When I last wrote about the Economy, it was strangled by labor and was, at times, too complex to be accessible for the majority of players. As part of our Economic Stimulus Package we loosened up labor and streamlined production, so we’re happier with the system now than we’ve ever been.

The next step in our ongoing quest to strengthen the Economy is to release a feature many economic tycoons have clamored for: Buy Orders. The Auction House has always provided a way for you to sell goods without a ready buyer. Buy Orders let you place orders for goods you need when there isn’t anyone currently selling them (at the price you want to pay). While we were at it, we jumped at the chance to make the Auction House cleaner, prettier and easier to use. You’ll see all of this when we release 1.17.

Buy Orders

To explain exactly how Buy Orders work, let’s take a look at the new Order tab in the Auction House UI.

To place a Buy Order, flip to the Order tab, type in the name for an item you want and click search. You don’t have to input a complete item name; just a partial entry is enough to get some results. The search returns all items that match the text you typed, in easy-to-use collapsible categories.

Next, you can select the item you want to order from the list. The price history for that item in your current port is shown on the right side. Then, fill in the quantity of items you want and the highest price you’re willing to pay per item, and click the Place Order button.

When you place an order, the total cost of the Buy Order, plus a listing fee, is deducted from your doubloons. You now have a standing request for the item at the price you chose in your current town. If your whole order isn’t filled before it expires, the doubloons you didn’t need are refunded to you.

Other players can fulfill your Buy Order simply by placing an auction in that port for the same item. They can also explicitly choose to fulfill an Order with goods they have in the same port, though they do not have to be physically present there.

Fulfillment from Auctions

Each time a Buy Order is placed, we check for any existing auction listings for the item involved. For an auction to fulfill the order, the following must be true:

• The sell price on the Auction listing is less than or equal to the buy price on the Buy Order
• The item of the Auction listing is identical to the item of the Buy Order
• The Auction listing is in the same port as the Buy Order

If all criteria are met, the order is fulfilled until no more items can be bought or until the listing is empty, whichever comes first. The price paid to the auctioning player is the price per unit of the Buy Order.

If a player places a Buy Order, we look for existing auctions to fulfill it in this order: first by listing price (lowest first), then in order of listing age (oldest first). If a player creates an auction listing, we look for Buy Orders it could fulfill in this order: first by price offered (highest first), then in order of listing age (oldest first).

Fulfillment by a Player

You can browse Buy Orders in much the same way as you do auction listings. For each order, you can see the following information:

• Total quantity being ordered for that cargo type
• Highest price offered for that cargo type
• The port where the order was placed
• How much time remains on the Buy Order

If you have goods that can fulfill an order, you can click the Fulfill Order button. The goods must be either in your warehouse or ship’s hold in the same port as the Buy Order.

     

You can then choose how much of the order to fill and the minimum price you want to collect. By default, this price is set to the highest offered for the item, but you can choose to charge less. Finally, click the Fill button, which triggers the following:

• You will fill any orders that will pay as much as you’re charging, until you sell the quantity specified or there are no more available orders within your price range.
• For each unit of fulfilled cargo, you receive the price specified by the Order you’re filling.

The order in which Buy Orders are fulfilled by a player is: highest offered price first, then oldest first.

When a Buy Order has been fulfilled, any units of the ordered item are placed in the Pickup tab for that port, just as if they had been purchased in the Auction House. These goods must be claimed from that port’s Auction House or they will incur storage fees, just like regular purchases. Buy Orders expire like Auctions too, and can be re-listed. They can also be canceled early.

So, that’s the nitty-gritty of how Buy Order work. You’ll also notice, as you play around with the new system, that we’ve made a lot of minor changes to the Auction House UI you’re used to.

The Auction House

To improve the flow of buying, selling, and ordering, we’ve added some new tabs, and combined some old ones. I’ll go over each tab briefly:

The first tab is Listings.

This tab is similar to the old Listings tab, but we’ve reorganized the filters and added the ability to search for Buy Orders. Searching for Auctions works the same as always, provided you’ve got the Auctions filter checked. Searching for active Buy Orders works the same way.

The next tab is Sell.

As you can see, we’ve added price history for the selected item in this port to this tab (and pretty much everywhere you could want it).

The third tab is Order, but we’ve been over that one already.

The next tab, Pickups, hasn’t changed except for some bug fixes and refinements. It behaves exactly the same as it used to.

The last tab is My Listings.

In this tab, you can see all Auctions you have up for sale, as well as any Buy Orders you have placed. We wanted to collect all of these into one tabs so you can manage your economic empire effectively.

In addition to the major changes you see here, you’ll notice a lot of smaller fixes have been made to the Auction House. There are too many to outline here, but we hope you notice and enjoy them all.