Think Sales Booths Are The Answer? Think Again. Auction Houses FTW

Lucifer66

I'll start a new one because they love to close these threads as it seems they don't want to face the fact that many players want an auction house. I don't really care because I want one too and they can keep closing them and I'll keep making them until they listen.

Some of you have suggested sales booths.

Well I have been in MMOs with these sales booths and for those unfamiliar with the concept let me explain. Somewhere in your character's options, usually in your inventory, there is a button that allows you to set up a sales booth and it has a dialog with slots much like your bag. You move your items over from your inventory over to this dialog, set a price for each one, name your sales booth, then clock on OK.

Then your character sits (or stands) behind a little booth. You stay there waiting for other players to come along and buy your items. During this time you can chat but basically you do nothing. No quest running, no PVP, no dungeons, absolutely nothing. It's the most boring part of any game I have ever done and I would never want to do it again. You can't log out and play another character, unless you have 2 accounts which most people who do this do.

It's absolutely wonderful for the game owners however because now they have given you the best possible incentive to buy a second account and they make more money. For players though it totally sucks because not only are you stuck sitting in one place, when people setup shop they tend to do it in a high traffic area like right smack in the middle of town by all the NPC shops where people go to repair and buy soul gems and stuff. So guess what you now have? That's right MEGALAG!!! Because you now have to load each and every one of those colorful little sales booths on your screen, much like if you had to load hundreds (or even thousands) of NPC mobs with all of their colors and name plates.

Every time you even get near a town you will be so lagged down to like 1 fps or even 1 fpm (that's 1 frame per minute) you will avoid them like the plague. I have even seen people pay others to go to town for them just to not face the nightmare that is sales booths. (No I'm not kidding one bit, a very common practice)

Searching for the item you want takes on a whole new meaning too. Now you have to LITERALLY SEARCH each and every one of those booths for what you want to buy by physically going to each one and looking at what they have for sale and you'll find your self stopping at the same one several times over because you don't know if you checked that one already. You will be running around in circles and it will make you dizzy watching it on your screen. They aren't in any sort of order either, just where ever the player happen to be standing when he clicked on the button, facing in no particular direction.

I played many games with these God awful things and while I did occasionally buy from some of the people who weren't in town, if they had a decent price. I only set one up once and then watched TV all day while my poor character sat there and sold his heart out. Then while I counted my gold from the sales I thought of all the fun I could have had playing the game and leveling my character and decided I wasn't going to do this again the next day just because the game developers were too damn lazy to make an auction house so I quit that game and have no regrets.

So there you have it. This is my experience with Sales Booths.

I think auction houses work much better.

1. With player competition to keep prices in check you don't have ridiculously high prices on items.
2. By charging players a fee they don't post stupid amounts of items and clog it up.
3. You can go to one place to buy/sell items.
4. You can search for the item you want.
5. It does not create lag.
6. You do not have to be in a guild to use it. <- Some people don't like to be in guilds.
7. By using guild stores you encourage people to only join large guilds that have large guild stores making it hard for small guilds to get new players.
8. If you are in 5 guilds trying to cover all of your options, how can you devote a significant amount of time to any of them? By the same token, how can any 1 guild count on any of it's players to be there when they need them? It's like trying to have 5 jobs and expecting full pay from all 5, it can't be done. About the best you can do is spend 1 day a week in each one, if you don't have a RL job and all you do is play this game.

Yes it's not perfect, but it is the best system anyone has come up with so far. It's far better than guild stores, and far far better than sales booths.

Now this is my opinion on the matter and I have made my points without attacking anyone so I encourage anyone to make their points and express their opinions without attacking me please.

Thank you.

Cybrdroyd

Auction House is the only thing that makes sense.

Bangstin

Agree totally.

You might want to change one word in the thread title so they don't close this thread.

AinGeal

Agree 100%. I remember the booths from Aion. So bad and what's worse were the obvious gold seller accounts that would set up shops.

Alpha_Protocol

The guild merchant system isn't like the one we saw in Aion etc.

They are shops like the ones we already have in game. They're going to be run by guilds not individual players.

They are going to be guild stores open to the public. It's actually a fine idea.

Edit: there won't be any lag... there aren't going to be a sea of players etc.. Different guilds will have shops in different cities etc.

You'll be asking a guildie where he got his Axe etc.. he'll say "in so and so shop in <insert town/zone>"...

Do you really believe it's a good idea to have 4,000 level 38 blue "Maul of Stamina" ranging in price from 1g to 3k gold on a global AH?

Evergnar

Have a hireling man the booth. Agree though any additional lag would not be worth it.

Lucifer66

Alpha_Protocol wrote: »

The guild merchant system isn't like the one we saw in Aion etc.

They are shops like the ones we already have in game. They're going to be run by guilds not individual players.

They are going to be guild stores open to the public. It's actually a fine idea.

Edit: there won't be any lag... there aren't going to be a sea of players etc.. Different guilds will have shops in different cities etc.

You'll be asking a guildie where he got his Axe etc.. he'll say "in so and so shop in <insert town/zone>"...

Do you really believe it's a good idea to have 4,000 level 38 blue "Maul of Stamina" ranging in price from 1g to 3k gold on a global AH?

Can I ask you why you prefer a guild run shop that is only in one town that many players will not be able to access because they are not in the same alliance or may not be high enough level to reach?

I find being able to have a diversity of price to be a true market economy system where if I saw that axe for a lower price I would of course buy the lower priced one thus setting an acceptable price on an item that vendors for less than 100g. Even if I paid 1k for it the player is still getting 10x more than if they sold it to a vendor. I would be tickled to death to get such a mark up.

As a seller of such an item, it would be my responsibility to periodically check my items I have for sale and if they are not selling, check the competition. If they are selling the same item for lower prices then I would have to adjust my price to compete. You have to remember, selling is a competition and whether you use a public guild store and an auction house, people will be as thrifty as they can be.

I see no advantage to having many public guild stores spread throughout the game unless they are trying to sell their items for higher prices and hoping to get away with it by making players do more leg work to find a better price, in which case players may think that guild is greedy. That could give that guild a bad reputation and who really needs that? Also you can't see what other guilds are charging unless you do the footwork yourself either so this makes it much more difficult to watch the competition. This will make it very difficult to sell anything because you will have no idea if someone is selling it cheaper elsewhere.This also will make for high volume of chat sell/buy messages.

I'm sorry, I hope I didn't upset you. I just thought though it and found some problems with that type of system. I really wouldn't want to have to travel all over Tamriel trying to find an item to buy, would you?

Is there some other reason you like the public guild store that I missed?

daneyulebub17_ESO

Guild stores, when properly implemented, are still the way I want to see it done. Makes the economy more dynamic, makes people haggle or check multiple places for good prices, adds some amount of interaction. Not just the universal AH that everyone "plays" for hours on end, standing immobile at the nearest AH npc and interacting with no one and just scrolling through list after list.

The key is IMPLEMENTATION. Mainly--a working SORT and a working SEARCH by name, category, level, etc.

We haven't seen that yet, so any pronouncement of the current concept of Guild Stores being unworkable are premature. Once the above two things are in place, the stores should be much, much, much more enjoyable and efficient to use.

Lucifer66

Are you saying a way to search ALL the guild stores or just the one you are at?

dcincali

The aion booths were funny cause you could kill the opposing faction then talk smack about them on your little auction board.

p.hurst1b16_ESO

It seems so lazy they did not make a proper search. Database searching is pretty rudimentary stuff and a text search should have been in from the start.

The Materials includes anything that can be deconstructed as well so that is all armour and weapon.

Even WoW did not have such basic features in game, evan at launch, the UI was sorely lacking and that was by design but at least it was easy to use the AH and was not so hard to manage inventory.

Why no Auction ? the current state of affairs is cumbersome and hard to use properly.

Gilandred

Lucifer66 wrote: »

I see no advantage to having many public guild stores spread throughout the game unless they are trying to sell their items for higher prices and hoping to get away with it by making players do more leg work to find a better price, in which case players may think that guild is greedy. That could give that guild a bad reputation and who really needs that? Also you can't see what other guilds are charging unless you do the footwork yourself either so this makes it much more difficult to watch the competition. This will make it very difficult to sell anything because you will have no idea if someone is selling it cheaper elsewhere.This also will make for high volume of chat sell/buy messages.

This is exactly how a market economy works. You, the buyer, shop around looking for the best deal. If you want convenience, you may be inclined to pay a little bit more. You are correct in way. There is no advantage to Guild Stores for the buyer. The market price drops in an Auction House system to the absolute lowest common denominator, which is only beneficial to the buyer. With Guild Stores, you have the opportunity to appease both buyers AND sellers.

Lucifer66

You know I really don't understand why some people don't like the idea of being able to go to one place to buy what they need. I wish I could do that in RL because I hate spending gas and time running all over town to 5 different stores to buy what I need.

Something about the idea of a guild running it seems to appeal to some people. But I don't think they realize that there are probably hundreds if not thousands of guilds already with more being made everyday. I don't really see how they could all be fit into the game without eventually running out of space. The developers would be having fits constantly making towns bigger to fit them all in as time went by...lol

AinGeal

Gilandred wrote: »

This is exactly how a market economy works. You, the buyer, shop around looking for the best deal. If you want convenience, you may be inclined to pay a little bit more. You are correct in way. There is no advantage to Guild Stores for the buyer. The market price drops in an Auction House system to the absolute lowest common denominator, which is only beneficial to the buyer. With Guild Stores, you have the opportunity to appease both buyers AND sellers.

This is utterly wrong. What an auction/trading house presents is a competitive market. Within a competitive market, prices are driven through supply and demand to an equilibrium price that is most efficient, fair, and beneficial to social welfare.

If the guild stores worked, then there wouldn't be a need to spam WTB/WTS in zone chat. The existence of such spam in such amounts is proof that current system is inadequate. Such imposed restrictions upon a market also askew equilibrium.

daneyulebub17_ESO

AinGeal wrote: »

Gilandred wrote: »

If the guild stores worked, then there wouldn't be a need to spam WTB/WTS in zone chat. The existence of such spam in such amounts is proof that current system is inadequate. Such imposed restrictions upon a market also askew equilibrium.

Again. The system is currently suffering from horrible implementation. Add a real search and sort feature, then give it 6 months, then come back with a verdict on the guild store concept. Right now it's UI is horrible and you can't make a valid judgement on the viability of the idea.

Gilandred

AinGeal wrote: »

Gilandred wrote: »

This is exactly how a market economy works. You, the buyer, shop around looking for the best deal. If you want convenience, you may be inclined to pay a little bit more. You are correct in way. There is no advantage to Guild Stores for the buyer. The market price drops in an Auction House system to the absolute lowest common denominator, which is only beneficial to the buyer. With Guild Stores, you have the opportunity to appease both buyers AND sellers.

This is utterly wrong. What an auction/trading house presents is a competitive market. Within a competitive market, prices are driven through supply and demand to an equilibrium price that is most efficient, fair, and beneficial to social welfare.

If the guild stores worked, then there wouldn't be a need to spam WTB/WTS in zone chat. The existence of such spam in such amounts is proof that current system is inadequate. Such imposed restrictions upon a market also askew equilibrium.

From a seller's perspective, a competitive market only works when the seller is in it "for profit." That's why there are anti-dumping rules in a capitalist economy; to prevent selling below cost to drive down price and ultimately drive out the competition. However, in an MMO, there are no such rules, and many sellers tend to dump their excess wares on the open market, regardless of the cost (time, effort, expense, etc). Therefore, only buyers tend to benefit from this type of "competition."

Granted, there are people that can still make money regardless of what system is in place. IMO, a Guild Store system (the one that's coming, not the one today) will even out the benefits a bit more rather than being one-sided toward the buyers favor as would be the case in an Auction House system.

Ser Lobo

I don't agree with them implementing an auction house, myself. I think that many other games have proven it creates rock-bottom prices on common items (the things that players need, but also the things that new players can actually achieve and sell) while destroying the concept of rarity.

Plus, many seem to forget that botting is very common on auction houses, especially with penny bids and transaction underbidding.

Every auction house I've seen does more to make it easier to buy things, but then rips off anyone selling anything unless they 'play the market', which generally means they have access to PTS and know what items are going to be popular after that next patch.

Darwa

Gimme a Broker any day. I'd settle for an Auction House though as I find the need to join guilds in order to have people try and rip you off is really detrimental to my desire to participate in the economy.

As it stands, I'm in 4 guilds that are filled with people I couldn't care any less about. That's not what a guild is supposed to be.

Ser Lobo

AinGeal wrote: »

Gilandred wrote: »

This is exactly how a market economy works. You, the buyer, shop around looking for the best deal. If you want convenience, you may be inclined to pay a little bit more. You are correct in way. There is no advantage to Guild Stores for the buyer. The market price drops in an Auction House system to the absolute lowest common denominator, which is only beneficial to the buyer. With Guild Stores, you have the opportunity to appease both buyers AND sellers.

This is utterly wrong. What an auction/trading house presents is a competitive market. Within a competitive market, prices are driven through supply and demand to an equilibrium price that is most efficient, fair, and beneficial to social welfare.

If the guild stores worked, then there wouldn't be a need to spam WTB/WTS in zone chat. The existence of such spam in such amounts is proof that current system is inadequate. Such imposed restrictions upon a market also askew equilibrium.

Show me a game that has an auction house, and I will show you spam in that same game in their local channels, or at the very least, a trade channel.

Trade spam is a completely false unit of measure on the success of guild stores. Trade spam exists in every game, from EvE to World of Warcraft, no matter the mechanics used to sell items (EvE having the most comprehensive online market out there, and it being broken apart regionally in much the same manner as ESO).

I will agree that guild store implementation is faulty, with search functionality and store representatives (keeps transfer too quickly, I feel). But it is still a superior system than auction houses in my opinion.

Ardeni

I agree (with OP) that the sales booths aren't a very good idea. Personally I used them to sell stuff overnight or while I was at school/work, but this is not a very good option in many ways:

1) It eats up server space from those who would actually want to play
2) It's not very environmentally friendly to have everybody's computers running 24/7

Given that the current system forces people to spam zone/guild chats and creates weird situations for common items to be extremely hard to find (such as items with certain traits for crafting research), I approve the idea for a global AH. The guild store system just seems like an attempt to be different and - as far as I'm concerned - being different is not the thing that you should always aim for if the existing solutions work just fine.

Yakidafi

Your over exaggeration was fun to read but I still hold booths before AH on entire server.
Edit: must add that I do not think any change is needed.

AinGeal

WARNING: This post will give you a short lesson in economics. Yes it's a long post, and yes I did say "short lesson".


@‌ruze

The trade spam in EVE consists of two types.

1. Scams for which there are plenty.
2. Goods that are made into publicly available contracts (half of which are scams) which is a sort of separate market that the main one.

However, GW2 is a fine example where there is a trading house and trade chat is minimal. The difference between Lion's Arch chat and any ESO zone chat is huge.

Also, no. It doesn't destroy rarity. It simply shows how common items really are. People who are against a competitive market (against a trading house) are those who try and instill false rarity. Look at Daedric motifs. People are still trying to sell those for over 100k. This is for a one time use item. Hell, to save cost you can create a character devoted to crafting and so you don't even have to buy it per character. Just once. These are an item that are still hot right now but they will cool off as everyone and their dog will have a character with all the motifs. The current market is causing prices to be unfair (in favor of the seller) and I would love to see a better economy in the game.


@Gilandred‌

It's called predator pricing. Rules against predator pricing is to protect competition. To protect newer and smaller firms from larger firms and allows them to enter the market. It's to encourage competition because it has been well established that a competitive market is the best kind of market.

I suggest looking up...

Perfectly Competitive market, Oligopoly, Monopoly, and Monopolistic Competition.

In a trading house, you can create buy and sell orders. Often people who simply want to sell fast will fill people's buy orders. Buy orders only have the lower limit of what you would get from a vendor but only on very common items do such buy orders sit at or just above vendor price. Sell orders will then sit higher than buy orders. How much higher depends on things like rarity of the item (which is a supply factor) and how badly players want it (which is a demand factor). The more people who are involved in a particular item's market, the less of a gap there is between buy and sell orders. In a competitive market, the greater the moving quantity of an item, the lower the price tends to be. In the case of buy and sell orders, the smaller the gap tend to be.

There are a few things that you need to consider here. The first is opportunity cost which is what someone gives up to get something else. The other thing to consider is the difference between an economic profit and an accounting profit.

Accounting is all about the flow of money. When you make more money than you spend, you make an accounting profit. Economics is more than this. It includes things like opportunity cost.

Example;

I give up working at a job making 50,000 a year to start a business. I sold 1000 units for $60 per for a revenue of $60,000 for a year. My business expenses for the year were $20,000.

My accounting profit is $40,000
My economic profit is -$10,000

What has this got to do with the game? You can only control one character at a time. If your goal is to make as much in-game money as possible, you have to factor in the opportunity cost. You can farm nodes to sell, you can simply grind mobs, you can quest, etc. You'll want to do what makes you the most money.

So go with farming nodes. You fill your inventory with a particular item (we'll use iron). You put it up for sale in a trading house and then go back to get more.

Iron is a very common item. So it doesn't take long for there to be lots on the market. However, it's used in crafting and so it moves well. Despite it moving well, its availability is much greater than its demand. The iron market quickly ends up with buy orders sitting at or just above what a vendor would pay and sell orders are only a gold or two higher than the buy orders.

Remember that your profit is revenue minus the cost. Economically this includes opportunity costs. It takes time to gather that iron. If after an hour you make an accounting profit of 500 gold, the question is did you make an economic profit?

If the answer is yes, then consider yourself lucky. Once it catches on, more people who are interested in making in-game money will add to the competition and drive selling prices down. In fact, once a competitive market is in equilibrium, economic profit should equal 0. This drop in economic profit will be accompanied with a drop in accounting profit as well but not to 0.

If your answer is no, then you ask the next question. Does economic profit equal 0? If the answer is yes then regardless if you are able to make an accounting profit or not (99% of the time you will) you are getting a fair price per unit. That is, both the buyer and seller are getting a fair price out of the deal.

If your answer is that you are suffering an economic loss, then that means there is something else you could be doing in the game that would get you more in-game money and you should stop with the iron and go do that something else.

As you, and others like you, exit the market due to the economic loss, there is then less competition. The price of sell orders will increase and the economic loss will diminish until economic profit equals 0 once again. The benefit here is that accounting profit will also increase too.

Thulsola

Evergnar wrote: »

Have a hireling man the booth. Agree though any additional lag would not be worth it.

What @Evergnar said. We can hire an NPC to staff our store - or the guild store. Hell, they can even have a training option similar to a horse that allows us to get some bonuses as our NPC clerk levels up.

And while search is an obvious feature that wasn't implemented in Guild stores, why couldn't there be a search feature for all stores in a given town? You could even make it so that store owners could pay to have their items appear higher in the search rankings -payments that get cheaper if you train your NPC clerk in advertising.

Lets stop trying to turn ESO into every other MMO out there, and instead look for new ideas that will better fit the nature of the game.

Crafting orders is something I'd like to see. You come to my store, order a level 41 blue medium armour pair of boots with exploration and a purple health enchant on them. You pay into trust for that item based on the prices I have pre-set, and then when i craft them and deliver the boots to you, I get the gold.

Thulsola

And all of that is why, @AinGeal, I think we the game needs better selling tools to support the end products of a crafting marketplace rather than just the inputs.

A very simple mechanic of having some slight bonus that a crafter can build on that makes their product unique or rare in the market place and some kind of custom order system that takes trust out of the process (You order a set of blue armour from me, I craft it, you back out, I'm left holding armour no one else may want).

Right now I can make more money selling embroidery than I can using that embroider to make armour for people. If we are going to have crafting primary characters, there needs to be changes so that it makes more sense for someone to buy a set of armour from me than for them to buy the raw materials and make it themselves.

poodlemasterb16_ESO

I do understand what you want. I am pleased the game does not have these things. It's on purpose you understand.

The bot farmers feed the spam gold sites we have to put up with because they can make a buck doing it. The less there is an easy way to just buy what you want the better for the game.

I farm or make all my stuff and for my son as well. My little crafting army is fun and although I have quite a bit of valuable stuff, I have most traits on my crafts that use them and my research is maxxed all the time, I have no interest in either buying or selling stuff.

Guilds should be just fine for those who want to sell and it does not bother me at all what you do in your guild.

bean19

The lack of a global auction house is a real bummer. I wouldn't mind quite as much if they didn't have a limit of sales on the various guild stores and if it had a decent interface that allowed you to search by type and by name.

AinGeal

Thulsola wrote: »

And all of that is why, @AinGeal, I think we the game needs better selling tools to support the end products of a crafting marketplace rather than just the inputs.

A very simple mechanic of having some slight bonus that a crafter can build on that makes their product unique or rare in the market place and some kind of custom order system that takes trust out of the process (You order a set of blue armour from me, I craft it, you back out, I'm left holding armour no one else may want).

Right now I can make more money selling embroidery than I can using that embroider to make armour for people. If we are going to have crafting primary characters, there needs to be changes so that it makes more sense for someone to buy a set of armour from me than for them to buy the raw materials and make it themselves.

I don't know if this applies at max level but it applies at lower levels. Find a green item off a mob or from a quest. Let's go with a lvl 20 heavy armor helm. Now craft a level 20 heavy armor helm and upgrade it to green. The helm crafted by the player will offer a higher armor rating than the one that is found despite both being green quality, despite both being lvl 20, both having the same trait bonus and enchant, etc.

There's your slight bonus. Crafted items of the same level would sell for more than their looted counter part simply because they offer slightly better stats.

Even without changing the mechanics of the game, simply introducing a trading house could change that problem (is it a problem) you are having about selling embroidery to make more money than the completed product. I sense artificial inflation due to the current economic restrictions.

It also doesn't help the way upgrading works. Mats are easy to get but upgrade components are not so easy. Well, not as easy. Until you invest points, you need 5 to get a 100% success rate to upgrade and despite using 5 to upgrade, you only get a chance of getting one back when you deconstruct. On top of that, people who demand them are those crafting. If the majority of the player base is crafting, then your demand for inputs will be high while your demand for crafted gear won't be.


Personally I would love a game that included crafting professions in with classes. If done with ESO (just an example calm down) you could choose to be a Templar, NB, DK, Sorc, Tailor, Enchanter, Alchemist, Carpenter, and Chef.

dodgehopper_ESO

Actually a sales booth would be great if it could be operated by a hireling. I don't see why it should not, we all play wealthy adventurers who probably don't have time to sell all the garbage we haul in from ayleid, dwemer, and other ancient ruins (as well as more recent strongholds). Even cooler if you could customize your hireling sales clerk. As for the way sales are handled, I like the fact that merchant guilds are limited in size. It promotes more guild play. In the end it is probably better for the social side of the game. Auction houses are a great way to lead into F2P if that's what you really want. If you want a cool subscriber game where people actually care about, do, and share in the content maybe its better if it was more about comraderie and working together.

Ser Lobo

I would probably support auction houses if they were: limited by allaince; and prevented the sell of loot (i.e. only crafted items and raw mats sold in AH).

I think such a system would work great to give crafters in ESO a special boost.

I openly oppose any system that allows the sell of looted gear and dropped food.

I personally hate bind-on-loot mechanics, but I would support them and seriously push for them if an auction house was ever added to the game.

RianaTheBosmer

AH is the only way to go. The guild shops was stupid.

Fleymark

The devs have already stated that they didn't put in an auction house intentionally because they feel that it would glut the economy on a mega server setup like this.

As I recall they explained it like this...Key items get farmed once they are known to be key, the market gets flooded and then it loses value in proportion to its actual practical value or merchant type players artificially keep the prices high by always buying them when they see them priced lower and put them back up for sale at the artificially high price. And the source of the items in the game gets farmed like mad, often creating CS problems.

What they did not say, but I took from what they said reading between the lines, is that this plays right into the interests of the RMT gold sellers. They farm the items, work the markets to keep the prices up, price the items to make buying gold appealing, then get their gold back to RMT sell again when the items get bought. And the average player who just wants or needs the item as a part of normal progression thru the game either gets pinched out, forced to farm unusuallly excessive amounts of gold for the item (helping supply the gold sellers), or becomes a gold seller's customer. None of which are good.

So they gave us 5 guild slots instead so that we can join trading guilds. This gives you access to up to 5 guild stores, 5 guild chats, and 2500 guildies to trade with. Plus there are always open /zone channels to arrange trades in.

Not necessarily ideal, I agree, but I think they gave sound reasoning behind doing it the way they did since we are on megaservers. But for that reason, I highly doubt you will ever see anything involving automated selling beyond what we have now with the guild stores.

I don't think asking them to increase the size of guilds, size of guild banks and stores, and improve the guild store search functionality (because not everyone uses add-ons and hindering that by default is arguably bad for commerce) would be unreasonable, though.