Things have been quiet recently...

[Sankt Pauli]

Darn work kept me busy lately, so it's totally fine for me that things have been more quiet hehe. :J

I like the bazaar-system and the basic idea behind it. I remember playing a pirate mmorpg with a similar system ("voyage century"), and it worked out quite good. To save the players the hassle of walking from seller to seller to check out what they have for sale there was a "advertisement text" the seller could set up ("Selling wooden legs! Eyepatches! All for 10 Silver!").
So you just checked the chatlog (i think adverts were even in a seperate "channel") and knew whats up for sale. Sure, if you have 2389424 different items for sale you have to concentrate on the top stuff in the advert text, and you still have to find the player selling the stuff you want, but hey, that's business.
In voyage century you had to stay online or your bazaar disappeared, which is imo a better solution when it comes to exploiting methods (creating unlimited bazaar characters, crashing servers etc...remember you'll have to deal with mainly xenimites at first ^^). There could be a option to minimize the game popping up whenever you're in "bazaar-mode", so the player doesn't have the gamescreen on his desktop all the time.
The "offline" variant could work with a limitation of bazaar-spots and numbers, but it could also annoy players who aren't able to set up a booth then because "all spots are taken".