Aion knocked out

In a strange coincidence, shortly after me posting about knockout criteria, Spinks is posting Aion impressions and mentions one feature I hate with a passion: "There’s no auction house, instead players can populate their own private vendor and set it out for other players to look at. This means that in any populated area, you’ll have to push your way past hordes of players in vendor mode. And if you want to buy, you’ll need to browse all the vendors individually."
[EDIT: Turns out Spinks was mistaken, there is an auction house as well. I'll edit this post, but don't remove it, because the point that I dislike games with only personal shops remains valid.]

I already abandoned several other games with that feature, only because I reached the point in the game where buying and selling stuff became important, and found that I just can't stand visiting a hundred small personal shops to find the one item I need. This feature single-handedly removes Aion from my "games I must play" list. Because in the worst case I'll be forced to search hundreds of small vendors; and in the best case the only reason why I don't have to search the vendors is that there isn't much of a player-run economy. I'm all for player-run shops, but only if you can search them from a centralized data base, or they work in addition to a centralized auction house.

Having to go into vendor mode to sell things not only makes it hard for the buyer to find things. It also means that you can't sell while adventuring. And presumably you need to stay online, afk, while in vendor mode, at least that is the case in most of these Asian games I've seen with that feature. That usually ends up with me setting a vendor up, going to bed, and coming back next morning only to find I got disconnected for some reason during the night and didn't sell anything. For a player shop to work well, and not use unnecessary bandwith, it has to work offline or when the player is doing something else, for example by operating out of player housing. Now there is one thing that Star Wars Galaxies did well, or even Ultimate Online! I won't suffer a worse system a decade later.