Most people are somewhat confused by trading in the game when it starts as it's not immediately clear that while in the Tutorial Mode trading is blocked to ensure new players learn the ropes and make a successful production system.
Branch Office
To trade you need to be out of Tutorial (reach level 16), purchase the Branch Office building and place it on your island. Remember the Branch Office does not require any interaction once built and can be safely ignored.
Once you have built the Branch Office you will receive a new Trading Tab on your communications window, bottom left, where you can place offers and accept other peoples offers. It also opens up the Trade channel to you from the Global chat.
Trade Tab
Trade Tab
Click the Trade tab in your communications window (bottom left), Click Update and scroll through the list, click on an offer, if you have the resources to trade the Accept Offer button lights up and you can click it to send your resources offer. The seller receives an email with your offer, they have 8 hours to make up their mind to accept or decline, if 8 hours pass your unsold resources are returned.
If they accept your times arrive in an email and you click on the OK button to add them to your stores.
- Be aware when you make an offer you can be without those items for 8 hours while waiting on a reply.
- Clicking Update after an extended period of time shows you all the offers added since your last update (i.e. ones longer than 10muntes ago.. accepting these trades obviously can lead to long waits as the user might now be offline and not expecting trades) pressing again refreshes the list to current offers only.
To Make a Trade
Trade Window
To make a trade you open the Trade tab and click Add Offer. Choose the resource to sell and the amount, do the same for what you hope to receive. Click the big Submit button and your offer goes live for 10minutes.
There are two methods for selling
- Sell the total amount of an item in one transaction and possibly have to reject lots of additional offers.
- Sell the item in smaller amounts to multiple people. Downside you might not sell out the item.
Say you have 400 Marble and you need Gold Coins: you can sell 400 Marble for 100 Gold Coins or you could sell 100 Marble for 25 Gold Coins.
Clearing a Trade
Once you have made all the trades you want or can you want to avoid receiving more offers. Press the Clear button at any time during the life of the trade to stop it showing to new viewers. However this does not able you to post faster than one trade every 10 minutes.
Trading with Friends
Friends Trade
To trade with a friend simply click on their portrait at the bottom of your game and click trade. You get a similar trade window to the Trade Tab and you make the offer, from there the system is the same as it was for making an offered trade in the Trade tab.
When trading with friends its often polite to email, whisper or Guild chat with them rather than just submitting random trades hoping to get a result. You catch more fish when you make fair offers trading what you want for what the other person wants.
Indeed people who randomly spam friends in the hope of them accidentally accepting a poor trade quickly get removed and even banned (not to mention added to unofficial Blacklists)
Scams
See the Scam section for information about trade based scams.
Links / Tools