Originally Posted by
ironhands
auction houses/trade brokers are commonplace in MMORPGs, not so much in shooters, there aren't many MMO shooters to compare to, but planetside doesn't have one, nor do any of the lobby shooters, barring TF2 if that even counts. Just because it has the term MMO, doesn't mean it's expected to have the same features you may have seen in some other MMO sub-genres.
An AH is handy in those games, because the gear is vastly different across the game, as well as crafting components, and player produced items. Defiance has none of these things, and the gear is all relatively the same. Weapons are only marginally better.
An AH has nothing to do with community. You don't interact with the community to buy or sell items in any AH I've seen - other than EQ, but usually that's just an AFK player. Most often it's simply an automated vendor system. It could be argued that by bringing people to the forums to post, there is more of a community presence with the current method.
You would get the same effect as an AH in this game with a vendor with a much greater diversity and stock count.