Silent trades - the comms problem

TLdR? How to communicate best in game when chat doesn’t work. Your solution?


Hello,

Bnet is still suffering from technical issues following yesterday’s update. Whilst logging on now appears back to normal, the lobby and in game chats are not functioning.

Trading is therefore largely one way communication at the moment. Sellers set out what they want and what they are offering in the game name, but potential buyers don’t have any direct means to communicate what they can offer against that. Solutions?

1. As Buyer, use trade window; put in your offer and see if Seller accepts or closes it to walk away. Rinse and repeat. Not great, no way to clearly negotiate.

2. Add the seller on bnet as a friend, then communicate using the bnet chat outside of the game. This still works but what a pain, and not everyone will be looking out for bnet messages, nor would everyone be willing to accept such friend requests.

3. Devise some kind of in game code for simple words like ‘more’? Eg. If you put a

Healing Potion (or other item with no intrinsic trade value) in the trade box it means you as seller want a higher offer?

4. Use the keypad voice commands - which still work. Thank you - sorry seem appropriate but not very precise. Die just sounds rude… and then each character voices these differently, so Amazon for example, doesn’t always say ‘sorry’ but instead scan say ‘oops’.. which in the context of a trade is just confusing.

5. Moving your character up and down repeatedly to say yes like a nod? Moving left to right to signal no like a head shake? But those would only work in answer to a question…

How would you conduct trades in these silent periods? Has anyone used anything that works well?

Ps. Not trading or trading later is of course an answer but not one that allows you to negotiate and trade there and then..

Keen to hear your thoughts.

Aards

6. Pray to the almighty management gods at the temple of Blizzard so that they here your suffering and grant their developing subjects a few minutes of their holy time to fix just another bug that their vibe coded AI colleagues have produced.

7. Stop in-game trading die a while and only use trading sites like this one.

8. Play offline for a while. It's quite refreshing!

I can't remember the last time I used in-game whispers for anything. B.net app chat is way more reliable. Also not foolproof since it is still blizz being blizz but nowhere near as unstable and bad as the "eats every first whisper every time" in-game nonsense.

Just communicate here pre-add, via the app post-add and in-game then generally boils down to just join -> trade -> done.

Post-join communication is rarely needed, apart from "thanks" and "bye". Though even if, many remain stuck on the auto-whisper-screen anyways from your prior b.net messages that duplicate there so just tab back into the app and keep using that.

For purely in-game trades, you won't realistically find any "agreed upon way of communicating without chat" as you're looking at too big a player base there and only a fraction of them would ever come to a place like this to read up on random communication ideas. Just stick to trade games with proper naming I guess, seeing how most of them should specify not only the offer but also the ask. If they don't, just slowly keep putting in

Jah runes one by one until they accept or your limit is reached I guess.