Having quest NPCs to play the "auction guy" for you would not be easy. The main question is : how do you search for an item you want to buy ? If you have ever tried Shards of Dalaya, then you will understand the problem : you can only scan through what an entire server worth of people have for sale. Unless you spend one or two hours a day doing that, you just forget about it and never browse. So people have to advertise, and you are back to the OOC/SHOUT/CHANNEL drawing board, you have just simplified the transaction process, not the whole trading.
As I see it you need an out-of-game mechanism for browsing/buying (until the bazaar opcodes are fixed at the very least). Hence the "e-commerce" site idea. EQBrowser for browsing, one page for buying. The rest can be pretty much anything.
Once you have that in mind, you can view all the other ideas as alternate (and possibly the most popular) interaction methods with the marketplace when it comes to sending/receiving items. Remember that ensuring proper transaction security with in-game transfers can be tricky, it is all in real-time, and many things happen in-game, anytime.In addition, although I can easily commit code to an out-of-emulator tool, I cannot do the same for EQEmu...
When you think about it the plan is quite clear : make it an out-of-game tool fully, with proper locking mechanisms described for the new marketplace tables. Make it sturdy through testing. Then EQEmu developers/contributors can add in-game commands to interact properly with the database tables and add in-game interaction. As long as they follow a few basic rules the database commands to pass should not be hard to write. The tough parts are ensuring no-one can cheat the system, and making it user-friendly (not so easy when all you have is a cursor and a command-line !).
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