Auction House system to complement existing Market Areas (Discussion) [dev1019]

[Nerlith]

I'm in favor of a limited AH to complement the Wards.

What I'd like to see is the Wards for each city turned into a single playmap instead of a pile of Instances of the same ugly hallway. With more stalls to rent. And some NPC's to provide crafting access at a basic level.

Get rid of the instancing, and add a new area to each city for the New Market.
Put a bunch of player rentable stalls, small up front fee but no taxes and anything sells.
Add a search NPC that will allow you to highlight anyone in the market area with an item, much like now but allowing for searches by name not just pre-selected items.
Then put an AH similar to what the parent described, with heavy taxes geared towards high-end specialty items only.

But don't stop there. Add more of these, but on smaller scales. Each with an NPC that will let you search all the items up for sale within that mini-market's radius. Put them in obvious places, like outside the Adventurer's Guilds, or other spots where a billion people crowd around selling stuff right now. Put them out in the field, near crystals and so forth.

Put some NPC's in some of the remote mini-market locations which allow for an indirect AH use. They way it would work is you park your retainer in the Market Ward. Then when you talk to that NPC, you can place bids or sell items using the cash and inventory space of the retainer you have parked. To make it interesting, put in some spots which have access to all three AH's, but the NPC's charge a use fee on top of the AH fees. That's just one idea, but all kinds of good fun could be had here.


I think the combination of better consolidation of the existing Wards space, plus the addition of min-market areas all over the world map, and finally the semi-limited AH would end up being really neat.


edit-
I also meant to mention- the player rentable stalls should offer more benefit than they do right now.
I would like the shops to have the ability to offer a third type of selling, in addition to per item or per stack: blind auction. Yup, that's right. When sellers search for the item in the market, they see "bid" for the price.