Question to CSM and CCP: In-game character bazaar

Council Of Stellar Management Assembly Hall
1

This is a question for both CSM and CCP, so I’m posting here.

Character trading has been an integral part of the game since its beginning, or at least since I remember (I’ve started playing during Red Moon Rising).

Why is character trading still done on the forums using third party skill viewing tools and having no in-game mechanisms to safely transfer a character without being scammed? Isn’t the amount of work that GMs needs to do over 20+ years greater than the amount of work required to develop an in-game character trading system?

With an in-game trading system, we’d get many benefits and no downsides apart from the development time invested:

  • character listing, sorting, filtering a searching, instead of digging through forums
  • an in-game mechanism to make sure that the character is eligible for transfer (positive wallet, NPC corporation, no kill rights,…)
  • locking mechanism for already trained skills, so extraction scams are not possible
  • in-game auction mechanism
  • secure ISK-character exchange
2 Likes
2

Maybe where its transferring accounts and not an asset in game is why its done outside the game.

3

Characters are entries in a database, like any other. I’ve worked on some fairly complex (and big) databases and I’m 100% certain that there are no technical obstacles for implementing this. Design challenges? Sure. But technically completely viable.

2 Likes
4

I would guess CCP never made a fully automated system for character trades because character trades do not happen often enough for such a feature to be worth the cost of building and maintaining such a system.

Manual work can actually be cheaper.

With such a complex sale a lot of things that could go wrong and players could get scammed. And while scams in the game are OK, scams are not allowed for character bazaar sales. This means it needs manual interaction of an employee anyway to monitor the sale even if part of the action were to be automated within the game.

5

There is no way to see another character’s skills in game, nor should there be imo. It makes sense to remain out of the game.

6

Whats the difference between ‘allowing’ others to see your skills via giving API/ESI access to a third party website and via using an ingame character trading system?
The control still is a 100% in your hands. Even better, ingame the access would be only available for characters actually for sale during the sales process.

1 Like
7

Exactly. Everything stays the same, only the third party is eliminated.