Marketplace : Bazaar replacement (WIP)

[AndMetal]

Chaos, I think you and I have the same idea, except mine would also incorporate web interaction, but most of the functionality is there for adding money, moving items, etc, so adding the commands shouldn't be too difficult (knock on wood).

[ChaosSlayer]

Originally Posted by AndMetal

(knock on wood).

honestly I am a fan of Ec Tunnel style trading - speicaly with small player communities we have, but heck why not =)

PS. posibly coders can actualy use the real bazaar search window for this, since its allready there

[Bulle]

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 !).

[ChaosSlayer]

ability to search for items is allready in the code of EQEMu - gm command #itemsearch

all you need to chage is to use same script to search a diffirent table =) (the market table)
so you don't realy need MUCh in terms of interface - show list of items, add, remove, buy

and yes testing that there are no bugs is a whole separate story =)

PS no way to comand eq bazaar window to work for us?

[Bulle]

You really want your players to use #itemsearch ? If not for the fact that GM commands are not widely available to players, searching with #itemsearch is quite crude, it searches on an ID or a portion of an item name.

One of the major barriers to an in-game trading facility is the incapability to make the Bazaar interface function properly in EQEmu. I am nothing of a hacker so I cannot reverse-engineer opcaodes and such. Given a specification of how they work, why not. But if we had that I guess the Bazaar would already be there.

[Bulle]

I have setup a very alpha version of the warehouse on my server, the place where you can move items/coins between your bank and your warehouse. and I have created a few dummy accounts and characters in one of my databases for test purposes. In addition I have a script that can tell me if the total items in the system differs from what I have inserted at the beginning.

So if you want to have a look at the interface, try it out and possibly break it you are welcome. Let me just state the rules of the game : I do NOT welcome you to break into my server through illicit means (eh !) unrelated to this web application even if you are the best hacker in the world. I welcome you to connect to the provided URL and try to break the way the warehouse should work, through concurrent connections, double-clicking on the submit button, script injection (yes !) and such. Just do not abuse it if you find a weakness, and report it

You will notice that most links are not wired yet. Only the "Bank / Warehouse" transfer is active, and the two search boxes for convenience. You can log into the utility with the accounts : Bololo, Rololo, Tilolo, Bokiki, Rokiki, Tikiki, Bobidon, Robidon, Tibidon. The password is "x" for all. The inventories start empty, with a bunch of items in the warehouses. Most accounts have many characters. Those accounts/characters are not used by any running game-server so it is a "closed" aquarium. I can log into a character to check the bank but that's pretty much it.

I should warn you that once a no-drop item has been transferred to a character bank they are stuck there. So be careful with those trader's bags. Most items are droppable/non-lore though.

My bandwidth is not awesome (like 128 kB/s upload) so be patient. Also if someone else is having fun with the same account as you, you will end up with the troll guy eating your orders (it's the guy moving the stuff around). Best is to switch to another account then. Oh and I am tweaking my servers this week-end, so if it is down just wait it out. If it does not work at all though feel free to reply/PM me.

The Address : http://friton.dyndns.org:8080/eqemutils


Have fun, I am waiting for your reactions

[ChaosSlayer]

Originally Posted by Bulle

You really want your players to use #itemsearch ? If not for the fact that GM commands are not widely available to players, searching with #itemsearch is quite crude, it searches on an ID or a portion of an item name.

One of the major barriers to an in-game trading facility is the incapability to make the Bazaar interface function properly in EQEmu. I am nothing of a hacker so I cannot reverse-engineer opcaodes and such. Given a specification of how they work, why not. But if we had that I guess the Bazaar would already be there.

i didn't say that =)
i said it coudl use same script, but it will apply it to market table.
If items table has over 50k entries, market table will prbaobly have 100-300 at most

[Gonner]

Another option that could be possible is in the bazaar zone have the toggle inspect, inspect the players bag slots. Even if it looks similar to how the EC days of trading used to be (trade bag full of items and they looked at each item like that). Putting prices on things is something is going to be the hard part and not sure how to do that. But that could be an alternitive to try.