Auction-House App Interest?

[Kich867]

Hey all,

Relatively new here but interested in contributing my expertise to the community!

I was wondering what the interest would be in some form of application that would serve as sort of an auction house for the server?

Obviously the items couldn't transfer and play couldn't be exchanged this way. However, I think this would be a good way for players to organize selling their items, the EC Tunnel's auction channel gets spammed incessantly and are difficult to follow sometimes. Furthermore, I think it would encourage people to sell -more- items that they may not have bothered selling before--why sit around EC tunnels spamming to sell these 25-50pp items? Well, what if you had them up on an Auction House (AH) and someone sent you an inquiry for them? Seems easy.

The idea would be to provide a place for users to list what they want to sell, what they want to buy, and what they're looking to trade. Users would create a simple account (just username / pass, which should not be your EQ username / pass), enter their character name that they'd like to sell from (it'd make sense to see "Brekk" instead of "Kich867", since Brekk is my in game character's name), and make some lists.

These lists would be searchable by other users and easily filtered. But most importantly the system would be passive. I would throw up an item on my Want to Sell list, I would go to work, come back, and find that I have a few offers.

How you'd handle it beyond that is totally up to you--you can log in to EQ and simply send tells to everyone that wanted the item and sell it to whoever happens to be on, or you could look for the first person to send a request to buy it, or you could connect to a private chat / send that user a message about when you'd like to meet them and on what characters.

After you sell the item you could flag it as "sold" to a character and the other players wanting that item from you would be notified that the item has been sold.

So just a quick recap:

Initial Feature Set:
- WTS, WTB, WTT listings.
- Listings sortable by price, stats, name, slot, race, and class.
- Passive user interaction via notifications and Sell / Buy / Trade inquiries.
- Notifications for when an item you have an inquiry for has been sold/bought/traded to someone other than you.

Future Feature Set:
- Item analytics: average sale price on the app, average buying price, item statistics, etc.
- Live chat complete with user list and online/offline indicator.
- Service trade lists, if you're a blacksmith or a tailor or you want to sell Multi-Quests (I haven't quite nuked out an idea on how to properly store and display selling MQ's and tradeskill lists yet).
- Any other interesting features the community dreams up.

Things I Haven't Worked Out Yet:
- How to get a database of the items in the game.
- How to distribute the application (be it a web-app or a .exe).

Qualifications:
- I have 2 years of full stack development experience (I program the UI, the server-side code, and design/manage the database architecture).
- I really enjoy EQ and have been itching for a side-project.

I don't believe this would violate any sort of "Not Classic." rules, since it exists outside the game and at that point in time theoretically someone -could- have set something like this up. Let me know if this would be against any sort of server rules though.