NO TRADE IN AQW posted by Cysero on

One of the most common questions/suggestions that we get is about adding Trade to AQW.

Cysero-New-Anime-AdventureQuest-AQW-PvP-MMO-January-7-2015

I know that I'm on the OMNI team now but the answer is the same now as it was back when I was working on AQW. We wish we had expected AQW to get as big as it did, because then we would have added it in when we were laying the groundwork. It's already something that we are heavily discusing for AQW 3D but for AQW... Trade will never be a part of AQW. 

There are several reasons. 

First, there is nothing in the AQW engine that would allow for trading of any kind so it would take not just writing the new function into the engine but a complete retooling of the entire AQW engine. The ability to give an item to another player is pretty core functionality. It's not something that you can just tack onto an existing game in most cases.  

Second, Flash actually has an actionscript line limit before it can no longer compile. The changes to allow for Trade and to make it secure, as it would need to be, would be a massive addition to the engine and the engine is already large enough that Adobe Flash has issues compiling it. Think of the engine like a slice of pizza. The AQW pizza already has so many toppings that the crust can barely support it all right now. Adding trade would essentially be adding another pizza on top of the first one at which point the pizza would then collapse under its own weight. Then you'd have to eat pizza with a fork and who want's to eat pizza with a fork? Mutants and losers, that's who. 

Third, having a reasonable trade system means having a balanced economy in-game. Gold rewards and item sale prices would have to be normalized across the game to make gold a reasonable currency with which to trade. This would mean going back over the game and retooling EVERY SINGLE quest, item price, monster kill award and shop by hand, one at a time, to balance the economy. All that could only take place after the math was done to figure out what changes would need to be made to make the ongoing economy viable. 

Fourth, all of this would take the code team a REALLY LONG time and without the coders, there isn't much that the rest of the Devs can do to make a release. While the programmers took the time to do all this and do it right, AQW would probably have limited to NO weekly releases which would make people come back less often which would reduce player count which would reduce sales which would pretty quickly kill the game off. We don't want that. That's bad. 

Fifth, it would pretty much ruin the concept of rarity which still plays a very big role in AQW. Some people would say that it's already ruined but those exact same people have some pretty amazing rare items that they wouldn't part with for all the tea in Teattle (which is like Seattle but has tea instead of coffee), so they can stuff it. People have suggested only making non-rares tradeable but most people wouldn't care about trade unless they could purchase hard-to-find items like rares so that's a pretty bad suggestion. 

Finally and most importantly, the ability to actually trade items would give hackers and scammers a real, actual reason to hack people's accounts. Right now, there's no real reason to do that other than to feel important in a pathetic sort of way and we STILL get THOUSANDS of e-mails a day from players who got "hacked" (read as: gave away their account to someone who promised them something, or tried to trade accounts even though it's against the rules for this very reason). Once the hackers and scammers actually had a reason, one of AQW's biggest problems would get substantially worse overnight. 

It's not impossible. Anything can be done but as you can see there are some pretty HUGE obstacles that make it very improbable. We're not scared of a little hard work and if something changes that someday makes it possible then we'll let you know but for now, it's pretty safe to say that Trade will NEVER be a part of AQW. Tell your friends. 

I hope this clears that up for you.


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