Operation of the Market.

[Oswalia]

Two constructive suggestions:

1> In a real market you are charged on completion, not on offer. Right now if you pay for a slot, then need to change your price, it costs you the slot money. This is making the market expensive to use and illiquid. The market is powerful feature, the game encourages us to use it, lets please make it efficient.

2> Peeps like to make many interesting offers of random stuff, but its difficult, as far as I can tell, to find that persons offers. Surely the ability to search on a name would add utility?

Offered constructively..

Os/

:)

[Kit_]

you can search by name, put their name in the search bar in TO.

[Oswalia]

So u can, ty Kit.

Os/

[Larili]

1> In a real market you are charged on completion, not on offer. Right now if you pay for a slot, then need to change your price, it costs you the slot money. This is making the market expensive to use and illiquid. The market is powerful feature, the game encourages us to use it, lets please make it efficient.


Indirectly you have given the reason why this suggestion has been rejected many times before. It would give rise to the TO being filled with `spam' and un thought out trades. You have a free slot ( x4) to get the price right, and can change it without costing you anything, The TO is working nicely as it is IMO, giving the Dev's a reason to break it is not a good idea ;)

[Oswalia]

@Larili: I would interested to see the discussion thread on this idea, a brief search came up with nada, but I may be searching the wrong keywords.

[Larili]

I put in `TO free slots' just now and got 70 hits ( most have nothing to do with the issue though :) ) I pulled this one of the first page

http://forum.thesettlersonline.com/threads/26405-I-d-like-to-have-more-free-slots-in-Trade-office/page2?highlight=free+slots

[Oswalia]

There's a confusion here, I am not suggesting altering the cost of additional slots, I am suggesting that payment is on trade completion rather than at listing. I think this would remove many 'bad' trades from the to. Players would actually have an incentive to move their price 'to market. Right now, if you have the wrong price, you've paid your slot price, so you may as well leave the 'bad' trade in place. This creates the to 'spam' you refer to.

[Larili]

I do not follow your logic, If their was no `penalty', at the time of placement, for putting up a poorly constructed trade which would not be bought, then players would put up tens or hundreds of trades just because they could, knowing they could leave them there for six hours with no cost to themselves other than the time it takes to place them.
Taken to extreme, this could mean a few individual `traders' giving the impression that `their prices' are the norm to the wider player community using TO, by simply flooding the TO with their sales.
The way it is constructed now, the more trades you put up, the more you have to pay, and the more you have to think whether your trades, further up the slot cost chain, are indeed worth the price you are offering ( + slot cost), if they are, then effectively those trades still do not cost you anything ;). The current system also ensures that each player is limited to one ( x4) free slots to `test' or place `frivolous' trades and not 10,20......which is what I refer to as spam.
I'm not sure what it is like over on Newfoundland, but on Sandycove, I see people getting upset when `traders', quite within the rules place long advertising trade lists in the trade chat channel. I'm not one of them as I can still choose to ignore it or not on the trade channel, but I'm afraid I would be one of them if I had to wade through pages of such on TO which in general is a part of the game.
Sorry but its still a `no thanks' for your idea from me :) Now if you suggest something which allows buffs to use the three extra slots, or a dedicated LS trading utility in the TO I'll give you a big +1 :)

[Dorotheus]

Paying upon completion opens up the possibility of offering a sale and then when the time comes to pay of not having the means to pay. How would you feel if the game suddenly took a load of gems to pay for your slots because system lag or a crash meant you was not able to open the loot mail containing the coins you was intending to pay for the slots with. What about the new player who down to lack of experience with the system has neither the gems or the coins to pay for all the slots they had just used.

[Oswalia]

Dorotheus's objection is easily addressed by charging a deposit at post, which would limit the potential trades. Deposit= slot charge, returnable at cancellation.

Larili's spam trade objection I think more robust. Surely increasing the marginal slot cost would address that abuse?