or depth of field blurring. Surprised we don’t have “lens flair” when looking up at the day star.

do you agree that its repulsive?

No. Over the years I’ve grown to accept that developers and players expect both HDR and Bloom as lighting effects found in games.

Back in my old MMO, City of Heroes, they actually fudged the RNG to reduce the chance of runs of bad luck on to hit rolls. If you had over a 90% chance to hit but missed, the next attack will guarantee to hit; 80-90% you can only miss twice in a row; 70-80% three times, etc.

DireSwift.9083:

xephire.8324:

Yep ANET/Ncsoft are just milking off what’s left of the cow right now

How do you milk a free cow? There is no revenue stream to milk once someone has bought it and I guarantee sales aren’t compensating for a lack of a subscription model. It’s all gravy for the user at that point. I wish every game I paid the same for (or even more) gave me that kind of service.

Let’s see; 28,899 million KrW 2nd quarter. Now last I knew Lineage was 64,000 KrW a quarter which would suggest that GW2 would be equivalent to 450,000 Lineage 1 subscribers in Korea who are on the 3 month plan. I think our sales are just fine.

Because Bloom is one of those graphic features you have on your game engine checklist like hard shadows or depth of field blurring. Surprised we don’t have “lens flair” when looking up at the day star.

Well if it’s just a delta, the stuff that changed or add since you were last on rather than every patch between now and then, a lot.

As for me my GW2 folder is 16.7GB in size according to Windows.

Check the docs in the “Legal Documents” link at the bottom of the page.

Why rework? Because you point was that with tessellation you can reduce the poly count of the model. Because bump maps and displacement maps aren’t interchangable.

I don’t this is about whining, just making sure that it’s not a mistake.

If someone offered you $20 that they said you dropped but you hadn’t, do you take it or do you politely tell them it’s not yours?

Daywolf.2630:

Behellagh.1468:

Tessellation is neither “free”, as in GPU time and resources, nor automatic, as in you must add code to enable it for every object that would benefit from tessellation (or displacement maps). Tessellation does not improve performance, just the opposite but can if done right make an object look more “real”.

Oh no, I strongly disagree. Yes, if you narrow it down to one aspect of the process, but you are throwing out other factors. No one said it was “free”, I sure didn’t, who are you quoting there?

You. Emphasis mine.

Daywolf.2630:

It’s actually a very nice improvement esthetically, performance wise, and regarding the improved speed of art asset development which means content is more quickly made.

There is no difference in the amount of work that needs to be done if the patch was a passed in with 10K of triangles or the 10K were the result of on card tessellation. Sure the bandwidth used to the card is a lot less but that’s about it.

A model mesh is a significant resource hog. Like some years ago, I’ve made models with one-million polygons to even come close to realism. My computer would cringe when I’d rotate the model. Computer performance has increased so that one-million polygons is manageable. But if I now use such a model in a real-time game engine, added with all the other models present, it just won’t be an enjoyable experience.

Over time we created smoothing shaders, displacement shaders, and other such methods, all working to increase realism but cut down on resource requirements of just using polygons alone. All modern games use these methods, it’s not just dependent on the raw power of GPU’s, architecture and the like, but even that has offset the overhead by their development.

Looking at that example model on the page, that is a low-poly model about the level of detail used in games over a decade ago. That is absolutely wonderful! With DX11, it literally transitions to film quality modeling. There remains overhead, but you are not using a high-poly model to get the result, which as a full process is far more manageable than if not using low-poly modeling but opting to use high-poly modeling to achieve the same results. Not only does this make it easier to produce high-end results, but makes rigging your models an easier process w/o the common odd results at bending joints and balancing weights etc. Development time cut, results improved.

Which page are you talking about because I didn’t link to anything with a model on it.

But what you are saying is there is a lot of work involved to take the assets used for a Dx9c renderer to make them optimal for a Dx11 renderer. I don’t disagree but the point most of the Dx11 crowd was making is that it’s simply a coding issue to get Dx11 performance. But as soon as you touch data you are getting the art crew involved and that is one reason it takes years to develop an MMO, graphic assets.

Yes depending how and in what the original models were modeled creating a new lower poly mesh with control point data for tessellation may be a simple push of a button. Then again it may not be. Then adding displacement maps instead of bump maps to replace illusionary surface detail for lighting with real detail is another step, skinning Vs geometry.

But I’m of the camp where before we go off and build a new renderer and improved textures and models for Dx11 they need to get a handle on their group of players issue.

Tessellation is neither “free”, as in GPU time and resources, nor automatic, as in you must add code to enable it for every object that would benefit from tessellation (or displacement maps). Tessellation does not improve performance, just the opposite but can if done right make an object look more “real”.

Either don’t look at a gift horse in the mouth or file a ticket asking why I got this?

Daywolf.2630:

Behellagh.1468:

Take a breath Daywolf. In. Out.

I already know all that, I work with API’s. Editors and compilers too of course. err was a part of college and beyond. Are you replying to what I wrote to you or what the other guy is saying? The other guy is on a wild tangent, making no sense to anything pertaining to the conversation. Join in on that, make even less sense, oddly becoming entertaining. Lets just throw out some more completely random comments and see where they fall! hahaha

Because you’re the one in the “Dx11 is all rainbows and puppies and will solve ALL the game’s performance issues if they simply used it in the first place” camp.

While true that Dx11 has reduced overhead over Dx9 and new features that can reduce it even more so, it isn’t the end all be all of graphic API. It is not a thing that by having in something automatically makes that something superior than another something that doesn’t having it. “But it’s got electrolytes!”

As for consoles if the XBox One is anythink like the XBox 360 then it’s not using a variant of DirectX but something more streamline and closer to the metal.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/graphics/2011/03/16/farewell-to-directx/1

Since I don’t know if it works for everyone and for me it sometimes takes more than one attempt, I described it as “jiggling” it. Quickly switching between tabs or open and closing it quickly TP quickly or a combination of the two.

There are some rumors out there since AMD announced Mantle because both next gen consoles have AMD GPUs based on the GCN architecture that just maybe Mantle is available to both of them. Anandtech suggested outright that Mantle IS the preferred API for the XBox One.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7371/understanding-amds-mantle-a-lowlevel-graphics-api-for-gcn

Sad side effect of trial accounts.

Yes and if you select other tabs and come back or open and close the TP the exchange does eventually comes back (at least for me over the last few days). Just that something isn’t kosher with the TP for the past few days on the server side of things. A lot of weird stuff has been happening.

Oo, those are ugly ping times.

I’m a low level guy (C and assembler) so I love it. This should also allow developers to roll their own higher level API just for their app. Downside is it’s tied to a specific class of hardware, AMD. You can’t code a Mantle app and have it run on nVidia hardware or older AMD hardware.

It’s 3DFX Glide all over again. There was a lot of amazing progress back then but you had to read the side of the box to see if your card was supported. Only thing I saw JC say about it was printed here.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-mantle-api-xbox-one-playstation-4-john-carmack,24434.html

Is this in battle? You can’t tweak your slot skills if you are in battle or suffering from a condition like poison or bleeding.

Good to know. Likely a similar breakdown for ore.

Jiggle it a bit. Switch to another tab, like the store and back. That restored it for me.

Take a breath Daywolf. In. Out.

DirectX is simply an API, Application Programming Interface. It in and of itself doesn’t mean it’s better or worse than OpenGL, another mature API for graphics that’s being used in the PS4. I’m sure that the XBox 1’s API for graphics is based on the 3D functionality of Dx11. It doesn’t mean it’s 100% identical to what a PC developer has. But since DirectX is Microsoft’s game API I’m sure the XBox 1 is using a custom variant of it.

What an API does, and only does, is hide the grunt work and nuances of hardware. It’s simply a standard library of high and low level functions that then does the dirty work of talking to the hardware either directly or though a device driver. The key point is the developer doesn’t need to know the nuances of the hardware or break what they need to do into many small steps, they can use more complex and abstract data with fewer calls.

Now it doesn’t prevent a developer from writing inefficient code that calls the API. It just provides a target to write to. It’s merely a translator from higher level abstraction to low level hardware manipulation.

Didn’t say CCP wasn’t developing it, but it’s a far cry from putting out a tech demo and implying as you did that EVE has added Dx11 support already (the phrase “did this” implies it’s done and out).

NCSOFT isn’t developing GW2, ArenaNet is. The game started development in March 2007. Dx11 wasn’t out until July 2009 with Windows 7. AMD didn’t have proper hardware support until Sept 2009 and nVidia until April 2010. ANet developed their own engine, reportedly based off of the GW1 engine developed back in the early 2000s. A game that supported GeForce 3s and ATI 8500 video cards. They did up the requirements to Dx 9.0c hardware support or better for GW2.

Until ANet started to bring in money and payoff what ever development cost debt they accrued in the 5 year development cycle they weren’t going to be adventurous enough with their development cash to slave a team off for Dx 11. They may have had one guy investigating but right now the engine team has bigger fish to fry with the O(n^c) performance problems when lots of players are in a small area. Run into a crowd, even one standing about doing very little and CPU usage shoots up, GPU usage drops and that’s not good. Run away CPU usage goes down, GPU usage and frame rate goes up. Dx 11 isn’t going to fix that. It has the hallmarks of an algorithm/code structure scaling problem.

If you are saving them for a rainy day to use in the Gem Store then, it’s a plan. I buy gems every day with gold, 1% of what I have in the bank, except Monday evenings before a big patch when I spend 5%.

Daywolf.2630:

Charak.9761:

maddoctor.2738:

Charak.9761:

Nope, they built their engine on DX9, they can’t change that without making a new game.

You mean all those games that changed DX version during their run time were re-created from scratch?

MMOs are seperate from single player games like Crysis. There’s alot more revolving around the design code for the sandbox version of an MMO than a linear path of other games. In cost effectiveness, it’s just easier for ncsoft to just pass on this upgrade.

Wat?
Anyhoot, it would require a new rendering engine for the client. Quite a bit of work, a year, two… But like the game engine and server side are all good. But the rendering engine, big work, specialized work. M$ never makes anything easy

Behellagh.1468:

Except the game development started in 2007, likely engine first. WoW added Dx11 support later. Of course WoW was making in the neighborhood of a BILLION dollars in sales every year since Dx11 came out so I don’t thing they had a problem hiring as many people as they needed to implement it. ANet is a bit smaller with quite a lot less in sales.

Yet, Anet and CCP both have the same size dev team ( ~200), but CCP did this with EVE? I wish I had a dime every time WoW was brought up in this forum, would mean free internetz for me hehe. But seriously, an indie did it… and big Anet/NCsoft at a loss? But then maybe for CCP the investment was worth it, they have stated that their goal is to be still operating EVE in ten more years.

How many years was EVE out before they rolled out a Dx11 client? Oh that’s right, it’s not out yet, they simply demoed Dx11, over a year ago. You can point at them once the new client is pushed out to live. Otherwise it’s just a tech demo along with PhysX support, also demoed at the same time (not surprisingly nVidia was helping out).

So on one hand we have a 10 year old game that doesn’t have Dx11 support yet but did have a demo of one ship in an asteroid field Vs a game that’s only been out a year without Dx11 support.

Now as for WoW, this is from one of their CS people on their forum.

Lurdlespor
Customer Service
Hello,

Graphically you won’t see any major difference, the only real difference is that later graphics adapters are optimised for Directx 11, so you may experience better performance.

However if you do experience issues with it (we’re still working on improving our Directx 11 support), then please do switch back to Directx 9.

Sounds like they have everything well in hand after 3 years since they introduced the first Dx11 supported client. And this is from the game with BILLIONS in sales in those years. You would think they would be able to get people to knock this conversion out of the ballpark with the resources they have.

So it appears neither easy nor trivial, as some have stated, to add Dx11 support into an existing Dx9 game.

(Yes it’s a bit of a strawman argument.)

Yeah. Jiggle it, it’ll come up.

That Chantry really knows how to keep it’s secrets.

I use Google to search the forum. Add site:forum-en.guildwars2.com to the end of the search.

I have no idea whose forum software they are using but a lot of features are either disabled to poorly implemented. I almost miss vBulletin.

Dee Jay.2460:

Visual fidelity aside DX 11 is a far more efficient API. World of Warcraft runs roughly 30% faster in the DX 11 version and doesn’t even use the improved visuals.

Guild Wars 2 is a much younger game and frankly it’s inexcusable for it to be based on such an outdated version of DX. And it’s not like they even had consoles to worry about.

I mean DX 11 has been the standard since….what?….2009? That’s 3 years prior to GW2 even being released.

Except the game development started in 2007, likely engine first. WoW added Dx11 support later. Of course WoW was making in the neighborhood of a BILLION dollars in sales every year since Dx11 came out so I don’t thing they had a problem hiring as many people as they needed to implement it. ANet is a bit smaller with quite a lot less in sales.

SolarNova.1052:

And u wont need a new OS for the motherboard. The talk about the OS was regarding your RAM. A 32bit OS can only use roughly 3.8gb(4gb) of RAM, a 64bit OS, depending on the package (home, premium, enterprise, etc) can handle up to 192Gb.
Windows 64bit:
Basic is 8gb,
Premium is 16gb
Professional is 192gb
Enterprise is 192gb
Ultimate is 192gb

Those limits are for Windows 7.

Windows 8 64-bit’s are:

Windows 8 is 128GB
Professional is 512GB
Enterprise is 512GB

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa366778(v=vs.85).aspx#physical_memory_limits_windows_8

I remember when at work we got into cellular automata, this was the 90s, during lunch and I tried using the default RNG in the compiler we were using to seed a screen with “food” for little agents to eat and reproduce with mutation. Now instead of getting a visibly random series of dots on the screen, as in some are in clumps, some far apart, let it run long enough and the screen gets filled, a repeating pattern formed on the screen, a series of diagonal strip of dots.

That’s one of the problems with some random number generators, consecutive calls (one to get an X position, one for Y) showed that the “spacing” between the two “random” numbers fell into a pattern easily determinable when used to paint a 1600×1200 screen. Seed didn’t matter as the pattern always emerged. That’s when I first started looking into alternate RNG algorithms.

If it can be mapped like any other controller (XBox) then it’s simply a matter of having a Dx driver for it.

I’ve always liked Mersenne Twikittener, downside it’s slower and possibly, jukitten possibly mind you, it may impact performance due to the shear number of random numbers generated every second in the game. Of course if that’kittenhe case they could kittenill use it only for loot drop rolls, MF forging and the like.

Edit: Honekittenly? Every words with the letter pair kitten is getting kittened? Jukitten isn’t a bad word. kittenill isn’t a bad word. Arrgh!

Edit 2: AAAAAHHHH!!!

Hmm, now where did I put that texture? I knew I had it a minute ago …

Well it’s a step up from invisible. Maybe you need to do a repair on the game, maybe for some reason (bug, race condition) the texture did make it to the video card. Oops.

They’ve been working on “fixing” the issue where you don’t see other players in crowded areas, first it was in WvW and later everywhere.

There are two additional settings in the graphic settings screen which govern the number of players seen, Character Model Limit, and the number of players who will be sporting their actual character model instead of a generic place holder, Character Model Quality. I believe the talk is to achieve a similar look in PvE the two settings should be set to medium.

But there is still a bad side effect where heading into a crowd of players for the first time will depress frame rate as the game “builds” all the player avatars that should be displayed around you on the fly. This hits the disk hard and in someplace like LA it can take a while before normal colorful players popup from generic models. Another problem is moving from one dense group of players to another and back again will retrigger the generation process. Go from the bank in LA past the MF and to the TP and back again will keep your disk busy for minutes and as an added side effect, mute most of the background sounds in the game until avatar generation is nearly complete.

There is one other option they added called “Effect LOD” it should be checked. It’s suppose to limit the shear number of effects being displayed during large scale events. Even checked it can still be overwhelming at times.

Hope that this helps somewhat.

For the average loot drop, I have no problem with RNG. There’s a boat load of items that is in your level range. Magic Find can shift the quality up a tad but I would rather have a variety than the same few items dropped by the same mob type. That would just make some mob types targets of farming.

But you need MtG style expansion deck stacking for some items especially for Gem store bought items. For the infamous BL Chests, guarantee one common, one uncommon and one rare and the way to do that is to only have a few possibilities for common (say 4), more on uncommon (10) and a lot of items on rare (30).

Gem store dyes, I’m not going to be happy paying gems for a dye that I can buy for less than 20s off the TP or a dye pack that has less than 1g in value for 7 dyes.

Mystic Forge, would be more fun playing if it had slot machine noises. Sounds of coins hitting a tray if the quality improved. Yea, I can reliably double my money using it but parking my butt there for an hour putting in “coins” and pulling the handle is only something to do if I don’t feel like playing the TP. Note neither of these activities is goin’ an adventuring, but I can earn more coin in the time I’m logged in.

If you have to toss four minis into the MF for a chance a Set 1 mini pops out, that’s just saying new supply isn’t going to be zero, just pretty kitten close to it. As long as there are collectors and supply dries up, prices will spike.

As for confirmation about Set 1 being discontinued, check out the Gem Shop, it says there. Unless there is some other way than buying the 3 pack random grab bag of mini (or forging them for other minis) to get them then supply will dry up.

Aaaa … i5s and i7s are both quad cores. HT in the i7 can provide a bit of a performance boost but at a 40% premium in price. If you want absolute best possible performance and cost isn’t a problem then i7s are fine. In general PC gaming, when building a new PC, I think the extra money for an i7 over an i5 would be better spent on the video card side of the equation. But GW2 is a rather CPU intensive game when there are crowds of other players around you.

Game engine doesn’t like crowds of players. Mucking with graphic settings won’t affect frame rate greatly in that case. Coordinating all of them, their position, the animations, any effects or sounds they are generating, is CPU side. If the CPU can only prepare at most, say 40fps of data ignoring GPU overhead, then that’s the most anyone can every get. Doesn’t matter if you have a pair of Titans or a 9800GT, they will only be as fast as you feed them and that’s on the CPU.

Hyperthreading is merely a way for Intel cores to run more efficiently by trying to execute two threads simultaneously. The end result simply looks as if the core is overclocked slightly (10-20%) but in some cases can actually perform worse than no hyperthreading at all.

Multithreading, that is already being done but balancing the amount of actual work between major threads to get the multiplicative effect that multiple cores can provide is difficult. It’s not like ray tracing, video encoding or file compression where the same block of code is simply run on all available cores with one supervisory thread coordinating.

As for the next gen consoles, there are already reports about the OSes on them stealing some of those eight cores for exclusive use. Still as SolarNova says, to get the most out of those new consoles, someone, likely game engine and 3rd party library developers, will need to create versions of their product that scale better to number of cores available.

But I make so much money there, mindlessly.

MrSsid.3618:

as i wrote

“im mainly WvW player "

ofc if i change CPU then with motherboard, im gonna target i5-4670K, but i dont know how it gonna work with old Radeon

What I said is true with Intel i5s as well. Frame rate is not ever going to be as good as you want.

And sure it’ll work with your HD 5770. In PvE the HD 5770 will now be the limiting factor with an i5. If you are thinking about overclocking an i5-4670K then you will need a 3rd party cooler. Expect to spend $30-50 for that.

And saying it’s using 1990s technology is as equal as my “anonymous post”.

Have you worked with database servers, as in developing or maintaining them? I’m telling you unless you are willing to put in a metric ton of memory, which costs beaucoup bucks, performance is limited to a few thousand transactions per minute, like in the 2-3 thousand range, at most. And that includes queries. Insertion/deletion costs takes longer and therefore fewer of them can be done.

And no we aren’t going to be trading CVs here.

Then there’s the web server itself, remember the TP we see is simply a browser. We talk to the server, the server calls up the database server, the web server gets the OK and then you see the OK as the browser gets the OK from the web server.

Edit: And if for some miracle someone from ANet comes along and tells us that the reason selling on the TP is artificially slowed and it’s intended to allow equal access to all then what will you say and do? They’re wrong? They should spend the money on a better server infrastructure? It’s a flippin’ game. We aren’t even paying them monthly. And they probably have to use whatever equipment that’s already at NCSOFT’s two data centers or that they had standardized on.

I’m tired that so many people are spoiled on how fast computers are on TV or in movies. Guess what, they aren’t. Not the reasonably affordable ones (<$100K).

For this game CPU.

That said there aren’t a lot of options with that motherboard that will provide a considerably better CPU. MSI website doesn’t list any of the FX- series CPUs because it’s only a socket AM3 not AM3+ motherboard. So the only place you can go is a faster Phenom II which is maybe 10-15%.

The alternative is swapping out the MB and CPU in which case I would recommend Intel, they are the better gaming CPU right now but their quads are a bit more pricey than AMD.

However if you are willing to accept that world boss events and WvW are not going to give you great frame rates and you tend to just do dungeons/fractals and PvE, then maybe a better video card is in order. Biggest unforeseen problem for upgraders is power supply. Is it enough to support a more power hungry video card?

Here’s the thing. Linux is a good starting point of you want to customize a game/media console OS. Android, ChromeOS, both examples of a customize Linux kernel at a root of a device.

SteamOS is simply laying the framework for yet another console, except one that can be built by multiple manufactures for the sole purpose of being a game/media center hooked to your TV. You can push all the OpenXX standards for devices, OpenGL 4 is as feature complete as DirectX 11, it’s just nVidia and AMD don’t devote the same amount of resources in making OpenGL drivers as robust as Dx11. OpenAL for audio and OpenCL for GPU computation (for physics) covers the bases.

The question is, if you build a competent optimized game/media OS, will developers include it in the mix of target platforms? If Valve also release libraries that can make the port as seamless as possible, sure, why not. And there’s still Wine but that’s an imperfect solution.

And no surprise, Valve is looking for Beta testers for Steam Hardware.

http://techreport.com/news/25420/valve-announces-steam-hardware-plans-seeks-beta-testers

Silverbleed.3169:

I’m a little confused on how this works. I can understand the tp is getting a bit of an overload at times when a ton of people try to sell. But it gets annoying even at times when I get this late at night or in the mornings. The slowing down suggestion did work at first but not anymore :’(

As I said earlier, the easiest way to keep loads down is to limit the sell rate at the source which is at the client (your copy of the game). Without that the alternative is when the TP is busy with players selling as fast as possible is other players being locked out because the TP database is overloaded. It would be rapid sellers get to sell while everyone else has to wait. This way can be annoying but if you are only selling a few items at a “slow” rate then you can.

It’s not the DB telling your client to put you in time out, it’s your client that’s saying “whoa there Tex, slow down”. Much easier to do it there. That means that you could be the only person using the TP and you will still hit the limiter.

Dench.5968:

Silverbleed.3169:

I’m a little confused on how this works. I can understand the tp is getting a bit of an overload at times when a ton of people try to sell. But it gets annoying even at times when I get this late at night or in the mornings. The slowing down suggestion did work at first but not anymore :’(

There are 3 theories right now about this:

- It’s an anti bot measure that fails at life.
- It’s an intentional feature that protects 1990’s era server technology
-It’s a legitmate error that has been ignored by Arena Net.

Things that set it off:
-Selling items quickly.

Things that don’t set it off:
-Buying items as fast as possible with a mouse/keyboard
-Bidding on items as fast as possible with a mouse/keyboard

I find that it will get set off anywhere from 5-10 items depending on how fast you sell. I can get it to trigger 100% of the time no problem in 10 items or less.

Pfft, 1990s technology. Show me a transactional database that can do multiple thousands of insertions and deletions a second on moderately priced servers then you have a point. It’s the insertion into the TP DB and the removal from your character’s DB that is the costly part. Bidding is merely a subtraction of coin and creation of a bid and queries can be deferred slightly without a player noticing but making sure an item is properly moved between the two, preventing “dupes”, keeping a record to allow rollbacks and restoration.

They ain’t Amazon and it’s not running on some Linux box under someone’s desk but you seem to overestimate the performance of a modern database that can be pummeled during peak hours.