Saturday, October 08, 2022

A Couple Suggestions for the New World Trading Post

 One of my favorite parts of MMORPGs are the online markets that they host.  I love making a few virtual bucks buying low and selling high.  I played Guild Wars 2 and Albion Online for a long time just off flipping stuff on the market and turning the profit into silly things I didn't need for my characters.  With my current addiction still being New World I find myself in the same boat with it's auction house.  Here are a couple suggestions on how it could be improved.

The first suggestion is adding a couple more filters to the recently added filter page.  Filtering by perks, gear score, and attributes were all great adds but there is still a lot of hovering or sorting required to find exactly what is needed.  A couple filters being added would finish out the filters in my opinion.

  • First change: If I want to find only heavy armor I have to hover over each item to see its weight.  Adding an armor weight filter would solve this.
  • Second change: If I select an attribute filter of STR and CON then I have to sort through all the split stat gear that has, for example, CON + FOC when I just want STR/CON split stat gear.  Ideally a filter would be added that allows for "only these two split attributes".

After these changes, again, I think filters are nearly perfect.

Next I would advocate  for a better buy order system for specific armor and weapons.  The buy order system for the rest of the items in the game works fine but its not useful trying to find very specific gear.  While you can define perks + gear score minimum + attributes desired in the current buy orders there are three main issues.  

First, you have to specify a specific item instead of just a certain slot (for example; you have to say Defiled Gloves instead of just "all heavy armor gloves").  Then secondly finding the buy orders as a seller/crafter is near impossible due to having to look through all the specific items instead of a general category.  Third; placing buy orders for a larger sum of gold is prohibitively expensive and only lasts a set number of days.  Combine these together and you are better just spamming TRADE chat.

To fix this I would separate the buy orders for specific gear from the rest of the commodity market.  Create new screens and ways to view the buy orders and then a way to much more easily match your inventory to those buy orders.  For example; "show all great axe buy orders" so a crafter can determine what they may want to try and craft or another example "show all matching weapons I can sell" for a seller to click sell from a single screen.  

Remove fees for having a buy order posted and instead limit how many a single player can have at a time.  I'd keep the 1/3/7/14 day durations to ensure the trading post doesn't get clutter, but make it easy for a player to renew a listing instead of starting over.  Then have a fee only for when a sale is made.

New World has a unique gear system with a ton of variety.  Players can swap gear on the fly as needed for different content.  It is part of what I find makes New World so fun to play.  Helping match buy orders and sell orders to the right players would go a long way for everyone.  There is likely gear being salvaged as you read this that is the perfect piece some is desperately trying to find to buy and that is unfortunate.  The in-game market should connect that buyer and seller!

What do you think?  Leave a comment.

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