Although the trade chat is indeed pretty damn ridiculous right now, changes should be done to the uses and rarity of materials and the such before an auction house is created.

Simply look at material prices - People are simply desperate and just keep crashing their market more and more. And that's with the crazy trade chat that nobody can keep up with. Now, consider that there are several players saving their materials and items for when the auction house is released. The prices will simply crash to ridiculous amounts - Some people might even go as far as to sell it for just slightly more than the vendor price, even though it'd cost you 4x more crowns to make that item.

Materials aren't very needed in the game right now - Most of the focus is on CE and crowns. There are no sinks, and crafting requires very little - After you have made your five stars, it's very likely that you won't ever need some specific materials again. And considering it's already pretty easy to reach five stars, and materials are so common, there's a pretty much infinite supply, and ridiculously low demand.

Additionally, with an auction house, all those players that have been sitting back will be able to earn crowns much faster, and thus with a bigger supply of crowns, CE is going to sell even more and the prices will raise.

In my opinion, if the auction house is released and nothing is done to balance the market of materials/energy, the result won't be very pretty. Right now, it's probably better to just be patient and put some effort into trading. Maybe you can even get some nice sales! coughscamsomenewbiescough

I feel prices are way too high right now to begin with and people are far too greedy.

But that's wrong its actually the other way around, people are selling items in the gray line between profit & loss because they're desperate for extra income, the material market itself is bunkers having one or 2 materials sell often while others never sell, the only thing keeping it alive is because UVs are the "hot thing" right now so a lot of people are buying in bulks.

Then you have ThreeRings amazing decision making, Nerfing Jelly king and causing and over-saturation of his weapons in the market as well as placing rare materials with actual market worth on the token vendor as soon as one player complains,etc.

The only real way to "profit" right now for the Average joey is through UVs, thats mostly a gamblers market unless you have the capital to heavily invest in a % to make a profit.So you have normal items being sold at pathetically low prices and a few items(UVs, Rare Items,etc) going for incredibly large figures

Some of the $paying players, buy (exchange) Crowns, because they want to buy a recipe/made-weapon/trade-items etc. But the Auction House, would let them raise plenty of Crowns for this, just by selling their surplus stuff. So, a lot of these energy transactions would no longer take place, or much less frequently. This shortage of people wanting to buy crowns with CE energy, would tend to significantly increase the crowns needed to buy CE with.

Players ($free) wanting to buy CE with Crowns, would have considerably more crowns available, as they would sell their unwanted stuff on the Auction House, again, this would significantly increase the Crowns cost of CE.

So, overall, we may see a considerable increase in the cost of buying CE with Crowns, with much fewer players actually selling CE, in the first place.

The (partial) counter argument to this, is that when you e.g. Do a complete run of tier 1, you will not only get the approx 4K Crowns of direct cash, but would also get very approximately (depending on AH market) 2k/3k crowns by selling surplus stuff from the tier 1 run in the AH.

Also, another partial counter, is that you will be able to buy items that you need, cheaper (in general) using the AH, which will give you more Crowns left over to buy CE with.

Anyway markets are highly complicated things to determine (otherwise we would all make $1,000,000's from the stock market, as we could predict what the most valuable shares would be in the future).
Presumably/Hopefully if there were any MAJOR market problems, after the introduction of an Auction House, three rings could adjust the various costs/limits of things, to rebalance the market, back to a working one.

>>> Nothing should be as much of a pain in the ass as trade chat.

Yes, agreed.
The trade chat could be improved by including which Heaven number (and ideally which area) the message is coming from (Trade 2, xyzplayerxyz, Heaven 3 - Bazaar, WTS 1*..4*). It could also be improved by allowing some kind of /filter command, so that only (sub)stirngs that you specify are shown.
Then instead of a far too rapidly scrolling window, you can limit it to just 'WTB', 'iron gear' or 'blue shards' etc.
Hopefully such improvements to the user interface, would be considerably quicker than the full AH implementation. I.e. A quick-fix for the trade chat, followed by full AH later.

I feel that the inefficiencies of the trade-chat creates opportunities for the savvy, observant, and focused trader to excel. The fact that the trade chat is so cumbersome allows me the opportunity to better juggle it than others, creating a competitive advantage i can use. The fact that i can follow many leads, and mentally keep tabs on who wants what, means that i can be a better trader than other people (although i am sure there are those better than me as well).

Once the auction house goes up, all that will be washed away by rock-bottom prices being available for viewing at any given time.

I say embrace what you have while you are stuck with it. Realize that the current trade chat creates a unique opportunity for you to trade with an advantage over others. I see so many people taking pride in being better than some one else at the combat, not dying in a run, never rezzing, managing CE, etc--just realize the current trade chat gives you a chance to do the same thing with trading.

Time is money, friend!

Auction house UI is already in the game files.

Not sure why some people are crying about not wanting an Auction House due to the fact that it will crash the market or make things sell for crazy low prices... It's going to happen sooner or later and majority of the people rather have it sooner.

We need a second source of income anyway. Players who don't buy CE are stuck running missions, then spending the crowns they earned on more energy just to keep running missions and not making as much profit as players who do buy CE. The AH will add another source of income which will help new players and veteran players make more crowns at a faster pace.

The prices of materials have dropped dramatically in the past few weeks as everyone can tell... When I started playing Flame Souls, Shadow Steel, and Sun Silver were worth 20-25k Crowns, now they are down to 10-12k. This shows that the so called "Market Crash" is already here.

An Auction House will most likely make a lot of items drop in value for the first couple of weeks, but then the prices will go back to normal... (whatever the normal will be) I personally refuse to sit in town for 20-30mins+ and try and filter through all the trade chat just to see what people are buying and selling. I might make a quick "WTS Blah blah blah" and then start a mission, but I don't see the point in wasting time filter through chat when you could be grinding item levels and farming materials / crowns for when the AH does come.

Overall the Auction House needs to get here. I've notice the games population dropping over the past few weeks as well. I can only imagine why... Derp!

Off Topic - If they wanted to make trade chat easier for players to use, they should of added chat tabs like any other MMORPG. this would make the trade chat easier to filter since you can spam in trade, then check a second tab for whispers.

Auction house will put prices into perspective. People love to forget untapped potential crafting players. And yes there's still a delta of 1k ce for selling made 5* items. Yes there's people willing to buy materials for personal crafting but cant be bothered with purchasing em. I'd go as far as to say most of all current traders are dedicated players. AH at least allows casual players to purchase items/materials/recipes.

So 3rings will check some statistics and prices, release an auction house, check after that and a week later, and things work out or they adjust things as needed. Remember when people were trading philoso feathers for 50-100k, they DID give us a predefined ghost t3 stratum (without announcing it anywhere but if you checked the to be made gate you could see it), and DID add philoso feather to the token trader a week later.

@ajericho, i strongly suggest you give the trade-chat a try. Just look for WTB followed by something that you feel you can part with. Pick an arbitrary number of crowns you feel comfortable with as compensation for that item, and whisper the person. I easily raised 10k in 10 minutes when i needed it. Don't just assume 30 minutes is not long enough to accomplish anything. I can tell you from personal experience as well that there is a rewarding feeling to making 2-3-4 times as much money in 30 minutes of trade-chat as u can in a dungeon. It is it's own unique type of fun. It even makes me enjoy my dungeoneering more because i see those mats i pick-up and i know i have plans for them. If you've given it a try and hate it, by all means avoid it. If you have not given it an honest chance, please do so, it can be tons of fun in its own right.

@jeburk, I've actually done it in the recent past to obtain my current set of 4* gear, as well as the Silent Nightblade recipe, and thus that's why I actually can talk about my opinion of the experience—which is that it took me far more than half an hour for each piece. If I hadn't been lucky and gotten an off weekend, I probably wouldn't have anything for my troubles.

Not to mention that, for some reason, while there were quite a bit advanced Flourish line recipes being sold, not one single person was actually selling the Flourish recipe itself during the times I was on. If I hadn't stumbled across one on a random Basil visit (and I've not seen it since) I would be missing out on a quite fun weapon. It seems to me like we could use more supply, because very few people currently using trade chat seem willing to spend excess time in trade chat selling a 1k crown recipe, even though it was entirely necessary in order to entertain the idea of getting the rest of the Flourish line at all.

And there's nothing wrong with that, with the way things are; but it's one of the potential wins that an auction house would give even to those who sell all the time on trade chat.