What's not to get. It means No one placed a bid on that trader for what ever reason making it a win for their dummy guild.
It happens. To often

A trader for hire for 10k if that trader doesn't get bid at all. Is intended clearly for legit guilds to have a second shot upon a guild losing their bid.

This is taken away by their dummy guilds.
Not to mention the gold they save and pocket.
Plus the bugging of the trader notice.

At trader switch. Every guild big or small has a chance to hire a trader if it's gone free to hire for 10k
The guilds that lost a bid, at trader switch. Will run around from area to area to find a trader that's not been bid on. The way it was intended

Again this is taken away by the funny guilds in the main popular areas

Hyrianeth wrote: »

This wouldnt happen on a global auction house.

My body is ready for your salt.

Yeah, it would be even worse. The richest players would buy out everything worthwhile and relisting for huge prices and cornering the market and dominating the entire economy, instead of just a few guildstores. Think before you talk mate.

Anne13 wrote: »

What's not to get. It means No one placed a bid on that trader for what ever reason making it a win for their dummy guild.
It happens. To often

So you have to know before the bidding which trader kiosk will not get bid on to get them for the risky bid of only 10k. If they know which traders don't usually get bid on, other guilds should/ could know this as well. Seems the root of the problem is that everyone wants exact that and only that one kiosk while the other 5-6 kiosk aren't so attractive to them.

Or are these dummy kiosk out in the wilds, next to a wayshrine in the fields of Eastmarch etc?

So you have to know before the bidding which trader kiosk will not get bid on to get them for the risky bid of only 10k. If they know which traders don't usually get bid on, other guilds should/ could know this as well. Seems the root of the problem is that everyone wants exact that and only that one kiosk while the other 5-6 kiosk aren't so attractive to them.

Or are these dummy kiosk out in the wilds, next to a wayshrine in the fields of Eastmarch etc?

No there are 4 main areas that are popular and busy
Every trader in Deshaan
Front craglorn
Elden root
4 in Wayrest

They cover each of these with their dummy guilds in hope no one else bids on them.

A possible way of curbing this might be for a guild to have to exist for at least a couple of weeks before being able to bid on a trader perhaps. Maybe even a month?

That amount of time between creation and the eligibility to bid on a trader yes might make the idea of disposable dummy guilds less useful.

Yours with paws
Santie Claws

People don't seem to be getting it.
If they were simply commited to insuring their preferred spot then why wouldn't they just up the bid by combining the bids from the primary guild and the bid for the dummy guild???

This is how the system was intended to be utilized. The profit combined with the donations should be self regulating. Always dumping the max amount possible to secure the spot. Instead these guilds are not only getting kiosks cheap as possible, they are also learning the cost of other kiosks (which being in a cartel can also provide), and guaranteeing that they can take cuts of the profit provided by its members and its members only, literally pocketing millions.

If they were comfortable dumping all the tax and donations into one spot, why would they have the need to use this practice, they wouldn't, simple. Unless of course the guild isn't doing as much business as is required for that spot. Meaning that legitimately more active and profitable guilds are not getting a fair shake.

It's definitely an exploit as there is no other reason than profiteering to partake in this practice.

One of the problems I see with the current system, which leads to the issue brought up by the OP, is the huge disruption in trading for a guild that is very active, if it loses a spot for the week.

The system should be designed to provide relative stability for guilds that are trading at the highest rates. What I mean by this is that the system should not be designed in a way that a guild trading enough to fund a 5 million gold bid per week should all of the sudden not have a trader if another guild bids 5.1 million, assuming they did everything else right.

The gaming of the system described by the OP is risk managament. ZOS needs to find a way to legitimately allow good trading guilds to limit their risk. It shouldn't be an all or nothing thing with guild traders. The current system of "all or nothing" leads to massive instability in the trading guild market, which leads to the cartels/exploitation as we see now.

If there was a legitimate way to hedge the risk of not having a trading spot, then we would see less collusion and better competition in this area of the game.

Ok so help me to understand an innocent question.

Evil Guild A with player base ABC bids on a mega-buck high volume trader $$$X

Evil Guild B with the same players bids on a cheap low volume trader $Y.

If both win the bids, they now have a high volume spot and a low volume spot - which basically does not help them much and they lose a little gold.

if both lose or if the mega-buck bid is the only one that wins, they are no better off than if they had just bid on the one.

So far, no exploit.

If they lose the mega-buck bid and win the crappy bid they now have two options:
Since their playerbase has overlap, they can just ask their players to post to feed the sucky position.
But if they want to get the whole orighinal guild involved, they can do this disband and quick-pick to keep their main guild feeding but into the sucky position.

So what this does for them is gives them a backup emergency if all else fails sucky fall-back plan at the expense of some extra gold spent.

Is that right?

jcaceresw wrote: »

I believe the solution is that the guild trader spot can't be used by another guild until the next rotation. If I am not mistaken, each 7 days the guild trader spot will be given to the highest bidder. Well then, if that dummy trading guild wins a spot and disband during the course of his "rightfully" week of operations such spot becomes unusable. All bids done after such disband goes for the next rotation which is Monday of the next week. That means a spot may be non operational for a whole week when those guild traders resort to such malpractice.

Claps. Exactly this ^^ as I stated before or just stop guilds being able to disband whilst owning a trader.

Royaji wrote: »

Ok, I do understand that the OP has a moderate language barrier, but I absolutely can't understand what the hell is he talking about. How in the world is it possible to get one of the prime spots for a "dummy guild" for cheap? The bids on every trader in one of the capitals exceed millions. There is no way you can get them for 100k and "save" money that way...

I do have a feeling OP doesn't even understands how bids work to be honest. The "dummy guild" trick is a thing, but it is used in an entirely different circumstances.

1. Guild A bids on a trader in one of the prime spots but they are not sure if they have enough money to get it. Let's say the bid here is 3 millions.
2. They create a "dummy guild" B to place another bid on one of the traders in cheaper area (like Skywatch or Windhelm) the bid here is only 100k
3. Guild A looses a bid so they don't have a trader at all.
4. Guild B wins the bid and takes the cheap trader.
5. Guild B is then disbanded and the cheap trader is bought for 10k by guild A.
6. As a result Guild A has a trader for the week even though they lost their bid for a trader in prime spot.

This is an issue but it has nothing to do with the things OP describes...

You don't get it.

What if no one bids on one of the top spots?
Also forget the lower areas.
They do not use dummy guilds in the lower areas

NeillMcAttack wrote: »

TheStealthDude wrote: »

One of the problems I see with the current system, which leads to the issue brought up by the OP, is the huge disruption in trading for a guild that is very active, if it loses a spot for the week.

The system should be designed to provide relative stability for guilds that are trading at the highest rates. What I mean by this is that the system should not be designed in a way that a guild trading enough to fund a 5 million gold bid per week should all of the sudden not have a trader if another guild bids 5.1 million, assuming they did everything else right.

The gaming of the system described by the OP is risk managament. ZOS needs to find a way to legitimately allow good trading guilds to limit their risk. It shouldn't be an all or nothing thing with guild traders. The current system of "all or nothing" leads to massive instability in the trading guild market, which leads to the cartels/exploitation as we see now.

If there was a legitimate way to hedge the risk of not having a trading spot, then we would see less collusion and better competition in this area of the game.

How though, does a guild, that is trading at the highest capacity possible, in the top spot, with the most active members, all giving weekly donations lose a position, if all profits are put toward the bid the following week!???

There are a few reasons.

First: Trading guild's profits eventually top out, especially when at a high end spot already. The amount of gold a guild has does not keep increasing at the same rate to infiniti, even if guild leaders are honest. Because of this, guilds will only ever have a limited amount of gold to spend on bids.

Second: Your assumption is that only trading guilds have the money to invest. There are plenty of rich players with the capital to invest in a high end trade spot, if they decided they wanted to try their hand at running a trade guild. If someone with millions of gold (plenty of people in this game) decided to start up a guild and bid on a top spot, it throws the whole system into a loop. If they win, the former guild gets kicked out. Then the former guild has to start bidding against other guilds (because they won't want to risk bidding multiple times against the new guild that beat them, where each week without a trader seriously jeopardizes the guild). Then they kick out another guild, who has to do the same thing.

It creates a lot of instability when there is a newcomer with capital in the market. With instability, people try to find ways to hedge, thus the current problem.

The current system provides no means of hedging and that needs to be fixed.

Also, there seems to be some thought that many guild leaders are skimming gold from their guild treasury for themselves. While this could happen, I think it's wrong to presume that this is the cause of the exploitation of the system.

We see cartels and dummy guild bids simply because this is the best and ONLY way to hedge risk in a very unstable system.

Anne13, either the economy is absolutely *** on PS4 (I'm on PC so I dunno) where no one bids on "top spots", or you don't understand whats actually going on.

If no one bid on those "top spots", then why is this a problem? Are there even enough trading guilds on PS4 to occupy all the traders?

If your guild is losing to one of the other traders going for millions....then just bid on the ones you say are supposedly winning with only 100k gold that are "top notch".

It's not an exploit and you are QQing over nothing.