It was suggested that I post the following here, so here goes Currently, the way our items are offered is not the best customer experience environment to promote greater sales and customer satisfaction. The way it is currently set up, it is more like buying from a catalog or Amazon than going shopping in real life. My suggestion is to bring the market place into the world(s) where these items are made for by creating a Market Place zone where each item could be actually placed, and the player characters could walk around and see each item in its default size, etc. set up in an environment, for instance, furniture would be set up like it might be in a furniture store, weapons, shields and cloaks could be displayed like they might be in a real store. This way, the players could walk around and browse through the market place content and get a better experience with the items they are interested in purchasing. I would suggest such a zone be set up in such a way that new items could be added in a way that makes sense for what they are and their default size, etc. As an example of how the environment could be set up, there is a player's prestige home wherein they've displayed all the craft-able items arranged in a way where the recipe items are grouped together according to their type, etc. I think having a virtual market place where players could go shopping would be a nice experience which might get some people who never look at the market place as it currently is, to go see what is available, and thereby potentially buy something(s) they might not have bought previously. It might take some time and effort to get it all set up, but I think it would pay off in the end.
There is already a preview tab built in where you can rotate, zoom, see how an item appears equipped on your character...so what would this add? I don't think it's a bad idea; it just sounds somewhat redundant of existing capability.
Sounds easy for them to create their own housing zone with buildings and different items in each house. use the housing zone to due a contest to set them up as the best displayed. Using a specific set of items as in contest and the best one gets copied to each server as the final display.
Everquest's market is pretty bad. They should make it more like Planetside 2's with daily sales and featured items. Along with a better search.
I personally would love something like this - especially since, like catalogues, they're seasonal but this would be a zone that could be partitioned to various areas (think karana size) so items can stay up year round.
This doesn't help when you're previewing housing items. Sure, you can see what the item looks like, but you have no way see size, or get an idea of how it might look in a native environment. I've bought things from the marketplace for my house that looked awesome in the preview, but once I got them out to place? Meh. I love the OP's idea, and think something like this in-game would be awesome!
I dispute your contention that the marketplace being like Amazon cuts down on sales... um.. have you seen Amazon sales figures?? But I do not in any way dispute that the marketplace feature really sucks. The search function is absolutely terrible... try searching for shield augments... but don't even think about searching using "shield" as your search parameter as only about a third of the shield ornaments have "shield" in the title.
