@
Stormtimbers "Kept out of chats? How else are you supposed to advertise your trade?"
Kept out of local and guild chats.... put in a trade channel or a auction house. To prevent spamming. Have you played other mmo's? LOL
tl;dr at the bottom
Exactly! Ever played TERA or Path of Exile or games of the sort? Good luck using public chat with the hundreds of people spamming B: +5 Crazy Awesome Weapon | S: +5 Not Crazy but Awesome Weapon. All day, all night. Everywhere you go. That's another reason why I disagree with the trading aspect, you're gonna start seeing guilds specifically for trading, they are gonna sit in one spot all day doing just that and not actually playing.
People will purposely go on ships doing mat runs and ruin the fun and roleplay by spamming all the wonderful trinkets you could be buying from them instead of looting. There will be plenty of guild hopping so they can spam their wares to the guild, leave and find another one to join and do the same. Legendaries that can only be found at certain locations i.e Tormenta would have one merchant sitting in the gold room waiting for someone to go looting there and then tell them "I have that exact weapon, why not do business instead of wasting time here?". Maybe I'm looking too much in to it as far as TLOPO but I'm just talking based on past experiences.
Granted, if you're a max level character who has done all, seen all, I can see becoming a merchant as a hobby to keep things from getting stale but at the same time I've seen trading completely ruin the entire point of what the specific mmo was supposed to be about all because players are more concerned about power, money and controlling the market than they are about trying to enjoy the game as it was intended.
I'm not trying to say that you shouldn't do what you enjoy doing on a game that you play, that defeats the purpose of playing at all of course but I'd really hate to see this wonderful game infested with merchant extremists who do absolutely nothing but pollute a server with their "business". I know it's an over-exaggeration and pretty irrelevant to this game by bringing up steam mmos with trading but there are, en masse, thousands upon thousands of people who utilize self-made websites to buy, sell and trade for real life currency. Hell, there are even thousands upon thousands of bots on steam scripted to buy for 0.01 USD and sell back for 0.02 USD just to try to profit off meaningless and pointless things as simple as trading cards but going in to all that is heavily digressing on the purpose of this post and I'll stop it there lol.
I believe that if the developers have their heart set on introducing a trading aspect to TLOPO, what I think could be a really good way to even it all out and keep the spamming at a minimum and keep things from getting polluted would be to add one more server to the list. Simply a trading server. Remember how the SOTL was put in to the test servers for people to mess with? Maybe they could try that route and have a server that has all the trading aspects separate from Abassa and the rest of the server. Want to trade? Go to "Tradessa(Lol or whatever it would be named)", do your trading and hop back on the regular server. The trading server would be the only one that allows the options for trading, buying and selling to another pirate. It might not stop all the shop owner's advertising on regular servers but it would help keep the chats from being spammed to death.
TL
R - Prevent the pollution of trade extremists by adding in their own little server to do business on and when they are done they can go back to the regular server and play normally again.