[snip]

I love this generational projection Do you have any actual data to back up your rant or are younger people an easy target for your frustrations?

Just to mess with your data, I'm 47. I hate stupid inefficiencies. I hate artificial obstacles placed in the way of functions that should be seamless.

Take this, for example: you go in game interact with the trader on their home turf. Do you get the item right away, since you're standing in front of their merchandise-laden wagon? Nope. You have to travel to some other part of Tamriel, sit through a loading screen. Then, maybe, the trader will mail it to you. Mail. After you were standing right in front of them. Seriously?

How much time and resources are wasted on guild trader bidding wars? How much player gold is shoved into guild fees and donations? How much buyer time is wasted wayshrining all across Tamriel to find an item? How many people have given up on buying and selling altogether because it's a colossal waste of time? How many sales have sellers lost as a result?

Eh, whatever. On the downward slope of life's mountain even arguing this is probably a waste of valuable time. *shakes cane* Get off my lawn

[edited to remove quoted content]

SugaComa wrote: »

Personally I think guilds should only be allowed to sell to guild members to start with and then when they have enough in taxes they can hire a trader, but traders should only ever be hired through taxes earned not from donations ... This will stop the whole over bidding on traders

I can break that proposal in about 5 seconds. I post 1 foul hide for 25 million gold. Log to my alt account and buy it. Bam, guild taxes earned and can now be used for the weekly bid.

Androconium wrote: »

Aznarb wrote: »

Spot doesn't matter at all you know..
I'm in a little vendor guild who don't ask me anything other than seling stuff.
I sell all pretty fast w/o problem.

Most of PPL use addon or external website to check price and location anyway.

This.

This would be excellent but oh wait maybe the person is on console? Either add a npc that replicates the add-on for PS4 or make a global ah since with that add-on you basically have a global ah on PC.

I couldn't disagree with the OP more, on all counts.

First some background. I am in 5 trade guilds and run two accounts. I average 900-1200 sales per week for around 4M gold per week. I have done this for almost two years so i think i have a good handle on the ESO economy. I sell a wide variety of items from crafted furniture to raw mats. I rarely "buy and flip" and I am by no means the most active or lucrative trader. I am not a guild master or even an officer in any of my guilds.

Firstly, I cant say whether selling in zone takes all day as I have never considered doing that. I list stuff in a trade guild and if it doesn't sell in 10 days I relist at a different price or in another store. Or perhaps the "all day" part is an exaggeration?

Trade guilds blind bid every week for their spot. This costs gold. For premium cities such as Mourhold and Rawl it is millions. Secondary and tertiary markets are also very expensive. Trade guilds fund this weekly cost by levying dues, setting selling minimums, having raffles and conducting auctions of donated merchandise or some combination of these. When you list an item for sale a 1% listing fee is charged and that gold disappears, the guild does not get it. (There is a post somewhere from ZoS that says this fee is refunded on sale but this is false, anyway I digress).

In addition, a 7% tax is levied on your sale, half of which (3.5%) goes to the guild. The other half disappears. Part of the reason for the tax is for its anti-inflationary benefits. In the absence of taxation (and the weekly trade guild bids) the game economy will experience significant inflation, You don't want that.

For a guild to raise 1M gold for a bid, it needs to sell 28M. Each guild only has room for 500 members. Even if every single member was active they would each need to sell 56k worth of stuff. You can see then that many guilds who face large bid costs have to have minimum selling quotas. Inactive players are removed from guilds to make room for players who are active and want to sell.

This being said, there are many trade guilds that operate quite successfully in smaller markets and have no dues or selling minimums. One of my guilds is like this. But, not every thing will sell for more than vendor prices, no matter where the trader is located. Non-set gear is an example.

My only other experience with MMO markets was WoW and it does not bring back happy memories. If you found the Uber Battleaxe of Awesomeness and ran to the AH to sell it, you would look up how many others are listed and list your for less than everyone else. After several days you go back to the AH and discover that nine other peeps have done the same thing so you have to cancel your listing and relist cheaper than those guys. This "race to the bottom" is not fun.

In ESO, you can still be undercut by your guildies but there are a lot fewer of them that the entire game community so it isn't nearly as bad. Also, most traders use addons to gauge market prices and list accordingly, without reference to current listings.

I remember the AH bots in WoW. I don't know if they still have them (I stopped playing after MoP). You would often see the bots parked to the left of the door to the AH in Stormwind (I cant remember where the bots were in Hordeville, sorry). These bots would auto-purchase items priced below a pre-set limit, and relist at a higher price. Also, they would buy stacks of items and relist them as single items. If you wanted to buy a bunch of potions for your next raid you would have to scroll through page after page of overpriced singles to get to a reasonably priced multi-stack. I understand that these bots infect central AH's in other games but I have not seen this for myself.

Just to be clear, guilds don't have an "iron-grip" on pricing. They just don't. Guild masters are too busy doing darn near anything else to worry about what is selling and for how much. What they are concerned with is total sales. Period. If anyone told me I was selling for too low a price or too high, I would tell them to get stuffed, then list tons of stuff for a low low price just to be a B^&ch.

With regard to restricting trade guilds to only selling "crafted or rare items", who is to say what "rare" means. If Alcast designs a build for vMA that includes the Beekeepers set from Greenshade, you bet it will become "rare" in a heartbeat. Who then tells trade guilds they can sell that?. This is moot in any event as having an AH would insta-kill trade guilds.

Enough about guilds, lets tackle to 450mph farmers. Pricing is determined by two factors, supply and demand. Farmers (yes I have one, although I don't use her very much anymore) zip around the country side harvesting everything they see. What they harvest increases the available supply, thereby providing downward pressure on prices. For the 2 or 3 minutes after a farmer has come by the "false sense of rarity" the OP mentioned may exist for a local viewer but this has zero effect of prices. If they didn't respawn in a few minutes I suppose this perceived rarity would be more common but fortunately for us the nodes respawn. Always.

A suggested improvement is a more robust Listing service similar to Tamriel Trade Centre. TTC works but has its flaws which results in frustration for buyers when they visit stores only to find the item they want is not there.

TLDR: suck it up, it isn't that long, just read it.