But that's where you'd state, "I'd love 100 wood for my 100 clay,"  or "I need atleast 100 wood."  It would be up to the person making the offer to include what they need/want and be as detailed as possible.

The main reason that I mentioned this method is because it leaves into the poster's hands and it also allows for counter-offering. This way, people can offer items over currency AND allow people to get a better idea as to what their offer is really worth.  No offense intended, but the only reason that I mention it is because a lot of people don't want to wait for an offer to expire and then have to post it again and again and it gives them a chance to settle on a different offer.

A time limit of (up to) a few days (I'd say no more than 3-5…maybe a full week, but that should be the limit) could be placed to limit the number of available trades.

No support. Trades are nice, but they generally lead to multiaccounting. Also the trade wanted will be loaded with beggars offering 1 cotton and asking for 100 vermillion.

I'm OK with the market as it is now. We even have an alerts system for finding things you want for sale (Account -> my triggers). This is fine for now.

Why would it lead to multi-accounting any more than sales? You could just as easily make a second account for messing with pet trades or auctions. If someone had a trade set up for 1 cotton for 100 vermillion, obviously the solution would be that no one would accept the trade and it would vanish from the page after 2-3 days.

This isn't an idea that just completely came out of my head. I've been on websites extremely similar to this one, and this idea has worked out perfectly fine. Sure you have people that do offer bad trades, but no one excepts it, and they give up after a while. You'll always have people that want more than a reasonable bargining price. You can find plenty of awful deals in the auction pages now, and what do we, as reasonable users do? Ignore it.

If people really do begin cheating from this system, they wouldn't be very hard to catch. I think it would be quite obvious, and all the moderators would have to do is look into whatever records they have and ban the person. Not too hard. I've seen this method be successful, and I think overall it would make it easier for everyone to get what they need and overall equalizing some of the item surplus.

I've got hundreds of different types of items just sitting in my inventory because it's a pain to attempt to sell all of them. I'm very nearly done crafting things, so they are no longer useful to me for anything. I wouldn't mind helping other users out by swaping items. This would provide another outlet for extra items which I believe is a good thing.

bump