112977-worst-broker-system-of-any-mmo-in-20-years

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Well done on creating the most frustrating broker for both selling and buying in my history of MMO gaming.
 
Buying a big stack of anything for crafting takes about 5 minutes as you have to buy in stacks of 1-5, and you always lose count on the ammount purchased.
 
Selling is just a gamble of undercutters and chancers making way undervalue buy orders.
 
I know its still early days but this game had the longest beta test i think ive ever heard of for an mmo.
 
Its the first mmo in a long time where i feel i actually might of had enough before the free month sub runs out.... impressive!
 
 	
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			I would agree if I didn't play ESO before this, which has no broker system at all, but yeah I still agree mostly. I really hear you. I played EQ2 as well(your avatar is a ratonga) and I think we were spoiled by the broker there. It really is quite amazing. For example, one of the things that absolutely drives me insane is that with Carbine's system if I look up "tree" it will tell me there are too many matches and dismiss me where as I remember doing the same in EQ2 and being able to sift through sometimes dozens if not a hundred pages of various trees. Seriously Carbine... if I'm looking up tree in your broker it's because I don't know what type of trees there are available, and I wish to browse. Your system assumes I know exactly what I want and in the case of housing that's a little silly.. but yeah.	
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Well done on creating the most frustrating broker for both selling and buying in my history of MMO gaming.
 
Buying a big stack of anything for crafting takes about 5 minutes as you have to buy in stacks of 1-5, and you always lose count on the ammount purchased.
 
Selling is just a gamble of undercutters and chancers making way undervalue buy orders.
 
I know its still early days but this game had the longest beta test i think ive ever heard of for an mmo.
 
Its the first mmo in a long time where i feel i actually might of had enough before the free month sub runs out.... impressive!
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Just enter 200 into the buy order tab at the maximum price you're willing to pay (above or at least matching the current lowest sell order, obviously).
The system will automatically buy everything within that price range at the appropriate prices (so you're not losing platinum by paying "too much").
Voila, 1-click 200 stack buying.
 
You're welcome.
 
Yeah it's a terrible UI, but I'm always surprised when people complain about bulk buying as if it were impossible. -_-	
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I would agree if I didn't play ESO before this, which has no broker system at all, but yeah I still agree mostly. I really hear you. I played EQ2 as well(your avatar is a ratonga) and I think we were spoiled by the broker there. It really is quite amazing. For example, one of the things that absolutely drives me insane is that with Carbine's system if I look up "tree" it will tell me there are too many matches and dismiss me where as I remember doing the same in EQ2 and being able to sift through sometimes dozens if not a hundred pages of various trees. Seriously Carbine... if I'm looking up tree in your broker it's because I don't know what type of trees there are available, and I wish to browse. Your system knows assumes I know exactly what I want and in the case of housing that's a little silly.. but yeah.
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Just enter 200 into the buy order tab at the maximum price you're willing to pay (above or at least matching the current lowest sell order, obviously).
The system will automatically buy everything within that price range at the appropriate prices (so you're not losing platinum by paying "too much").
Voila, 1-click 200 stack buying.
 
You're welcome.
 
Yeah it's a terrible UI, but I'm always surprised when people complain about bulk buying as if it were impossible. -_-
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This must be your first MMO.
 
 
You can easily buy stacks of stuff with buy orders (which is kinda dumb but not some "omg" big deal).
 
If you're going to pin undercutting on the game then I hate to break it to you but undercutting has been an issue since the very first auction house was ever introduced into the very first MMO.	
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			You're right OP. It is the worse. Doable, but horrible.	
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			The only game I've played where undercutting wasn't a big issue was gw2. I suspect that was the case for two reasons. One, the system is anonymous, and two the broker was game wide even before the inclusion of a megaserver. I think the ability to fill buy orders helped too. You knew exactly what people were willing to pay. I'm not saying there was no undercutting, far from it. Just that in basic things like resources, normal armour, etc, the game prices seem more stable than most I'd played.	
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			Think there's an addon for this.  I use a few CX/AH addons here and there to improve the base system but I recall there being some kind of bulk buy addon.	
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I suspect that was the case for two reasons. One, the system is anonymous, and two the broker was game wide even before the inclusion of a megaserver. .
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Ahh, okay.. fair enough. I had completely forgetten about that. I had been thinking that posting stuff in Wildstar seemed strangely cheap, and now I know why. :)
 
Oh, as to why anonymous is a good thing. I learned this in rift. I have never been a huge auction house person, but my fiance is. He would spend hours a day listing and making stuff to sell, that's all he did. He would quite literally get into wars with other sellers who annoyed him, or ones that were annoyed with him. If he saw a name that was a "rival" he would go out of his way to undercut said rival and get his stuff sold first, and said rival would do the same thing. I swear.. it would be an hour of him listing it at one price, other person lists it at a different price one minute later, so he lists his at a different price, and then another minute later... add nauseum. A system where you can't see names doesn't necessarily curb the undercutting, but it can curb the unnecessary ego trips.	
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			Oh yeah I agree about the anonymity... my point was Wildstar is also anonymous. You can see who's standing in front of the AH/CX, but you have no definite way of knowing who's undercutting what at any point in time.	
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			Ahh, okay, fair enough. :)	
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The CX kinda works very much like entering a limit order for a stock with a broker.  Not hard once you understand the concept, but maybe it just makes more sense to me because I work in that industry.
 
Basically, you tell them how much you want to buy, and the highest price you want to pay for it (the bid), and they fill the order starting at the lowest prices they can get. 
 
Conversely, if you want to sell, you tell them how much you want to sell and the lowest price you're willing to accept (the ask), and they'll fill the order at the highest prices they can get.  
 
Orders generally stay open until filled or cancelled, or you can specify a specific end date when you place the order (which may result in you not getting the entire quantity)
 
Brokers usually charge a commission for their services which covers the fees that the exchanges charge the brokers for executing the orders, as well as the broker's operating costs, etc.  This gets charged regardless of whether or not your order gets filled.	
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The wildstar broker is great.
 
Admittedly the buy now option kinda sucks, but if you understand the broker and use it as it's intended it's fantastic.
 
The issues lie in the filters sucking for the AH. When items can be created with the same name and entirely different stats, I want to be able to search for items with 100+ brut(not 3) and 3+ rune slots, but I need to wade through every single item of the type I want, even though  half of them only have a couple of runes or were made with a medic in mind.	
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Buy Now refuses to buy the stack if the higher priced items exceed your bid.  My Buy Now wishlist:
A mode that would buy as many of the requested stack size as it can given the bid price.	Additional averages for 100 and 200 pieces.	A mode where if you use the average at or above your stack size would buy the stack. (see note)	A mode where it would buy as many as it can given a pot of money (Manual version of #3).
Note: You want 40, you enter the 50's average.  If the average was correct, the pot of money collected should cover the cost of the entire order.	
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The broker system works great; I like it more than any other broker system I've ever seen. I remember when EverQuest started its trading system, you think this is bad?—Listen up; let me enlighten you about what a lot of these problems are really about, and it isn't the broker system that's at fault. The people playing the game are making the trading system over complicated; people are listing items under vendor prices for one, for two, the game is two months old and I’m sure it’s still something they’re working on, be glad you even have it. There are many other things people are doing that further complicate the markets, things I won’t be describing here.I'm sure at some point Carbine will start creating more rules for you all practicing these bad behaviors, out of what's been termed altruism, and I'm sure whatever is driving people towards listing items under vendor prices is anything but altruistic in nature, just look at your in-game behavior, it would be a good indicator of your motivations in my opinion.
 
I'd be willing to wager they're casual players trying to drive prices down in every market by practicing these marketing strategies, because they either don't farm or have much materials of their own and they want to ruin it for anyone who does.The system is fine; it's the people using the system that are the problem. 	
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 I remember when EverQuest started its trading system, you think this is bad?
 
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There is nothing wrong with the Wildstar's broker system except for,
Entering money is extremely inconvenient and dangerous by default due to having to enter it in coppers. It took a long time until someone made an addon that uses currency fields but its well worth it even though it can be buggy (BetterMoneyInput). This should be core functionality, imo.	CX: the Buy Now is highly unintuitive or even broken because the default price is not the Best Offer price but the 50th worst price (Top 50 price).	CX: I had to download and learn to use an addon in order to set useful default prices for Orders (Commodity Stats addon), otherwise I would have to fiddle with prices on every single order.	AH: runes are at the heart of Wildstar's progression (a bit too much too be honest), yet there are no ways to filter for rune count or multiple runes in the AH. I had to download an addon (AuctionHouseRunes) just to be able to browse, not filter, runes with gear without having to look in detail at pages full of every single gear item.	AH: there is a fixed set of gear Specials in the game. Some of them can make a significant difference to output or specific circumstances. Yet there is no way to search for them.	AH: the ability to browse certain categories is immensely limited, e.g. bag slot count under Bags and types of decor/improvements under Housing and Warplot.	CX and AH: the ability to list only 25 items is surprisingly limiting, especially for the CX. It makes it very difficult to scale up certain strategies for making gold. This can be both a good thing and a bad thing, depending on perspective.
Apart from these issues, the core of Wildstar's centralized broker system is actually impressive. Having played many MMOs, including extremely painful systems from games like ESO or Neverwinter Online, this is one of the fastest/best performing and usable I have seen. With support from a few addons, you can have a functional and convenient system for buying and selling your items.
 
The split between CX and AH is also interesting and may be one of the reasons for higher performance. It is a shame it is not exploited more for that and other reasons. For example, I believe there is at least one settler station in the world that appears to offer a temporary CX (not AH) for selling stuff you have picked up during questing - whether it works or not is another matter, but the core idea is sound and should have been extended imo, say into the daily zones.
 
The core difficulty for some players is that Wildstar's CX uses a realistic trading system, i.e. bid/offer order system. This is not common at all in MMOs and can be a bit tricky to wrap your head around the first time. But once you do, you'll understand its power and convenience, not just for players but for devs too - which is useful for future feature improvements, maintenance and scaling. For example, transitioning from a realm system to a megaserver system, as planned for Wildstar, would be extremely difficult with the economic systems used in other MMOs, but relatively straightfoward with Wildstar's order system by comparison.	
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			Just want to say thanks to those who mentioned how the buy order stuff worked. I've never played a MMO with this system and the buy now is a bit frustrating, but using the buy order makes much more sense now that it's been explained.	
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Not the bazaar.... oh the nightmares of that zone, at least they had it all in one zone and not like Anarchy Online..................................
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Head down, don't look up... oh, and have fun dragging thousands of coppers to the bank to trade them in for gold and silver after you've parked your merchant for the night...
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I agree that the out-of-the-box Carbine AH interface leaves a lot to be desired, especially in terms of filtering. I've only just started using the AH looking for decor items, and it's infuriating when you don't know the exact name of the item.  Maybe I just want to browse all "Exile" items, but I can't do that because there are too many items and the GUI can't display them all.
 
I'm interviewing addons to make this a better experience for me.
 
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AH: the ability to browse certain categories is immensely limited, e.g. bag slot count under Bags and types of decor/improvements under Housing and Warplot.
 
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Oh gosh.. my hyperbole magnet missed this thread.  Worst in two decades?  Let me think back two decades.. that's before EverQuest 1 so OP must be referring to MUDs which I believe were a text interface, so this one - even with flaws - is better.
 
EverQuest 1.. the original AH was a tunnel in East Commonlands, where you'd have to stand there and spam the /auction channel with what you were selling.  There was no interface.  There was no offline selling.  Just /auction WTS a bag full of junk by Torch 3.. come on by!"  and browsing meant placing bags in Trade so you could look inside them at the actual items.
 
It was several years before they implemented a market-style where you could leave your PC parked (online) and be browsed as a merchant.  That still required you to have your computer on and connected to the game to sell stuff.
 
EQ2 and WoW started the offline selling broker/AH stuff around 2004.  So please cut your inflated hyperbole criticism to be the last 10 years, not 20.  Thanks much.
 
That said, yes, the Wildstar AH/CX have definite room for improvement, which I am hoping comes with their QOL "we listened to your feedback" changes in Drop 3.	
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What the-
You had to manually exchange currencies?! Hahahah oh wow and I thought this game had some serious "who thought this was a good idea" features.  :lol:
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Just enter 200 into the buy order tab at the maximum price you're willing to pay (above or at least matching the current lowest sell order, obviously).
The system will automatically buy everything within that price range at the appropriate prices (so you're not losing platinum by paying "too much").
Voila, 1-click 200 stack buying.
 
You're welcome.
 
Yeah it's a terrible UI, but I'm always surprised when people complain about bulk buying as if it were impossible. -_-
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