Before I began playing WoW, I played Guild Wars. <gathp!> I actually really enjoyed it and still do, though it's different enough from WoW, I'm sure most players couldn't go from WoW to GW and enjoy it. One of the things that bugged me about Guild Wars was that you could walk into Lion's Arch anytime of day or night, and general chat would be full of people spamming the "golds" they wanted to sell. No, not gold, in GW, "golds" means the highest quality, or gold, items. And they would spam this over and over and over. I never made any money with GW, because even when I got a decent gold item I could sell, I didn't have inclination to spend my time in game sitting around in the cities spamming the poor general chat with my endless pleas for a buyer to care about what I had for sale.
So you can see how much of a revelation it seemed to me when my 10-day trial of WoW expired, and I was finally forced to begin shelling out the fees for a monthly subscription, and I finally gained access to an auctionhouse. It was like my world had summersaulted!!! No more crappy spam about everything you're selling, just go plop it on the ah, go to bed, and you wake up and all your primals are sold, and you've got 100 more gold. Great!
Except ... the trade channel is STILL full of spam!!! Some of that is people who are looking for a more immediate buyer for high demand goods, some of it is people looking for items that may be on someone's person, that aren't available on the ah. These are fantastic uses of the trade channel. The remainder of what makes up trade chat, however, is the focus of today's blog: Tradeskills.
Tradeskills in my mind, are just like any other item for sale in an MMO. A service is rendered for a fee. The auctionhouse does a great job of hooking people who already have a finished product to sell up with a buyer. So why can't we have something that hooks people who don't yet have a finished product up with a buyer? That would reduce traffic in the trade channel tremendously, and further expedite us being able to get on with our game.
There exists a forum for each server, with a list of rare tradeskills, and some people who have them. I browsed that list for some of the enchants and cloth patterns I need, added everyone it listed to my friends list, and was able to easily get some great new stuff. But obviously, something external to WoW itself is insufficient.
What I envision is something similar. A forum perhaps. You register with it, it scans your tradeskills and for a daily membership fee, say, makes all your craftables listed on the tradeskill auctionhouse. List what prices you charge along with any skills that are more valuable, if you wish. Then when I have the mats and am ready to buy my [Spellstrike Hood], I go to the crafting ah, and search for it. I find three people who are listed as having it, and currently being online. Player A charges 70g for the nether, B charges 80g, C charges 90g. For a small percentage of the value of the good being negotiated, the ah allows me to see the names of Players A B and C. I whisper Player A, but alas, he's running Kara right now. Darn. So I whisper Player B, and he's farming [Netherweb Spider Silk] in Terokkar. We party up, meet, and 30 seconds later, I have my [Spellstrike Hood].
That's one image I have of how this works. Perhaps the mechanics would have to be tweaked tremendously to make it actually work. I don't care about the specifics. I just like this thought because he's off making money farming, and I don't have to spend all my time in the city just trying to find someone to craft my junk.
I've thought of a few ways to create some kind of private registry of people who have patterns using a mod to farm the trade / general chat channels and then it just tells me anyone it has in its database associated with that skill, and spits out a list of names. But that would never be as useful or efficient as if Blizzard were to implement this themselves, because ideally, I don't want to have anybody NEED to be wasting away their day in a city hawking their services OR trying to find a tradesman for them.
In one of the blue summaries I read recently, it said that Blizzard was still hanging onto the idea of someday providing housing in WoW. I think that would be cool to have a house. However, I think it would be much cooler to buy a SHOP. Perhaps instead of my previous idea, they create a "shopping mall". Since most tradesmen will be out doing stuff rather than sitting at their booth, those who ARE there will have their booth moved to a spot in the center of the enchanting sector. Those who aren't, but have purchased a stall, will have a sign which is visible with a small menu of craftables and prices sitting on their stall in an expanding ring (or square) around the people who ARE sitting in their stall. Then you can literally go window shopping! Wouldn't that be fun? Or perhaps if I want to pay more, I get a bigger shop with two levels. Then maybe I get two apprentices and go farm lots of mats to help them level their enchanting up, as long as they stay and man my shop and whisper me when someone wants to buy one of my chants.
Anyways, I think there are a lot of ways, more efficient and / or more creative to mandate dependency on other players through tradeskills than just making us shout in trade chat till we're horse that we're looking for Enchant Weapon - Soulfrost, or whatever freaking rare chant you may be in need of.
