The Barter Area on test

[Sylphan]

Barter has been up on test for a few days. It's probably not too late to suggest a few changes, you might want to test it yourself. What do people think so far? Does it look good? Do you get lost in the maze of rooms? Have you found a purpose for the stables area?

For those who haven't seen it, I'll try to describe it.

In Bazaar you can say 'I want X money for Y item'. No other formats are available. People can find you by searching for item Y, or they can find you by searching for all items in a certain price range, or various other types of searches. You have no control over what quantity people buy. You may offer a full stack for sale, but you can't offer to sell it only as a full stack. If someone wants to buy just 3, or 12, or whatever, they can.

Now... in Barter you can say 'I want item A and I offer items B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K, plus L money'. Yes, you can put up as many as ten items (or ten stacks of items) for the single item you want. Or you can simply offer money for the items you want, which makes you seem more like a buyer than a barterer. People can find you by searching on item A, and there are no other searches.

You can specify a quantity of item A, but you can't offer to buy only that quantity. You may want 20 bone chips, but there's nothing to stop someone from coming by and selling you 3 bone chips, then someone else coming along and selling you 2 more, etc. Don't worry, it decrements your quantity-to-buy automatically after each purchase. Also it disables the line if you run out of money. For instance if you specify buying 20 bone chips at 1 plat each, and you only have 8 pp 3gp, the offer to buy will be disabled once you've purchased the first 8. It's really quite clever about not advertising impossible barters. It will not dip into your banked money.

While your character is sitting in a booth being a buyer, he doesn't eat or drink. Just like bazaar traders.

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It's important to note that the only possible format is 'I want item A and I offer items B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K, plus L money'.

You can't say 'I want Z money and I offer items B,C,D,E,etc'. You can only buy items, not plat.
You can only search on item A, not on B,C,D,etc.

So you can't offer, for instance, to receive 10K plat for a full set of ten solstice-robe items. Even if you could, people who wanted a set of solstise items still couldn't find you in search -- they can't search what you're offering, only what you want to buy.

Item A can only be a single item.

So you can't do clever newbie quests like 'bring me 2 bone chips, 2 medium quality cat pelts, and 10 muffins, and I'll give you a Bracer of Loyalty of Vox'. You can only do really simple single-item quests, such as 'bring me a Pristine Lion Skin and I'll give you this Earring of Fire Resistance'.

I doubt that buyers will offer to trade ingredients for completed combines. You'd need to have the completed item in order to get the ingredients, so it's really not equivelant to someone bringing you the ingredients for a combine. But people could offer to buy a tradeskill item and offer money -- which is still great for us, we can craft things on-demand as-needed, and have a guaranteed buyer.

[Claile]

I had a few issues with the Barter hall and sent in feed back. To me, imho, I see this as a dublicate of services. You can buy horses in stables. Wandering the hall I did notice all the TS stations. I also have issue with the ramps, they will slow POK and make for congested area, est the guld hall next to port in

[Sanadila]

One nice thing about the barter interface is that it loads everything in your inventory and tells you if someone is currently looking to buy that item.

EDIT: Woohoo....as I was typing the above reply, I made my first buy. 1 mammoth meat *laughs*. If this works out, I'm going to have to up my price for halas meat pies just a bit to cover buying the meats.

[fesc_necrado]

One nice thing about the barter interface is that it loads everything in your inventory and tells you if someone is currently looking to buy that item.

That's great..makes things easy.

My question is where is the barter area, I take it this area is seperate from the bazaar?

[Sanadila]

Yes. On Test, the guild hall is on the south side of the western trader building. The Barter Hall is on the north side. I don't think the guild halls are enabled yet on Test, but the barter hall is. Warning, though, it's not a clickable entrance. If you hit the right spot, it automatically zones you. If you approach the door from the side, you might miss the spot. If you run up the center of the ramp, you'll hit the zone in at the top.

One annoying thing, all the exits take you to the bazaar instead of back to PoK. I don't know if that's intentional or not. I also don't know if they'll be keeping the entrances in PoK. This is actually part of the new expansion that will be coming out. They just put it into Test early, probably because most people don't worry about buying and selling in Beta.

I have the feeling that they may be intending to merge the bazaar with the barter hall. All the venders from the Bazaar have been duplicated there as of the last patch, including the horse merchants and the spell merchant. I haven't looked around to see if the various quest npc's from the bazaar are in there or not. That may be problematic until it actually is merged, if that is what they are going to do. As of now, /trader doesn't work, but I'm checking it after every patch just in case.

[Sylphan]

I went so much into the technical that I forgot the important stuff.

The entrance to the barter zone is in a corner of PoK. One exit from the barter zone leads directly to the bazaar. There are several banks, an assortment of tradeskill containers, and lots of stalls for the traders to stand in, but I haven't seen any merchants there yet.

The barter search tool opens when you type /barter and is very similar to the bazaar search. Once you do a search you can right click a trader name to face him or use the 'find trader' button to show a path. There's even a 'hide traders' button. When you get there you right click him and choose to sell him something. Very bazaar-like.

The buyer window opens with /buyer. One section of it searches the whole EQ database, so you can offer to buy things you don't already have. After setting up the list of things you want to buy, you stand in a booth and click the 'start buyer' button. No special bags are needed. Quite similar to the bazaar, but in a 'want to buy' way instead of 'want to sell'. The big difference is that you can offer a collection of items for what you want, not just money.

[Ravenswood]

I really hope they merge the two areas; I'd hate to have to decomission another puppet to vendor-duty

[Laurelleii]

I have a question that kindof goes along with the above comment. Do you have to CHOOSE to be a buyer or a seller? Or can we set up one toon to both sell what we normally sell on our bazaar mules AND buy things we would like to watch for? Or are we all going to need another mule to do our buying?

[Sylphan]

Right now the barter zone and the bazaar zone are two seperate zones. You can't be in two zones at the same time so you can't be a buyer and a seller at the same time (unless you have two accounts).

[Sanadila]

As I said before, I think they may be heading to merging the two zones, but they haven't done so yet. The /trader command doesn't appear to work in the zone. I am hoping that they will merge the two functions so that you can buy and sell on the same toon at the same time. Otherwise, as you said, it will be a problem for anyone that doesn't have multiple accounts.

[Boleslav]

This is intriguing. I like the idea of being able to advertise that I want a certain item or items while off line.

I sell a lot of tradeskilled items in the bazaar. Currently, I run around checking for my component pieces in the bazaar regularly. I think this will tend to raise the bazaar prices of well known items. I would expect serious bazaar types to be aware of barter asking prices and price their goods accordingly.

I see this especially being the case with tradeskill component items. A trader can set up something of a standing offer to buy certain components at price levels that let them make a profit. So you will likely never see those items below wherever that price gets set for long again.

I hope that the zones get merged too. Even if I still need two accounts to be both a trader and a barterer at the same time, having ttem in the same zone will make shuffling items and money between the toons much simpler.

Boleslav Forgehammer
Paladin of Brell in his 66th Campaign
E'ci – Sacred Destiny

[Tanker]

Well, you guys can now see what I was referring to in my post in this thread. The Barter system gives you a great tool for collecting components at the prices you want to pay. Simply put yourself up as "buying" spider silk at 3g a piece (or whateve they go for these days ) and wait for people with silk to burn to dump them on you instead of the NPC merchants.

We hope those of you on test will give it a thorough once-over looking for bugs, etc. We put it up on Test as well as Beta before launch in the hopes of getting as much testing as possible.

For those of you wondering how the system works, please hop onto test and visit the Barter zone for yourself. The bazaar analogous commands are "/barter" = "/bazaar" and "/buyer" = "/trader" to bring up the windows, and each of them have a ? button in the upper right that'll bring up help on how to use the system.

[Laurelleii]

Though it would be simpler to use one toon for both things, I can live with creating another toon to do my buying. I do agree that the merging of the bazaar and the Barter zone does definitely need to happen for the two to mesh as intended. Not only would it make it much easier for those of us who will be using two toons for buying/selling but it will encourage those would normally just throw up their trader to seek a buyer first instead. I don't think everyone would go thru the trouble to zone over to do it. Especially if there will be weight issues when carrying large amounts of plat back and forth.

[Tanker]

Couple other things:

- Weight is not an issue in either the Bazaar or the Bartering Quarter. Encumbrance does not slow you down in these zones. There are also Bankers in each zone.

- We thought about putting them in the same zone, but had to decide against it for several technical reasons not the least of which was that the bazaar zone was already overworked just handling bazaar people (and their searches, etc.). Potentially doubling the number of players in that zone was worrying. Having 2 zones where you could do both wasn't a great answer, either, as people would gravitate to one or the other, creating one full and one empty zone.

[Trellium]

I like the bazaar, and I like the new barter system. There are things that I would very much like to get in /buyer mode, but I really would like to see the two zones either merged in to one, or at least have them zone in to each other. Trading/buying/selling in separate areas would be a big pain ... its already annoying me on Test, lol.

The reason they might not put the bazaar and traders together is that they are from different expansions. So, its the zones that are blocking you from bartering. I would rather see /barter, /buyer, /bazaar, and /trader commands themselves be checked to see if you have the expansion, rather than zone limitations which forces people to go to different areas just because they offer things from different expansions.

I also think they would sell more expansions ... if you can get oooo so close to seeing all the trading going on, but the /barter and /buyer commands don't work for you.

BUT:

I think its annoying that I can't buy bonechips (or whatever) from people unless both they and I have "the NEWEST!!!!(tm) expansion". Why not let everyone have access, but not let them go in to /buyer mode without the expansion? Automation of a buyer is new to EQ, but the concept of walking up to an NPC or PC to sell an item is not.

Buying, selling, and trading are things that have been promoted in EQ since before it was even released. For someone to be able to both buy and sell (oo -ah! The technology!!) game items would require the original game plus two expansions. Is it just me or does this seem a bit strange?

Or, is the barter zone going to be generally available?