Is there really no auction house?

SevenKingdoms

I've just started playing, and there are a few concerns I have, though this is my primary concern.

Apparently, since there's a lack of an auction house, you have to join five different guilds just to sell your items, and even then, you have to bid on a "trader" to do so.

My concerns are:

A.) Each guild only allows 500 members, meaning a "trader" is a requirement to sell items. How are smaller guilds supposed to afford this? It has to be expensive to bid on something this important.

B.) Being a member of five different guilds, and your guild not being displayed to other players, it seems like this really deprives us of the guild experience that's proven successful in every MMO.

C.) Basically, every guild you join should be focused on trade, at least until you get to whatever the level cap is. So, unless one of your successful trade guilds also does raids, aren't you going to be forced to raid with ransoms?

D.) Doesn't this system mean joining a guild of just friends is a bad idea, since it'll take up one of your guild slots, ultimately reducing your access to a buying/selling outlet?

E.) How are you supposed to search for, and buy, items? Do you really have to find each trader's location on each map, then physically visit each one of them? Then, every time you actually find each item or material, won't you have to write down the price and location of each item, and after you search every trader, revisit each one that had every item or material for the lowest price to actually buy the item? Then, won't you have to repeat this process every single time you need to buy something?

This seems like a really, really bad trade system, that will become a major hassle. If this is correct, then could someone please explain why they would think this was a good idea? The only thing I could possibly think of is that they wanted to try something different, though you would think that once they actually thought about it, they'd realize how terrible this idea really is. There's a reason auction houses are similar in every MMO -- it's the system that works.

Jura23

I agree. Messing together trading and guilds is something I don't like, but it seems like they plan to stick with this system, so there is little point arguing about it.

Volkodav

The game is made the way they chose to make it.We either live with it's systems or we have to find another game that works for us.Personally,I dont mind this set up.You just have to adjust to it is all.

Brightxdawn

Searching and buying items is not as hard as you are describing it to be. It is actually quite simple.

Deadmano

You can sell to the guild store from any bank in the various cities... Not that hard. And if you're on PC you have a TON of add-ons that can help you simplify the process, such as the Master Merchant one.

You can also sell to /zone, I do this constantly and have never had an item NOT sell. You want to be selling stuff that will sell, not your random junk meant for deconstruction. Sets/Blues and above sell 99% of the time, may take a little longer and a few posts but it does work.

I don't find the system lacking as I prefer to be self-sufficient and get everything I need. I personally can't understand why others would buy gear when it drops with a few dungeons etc. But hey, who am I to complain if it means I can sell them for 4-5x that which the NPC traders will give me.

Xendyn

This horse is dead, rotting and molding away.

ZOS has it the way they want it and no, you don't need 5 trade guilds, just a couple good ones.

Using the Search tool up there^ will save you a lot of time, there's not much new to say on most topics. It's all been hashed and rehashed over the last couple of years.

Leandor

While his is just a snarky jab with little value, @ScooberSteve has a point: ESO has a decent trade system, it is just a bit more complicated than what we were used to.

Instead of a central auction house, we have approx. 250 of them. The guild traders can only be stocked by those in the owning guild but can be accessed for buying by everyone. That means that your actual market is still all of the servers population, it's just a bit difficult to reach them.

This is part of the beauty of this system, prices fluctuate a lot less then with a centralized system, since you can just move to the lesser frequented places and find totally different prices on commodities.

In order to find rares and or highly valuable things, you'd have to look at the traders at the main trade spots (belkarth, rawl'ka, mournhold, to a lesser extent elden root, wayrest and orsinium), where the big trading houses will have their traders.

Getting a trader is expensive - if you want to have one at those locations, assume weekly costs of up to 2.5mln gold. But then, these don't pay out if you have nothing to offer, hence small guilds have no place there. Other, less frequented regional main cities can be rented for much less, sometimes for as little as 100k gold. For standard commodities and medium value items, these offer a decent turnaround as well.

Bottom line is: you can get away with just one trade guild as long as that one has a decent spot (been doing that for ages) and have the other 4 for social areas. Trading is more complicated than elsewhere, but considering that you could theoretically have millions of players on one server, a centralized auction house would become a nightmare.

AzraelKrieg

We don't need an auction house. What we need is an Auction Horse. @Gidorick we summon you.

ku5h

ScooberSteve wrote: »

Yes it is true you need brains to play this game. Maybe wildstar is more your thing?

If you think you need brains to do what he described then the joke is on you. Even below average IQ monkey can spent 2hr searching for lowest prices, but i guess some ppl find it challenging, lol...

Brightxdawn wrote: »

Searching and buying items is not as hard as you are describing it to be. It is actually quite simple.

True, but just think. How many times you bought an item you look for on the lowest price range?! Probably never. If you really wanna find cheapest price, you have to spent time. But i guess there come in to play kiosk locations, and bidding for them. For examle, if i post potent crux in Bekarth for 25k, and post one for 20k in the middle of nowhere, Belkarth one will sell faster. Why? Because hundreds of ppl will browse trough that kiosk every day, while others are rarely even visited (main cityes excluded).

So the moral of the story is, they knew this sistem is 100% iritating, but they needed i large gold/time sink like everything is in this game.
Dont get me wrong, i love this game

Tandor

I completely agree with the OP, the present system is dysfunctional.

That's partly because of the difficulty in searching for stuff and buying it, especially at lower levels when you have limited accessibility to the traders, but also because the nature of the guild-based system is such that you cannot sell effectively without belonging to at least one guild and with a finite number of traders and people able to belong to up to 5 guilds with membership capped at 500 (and with guilds able to hold multiple traders) there is only a very small proportion of the playerbase that can actually sell items at all. The system works well for them, but sucks big time for everyone else.

It's even worse on console, of course, as that version lacks both text chat for zone selling and addons for making the trading system manageable for those who do participate in it.

I'd love to see the system improved, although an auction house doesn't necessarily have to be the answer. A decent search function for buyers with a fee charged for optional automatic delivery by mail would open it up to all buyers, while an independent trader in key locations able to be used by anyone but with higher commission charges made and divided between the guilds trading in that location would open it up to all sellers.

The argument that opening up the trading system to more participants would simply allow people to play the markets and distort prices has always been false and has recently been proved to be so by the number of complaints about such things already happening under the present system. There really are no valid reasons any longer to maintain the present system which is hugely restrictive to sellers and massively impractical for buyers, and I hope ZOS finally realise it needs improving in one way or another.

Gidorick

Da da Daaaa!

Thanks @AzraelKrieg !

Gidorick wrote: »

Link to the original post with details!: http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/159594/eso-needs-an-auction-horse-expanded-concept

Alucardo

Lmao I read the title and came here with the intention of summoning @Gidorick too. Someone beat me to it.

#SupportTheAuctionHorse

Xendyn

Lol, this has become a tradition @Gidorick

Yes to improvements for sure.

Global search to find where the items you want are
Better search tool within the stores
More traders so smaller guilds have a shot or maybe traders specifically for smaller guilds

and poor consoles, I just don't know at this point

Volkodav

Gidorick wrote: »

Da da Daaaa!

Thanks @AzraelKrieg !

Gidorick wrote: »

Link to the original post with details!: http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/159594/eso-needs-an-auction-horse-expanded-concept

Supporting the Auction Horse here!

Volkodav

That's weird.I quoted the auction horse picture,by Gedorick,and it didnt show up.I said:
Supporting the Auction Horse here!

AzraelKrieg

Because Gidorick's message itself was a quote.

failkiwib16_ESO

A.) Each guild only allows 500 members, meaning a "trader" is a requirement to sell items. How are smaller guilds supposed to afford this? It has to be expensive to bid on something this important.

Trading guilds usually recieve donations, some require it from its members, or require minimum sales of 1k per week. When their income gets high, they start cashing in gold - however, sometimes they end up in bid-wars and waste millions to secure their trader, and keep the guildies happy. It is a dirty messy business.

B.) Being a member of five different guilds, and your guild not being displayed to other players, it seems like this really deprives us of the guild experience that's proven successful in every MMO.

You can alternatively temporary leave a guild to join a trading guild, sell your items and leave again when your pockets are full, to rejoin your previous guild to play with them again. It is not ideal, it doesn't feel right -.- but is an alternative...

C.) Basically, every guild you join should be focused on trade, at least until you get to whatever the level cap is. So, unless one of your successful trade guilds also does raids, aren't you going to be forced to raid with ransoms?

The successfull trading guilds can cover your needs, you just have to keep your sales up on a daily base in 1 trading guild, and the other 4 can be gameplay guilds. But of course you will be earning less than if you joined 5 trading guilds and kept up your sales on a daily base.

D.) Doesn't this system mean joining a guild of just friends is a bad idea, since it'll take up one of your guild slots, ultimately reducing your access to a buying/selling outlet?

Yes and no, it forces you to prioritize. I had to leave my social guilds for a while once, to join trading guilds because I was 5 millions short of new gear. It took me 2-3 weeks since I am a slow seller, and I left the trading guilds to join my social guild afterwards.

E.) How are you supposed to search for, and buy, items? Do you really have to find each trader's location on each map, then physically visit each one of them? Then, every time you actually find each item or material, won't you have to write down the price and location of each item, and after you search every trader, revisit each one that had every item or material for the lowest price to actually buy the item? Then, won't you have to repeat this process every single time you need to buy something?

Yeah it is eyewatering and annoying. If you play on PC then you can have Awesome Guildstore addon that lets you search for individual items, it speeds up the process of searching through various guilds a little bit. Otherwise you have to go through the eyewatering annoying primitive search.
-If you are member of 5 of the best selling guilds, then you can relax in your bank and search through the guildstores, if not then it is adviced that you go to their locations and search

Asherons_Call

"E.) How are you supposed to search for, and buy, items? Do you really have to find each trader's location on each map, then physically visit each one of them? Then, every time you actually find each item or material, won't you have to write down the price and location of each item, and after you search every trader, revisit each one that had every item or material for the lowest price to actually buy the item? Then, won't you have to repeat this process every single time you need to buy something?"

This is far and away the most frustrating part of the guild trader system, especially if you are on console. You are 100% correct in your assessment. Pretty good for a player that just started.. You must have been around the block a couple times.

This system caters to the sellers. If you are a buyer, good luck and I hope you have a lot of extra time on your hands.

anitajoneb17_ESO

Tandor wrote: »

people able to belong to up to 5 guilds with membership capped at 500 (and with guilds able to hold multiple traders)

Guilds CANNOT hold multiple traders.

Asherons_Call

anitajoneb17_ESO wrote: »

Tandor wrote: »

people able to belong to up to 5 guilds with membership capped at 500 (and with guilds able to hold multiple traders)

Guilds CANNOT hold multiple traders.

Yea they can. Just have an officer of the guild create a "sister" guild. They do it all the time

Sithisvoid

No auction house, but we do have price fixing

Arkadius

Asherons_Call wrote: »

anitajoneb17_ESO wrote: »

Tandor wrote: »

people able to belong to up to 5 guilds with membership capped at 500 (and with guilds able to hold multiple traders)

Guilds CANNOT hold multiple traders.

Yea they can. Just have an officer of the guild create a "sister" guild. They do it all the time

But that's still another guild.

Asherons_Call

Xiana wrote: »

Asherons_Call wrote: »

anitajoneb17_ESO wrote: »

Tandor wrote: »

people able to belong to up to 5 guilds with membership capped at 500 (and with guilds able to hold multiple traders)

Guilds CANNOT hold multiple traders.

Yea they can. Just have an officer of the guild create a "sister" guild. They do it all the time

But that's still another guild.

With the same core of people in control of it

anitajoneb17_ESO

Asherons_Call wrote: »

anitajoneb17_ESO wrote: »

Tandor wrote: »

people able to belong to up to 5 guilds with membership capped at 500 (and with guilds able to hold multiple traders)

Guilds CANNOT hold multiple traders.

Yea they can. Just have an officer of the guild create a "sister" guild. They do it all the time

And so what ? That's still another guild that can have 500 members and will do the maximum to have those 500 members. So that's still 500 players x total guild traders that have access to the trading system.
The fact that some guilds are "sister guilds" has no influence whatsoever on the accessibility of the trading system.
Your vision is biased and based on wrong statements.

Any given guild CANNOT have more than one trader. FACT.

Arkadius

Asherons_Call wrote: »

Xiana wrote: »

Asherons_Call wrote: »

anitajoneb17_ESO wrote: »

Tandor wrote: »

people able to belong to up to 5 guilds with membership capped at 500 (and with guilds able to hold multiple traders)

Guilds CANNOT hold multiple traders.

Yea they can. Just have an officer of the guild create a "sister" guild. They do it all the time

But that's still another guild.

With the same core of people in control of it

It doesn't matter who controls a guild. It still requires its own management. ONE guild can only have ONE trader.

code65536

A) It's not that hard to get into a trading guild. Most trading guilds spend a lot of time and effort recruiting and looking for members. The really high-end ones (with 8-digit weekly sales figures) are the ones that are very exclusive and hard to get into, but you can make plenty of gold with more modest guilds (that are also far more relaxed in terms of member requirements). I make most of my gold in mid-sized guilds.

B) It's up to you to prioritize your guilds. Most people don't display their membership in a trading guild. Hell, I'm the GM of a trading guild, and I never wore its tabard. The 5-guild system allows you flexibility and freedom, and lets you have guilds that are more about utility, and it's what makes it possible to have different guilds focused on different things (PvP, PvE, trade, social, RP). I'd hate to be limited to just one guild.

C) You don't need five trading guilds to make good gold. Just one is enough, and most people I know have just one or two. Now, there are some who run with five trading guilds, but those are the people who think the economic game is the most fun part of ESO. To each their own.

D) See above. If you goal is to make absolutely as much gold as possible, sure. But that also requires a lot of work. Keeping 150 slots filled is very time-consuming. Unless your goal is to make as much gold as possible, then just one or two trading guilds will be more than sufficient.

E) Yes. AwesomeGuildStore is a great addon to make searching each individual guild store easier. But otherwise, yes, you do have to visit each one manually. But that's what you have to do anyway in real life, right? You can either drive around town, visiting every store, to find the best-priced milk in town. Or you can just go to the closest grocery store and pay whatever price they offer, because that convenience is worth whatever small savings you might get. I do the same thing. When buying simple items, I usually buy it from the banker's store interface, straight out of one of the guilds that I belong to, because it's convenient. For very expensive items, I will shop around a bit, but, depending on how large of a purchase it is, I might just hit a major trading hub or two, or I might make a full circuit of every trader in Tamriel. And, again, this is something that you would do in real life, too.

I don't consider this to be a downside. Hell, I consider it to be one of the best features of the economy, as it adds flavor and variety.

anitajoneb17_ESO

SevenKingdoms wrote: »

A.) Each guild only allows 500 members, meaning a "trader" is a requirement to sell items. How are smaller guilds supposed to afford this? It has to be expensive to bid on something this important.

A trader is no requirement to sell items. You can always sell to the people in your guilds even if they have no trader. Correct phrasing would be "A trader is a requirement to sell items outside of the guild". A trader only broadens your customer base, but you already have a nice large one (500 people isn't small) even without a trader.

SevenKingdoms wrote: »

B.) Being a member of five different guilds, and your guild not being displayed to other players, it seems like this really deprives us of the guild experience that's proven successful in every MMO.

What's "proven useful in every MMO" might just as well be your opinion, even though I'm not sure what you mean (never played any other MMO).
I for sure would HATE to have my guild's name "published" before my character's name, because that would mean that my guild's identity is stronger than my individual identity. I am in 5 totally different and independant guilds with different cultural backgrounds and different purposes, and I'm very happy this way.

SevenKingdoms wrote: »

C.) Basically, every guild you join should be focused on trade, at least until you get to whatever the level cap is. So, unless one of your successful trade guilds also does raids, aren't you going to be forced to raid with ransoms?

Wrong assumption. You can be very happy and sell very well with just one trading guild. Don't know why you think one should focus on trade until endgame... ?
But there are also guilds that do "everything" : trading / raiding / PvP / PvE / RP...
I prefer "specialized guilds" though, they're better at what they do if they do only one or two things and I'm more likely to find like-minded people in them.

SevenKingdoms wrote: »

D.) Doesn't this system mean joining a guild of just friends is a bad idea, since it'll take up one of your guild slots, ultimately reducing your access to a buying/selling outlet?

You don't need 150 sales' slots ! 30 (1 guild) is more than enough, 60 (2 guilds) can be necessary if you really are a dedicated farmer / trader. More is perfectly uselesss : you couldn't put up with sales volumes anyway and your slots would be empty.
3 social guilds is fine and enough too (believe me, once you've socialized well in the game, sometimes you just log on "invisible" in order to enjoy gaming undisturbed by whispers ).

SevenKingdoms wrote: »

E.) How are you supposed to search for, and buy, items? Do you really have to find each trader's location on each map, then physically visit each one of them? Then, every time you actually find each item or material, won't you have to write down the price and location of each item, and after you search every trader, revisit each one that had every item or material for the lowest price to actually buy the item? Then, won't you have to repeat this process every single time you need to buy something?

Admittedly, searching is tedious. But it adds to the strategic and social aspects of trading in ESO. As a seller, you have to build up your social network, be careful what guilds you're in and their reputation, because potential customers will not rely on a robot software to choose their supplier. If they know you, trust you, know your guild trader's location, they will come straight to you instead of searching everywhere.
A game within the game, that a unified search engine would completely destroy. (Wouldn't mind an improved native UI for guild stores though).

SevenKingdoms wrote: »

This seems like a really, really bad trade system, that will become a major hassle. If this is correct, then could someone please explain why they would think this was a good idea? The only thing I could possibly think of is that they wanted to try something different, though you would think that once they actually thought about it, they'd realize how terrible this idea really is. There's a reason auction houses are similar in every MMO -- it's the system that works.

It seems like you're really, really too new to the game to judge a system that you haven't really tried yet. There's no reason every MMO must have similar auction house and trading systems, and obviously that system doesn't always work and would not work in ESO.

RAGUNAnoOne

Gidorick wrote: »

Da da Daaaa!

Thanks @AzraelKrieg !

Gidorick wrote: »

Link to the original post with details!: http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/159594/eso-needs-an-auction-horse-expanded-concept

this is the face I made when I saw this again...how many times is that now?

RAGUNAnoOne

The quote is bugging out not letting me post

Gidorick this is the face I made when I saw that again... how many times have I seen that same image?

Arthur_Spoonfondle

SevenKingdoms wrote: »

This seems like a really, really bad trade system, that will become a major hassle. If this is correct, then could someone please explain why they would think this was a good idea? The only thing I could possibly think of is that they wanted to try something different, though you would think that once they actually thought about it, they'd realize how terrible this idea really is. There's a reason auction houses are similar in every MMO -- it's the system that works.

This is a really bad trade system but, the players that are in successful trading guilds and making fat profits, make such a fuss about not wanting to lose their advantage, regardless of the cost to others, both financial and in wasted time looking for things to buy, that nothing will ever be done about it.

However, the whole game is failing to live-up to the early promise, so it is not worth worrying about. Just play something else and let the traders run around making too much money to spend, in their selfish little way.

Asherons_Call

Xiana wrote: »

Asherons_Call wrote: »

Xiana wrote: »

Asherons_Call wrote: »

anitajoneb17_ESO wrote: »

Tandor wrote: »

people able to belong to up to 5 guilds with membership capped at 500 (and with guilds able to hold multiple traders)

Guilds CANNOT hold multiple traders.

Yea they can. Just have an officer of the guild create a "sister" guild. They do it all the time

But that's still another guild.

With the same core of people in control of it

It doesn't matter who controls a guild. It still requires its own management. ONE guild can only have ONE trader.

One core group of players can control multiple traders. This is done to monopolize a particular area. I've seen it happen.