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| Its Time |
The recent episode where Odyssey 1.1 changed the cache and thus broke cache scraping for all the software that powered Eve Central et al. brings me to mind of a pet peeve of mine.
Let's try an exercise: Open your contracts window and check for the price of something valuable, say a Phoenix dreadnought. You'll probably see a couple in your own region, but you want to see if there is a deal anywhere in the cluster, right? So you change the search parameters to All Regions. It doesn't matter if it shows you contracts in hostile space as you are aware enough to see those and avoid them. But at a glance you know the complete contract price picture for the dreadnought in the game.
Now, open the market window and look at the Phoenix. You'll see prices for your region, but you are prevented from seeing any market orders farther than that. You could be one jump out of a region, you'll never be able to see its market until you make that last step into it.
It has always been this way and I doubt there is anyone at CCP that remembers exactly why they decided to have regional markets only. Lore reasons? Economic? Performance? I'm sure in the past ten years the original reason for it has passed away much like the uses of Defender missiles and mines.
One of the downstream effects of regional markets is the establishment of Jita as the super-trade hub. It seems unintuitive as you would think that limiting market visibility would lead more to the creation of regional trade hubs but I think the opposite is true. Since a player cannot easily check the selling/buying price of goods in the game, its easier for buyers and sellers to congregate in one commonly agreed upon system for the vast majority of market transactions, thus Jita.
However, if the market window was freed from this archaic restriction, everyone and not just those aware of or industrious enough to use Eve Central could benefit from seeing the going rates across all regions. Therefore players could more accurately decide where they want to buy and sell their wares, removing some of the draw of Jita and strengthening the regional trade hubs. I.e. why go to Jita when I see Dodixie one region over has the same stuff at comparable prices?
You can sort of see this effect by the fact that contracts are less concentrated in Jita than the markets tend to be. By allowing players to sell from anywhere and still be seen on the wider market, you allow them to choose to sell away from Jita to actual local markets at competitive prices.
While we are at the process of fixing the market window, lets add some more control over the display and filtering of items, categories, and orders. Let's add more information like the sec status of the system the order is in, and clean up the market history window to be easier to read at a glance.
Let's give all players in game the same power to use the markets as players who know about Eve Central have.
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