Want to Buy

As everyone in the world is most likely aware, I want a Swift Spectral Tiger.

I’m on a server where they float in and out of the AH; sometimes I see 2 or 3, sometimes just one.

We’re done to one at the moment and it’s listed for about 600k.

This is a bit of a jump in price from the 350k they are normally listed at.

Every now and again I see someone in trade attempting to pawn one off for a bit cheaper.

I’m not quite at the financial level to begin negotiating for my steed and so I can only watch as the tiger scrolls up my chat and out of my reach.

And then I had a flashback to how buying and selling worked in my previous MMORPG, Rappelz.

When I was playing there was no centralized auction house of any sort. (As I was phasing out of the game they had gotten as far as putting in the building that would serve as the AH but it still didn’t work.)

There wasn’t direct trading available, you had to dump items and gold on the ground and hope the appropriate person picked them up.

To get around the trading issue, there was a sort of personal shop feature.

If you wanted to sell an item, there was a command to turn your character into a store front. I think it was supposed to look like a weapons rack, but it always reminded me of a magazine rack in a doctor’s office.

Your store had a black banner with blue text that you could create a personalized message. “Force chips for sale” or “Get Skill Cards” were common. You also set your price and could limit how much of an item you wanted to sell.

Another character could interact with your store front, browse, and choose to buy or not.

And yes, this meant your character had to be in the game continuously if you wanted to sell anything. You think Org gets laggy? Imagine if every character that had an auction open was sitting right there, all day and night.

But the stores could be used in reverse.

If you wanted to buy an item, you could open a store with a yellow text banner advertising what you were looking for. The trick was, you had to have at least one of the item you wanted to purchase already in your inventory. But again, you could set the quantity and price that you were willing to purchase. Another character could browse your wish list, and if they had the item and liked the price, could sell it to you.

(There was a bit of a scam with newer players that didn’t know the difference between the blue and yellow banners. People would drop yellow “purchase” shops with the text indicating that they were selling items. A new player would see items at incredibly low prices and “buy” them before realizing they had actually just sold their entire inventory of force chips.)

I think it would be entirely possible for WoW to implement a portion of the AH that is for buyers to advertise their interest. Since links can be created without the item “physically” being in your inventory I would be able to set up a “purchase post” for my Swift Spectral Tiger at the 350k that I’m willing to pay. If someone has one and my price is reasonable, they can elect to sell it to me through the AH.

Obviously, I would have to have the funds secured for the transaction and there would need to be some sort of transaction fee to weed out the people hopelessly posting for Epic Weapon of Epicness – 1 copper.

I know as a crafter I would use this service quite a bit. What do you think?