Trading used to be one of my main activities in BDO. You can see evidence of this by my Master 10 trading level. Never made great money at it but liked that I could do it without constant concentration like is needed for grinding/fighting.

When the new trading set up came online, at first really hated it. After a little while though, got used to it and had at least some success with it. Now that I clearly understand it. My assessment is that it could be incredibly cool but execution of its functionality imho is a failure. Have three main complaints:

1. Too many trades fail to make money even when their (verified) news is all positive. After trying different strategies, finally settled on only going for trades where all available news is positive for the caregory and verifies what is shown in the newsletter (or is opposite of what's in the newsletter towards the positive direction). I can spend up to an hour chasing down the "rumors" in the letter and buying the trade goods. After dilligently doing this would expect to have a good result most of the time. However even after jumping through all the hoops, trades are still successful less than 50% of the time. Incredibly frustrating to go through all the work and then lose millions of siver on the deal over and over.

2. The second complaint is that too often there is no real news (in either direction) behind what's in the news letter. Haven't got an exact percentage but would bet it's no more than 30% of the time that there is any news of any kind behind what's in the letter. When I have to run a toon all the way to Grana only to find no speech bubbles of any kind where they're supposed to be, again really frustrating! What does it mean?? Does no news mean what's in the news letter is wrong? Or, does it mean this news is just useless? Or, does it mean I just haven't found the right place for the speech bubbles? Guess only Pearl Abyss knows the answer.

3. Not enough positive news in the news letter. Given the large amount of effort required to do a trade when you include chasing down the news for it, then driving the wagon around far enough to trigger the distance bonus, I don't even do a trade unless there's at least one "skyrocket" rumor and no verified negative news about the category. I'd bet I look at at least 15 or 20 newsletters every week and less thant 10% of them have a story worth doing all the work for. This means one or two trades a week after spending literally hours chasing down the news stories. And after all that effort to have a success <50% of the time when I finally do get a promising rumor makes this a losing proposition to my mind.

Bottom line: It can take hours to go through all the motions to plan and execute a trade and then to be in a situation where over 50% of the time I lose up to tens of millions of silver makes the whole thing a bad joke imo. Have given up on trading at this point. Like I said at the beginning though would love the new system if it actually worked. At least there's bartering which I think is successful.

hardy anything to love, hardly anything is a trade.

I did trading purely for exp occasionally but with the trade remake the exp dropped by around 50% which is just awful for a skill that was already very slow to lvl up.

1st and formost remove "random breaking" of trade items during transport, that is just stupid and can destroy your entire day.

I would make it be a 250% sell value at all times, the purchase price can then vary from 30% to 300%.  The 250% would then decay so the quicker you sell it the more the profit.  Add a restriction that it can not be "adjacent" regions either, so you have to go from Serendia to either Kamasylvia, LoML, MoEW, Valencia, or Ulukita.  Give someone 1 hour to get trade goods from 1 point to the other before it starts to decay. 

Doing that you could make maybe 400m an hour top end with a forest path wagon or ship.  

After doing that, add a "jackpot" trade option.  A jackpot trade item would be a trade item you get the option to purchase when selling other trade items, you can decline or you can purchase it.  A jackpot item would be unsellable for 24 hours, the value will be anywhere between 100m and 1b silver and will sell for minimum of 150% up to 1,000% of the value, and their value will not start to lose value until 1 week has passed.  If your wagon or ship is carrying a jackpot trade item, the bandits become drastically stronger, and bandits will show up in the sea.  You will not be able to just drive past them, you will have to do something, you will either be able to give them a cheap trade item, or fight them and there should be a sizeable reward if you fight them.  In the event your wagon gets destroyed or the ship sinks while the jackpot item is on board it will break last after other trade items. 

All this jumping through hoops... when Bartering gives not just more Silver (and sometimes a "special barter" worth up to a 1.5 Billion)...  And allows over 20k WT on a BASE LEVEL +10 "green gear" Advance... AND trades for a currency you can use directly for Manos Gear (which is an Inflation-Hedged commodity vs. Silver or combat gear) ...  And then on top of that, you can use a Blue geared boat to move up to 600 *Pure-profit* crates to LotML while also doing the Margoria CC exchanges and Ocquilla dailies all in one trip.

...and Despite all this, Bartering is still considered one of the least worthwhile lifeskills in the entire game which means that Trading is objectively ranked where Alchemy *used to be* and is arguably worse than mid level Horse Training too (even without Card-Swiping for more skill Coupons).

Somehow it's even more Boring than all those other activities  because at least with Training you can minimize to tray for up to 10 hours with Buffs and play a game that's actually FUN.  ...How bad does a "life skill" have to be, to fall behind all of those conflicting realities and designs?

Really interesting to see other peoples' perspectives on this. Seems like there are definitely a lot of different ideas for how to address the issues and a fair amount of difference in what people view as the issues. Does seem like there's some agreement that trading is fundamentally broken though.

Agree with the idea that bartering is a lot more rewarding and fun right now. It has become one of my chief activities in the game at this point. I do miss trading though. And if some tweaks were made, I think I would really like trading again.

At its core, I believe the new trading "model" has some great aspects that would make it fun and worth pursuing from a silver perspective if it all worked better. I can make up to nearly a hundred million silver on a good trading deal (as I play it) which isn't earth-shaking but also not to be sneezed at.

The big problem for me is that I can lose tens of millions of silver just as easily and all-too-often do. When I follow all the instructions and still lose more than half the time, NO FUN!!!

I also think the whole news thing could be a lot of fun if it was more reliable and if there was actual news (good or bad), at the places the news letter says, more often. I've taken to housing alt toons in the far away towns just to check out rumors from the news letter and it helps. But, so much of the time, there's nothing to chase down... Not very satisfying.

All this said, just want to say that for me (And, only for me; understand others feel differently.), I'm not suggesting to get rid of trading. I'd really like for PA to just fix it and make the new trading model as much fun as it could be.

Since I didn't actually offer a proposal.... I'm wondering if maybe ...some kind of "base of the Eternal mountains seaway" being added to the game later might help?  And a short land-hop to the southern ocean hidden somewhere in there? 

In other words if you look on the map to the east of Ulikita, there's a big Lake there but we have no idea what's on the other side of it...  Maybe if the rivers in that area got a Second pass by the map makers, widened up,  and/or some kind of Barge was added to the game specifically to move Large Wagons with,  ...then you could have up to 20k or more Freight trips made possible all the way from Anorcado down around Altinova and into the new Eternal winter port and some way, over to Starry Port using a network of carracks, barges, and wagons making short hops instead of looooong trips around the North balenos/epheria route?

Food for thought anyway, should they get smart about this and turn it into more of a Puzzle that the players with good Navigational skills and Route-coordination can "game" as opposed to the hard RNG rolls of product-availability that it appears be centered around right now

If one is to invest time and care in this game, there should be pay-off.  Pretty simple.  So yes, the "rumors" should become "news".  Speculation is what destroys markets irl, so why should we speculate in this game?  Just let us know when certain items can be traded so the time and care we invest can pay off.

Also, we need to be able to trade with all trade NPCs again.

All of them.  Every single one we used to be able to trade with.  Now they're just useless ciphers.

Give them and the trade skill meaning again, PA.  Please.

I don't trade no more with the new system. Exp dropped, silver dropped and the activity isn't calm as it was before (going from points to points with always something to sell and to buy).

Maybe, one day, trade will be pleasant again. Until then...

That's a good point, not everything has to be some sort of high intensity super involved game.  They need to leave in some lower intensity activities.  That sort of balance seems to be slowly getting lost.  Hope they don't "improve" the rest of the lifeskills like that.