Marketplace : Bazaar replacement (WIP)

[circuitdragon]

It would be a bit of doing on the GMs part, but just as a though, its it harder to have NPCs for sale? By this I mean, players either buy or rent NPCs in the game. Each player can then trade items to this merchant, and set prices. This way all trading would be done in game, with or without clients online. Possible issues with this though would be lag if say, 300 "merchants" were being placed in the bazaar...but I've no real clue as to how much lag one standing NPC could generate. Just a thought though...but if thats going to have a lot of issues and or become far to complex, your idea sounds awesome just as well.

[AndMetal]

I think this would be an excellent compromise for Bazaar functionality.

In my head, I personally think it would be best to incorporate in-game commands to move items you want to sell into a "bank" (read: a separate table in the DB, maybe called trader_items or something like that), then manipulate everything out of the game, through a web interface. For buyers, you could then send money to your trader account via an in-game command (kinda like a PayPal account) to buy items. Once you buy items, you could then either keep them in your bank until you remove them with another in-game command, or have it automatically put into the first available slot in your inventory or in-game bank.

The reason I think that would be the better way to do it is because characters' money is stored in the profile blob. It is only loaded from the database when loading into the server, so if someone is already logged in and you try to update it, they wouldn't actually lose any money for the transaction. And unless you use the built-in web server, you can't easily find out if someone's logged in or not (unless you use the telnet commands, which is kinda messy).

Luckily, the inventory stuff is all in tables in the database, so that's easy enough to manipulate directly via a web page (and is updated into the database real-time by the server).

Anyways, some stuff to think about...

[ChaosSlayer]

I have not read original post in great detail, but thinking how eq2 market works, here general idea layout, how I see the principle.

1. A Db will recieve a new table called BAZAAR (or market)
2. All players will have access to special command like /bazaar (or /market) or posibly #market.
Inside that command players can: add item to the market listing with a price, or search for items offered.
#market add ITEMID PRICE (perhaps dragging icon link into comand line text box woudl work?)
#market REMOVE ITEMID (your own item only of course)
#market listitems (or search for by various options.)
#market BUY ITEMID

One player ADDS the item to the market it is REMOVED from players inventory or bank (or perhaps make a rule item MUST be on a corsor or soemthiogn liek FIRST inventory slot) and a new row is added to the MARKEt table

The MARKEt table will need to have following collumns:

listing_id, itemid, item_name, player_id (seller), price, quantety

When players buys an item, cash is removed from his person, item is removed from the market and put onto buyers cursor, and cash them is added to sellers bank

so in conclsuion - players inside the game can add, remove their own items to the market, and buy them.


The way I see - such structure works no diffirently than build in Gm comands.
No need to stand alone add-ons

Of course my understanding of EMU code only goes so deep, but this seems like simply enough general concept.

Oh yeah - server admin should be bale to restrict access to market for exmaple to specific zones.

[AndMetal]

Chaos, I think you and I have the same idea, except mine would also incorporate web interaction, but most of the functionality is there for adding money, moving items, etc, so adding the commands shouldn't be too difficult (knock on wood).

[ChaosSlayer]

Originally Posted by AndMetal

(knock on wood).

honestly I am a fan of Ec Tunnel style trading - speicaly with small player communities we have, but heck why not =)

PS. posibly coders can actualy use the real bazaar search window for this, since its allready there

[Bulle]

Having quest NPCs to play the "auction guy" for you would not be easy. The main question is : how do you search for an item you want to buy ? If you have ever tried Shards of Dalaya, then you will understand the problem : you can only scan through what an entire server worth of people have for sale. Unless you spend one or two hours a day doing that, you just forget about it and never browse. So people have to advertise, and you are back to the OOC/SHOUT/CHANNEL drawing board, you have just simplified the transaction process, not the whole trading.

As I see it you need an out-of-game mechanism for browsing/buying (until the bazaar opcodes are fixed at the very least). Hence the "e-commerce" site idea. EQBrowser for browsing, one page for buying. The rest can be pretty much anything.

Once you have that in mind, you can view all the other ideas as alternate (and possibly the most popular) interaction methods with the marketplace when it comes to sending/receiving items. Remember that ensuring proper transaction security with in-game transfers can be tricky, it is all in real-time, and many things happen in-game, anytime.In addition, although I can easily commit code to an out-of-emulator tool, I cannot do the same for EQEmu...

When you think about it the plan is quite clear : make it an out-of-game tool fully, with proper locking mechanisms described for the new marketplace tables. Make it sturdy through testing. Then EQEmu developers/contributors can add in-game commands to interact properly with the database tables and add in-game interaction. As long as they follow a few basic rules the database commands to pass should not be hard to write. The tough parts are ensuring no-one can cheat the system, and making it user-friendly (not so easy when all you have is a cursor and a command-line !).

[ChaosSlayer]

ability to search for items is allready in the code of EQEMu - gm command #itemsearch

all you need to chage is to use same script to search a diffirent table =) (the market table)
so you don't realy need MUCh in terms of interface - show list of items, add, remove, buy

and yes testing that there are no bugs is a whole separate story =)

PS no way to comand eq bazaar window to work for us?