Trader swap issue - EU server

anitajoneb17_ESO

Moonsorrow wrote: »

We need permanent bans for those who exploited the duplicate gold. No other choice. I wish ZOS will be strict on this issue. We the majority of players who have to "live" with this economy will support heavy punishments so let that Volendrung hit hard on all exploiters since they made our daily playing a lot less fun.

Be careful with that. It's not like GMs are interchangeable NPCs. They are "leaders". Many guild members, including in trading guilds, feel committed to their guild(s) and their GMs. Perma-banning GMs (regardless of the moral justification of said sanction) leads to disbanding of ingame communities and many players leaving.
Things are not that simple.

Sanguinor2

agegarton wrote: »

Who has intentionally abused anything.....? Great post mate - you admit you haven’t got a clue what happened or how guild trader bids work, but you insist on making BS comments anyway. What a prat.

Rephrasing it in a way you might understand:
Guildmaster/Guildbank got additional Gold back when they had no Control over it? Not intentionally abusing something they are fine.
Guildmaster/Officers who left all the extra Gold in the bank and did Nothing with it? Not intentionally abusing something they are fine.
Guildmaster/Officers who took an amount that is equal or less to what they would have received back under normal circumstances? Not intentionally abusing something they are fine.
Guildmaster/Officers who know perfectly well that they shouldnt have received that much Gold back yet took it all and started mass buying stuff to resell at higher Prices? Intentionally abusing a bug, AKA exploiting AKA against TOS, Zos is well within their Rights to ban those People for whatever Duration they see fit and/or punish them in another way.

Maybe this clears it up? Im sure there is a majority of guildmasters/officers that didnt exploit this bug, that doesnt mean that those that did should go unpunished.

Varana

Derra wrote: »

IDK how the guild trader thing worked or which guild got the trader in the end. So i have no idea how much control people had over that.

IDK, shouldn't you, like, know what you're talking about before talking? (Can we request a perma-ban for this?)

Guilds "won" a trader through the bidding process. But the system was too slow to process that information, so at some point, most traders were without a guild: The old guild was removed, but they were not yet assigned a new one. Now several random players went up to a guild trader and just hired them for their PvP guild or other small, mostly non-trading guild - even though that trader had been won by a guild that had bid for them.
In fact, that happened with lots of traders, meaning guilds that won a trader are now without one. Because during the patch, the game sorted things out and assigned the traders to the guilds that hired them, not those that won them.

So they abused the bug, as well. No one can tell me that experienced players who go to Belkarth and see a trader for hire there, just assume that no-one bid for that spot. Are they going to be perma-banned as well? Who in those guilds gets banned? Because it doesn't have to be the GM who hires a trader. Also, that would mean that quite a lot of small non.trading guilds will be affected. Do you want that to happen?

Also, why do I have to explain that again?

Waynerx8

Some touchy GM's on here

kate.georgeb16_ESO

Bosov wrote: »

kate.georgeb16_ESO wrote: »

I run a small casual social guild that likes to get a trader if we can, even though most weeks we get outbid and even if I get a trader I'm mostly funding it myself as not a lot of players list stuff. I chucked 1 million of my own cash into the guild bank and made 10 smallish bids. I got 6 mails saying I had won, and a trader showing on our home page. However someone else had the trader. Yes we have about 4 million in the guild bank now but I don't dare spend it in case I get banned for exploiting a bug.
The second guild I am in is a small trading guild. Pretty much the same thing happened to them, except that we have now lost quite a few good member because we've not had a trader two weeks in a row. The whole thing is toxic and it's making people lose interest in the game.

Not spending it because the risk of being banned. Where is your moral.. what about not spending it because it is wrong!

Joke.. i predict that your guild gold will be removed while the people who bought all mats on the server will be allowed to keep the mats. Worst case they might get a 1 week suspension or something...

kate.georgeb16_ESO

Not spending it because the risk of being banned. Where is your moral.. what about not spending it because it is wrong!

Joke.. i predict that your guild gold will be removed while the people who bought all mats on the server will be allowed to keep the mats. Worst case they might get a 1 week suspension or something...

Both reasons in my case and many others.

Thorvarg

anitajoneb17_ESO wrote: »

Moonsorrow wrote: »

We need permanent bans for those who exploited the duplicate gold. No other choice. I wish ZOS will be strict on this issue. We the majority of players who have to "live" with this economy will support heavy punishments so let that Volendrung hit hard on all exploiters since they made our daily playing a lot less fun.

Be careful with that. It's not like GMs are interchangeable NPCs. They are "leaders". Many guild members, including in trading guilds, feel committed to their guild(s) and their GMs. Perma-banning GMs (regardless of the moral justification of said sanction) leads to disbanding of ingame communities and many players leaving.
Things are not that simple.

On the other side, I checked the various (illegal) Goldseller sites. The price for 1 million gold is currently at about 15, - Euro. This means that the largest repayments, with complete sale, bring the appropriate guild leaders 15000, - Euro to 45000, - Euro. Do you think they are worried about possible / imminent sanctions by ZOS?

OsManiaC

I am just waiting to get my gold back for the legal bids I did, and get the gold taken from me. this whole fiasco, erasing history,etcc destroyed everything for me.

about the gold usage? my recent experience; nothing done for fungal grotto1, vSS chest run, fee necromancer creation . These are all my losses, and also the people who listened me to not do it.

they already sold with real money, who cares if they banned? damage is done, ı saw lots of trading done in two days. zos is lacking preventive and predictive actions. They can even outbid you this sunday,

Uryel

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Thanks for everyone’s patience

What patience are we talking about here ? We're being patient when you say the servers will be upgraded next year. We're patient when you do silly things to races, classes, skills, when you break the most recent class added to the game with bugs, when said bugs go away without being officially patched after several weeks... We're patient with basically EVERYTHING here. So yeah, damn right you can thank us for that. Any business that wouldn't rely on the sunken cost fallacy as much as an online game would have tanked already. Several times.

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

the issues impacting the guild traders from this past weekend were ultimately tied to the overall game load and related processing requests. The cause was a high volume of add-on requests, game server requests, and multi-bid process requests all hitting at once.

Yeah, so ? This is, this should be at least, business as usual. It's not like trade-related server load is anything new. It's been a whole year since server performance has started degrading quite a lot. You guys used some band-aid several times already, and we all have been requesting server upgrades for a while now. We STILL have huge lags for no reason, framerate drops in the middle of nowhere with nothing especially GPU-intensive visible for several seconds, long loading times, returns to the login screen, delays in bar swapping and whatnot... But hey, everything's just fine, server upgrades can wait until 2020, that's our roadmap.

Well, it should be pretty obvious now that no, it can't wait. Sure, in a few days from now on you can expect the WoW crowd to leave and go play Classic. That's a server upgrade by itself : less load, more ressources available for everyone else. Will that be enough ? Wouldn't you want, as a business, to try keeping those customers ? I know new customers provide more income than returning / staying ones, but new customers influx relies on game reputation. You may be "killing it" now, but your reputation won't improve with a flustercluck each and every patch.

Basically, server upgrade has been overdue for months, get to it now. You just admitted your servers can't handle the load, so make them able.

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Disabling this functionality is the quickest and least impactful way to effectively adjust the overall load on the game. We’re still working on adding the additional safeguards and once we’ve tested it internally, we’ll determine if it’s something we can hotfix or if we’ll need to add it to an incremental patch. We’re also discussing the possibility of moving when guild trader ownership switches to another time that’s outside of primetime hours, but still during a reasonable time.

Hey, look, more bandaid.

So, let me see if I get this right. You guys create a game with interface and functionalities so bare that pretty much everyone and their cousin has to use addons fo the most basic things. Like, actually having a minimap, some sort of inventory management tools, proper trade history, and whatnot ; and then you blame those addons we only use because you never provided those functionalities in the first place to be responsible for your shortcomings ? Impressive.

I've been playing MMOs for almost 20 years now. Back in 2002 when I started Anarchy Online, interface could already be customised and things moved around. Every game with any sort of trading system in it I have played over those years always had some form of purchase / sales history. Minimap was pretty much always there, as an option one could toggle as they please.

Your base interface and functionalities would already have been sub-par 10 years ago. BUT at least, you give us tools to do all the work for you, so some people did. And now you blame THEM for doing YOUR job. All the while still not doing your job and not upgrading servers that have really, really needed it for over a year.

And let's talk about your coding, too. How can such a mess even be possible ? Or the previous mess, where Necromancers were stuck in infinite blocking / lost the healing part of their skills / insert many, many other bugs ? Or the desync of AoE attacks and their visual indicators ? You guys manage to break things you don't even touch. That's bringing clumsiness to a whole new level.

I used to work in IT, systems and networks management, back then. So here's how we did work when we had stuff to add to live servers : once whatever it was was coded, we tested it on a specially dedicated test server. It wasn't something fancy like a huge public test server where customers would be able to report bugs, no, just a private server where the team would try the new stuff and see how that goes, as well as roughly checking if something else was broken. THEN, if everything was fine, code was pushed to live. If it wasn't, then back to the dev team.

You guys are trying so hard to push that "year of the dragon" deadline thing, which no one ever asked you for in the first place, by the way, if the in-game year of the dragon was taking one year and a half in the real life no one would have cared... You are trying so hard to push that deadline that you skip the most basic requirement of every upgrade ever : see if it works first.

The way you guys proceed reminds me of some really, really bad companies I've had the displeasure to work for, which tried to cut the costs at every corner by subcontracting some of their code development to really dirt cheap external team. You get what you pay for, so code was crap, and of course they didn't bother testing it before implementing it, leading to us support team to deal with the dungstorm and trying to find workarounds for things that shouldn't have happened in the first place. Which, in the end, causes more loss of money than actually paying some decent people in-house to do some proper coding and testing. The only use of that kind of policy is to shift the blame on the subcontractant. The higher ups rant, we get a new subcontractant, rince, repeat.

Pretty much the same as what you do, come to think of it. Shift the blame on extreme server load caused by addons, when said addons wouldn't even exist in the first place if interface wasn't so devoid of everything, and load that wouldn't even be excessive if the servers were upgraded according to their population.

Seriously, stop that crap. Do some proper coding, and more importantly, do some testing. There is NO WAY something like that could have happened if you had tested your code and if it were running on non-potato servers. If you expected load-related issues, and by now you should expect them all the time, it was easy to simulate by running the testing environnment on a virtual machine for which you gradually reduced allocated ressources until it lags as much as Cyrodiil on a friday night.

You want our money ? Give us good reasons to spend it on you.

JPS

I predict nothing will happen. I also predict that extra gold will be gone in no time, since guilds who got the extra gold will take this opportunity to bid more for a better location. Wich makes the guilds that regularly have that trader bid more to counter it and keep their trader. Wich… yes, makes all this extra gold go away in no time..... Funny how that works out....

Guilds and their trader locations have been pretty much established for quite some time. Not much changes for most ever, unless Zos messes up. Therefore that extra gold really doesn't matter. A guild who already had 500 million and a trader in a good location doesn't need another 500 to maintain it. And as said above, they will have to bid more now to keep it, so it will balance out.

Also, unless there is proof I don't buy for a minute that people went around and bought all the mats to sell them for ridiculous prices. What I see more is that unknown guilds with unknown people with maybe 2 Temp Alloy in their bags now see that there simply isn't much supply due to regular sellers nto having a trader. So yes, prices will skyrocket. This will also be corrected in a week.

But sure, let's keep harping on who needs to be banned and why. Instead of looking at who caused this whole mess to begin with. I'm sure it suits them fine....

Gandrhulf_Harbard

anitajoneb17_ESO wrote: »

Moonsorrow wrote: »

We need permanent bans for those who exploited the duplicate gold. No other choice. I wish ZOS will be strict on this issue. We the majority of players who have to "live" with this economy will support heavy punishments so let that Volendrung hit hard on all exploiters since they made our daily playing a lot less fun.

Be careful with that. It's not like GMs are interchangeable NPCs. They are "leaders". Many guild members, including in trading guilds, feel committed to their guild(s) and their GMs. Perma-banning GMs (regardless of the moral justification of said sanction) leads to disbanding of ingame communities and many players leaving.
Things are not that simple.

Of course things are that simple.

Doing the right thing is ALWAYS the right thing.

If you (general you, not specifically you) broke the rules you deserve a ban - it really IS THAT SIMPLE.

Can't do the time, don't do the crime.

And I refuse to accept that anyone at all did not know that spending that "bugged gold" was wrong.

All The Best

TQSkull

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Thanks for everyone’s patience while we continue investigating the guild trader and multi-bidding issues that recently occurred on the PC EU server. To give everyone an update, the issues impacting the guild traders from this past weekend were ultimately tied to the overall game load and related processing requests. The cause was a high volume of add-on requests, game server requests, and multi-bid process requests all hitting at once.

As a temporary solution, we’ve disabled the guild history API functionality that addons use on the PC NA and EU servers until we have additional safeguards in place. Disabling this functionality is the quickest and least impactful way to effectively adjust the overall load on the game. We’re still working on adding the additional safeguards and once we’ve tested it internally, we’ll determine if it’s something we can hotfix or if we’ll need to add it to an incremental patch. We’re also discussing the possibility of moving when guild trader ownership switches to another time that’s outside of primetime hours, but still during a reasonable time.

As for the excess gold that some guilds received, we’re currently reviewing which guilds and individuals were affected and will be determining an appropriate course of action soon.

We apologize for the trouble and confusion all this has caused, and appreciate your continued patience.

Aren't there any mod users on NA servers..? Weird that there weren't any problems.. or may it be possible that NA servers have more capacity to handle the "overall game load"?

Hämähäkki

Uryel wrote: »

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Thanks for everyone’s patience

What patience are we talking about here ? We're being patient when you say the servers will be upgraded next year. We're patient when you do silly things to races, classes, skills, when you break the most recent class added to the game with bugs, when said bugs go away without being officially patched after several weeks... We're patient with basically EVERYTHING here. So yeah, damn right you can thank us for that. Any business that wouldn't rely on the sunken cost fallacy as much as an online game would have tanked already. Several times.

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

the issues impacting the guild traders from this past weekend were ultimately tied to the overall game load and related processing requests. The cause was a high volume of add-on requests, game server requests, and multi-bid process requests all hitting at once.

Yeah, so ? This is, this should be at least, business as usual. It's not like trade-related server load is anything new. It's been a whole year since server performance has started degrading quite a lot. You guys used some band-aid several times already, and we all have been requesting server upgrades for a while now. We STILL have huge lags for no reason, framerate drops in the middle of nowhere with nothing especially GPU-intensive visible for several seconds, long loading times, returns to the login screen, delays in bar swapping and whatnot... But hey, everything's just fine, server upgrades can wait until 2020, that's our roadmap.

Well, it should be pretty obvious now that no, it can't wait. Sure, in a few days from now on you can expect the WoW crowd to leave and go play Classic. That's a server upgrade by itself : less load, more ressources available for everyone else. Will that be enough ? Wouldn't you want, as a business, to try keeping those customers ? I know new customers provide more income than returning / staying ones, but new customers influx relies on game reputation. You may be "killing it" now, but your reputation won't improve with a flustercluck each and every patch.

Basically, server upgrade has been overdue for months, get to it now. You just admitted your servers can't handle the load, so make them able.

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Disabling this functionality is the quickest and least impactful way to effectively adjust the overall load on the game. We’re still working on adding the additional safeguards and once we’ve tested it internally, we’ll determine if it’s something we can hotfix or if we’ll need to add it to an incremental patch. We’re also discussing the possibility of moving when guild trader ownership switches to another time that’s outside of primetime hours, but still during a reasonable time.

Hey, look, more bandaid.

So, let me see if I get this right. You guys create a game with interface and functionalities so bare that pretty much everyone and their cousin has to use addons fo the most basic things. Like, actually having a minimap, some sort of inventory management tools, proper trade history, and whatnot ; and then you blame those addons we only use because you never provided those functionalities in the first place to be responsible for your shortcomings ? Impressive.

I've been playing MMOs for almost 20 years now. Back in 2002 when I started Anarchy Online, interface could already be customised and things moved around. Every game with any sort of trading system in it I have played over those years always had some form of purchase / sales history. Minimap was pretty much always there, as an option one could toggle as they please.

Your base interface and functionalities would already have been sub-par 10 years ago. BUT at least, you give us tools to do all the work for you, so some people did. And now you blame THEM for doing YOUR job. All the while still not doing your job and not upgrading servers that have really, really needed it for over a year.

And let's talk about your coding, too. How can such a mess even be possible ? Or the previous mess, where Necromancers were stuck in infinite blocking / lost the healing part of their skills / insert many, many other bugs ? Or the desync of AoE attacks and their visual indicators ? You guys manage to break things you don't even touch. That's bringing clumsiness to a whole new level.

I used to work in IT, systems and networks management, back then. So here's how we did work when we had stuff to add to live servers : once whatever it was was coded, we tested it on a specially dedicated test server. It wasn't something fancy like a huge public test server where customers would be able to report bugs, no, just a private server where the team would try the new stuff and see how that goes, as well as roughly checking if something else was broken. THEN, if everything was fine, code was pushed to live. If it wasn't, then back to the dev team.

You guys are trying so hard to push that "year of the dragon" deadline thing, which no one ever asked you for in the first place, by the way, if the in-game year of the dragon was taking one year and a half in the real life no one would have cared... You are trying so hard to push that deadline that you skip the most basic requirement of every upgrade ever : see if it works first.

The way you guys proceed reminds me of some really, really bad companies I've had the displeasure to work for, which tried to cut the costs at every corner by subcontracting some of their code development to really dirt cheap external team. You get what you pay for, so code was crap, and of course they didn't bother testing it before implementing it, leading to us support team to deal with the dungstorm and trying to find workarounds for things that shouldn't have happened in the first place. Which, in the end, causes more loss of money than actually paying some decent people in-house to do some proper coding and testing. The only use of that kind of policy is to shift the blame on the subcontractant. The higher ups rant, we get a new subcontractant, rince, repeat.

Pretty much the same as what you do, come to think of it. Shift the blame on extreme server load caused by addons, when said addons wouldn't even exist in the first place if interface wasn't so devoid of everything, and load that wouldn't even be excessive if the servers were upgraded according to their population.

Seriously, stop that crap. Do some proper coding, and more importantly, do some testing. There is NO WAY something like that could have happened if you had tested your code and if it were running on non-potato servers. If you expected load-related issues, and by now you should expect them all the time, it was easy to simulate by running the testing environnment on a virtual machine for which you gradually reduced allocated ressources until it lags as much as Cyrodiil on a friday night.

You want our money ? Give us good reasons to spend it on you.

One of the best posts I've read in a while.

Totally agree

Ratzkifal

Ban the people calling for bans!

Arrodisia

Thorvarg wrote: »

anitajoneb17_ESO wrote: »

Moonsorrow wrote: »

We need permanent bans for those who exploited the duplicate gold. No other choice. I wish ZOS will be strict on this issue. We the majority of players who have to "live" with this economy will support heavy punishments so let that Volendrung hit hard on all exploiters since they made our daily playing a lot less fun.

Be careful with that. It's not like GMs are interchangeable NPCs. They are "leaders". Many guild members, including in trading guilds, feel committed to their guild(s) and their GMs. Perma-banning GMs (regardless of the moral justification of said sanction) leads to disbanding of ingame communities and many players leaving.
Things are not that simple.

On the other side, I checked the various (illegal) Goldseller sites. The price for 1 million gold is currently at about 15, - Euro. This means that the largest repayments, with complete sale, bring the appropriate guild leaders 15000, - Euro to 45000, - Euro. Do you think they are worried about possible / imminent sanctions by ZOS?

And just how did they(GMs)suddenly become gold sellers? Let's remove the tin foil. Most didn't even spend the money and the economy is very stable. They didn't go run off to suddenly become gold sellers. I have to face palm that, Sorry. ZOS dealt with gold selling long ago. It's at an all time low at this point, if it even still exists. We have no more in game advertisements for it either, without them ending with the ban. You going to check with a dubious site that exists to steal credit cards and personal data has zero to do with this topic, and doesn#t make anyone a gold seller. We know a lot of GM's and none are gold sellers. Players aren't going to risk their guilds, accounts, and financial health for some bug in the game. OMG This is so ridiculous.

Anyway, best regards.

Sanguinor2

Ratzkifal wrote: »

Ban the people calling for bans!

Ban the People calling for bans for the People calling for bans! Banception everyone!

Bosov

anitajoneb17_ESO wrote: »

Moonsorrow wrote: »

We need permanent bans for those who exploited the duplicate gold. No other choice. I wish ZOS will be strict on this issue. We the majority of players who have to "live" with this economy will support heavy punishments so let that Volendrung hit hard on all exploiters since they made our daily playing a lot less fun.

Be careful with that. It's not like GMs are interchangeable NPCs. They are "leaders". Many guild members, including in trading guilds, feel committed to their guild(s) and their GMs. Perma-banning GMs (regardless of the moral justification of said sanction) leads to disbanding of ingame communities and many players leaving.
Things are not that simple.

Im pretty sure 90% of a tradeguild their members doesnt care about who the GM is. People already leave when there is no tradespot. Guilds also kick members who arent selling...

If a guildleader received millions of bugged gold and used that gold to destroy the economy on the server than he or she deserves some kind of punishment for that.

Naftal

JPS wrote: »

But sure, let's keep harping on who needs to be banned and why. Instead of looking at who caused this whole mess to begin with. I'm sure it suits them fine....

It's not an instead thing.

People want the things fixed AND exploiters like you punished.

JPS

I fail to see myself as an exploiter. If anything I did not swoop in to get me a trader for 10K, wich clearly wasn't meant to be mine. See where I'm going with this? No, ofcourse you don't…..

Run along now…

OsManiaC

Naftal wrote: »

JPS wrote: »

But sure, let's keep harping on who needs to be banned and why. Instead of looking at who caused this whole mess to begin with. I'm sure it suits them fine....

It's not an instead thing.

People want the things fixed AND exploiters like you punished.

I want things fixed and and exploiters punished but care to see where this guy is doing Exploit?

if they ask me to choose which to do first like ban them or find preventive/predictive action, I would select second. I dont know what will I face this sunday

Cously

No one should be above the TOS. You can bet if one billion appears in my account overnight I will call the bank. The ones who took advantage are both cowards and selfish. To come here and defend the actions when so much people are going through misery like losing their spots which they worked hard to bid is absolutely disgusting. Filthy. I will not blame only the GMs, ZOS bears most of the burden due lack of foresight and action but the ones who money laundered ARE part of the problem.

Naftal

JPS wrote: »

I fail to see myself as an exploiter. If anything I did not swoop in to get me a trader for 10K, wich clearly wasn't meant to be mine. See where I'm going with this? No, ofcourse you don't…..

Run along now…

Did you use the extra gold you knew you weren't supposed to get like you admit earlier?

You must lack a lot of self awareness.

JPS

There aren't even enough facepalm gifs in the world to counter all this stupidity that goes on here.

Naftal

JPS wrote: »

There aren't even enough facepalm gifs in the world to counter all this stupidity that goes on here.

I mean, whatever works for you as a defense mechanism.

You know you *** up but don't want to take responsibility and now are crying on the forums about it. Trying to point fingers at others. So damn pathetic.

Arrodisia

The goal here should be to provide constructive feedback, like possible solutions to make sure this doesn't happen again. Prices are stable. So, the rest is just BS.

agegarton

Sanguinor2 wrote: »

agegarton wrote: »

Who has intentionally abused anything.....? Great post mate - you admit you haven’t got a clue what happened or how guild trader bids work, but you insist on making BS comments anyway. What a prat.

Rephrasing it in a way you might understand:
Guildmaster/Guildbank got additional Gold back when they had no Control over it? Not intentionally abusing something they are fine.
Guildmaster/Officers who left all the extra Gold in the bank and did Nothing with it? Not intentionally abusing something they are fine.
Guildmaster/Officers who took an amount that is equal or less to what they would have received back under normal circumstances? Not intentionally abusing something they are fine.
Guildmaster/Officers who know perfectly well that they shouldnt have received that much Gold back yet took it all and started mass buying stuff to resell at higher Prices? Intentionally abusing a bug, AKA exploiting AKA against TOS, Zos is well within their Rights to ban those People for whatever Duration they see fit and/or punish them in another way.

Maybe this clears it up? Im sure there is a majority of guildmasters/officers that didnt exploit this bug, that doesnt mean that those that did should go unpunished.

And how many GMs do you know for certain - not your opinion, but for certain - who took the gold deposit and used it in the way you are suggesting?

In my experience, the vast majority of those who are taking advantage of the situation (quite legitimately it must be said) are people who do not ordinarily have the chance to sell in their current locations. There are guilds that managed to snag their spot by re-taking it when it become "vacant" but again, the fact that some people are pricing items at the highest rate possible does not mean that anyone used the refunded gold and bought up everything. The reality is that there is a serious supply shortage, so demand has increased prices on some items hugely. That's because loads of guilds - big trade guilds - didn't get their spot.

So yeah I'm clear - maybe you're not? Maybe you're just spewing hot air and still don't know WTF you're talking about ? The issue here is not that you think you might possibly have an opinion on why prices are currently high, but what to do ABOUT THE ACTUAL ROOT CAUSE PROBLEM.

Urigall

Solutions? Implementation of the bidding system can be fixed - seems to have worked for PC-NA although I have no direct knowledge of how it went. But the changes won't achieve what was intended.

This is lifted from an official, ZoS comment on the PTS board (emphasis mine):

The guild trader system is a cornerstone of the in-game economy in ESO, but over time the enormous pressure on trading guilds to have a guild trader every single week has led to behaviors which reduce competition and negatively impact trader customers. Tactics employed to ensure guild trader ownership each week, such as the generation of alternate “shadow” guilds to bid on additional locations as well as guild trader speculation and resale through guild dissolution, often lead to fewer traders populated with goods and massive amounts of wasted gold.

A reasonable inference to draw is the changes were aimed at shutting down these practices.

Needn't have bothered. Judging by the outcome of last Sunday's round of bidding, the bogus guilds are still around. As most of us have seen, around half the kiosks that were secured have next to bugger all inventory. Some are - or were - empty. The implementation of the system on PC-EU was borked (anyone else notice that btw?) but that's not the point. Even if the bidding system had worked perfectly, the bogus guilds would, in all probability, still have secured some kiosks. Maybe a lot fewer than was the case this past Sunday - the "grab a guild at ten grand while they're still available" glitch was probably a factor. But the fact that kiosks were grabbed - and left bereft of goodies - suggests that ghost guilds (or bogus/phantom/not legit, as preferred) had been created. They'll still be around next week.

This is the bit that amuses me. ZoS is a huge enterprise with gazillions in resources. A few players who have invested...what...fifty quid each or thereby...maybe another tenner a month for ESO+...are still influencing how a key aspect of the game plays out. And the mighty ZoS seems unable to do zip about it. It's the equivalent of a few kids with BB guns stopping an M1 Abrams tank.

The way the kiosk bidding system (still) works opens up a marketing opportunity for ZoS - "Instaguild" Includes 50 bogus traders, 30 saleable items and a limited edition GM hat. Only 5,000 crowns. It's obvious that ZoS can't stop the bogus guilds, so the company might as well make some money out of it.

Last, a quick heading off at the pass job. Notwithstanding (now there's a fancy word) the ghost guild thingy, guild trading adds vibrancy and life to the game. The dearth of current, trading activity - a consequence of the bidding bork - shows that quite clearly. There is much less activity. In addition, many players spend a lot of their time trading. That's another beneficial aspect of trading - keeps players interested in ESO. Whether or not one doesn't view trading as a legit, ESO activity is irrelevant. Some players like PvE, some like PvP, some like housing and some like trading. The focus for each player is a matter of individual choice.

A global AH is NOT the solution to our problems so please don't conjure up that spectre (yet again) We've had enough of ghosts in the form of phantom guilds.

Flaminir

Posted by Kai in a German thread...

Hello,

nobody blames the addons. It was up to the server utilization at the time of the guild dealer change.
Disabling certain add-on functions that cause many server queries is the fastest way with the fewest side effects to reduce server load. Of course it is not a permanent solution.

Another way is to put the dealer change on another time, e.g. for the morning. This is also being discussed.

If you have too much gold in the guild bank due to the bug, you do not have to do anything. Of course, it would be an advantage if you did not touch the gold to simplify tracking and possibly deleting.

Original thread herehttps://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/de/discussion/comment/6289795#Comment_6289795

wavingblue

Except in the 'Murican version of WTF is going on add-ons were front and center, again. Ask him if they KNEW add-ons were going to be an issue including the evil trading ones, why didn't they disable the add-ons prior to EU trader flip? The add-on load didn't magically explode overnight, they knew what to expect as they have been running at high load levels for a very long time. How does disabling add-ons NOW fix a problem that happened THEN?

Darkheart

I'm a guild leader of a trade guild on EU and i gladly give back all the gold I was refunded too much. I do want the gold back from my winning bid on the trader I did not get this week. All gold that was refunded too much is still all in our guild bank. Cause I knew we got this gold by a mistake.

But those who say to ban GMs for a mistake out of their control shows a lack of intelligence from those persons.


Pegasus Red , Merchants of the Wulves.