Modest Proposal for a Feature/QoL change for the Exchange to reduce heartache, loss & support ticket

azselendor

Hllo all.

A month or so back I had an experience many other players have had. I'll keep ir short, but I posted some keys up and left off a zero on the price selling them at a faction of the asking price. naturally, they were snatched up within seconds of me realizing what happened and attempting to correct it. I asked support for help, and everyone knows the response and it got me thinking. In a wonderful exchange with a support rep/gm, I understood their point of view and why their hands were tied and got a positive response on my suggestion...

which, as appears below.


Here's what I'd like to suggest a feature/change to the exchange. When posting an item to the exchange, I'd propose 2-steps be added to the process.

1. Upon pressing post, a prompt appears with a "Are you sure you want to sell X for Y?" and CONFIRM YES/NO.
2. Then, items submitted to the exchange be delayed for 5-10 minutes before going live on the exchange to allow people the chance to undo accidental postings.

I suspect this simple change would cut down on a lot of tickets like mine and others and reduce a lot of heartache with users. I've heard too many stories of people making similar mistakes with keys bought with real world money. In my case, I only lost some EC, but others I've heard of lost a good sum of money. My proposal would significantly reduce those events from accidently happening.


But one of the key, major benefits of this isn't even to players, but to Cryptic and Perfect World support as this would have the effect of reducing the number of support tickets coming into them. I'm sure someone can sit down and calculate how long, on average, it takes to resolve a support ticket for each rep, how much that time costs and work out a price per ticket and I'll bet that those two modest changes I propose would free up time and money for those reps to handle more pressing issues and bugs and save money in the end.


I think it's a win-win for players, support, perfectworld and cryptic alike.

Thoughts? Opinions?

Unknown

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azselendor

I disagree.

The idea behind the confirmation prompt is to force a user interaction where they have to make a decision, warning the user they may have done something stupid. Maybe this would be more useful for a stack or bundle of items, I think. But the point here is to remove accidents and leave only user carelessness.

As for the delay, the time frame can be tweaked, but it does boil down to time between the user making a mistake and submitting the ticket. I suggest 5-10 minutes because of user carelessness and it's not like the exchange is going to suffer from items being delayed -- only people who are impatient to flood the exchange/relist their wares. The goal of the delay is to counter and address of people ignoring the confirmation prompt.


So if someone posts 10 keys for 1million ec, the game will prompt them if they are sure or not. If they ignore the prompt and post anyways, they still have a few minutes to correct their mistake. And then, THEN, if they don't and loose their items, well, no one can deny they didn't have an opportunity to correct their mistake. They lost their 10 keys as a result of their own actions, not an accident or mis-click or or malfunction or typo or lag.




As for placing the player nag on pricing, I can agree with that to a point -- but that would require the exchange to calculate and compare pricing on the exchange meaning the nag could be manipulated by market whims and woes. That's not a good solution. Perhaps every item can be assigned an EC value in game, and if posted below, say 60% of that per item, it produces a prompt?