There are multiple issues in TMW Classic that make trade needlessly difficult.
In this post I will discuss some of them and provide corrective ideas. (MM = ManaMarket bot, M+ = ManaPlus/ManaVerse)
1. The inability for player shops to automatically complete trades. (The Shop button in inventory-F3)
viewtopic.php?t=21396
https://wiki.themanaworld.org/index.php/Game_Rules (AFK Bot)This is both a technical and a social issue. The "no AFK bot" rule needs a clear exemption for trade bots.
Until that is done, there will be little interest to add this functionality to M+.2. Players require special permission to run their own shop bots?
https://wiki.themanaworld.org/index.php ... endly_Bots
Friendly bots must be authorized by The Mana World Committee before they may connect to the server
While I don't believe dozens of trade bots to be scalable (who wants to
talk to dozens of bots on a daily basis to check which one has the item you want?),
I do think that it would be a good stopgap measure to allow them. I propose that,
instead of "TMWC autorisation" the rule be changed to
"You must announce your bot on the forum if you plan to run it for more than one day".A possible scalability solution would be for all such bots to announce their items to
a central bot, which players could query for items and bot names & locations.
Either that or a dedicated market NPC, see below.3. Player-run shop bots are throttled into oblivion.
Anyone who has ever purchased anything from Lya. knows what I am talking about.
It takes over a minute to complete a trade. This is unacceptable.Please increase flood limits. This can be done either manually for every bot
that is officially announced or globally for all players/clients.4. There is no setup possible for automatic item-for-item exchanges, bypassing the money system.
There have been multiple times, both on forums (viewforum.php?f=14)
and in-game, that I've seen players wanting to trade certain items for other similarly sought-for items,
without having to attach monetary value to any of them.Example: trading bug legs for lifestones without paying gp for the conversion service
(e.g. magic xp itself being payment). I have done such an exchange. Or trading between illia rewards.Possible solutions: dedicated market NPC, implementing this in M+, implementing this in MM.
5. Players are only allowed one slot in ManaMarket
I believe this to be a technical issue with the number of inventory slots.
However, this limitation means players will prioritise selling frequently sought-after items,
ignoring common items that people would sometimes buy for quests or other uses.
Additionally, MM seems to only sell about 10 items at a time. Thus there is still
90 item-slots of head room before it becomes an issue.Solution: dedicated market NPC, stopgap measure below.
6. Players have to ask for special approval for MM
I can only guess what prompted this requirement, however, I would suggest
that an experiment be made with auto-granting seller permission to anyone over level 50
or that has completed a certain quest. This would indirectly help with the "one slot only"
issues as very active players would undoubtedly have multiple qualifying accounts.7. At MM, it is not possible to set-up automatic buys
Example: you want 25 red scorpion stingers for a quest, but no-one is selling those.
You would like to put up a listing "buying 25 stingers for 100gp each" and wait.Solution: implement.
8.At MM, there is no way to adjust price of an unsold item
The only way to adjust price seems to be:
1) Walk to MM
2) !getback <complete trade>
3) !add .. <complete trade>
4) Walk back.Solution: a command should be made available, eg. !relist <id> <new price>
A possible solution to most of this would be a dedicated market NPC/bot(GM) with SQL instead of in-game inventory backing:
Code: Select all
<owner:int32>,<expire time:32>,<sale_id:16>,<sale_am:16>,<sale_gp:32>,<buy_id:16>,<buy_am:16>,<buy_gp:32>
This form would allow players to list one item and/or money in exchange for one other item and/or money.
The NPC/bot would take in your items via trade, delete them and store a record in database.
On init or any change it would regenerate the shop item list. On purchase it would createitems
and delete them from database, adding a new entry to trade completion database/log.
This should be possible to implement in Moubootaur Legends at least. I don't know enough about
Classic's server to tell whether it is possible or not.
With some waste of space, it would also be possible to widen the above table to support up to
N:N+gp item exchanges.