This is actually orthogonal to an auction house. It's a cheap, easy, low-impact fix for the problem of "tradespam is annoying." An auction house is a notable more complicated, somewhat more difficult, *much* higher impact fix for "buying and selling is annoying." The two really have surprisingly little to do with one another.

And if someone is spamming the general chats with tradespam, you can report them via complain - and if they're being complained about by a significant fraction of the people in the general chat, they're not all that likely to be spamming the general chat for all that long. It's not god business, and so people (for the most part) won't do it.

Well, I'm not so sure that an auction house will get implemented anytime soon. Over at their other game, Puzzle Pirates, people have been asking for an auction house for years by now..

If that's true, then they really have to improve the trade channel. I haven't been online since the update, but from what I hear, it's still instanced. Which means they only solved half of the problem. Sure, people who were annoyed by the spam can be happy now, but the traders still have the problem of having to Haven-hop to reach everybody who might be interested.

Perhaps they could add something like the inn in PP, a place where all those who are willing to sell / buy can go (Trade-Haven or something)?

Most people I saw this morning weren't spamming /1, and when they were, someone pointed it out and they corrected themselves. (Not everyone reads patch notes I guess.)

If they were to add a central trade hub, they would require a better server to do it. The reason they have everyone split up right now is to avoid lag amongst the populace.

Yeah, the trade channel isn't the best solution in the world, but it does have a benefit. It slows down the rate of depreciation on items. If you look at games with auction house systems, items drop in price very quickly as people strive to undercut and undercut until people are hardly making anything on common items at all. With the system in place, people have to do research if they want a fair price, and have to shop around. It's like malls vs. Amazon.com. Malls (the trade channel) were able to keep prices high and compete until Amazon.com (pseudo auction house for our purposes) came in and drove prices down. Amazon makes profits by selling volume, whereas malls have to make money by selling quality goods at upscaled prices.

It would be nice to know whether the Devs are listening about an auction house and whether or not they're even considering implementing one. Either way, it would be nice to know so we don't wait in anticipation for something that will never come :)

Good to hear! I assumed as much, but it's always nice to get a line back.

(It does make me feel a little awkward socially about the "ridiculous" line, but, well, there it is).

Thing is, I *know* you folks, as a team, are good at mechanisms like this. I played Puzzle Pirates a fair bit - I've run shops, and transported raw materials from one island to another, gambled away big stacks and won them (okay, I lost a lot more than I won), tried to beat the market on cannonballs... And it was worth every penny I spent on that game.

Over here, it's also well worth throwing down a few bucks, for the crazy smash-em-up joy of clockwork running. You've done something that is smooth and happy-joy-making in the vast majority of respects. It's a good game, even a *great* game, with a few little bugs, and one big one. That one big glitch is trade.

Taking those things together, I'm just baffled. When I get annoyed at trade, I keep thinking "But... but... It's Three Rings! They're *awesome* at this!"

Another vote for a system like the energy market (which you obviously think is a good system since it's been used in every OOO game since doubloon oceans were launched for puzzle pirates).

In fact, exactly like the energy market. The same interface, just with an extra page before the exchange itself which is exactly like the arsenal but showing every item in the game which can be traded.

Or a little different, you could add the offer to sell to the arsenal and have no buy offers at all in the market, just a list with the lowest offer for each item. This makes pricing a guessing game when demand exceeds supply but discourages playing the market, as I'm sure OOO would prefer us to be in the clockworks.

This isn't like puzzle pirates where there would be a flood of tan rags. Everything in this game is useful to someone.

Edit: damn, posted in the wrong thread somehow.