Trade chat, assessments and renovation

[Fallen_Echo]

Hello there Tenno!

 

Following the example of my other chat system rework thread, i decided to do my best and try to rebuild the trade chat into a pleasent form of trading.

Now lets go on with a simple start and take a look at the trade chat and its problems. All pictures have been already posted on the internet and atleast a year old.

Now at first glance pretty much everybody knows what we see here, its the carbon copy of the first iteration of ingame trade chats. Theres a strong reason why most games have already put in an auction house or something else thought in this discussion WE DONT TALK ABOUT THOSE. This discussion is STRITLY ABOUT IMPROVING THE TRADE CHAT!

What you can see here is that normally the trade chat is nothing but a wall of text, even with some filters enabled the messages flwo into each other creating a mass of text unpleasant to our eyes.

 

Okay enough talk of the old, lets talk about the new.

First of all i would like to thank @S4F8 who is probably not with us anymore for sparking the base of this idea with a suggestion made in 2015. Take a look at this picture:

This suggestion has foreseen the future with filters but somehow still looks more promising than what we have currently. So lets go on:

Chat tabs:

First of all we separate the trade chat into 3 categories. Trading and sales, Trading and offers and Custom Trading. Names are open for changes.

The first tab, Trading and sales has the following functions:

• Ability to use item based filtering (See below at filtering)
• Ability to use standart filtering (See below at filtering)
• Ability to apply one of the following colors to your messages, blue, red and green.
• Ability to turn on regular coloring (for the color blind)
• Ability to see the names of each player who posted on the trade chat
• Each message is Bold and has a line under it for better visibility and separation
• Ability to post items for selling (the WTS tab) throught the sellers menu. (See below at sellers menu)
• Ability to rename the chat to your liking

The second tab, Trading and Offers has the following functions:

• Ability to use item based filtering (See below at filtering)
• Ability to use standart filtering (See below at filtering)
• Ability to apply one of the following colors to your messages, blue, red and green.
• Ability to turn on regular coloring (for the color blind)
• Ability to see the names of each player who posted on the trade chat
• Each message is Bold and has a line under it for better visibility and separation
• Ability to post items for buying (the WTB tab) throught the buyers menu. (See below at the buyers menu)
• Ability to rename the chat to your liking

The third tab, Custom trading is a highly customizable chat tab with the following functions:

• Ability to use item based filtering (See below at filtering)
• Ability to use color correction filtering to your own liking (See below at filtering)
• Ability to use standart filtering (See below at filtering)
• Ability to see the names of each player who passed throught your filtering
• Ability to flag players who might have the item you want to buy or players who might want to sell what you need
• Each message is Bold and has a line under it for better visibility and separation
• Ability to rename the chat to your liking
• This chat is mainly for searching so you cant use it to post messages, when you attempt that you are redirected to the proper chat tab.

 

When a player wants to post a message on the trade chat they have to go throught the Sellers/Buyers menu, you can read more about that just after the filtering introduction.

Filtering:

This suggestion introduces 2 types of filtering systems to cover every players need.

The first filtering system is what we have currently the standard filtering. This currently has a good place in the game and i think its good for specialised searching so i dont touch what is not broken.

The second filtering system is the item base filtering.

Item based filtering:

As seen on the upper picture the item based filtering opens up a simple roll down window where players can simply click on what items they want to see and what items they dont want to see.

When you choose the filtering here you have access to the following filter behaviors:

• Show, obviously this makes messages only having the filtered parts shown
• Remove, this removes messages with the filtered parts
• And, this only shows messages what have all filtered parts
• Or, this shows all messages what include any filtered parts

This system has easy filter solutions as:

• Prime filter, make it only show messages with prime items or remove prime items from the list
• Riven filter, make it show or hide riven messages from the chat
• Custom filtering, this is here for any custom items what are not primes or rivens
• Advanced Prime Filtering, this filter simply removes every part of the message what is not connected to the choosen item. For example we entered spira prime into the filter. The message WTS boar prime 10p and spira prime 20p becomes WTS spira prime 20p. If its set for hiding the said message will look like this WTS boar prime 10p.
• Advanced Riven Filtering, this filter pretty much does what the upper one the difference is you can choose what weapon riven you search for. For example searching for dakra rivens only show message parts with dakra rivens.
• Advanced Custom Filtering, just like above this filter is here to cut down the unneeded message parts.

Color correction filtering:

This option is essentially the same as the item based filtering with the only difference that you can choose to set what color should messages have to better differentate each message.

Nothing fancy, you can choose between blue, red and green.

The point of this is better visibility.

 

The trading menu:

 

When you want to post a message in the trade chat a pop-up window opens where you can choose to enter the Sellers menu or the Buyers menu.

In both menus you can either manually type in what you want to get/sell in their own slot. When you are finished you can click enter and the system automatically posts your message in the approtiate chats. You can still use your own messages to promote yourself but the actual items have to be put into the selling/buying brackets.

This is the best attempt of mine to visualise how it looks. On the left side you can put one custom message, in the selling bracket you can put in your items and next to it you can fill out the pricing if you want to.

In the pricing you can choose to request a pm with an offer, write in your preferred price or leave it blank.

Same happens in the right side in the buying brackets.

When you filled up the menu you can go and click accept (or whatever we want to call the button for it) and the system automatically posts your message in their own place.

For example lets just use the first two lines from the picture.

In the Trading and Sales tab your message appears like this (the [] is to illustrate the automatised parts, the pricing and the items are always linked up):

Great sales, cheap prices! [Spira prime set 10p] , [Dakra salty visitax PM]

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the Trading and Offers tab your message also appears like this:

WTB various cheap stuff [Ogris riven PM] , [Sunika kubrow imprint 10p]

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Since we havent choosen a coloring for the items all messages are in the default color. Since every item is linked throught these menus the filtering system can more accurately find what the user looks for.

 

 

[(PSN)guzmantt1977]

22 minutes ago, Fallen_Echo said:

• And, this only shows messages what have all filtered parts
• Or, this shows all messages what include any filtered parts

I believe that the OR is currently standard. I am unsure about the functionality of the AND as that already exists with phrases like "Mantis fuselage" as opposed to CONTAINS"Mantis", CONTAINS"fuselage" which would produce many false hits. 

 

31 minutes ago, Fallen_Echo said:

Riven filter, make it show or hide riven messages from the chat

This is probably the most useful addition that they could make, as there is currently no way simply filter rivens based on the word "riven" as unlike other items they don't contain a single common identifying name part and do share common name parts with at least one weapon. 

 

39 minutes ago, Fallen_Echo said:

• Advanced Prime Filtering, this filter simply removes every part of the message what is not connected to the choosen item. For example we entered spira prime into the filter. The message WTS boar prime 10p and spira prime 20p becomes WTS spira prime 20p. If its set for hiding the said message will look like this WTS boar prime 10p.
• Advanced Riven Filtering, 
• Advanced Custom Filtering,

I suspect that the coding for this may be complicated and the processing power would be much greater than what's currently needed.

I don't really think that this is needed based on my experience on ps4. The main difficulty in Trade chat is the number of messages that are sent in a short period. A well chosen filter already drastically reduces the number to manageable levels. A good example is CONTAINS"junk". While this would still show WTS, WTB, WTT, prime junk, junk rivens and all messages where junk is only one of the items, it's far, far easier to follow the flow of messages thank if no filter is set. 

 

54 minutes ago, Fallen_Echo said:

Color correction filtering:

This option is essentially the same as the item based filtering with the only difference that you can choose to set what color should messages have to better differentate each message.

Nothing fancy, you can choose between blue, red and green.

The point of this is better visibility.

While the processing power may be greater, if the chat is a version of a standard IRC, then this will probably be relatively trivial if the ability to show other colours exists as I'm pretty sure that I used to have scripts that did similar stuff client-side in the past so it's not a reinvention of the wheel. 

I might try to avoid red, purple and blue as those are already used in specific ways in our chat, but there should be a fair number of useful preset colours, and even background colour may be adjustable. (effect creates a block of the chosen colour with writing on top, some combinations are OK and it's really hard to miss, as long as they don't try to use fluorescent colours as defaults I won't mind 😂 ... But seriously no fluorescent colours.) 

1 hour ago, Fallen_Echo said:

The trading menu:

I'm OK with something like this being added, but I suspect that it begins to stray into auction house territory. Also selling girlfriends is probably not going to be allowed. 😛

 

 

Overall the biggest unknown would be the exact capabilities of the chat system itself I think that some of the suggestions have significant merit, while others could probably be achieved more simply by simply having a tutorial on how to use the chat effectively.