The Bazaar

[AndrewTilley]

It sounds nearly identical to how Mike described it during several of his dev Q&A streams. Here are a couple such examples:

@AndrewTilley

Q: Is there going to be a trade system? And if yes, how?

A: Yes, there will be a trade mechanic – a way you can get new gear from other players, or give your gear to other players for an exchange of some sort of currency. I’m purposely being very vague here because we don’t have all the details worked out for it yet. It’s something we will adjust throughout our testing. It’s not going to be anything like you’ve seen before, I don’t think.

We have a few odd goals we’re trying to achieve with our trading system and weirdly enough one of them is not making it too easy to find the gear you’re looking for, or too easy to sell the gear you have. There’s a sweet spot of convenience we want it to have where it’s a fun and engaging thing to do, but it doesn’t take up a ton of time and it’s not instantaneous. So you can’t just say, ‘okay I’ve hit level 40…I can now use unique item X and I have enough of currency Y so I’ll just go buy it and get it and I’m good to go’. This works really well in several other trading systems, for sure, but we’re trying to build it a little bit differently from scratch. That sort of interaction is something we’re trying to curb a little bit just so that it’s not instantaneous and guaranteed, I guess, so that there’s still a bit of interaction – like you’re interacting with a community and you’re playing with other players.

@AndrewTilley

Q: Can you explain plans for the Bazaar?

A: I can’t really explain this – you guys are giving me a bunch of stuff that I unfortunately can’t talk about very much. Umm, plans for the bazaar I can talk about from a theoretical standpoint – in the things we’d like it to achieve – which is kind of similar to what I was talking about last week, unfortunately. We want the bazaar to create a sense of community. We want people to have a place to go to trade and interact with other players. We want it to be something you go do – like I’m going to go search the bazaar for something and less a, and this is the example I gave last time, I hit level 40…I’m going to get my level 40 unique boots that I know are going to be for sale in the bazaar as soon as I get there for ten thousand gold or something, you know.

It’s about getting that core feeling of it’s a tool to help promote community. I think that’s really important. Having trade not be instantaneous is a little bit important, and not having it be guaranteed is a little bit important too. So having it be something where you are searching for the right thing – okay, you ever go to a flea market and you’re hunting for a game or something like that and there’s 80 different shops and they each have games and you’re digging through them all for this specific game. It’s this type of feeling that we’re more interested in invoking, rather than just a search box. It’s tough because we don’t have any of this stuff done yet so I can’t say exactly what it’s going to look like or be with the exact rules and restrictions it’ll have.

Personally, I look forward to seeing how it works and feels once it’s fully realized and implemented.