Trade Chat Filtering.

[polarity]

At peak times trade channel becomes absolute chaos, due to the sheer number of messages flooding the channel.

 

* Making a full auction house is a ton of work.

* Getting people to use just one trade channel is hard enough, so splitting it into three separate ones isn't going to guarantee anyone uses them properly.

 

What could be done in the short term is a few minor changes to how the text is displayed, with filtering done on the client:

 

* WTS acts as a markup tag, so that everything following it up until another tag is colored green.

* WTB does the same, coloring text red.

* WTT colors text yellow.

 

(with an option to select custom colors for those who are color blind)

 

There could be a cap on number of tags allowed per line.

 

This would make it very easy for people to mentally filter out lines or sections of a message that they have no interest in, instead of having to closely look at the start of every line to spot that single S, B or T.

 

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Slightly longer term, the chat could completely filter out lines that don't start with the right tag, selected from a dropdown.

 

People would have to separate their messages into WTS and WTB sections, but the cap on how many messages they can send could take that into consideration, and it wouldn't be a problem there being more messages when over half are getting filtered out.

 

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The next filter to add could be a text entry box, so that lines missing that word would be hidden, allowing people to watch for a specific item, without having to scan through a simply massive amount of text.

 

You could even throw in an audio cue when a message matching that word and the Sell/Buy/Trade dropdown appears.

 

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All small changes, requiring a minimum of coding (I know, as I've written chat filters myself for other games that use Lua for their UI), that will give a maximum of usability improvement for that small amount of work.

[Demonfr34k]

TBH I think we should just get an auction house like in most games and build an area for "Trade" in all relays.

[BRad_Skirata]

It'd be nice to set "Highlighted terms" for certain chats.  For example, if I'm looking for a Loki Prime Helmet, it'd be hella awesome to set those terms to become highlighted when someone else enters them in the chat.  Or set my own name, so I can see when in clan/alliance/region/DC someone is talking to me with ease.

 

A full auction house would be the ultimate solution, but I'd rather DE bandaid it with these chat function ideas and work on the current to do list they've mentioned for this year.

[H3RRD0KT0R]

I think we need a chat 2.0, our chat is showing its age... that's not a trade tab issue only, whenever a new alert pops up for example, the recruiting chat is flooded with "lf taxi".

[SonicSonedit]

TBH I think we should just get an auction house like in most games and build an area for "Trade" in all relays.

I wish I could upvote you more.

[Seb-ZA]

To anyone's knowledge, has a market for players (similar to the current market) ever been discussed? 

 

Edit: I should really read the entire thread for commenting. Tenno'd by Demonfr34k. :p

Edited April 7, 2015 by SR-02

[Inez]

OPs ideas are wonderful. If they could implement chat with Lua and let us write our own mods that would be even better.

[AirlockMaster]

Recruiting would benefit from this too,  that would stop endless flood of posts for specific node (ahem, Draco) for people who have no interest in said mission.