Guildstore - Optimize for Addons, Optimize built in search, wait or a combination of the above?

zgrssd

Note: This is not about the idea of making the Auction house guild wide. There are enough threads about that.

I will just try to explain wich two ways Zenimax could go to optimise the performance of the Guildstore as it is, what the pro and cons of each approach are and then ask wich ones you would favor.
In the end it boils down to the question: Do they do paging/filtering on the server side (Optimised for built in search) or on the client side (optimsied for addons).
In a game without addons they would have to improove the built in guildstore seach functions no questions asked, but this is not such a game. We have addons. They just have to optimise it for one approach or the other:

1. Optimise build in Guild Store Search
Especially this means more detailed Categories and a string based search in the default Guild Store interface. Also include stuff like showing price per item

The advantages are:
You would not need an Addon
The serach would be faster then anything addosn can do
It would be ideal for people with slow internet connection

Downsides:
This will take forever to implement. Unless they already have somethign close to
being finished, it may take up to a year. There is simply too much they can break to make this any faster.
Bugfixing those will take longer. Since they can break a lot more with even minor code changes, they have to test it much more throughly.
They might have other, more important stuff to deal with (classes, skills, lags), so implementing/fixing this is propably not going to be a high priority (hence the one year estimate).
There might be slight delays when viewing the next page of results

2. Optimise for Addons:
This involves doing little to no filtering on the server, just shove the entire result over to the client in one go (instead of 100 page pieces per search). This also means not developing the build in function much further, or only as a very low priority.
Addons would be able to get Guild Store data almsot instantly and could do whatever filtering and detail data showing comes to mind.

Advantages:
Since there is a lot less we can break, we can programm and add stuff faster.
For the same reasons we can bugfix faster.
No delay when going through different pages.
You would have the choice between different addons and thus have the search functionaltiy perfect for you.

Downsides:
You need a Addon
More data to be transfered per search request. This can especially be bad for people will slow internet connections.
Answering search request might take a lot longer. I estimate wait times between 5-20 seconds per search request at main times (bad if you only want the first page).
You are limited to what the addon programmers can/are willing to do. Search and Filtering can get difficulty fast. Addons might fall out of development/bug fixing simply because they become too complex for anyone to work on them.

3. Wait and give them more time
I am only looking at this from the outside, so my highly educated guesses have a decent change to be dead wrong.
It could also be that they already have something almost finished, throwing it overboard just on palyer whims might be bad
Also this is a new MMO (2nd month as of writing this). We knew problems like this would happen.
We also know they have a lot of other stuff on thier mind, the very vocal balancing crowd in particular
And of coruse you might not be that concerened with guidstores right now, because you mostly buy/sell via chat anyway or don't do much player trade.

4-5:
Mixing the above.

zgrssd

I voted for "Optimsie for Addons".
Honestly, we addon programmers would have produced a suiteable function in the during early access or beta, if we would not have to do a single search request for every 100 items.