Shiny new topic. Ooooh.
Anyhow, I've heard this term thrown around a bit and is it true that, come release, we'll have ourselves a market for materials? A way of auctioning them to other players? I expected that, but didn't really miss it. So anybody?
From what I've seen/heard it's something the devs are looking into exploring but the actual mechanism hasn't been decided yet. We might not get it by release, but then again, we got PvP pretty quickly after we first heard they were working on it. So you never know!
The developers make a habit of not telling us about everything they have in store for us, because the game is still so much in flux that plans are quite likely to change before features finally get implemented. That's why you usually don't hear about their plans to implement things until such plans are quite concrete. As in, they've started working on it and it looks like it will be implemented soon, in a specific fashion; then they dare to mention it. :)
Features to improve trading have been mentioned very carefully; it doesn't seem anything is currently in the works for this. You could discuss it on the Suggestions forum though, I bet there's plenty of people with great ideas about it.
Though they already mentioned what they'll do for the next update, so don't expect it too soon. A more robust crafting system would be nice though... It's all a bit too obvious and bland.
I personally like the current trading system. It promotes player to player interaction, which is good. Auction houses are rather impersonal and uninteresting, from my experience with other MMOs.
From my experience with other MMOs, sitting around in town to try and sell your items takes up about as much game time as you spent getting those items. If there were an option to sell things at a market/auctionhouse, you could still do that ;) but I wouldn't have to.
I asked a Gm in the game once, and he said that it's something they want to do in the future, but for the near future it's not something that has high priority. It was something to that effect.
So that's saying they may well do it eventually, nice one. Thanks guys!
So far it's just player - player trades? I wouldn't mind having some sort of an auction house though. From experiences at Puzzle Pirates, having to stand around for ages spamming the same "Selling ...." message over and over again is really frustrating and time-consuming.