A(nother?) Trading System solution

I doubt this will go anywhere but I figured, "why not?".

From the little I've gathered, GGG's goals with an in-game trading system is to slow down trading, prevent instant buy-outs, and retain the premium stash tab's purpose and utility. The community's desires, while valued, are secondary to these requirements - else, we would already have our auction house. Retaining player interaction is also a consideration. If I'm wrong on any of these points, I very much welcome being corrected.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmKcEkzSo0k&feature=youtu.be&t=1417

In this podcast, Chris says they toyed around with the idea of a forsaken master player-shop but tabled it because of instant indexing. If instant indexing is undesired (and thus instant buy-outs), I can only assume their purpose is to slow down trading for the purposes of player retention.

Given these requirements, I thought of a possible compromise for an automated player-shop that satisfies the previously listed parameters:

The following paragraph lists the default enabled options allowed to players in their forsaken master shop (i.e. non-premium tabs). Instead of having player shops have instant buy-outs the shops would allow for open auctions with an optional minimum starting bid set by the player - the bidding system would allow offers of mixed currencies. The lister, at their leisure, can check offers on their item and reply to a bidder if desired for trade. Such a system would encourage players to wait on selling high-valued rares in hopes of getting the highest offer possible.

A premium stash tab can offer more powerful tools for the lister to automate certain aspects of trading such as offering the option to enable "hidden auctions" for select listings. I haven't yet thought of other advantages that premium tabs could provide but suggestions are welcome.



An independent idea - Item Emporiums
Something that could work in tandem with the previous compromise is unique worldspaces dedicated to trading. Players in search of items could go into, for example, the body armour emporium and hang with other prospective buyers around, say, 3 notice boards (armour, evasion, ES) that index player shops and have filters similar to those on poe.trade. The key difference between the current system and this one is that the main method of interaction would be through bids and, possibly, a comment system enabled for each item. By default, highly-viewed items would be listed first in the spirit of aggressive competition between buyers. The bulk of Player Interaction™ will occur between competing buyers through local chat or an item's individual comment board (should it exist).


This is something I thought of pretty quickly and is likely riddled with problems I haven't thought of. As any suggestion, this can be a basis for a more fleshed-out implementation. Any feedback is greatly appreciated - even if it completely trashes the suggestion for whatever reason.

Thanks for reading.

I like it.

TL;dr: Have an auctioning system (without instant buyouts) where the Lister is notified of all bids, and the impetus is on the Lister to complete a transaction.