PTS Update 23 - Feedback Thread for Multi-Bidding

Nordic__Knights

And I'm sure everybody desired outcome is to have a trading system that is free of all the harassment that goes on as well as the constant need to empty and drain your guild pockets in order to secure a trading spot to begin with

Grimm13

Gandrhulf_Harbard wrote: »

Grimm13 wrote: »

Gandrhulf_Harbard wrote: »

And that in an of itself is indicative that there is a massive problem with the current system.

Why are they recruiting 100% of the time?

But, as they say, there's none so blind as those who refuse to look.

I am recruiting all the time as there is a constant stream of players that stop playing. I am up front about cutting inactives after 21 days, used to be 30 days but I still see about 10 - 16 players a week stop playing ESO. Past year I have had about 10 players come back after a 3+ month hiatus.

Why is there 60 - 80 players stop playing eso in a months time? I am not even counting on those that come in during free eso trials. I do see an increase of quits around updates first announced, tapers off then again when Updates released then tapers off again.

With the guild finder I now have hundreds of apps to instantly replace the attrition. I no longer have to go bug zone chat with ads for hours of my play time trying to be in the right place at the right time.

I would really love to see the game attrition rate and find out why ESO has a problem with player retention.

Call me old fashioned. A Guild is a place Members go to to feel "at home" no matter what game style they prefer, no matter how frequently they are active. A place for them to be among friends.

The idea of dumping someone from a GAMING guild because they "don't pull their weight" is, I am not at all ashamed to admit, 100% totally alien to me.

No one would even dream of ejecting a Member, a friend, if they hadn't logged in for 21 days, or hadn't posted goods to the AH for 21 days. It simply would not happen.

That is does in ESO, and that it is seen as acceptable is in my opinion testament to just how badly designed the Guild System is.

Because you can be in 5 guilds most players really don't care that much about any of them, so they don't feel the need to give them any loyalty, and in return the Guild offers no loyalty back.

Because you can be in five guilds, different ones can serve different needs. I suck at running events but do well in keeping a trader. I decided to provide a trader service to those that do not want to pay a fee or have a quota, just use the trader and not even be required to use the chat. Don't even run a auction or raffle. I tried to even offered a discord channel but it was not used.

It is a bare bones Trading guide, but works for those that want this type. Never have a want to fill spots, before the Guild Finder it just time to fill back up.

I have to ask, out of your 5 guilds, how active are you in all of them? I have a good number of people that like they can have a active trader and not added pressure. They get enough of that from others.

I do make allowances for people that let me know they need time away. Some are in military, have other work or health issues. I do not count those that ask to be away as inactive. I run a pretty different model, probably not many guilds could be run this way but it fills the needs of those that want this.

Dusk_Coven

Gandrhulf_Harbard wrote: »

The idea of dumping someone from a GAMING guild because they "don't pull their weight" is, I am not at all ashamed to admit, 100% totally alien to me.

What the current system of bidding for kiosks does is make Trading Guilds (not just any guild -- guilds fighting to keep a trader) into more like BUSINESSES.

Businesses that have to pay rent.

Which means they can't have too many freeloaders, whatever each guild's definition of that is.

So if you like you can add that to your list of complaints about the current guild kiosk system.

Gandrhulf_Harbard

Grimm13 wrote: »

I have to ask, out of your 5 guilds, how active are you in all of them?

After what I just said you think I am in 5 guilds?

I joined a guild to be with people I consider friends, nothing more, certainly nothing less.

I am in one guild, and that is all I will ever be in at any one time.

If I don't care to commit to them I can't expect them to commit to me.


All The Best

silvereyes

Grimm13

silvereyes wrote: »

Needs a robot cat taking a squat on the shoes to be more accurate... just saying.

wenchmore420b14_ESO

reoskit wrote: »

wenchmore420b14_ESO wrote: »

SteamKitten01 wrote: »

I was doing some playing around on the PTS with the multi-bidding system and testing out placing more than one bid and noticed when placing identical bids, the order I bid in is not necessarily the order they show up on the bid list. Take the example below with bids # 4-7 for the guild in the image below. All 4 have the same bid but they are not listed in the order the bids were placed. I placed the Alinor bids first and then ported to Belkarth to place bids on traders there. I encountered the same issue when bidding for all 3 of my guilds that bids were not listed in the order they were placed. If I went back and added 1 gold to a bid, the correct bid would jump to the top, but if bids are exactly the same, it seemed to be random which bid was listed at the top of the list.

Question?
Where or how did you access that screen? I am on PC/NA, non steam. I looked for that screen on PTS but didn't see it.
What am I missing?
Thank you & Huzzah!

Image capture from an officer in our guild:

Thank You!! Huzzah!

wenchmore420b14_ESO

Ok. So got my regular trader on PTS. Ready to bid for next week, but confused why. As has been stated, PTS can NEVER reflect the consequences of how this change will affect the live server.
75% of kiosks are empty anyway. This bid listing of which is first, etc might be worth checking out, but my question is....
Why is there crickets here now?

PLEASE! @ZoS! Look at the responses that this is a BAD idea!!

Please communicate with us on this. Listen to the GM's like you once did.

Thank You!!

Grimm13

Did my 10 bids again for the week. I'm being lazy by using two zones in their major hubs.

I did find the place to check the bids placed. Want to see it changed to list previous week and this week, also have the returned bid amounts listed there as well.
Hate the fact that you would have to pick through the Guild bank history to check that all the funds were returned.

Placing the bids to see if there is a glitch, doubt that there is enough stress on system to really test it.

reoskit

wenchmore420b14_ESO wrote: »

but my question is....
Why is there crickets here now?

Crickets from whom? If you mean ZOS, *shrug*.

If you mean the users:

I, for one, feel like I've said what I have to say on this matter for now. The only change made to the UI/bidding system with this patch was to continue on the same development path originally stated. Did I expect them to scrap the system immediately, even after 35+ (tbh I've lost track of how many) pages of feedback? No.

That said, I'm not interested in being used as free QA for a system I do not support and especially not on a system that cannot be fully tested.

Sorcery

reoskit wrote: »

wenchmore420b14_ESO wrote: »

but my question is....
Why is there crickets here now?

Crickets from whom? If you mean ZOS, *shrug*.

If you mean the users:

I, for one, feel like I've said what I have to say on this matter for now. The only change made to the UI/bidding system with this patch was to continue on the same development path originally stated. Did I expect them to scrap the system immediately, even after 35+ (tbh I've lost track of how many) pages of feedback? No.

That said, I'm not interested in being used as free QA for a system I do not support and especially not on a system that cannot be fully tested.

Yep, not much more we can say really, just wait an see what happens with all the feedback given..hope for the best i suppose!

wenchmore420b14_ESO

reoskit wrote: »

wenchmore420b14_ESO wrote: »

but my question is....
Why is there crickets here now?

Crickets from whom? If you mean ZOS, *shrug*.

If you mean the users:

I, for one, feel like I've said what I have to say on this matter for now. The only change made to the UI/bidding system with this patch was to continue on the same development path originally stated. Did I expect them to scrap the system immediately, even after 35+ (tbh I've lost track of how many) pages of feedback? No.

That said, I'm not interested in being used as free QA for a system I do not support and especially not on a system that cannot be fully tested.

Lol.. Yes, I meant the devs and crickets.
I know they tend to be REAL quiet with LOTS of threads, but , this is a subject that they should discuss with us.
I'm not real vocal about a lot of stuff, but this is gonna be a Living Oblivion for ALL GM's.
@ZOS_PhilipDraven please anything you can add?
My 2 drakes! Huzzah!

Dusk_Coven

wenchmore420b14_ESO wrote: »

Lol.. Yes, I meant the devs and crickets.
I know they tend to be REAL quiet with LOTS of threads, but , this is a subject that they should discuss with us.

I think they've told us enough without telling us all sorts of things we don't want to hear.
- they are addressing manipulation of the system
- they are adding a quality of life improvement in no longer having to scramble for a backup trader in case your one bid fails
- what we don't want to hear: these changes will change the rules of the game, so everyone's just going to have to adapt to the new market competition environment (i.e., suck it up)

JHartEllis

Thinking more on why 10 bids is TOO many and why the number should be reduced:

Having 10 bids greatly increases the chance of placing misbids since you can't "lock-in" for the week until you've placed ALL the bids.

Spreading out the bids greatly increases the chance of an order-of-magnitude extra-digit misbid (e.g. bidding 40,000,000 instead of 4,000,000). I currently always bid at least 10% of the guild bank balance to avoid this, which won't be an option anymore. This problem is alleviated with ANY number less than 10.

Guild banks will become huge and tempting targets. It's already difficult to find trustworthy officers, and a huge pile of gold changes this dynamic very negatively. This increases the likelihood and impact of bank thieving and malicious bids. Guild leaders would have to be way more careful with who they give bank access to, and this magnifies the risk of the "long con" like the infamous EVE Online betrayal. Worse yet, outside of leadership control, it would make GMs and officers more likely targets of hacking/phishing attempts.

In the short-to-medium-run, it is putting and will continue to put enormous pressure on guild leaders to raise enough gold to cover many bids. This pressure is proportional to the number of bids. Increasing the burden on guild leaders seems to be the opposite intended effect of the multi-bid system.

POTENTIAL SOLUTIONS:

Reduce the number of bids. Anywhere from 3-8 would achieve the goals of multi-bidding without leading to as many negative consequences.

Only have the highest bid withdraw from the guild bank. This reduces many risks associated with high gold balances.

Allow for bid retraction/reduction.

Allow the GM to set a maximum allowable bid from within the rank settings. This would allow guilds to avoid the extra-digit threat and reduce the severity of malicious bids.

Allow the GM to set a maximum allowable guild bank gold withdrawal from within the rank settings. This would reduce the impact of bank thieving.

---

I think overall that multi-bidding will be a beneficial game improvement. However, I think most of that benefit is lost by having 10 bids since it invites so many problems.

Merlight

JHartEllis wrote: »

Only have the highest bid withdraw from the guild bank. This reduces many risks associated with high gold balances.

That wouldn't protect you from typos or theft at all. What it would achieve is eliminating the dilemma "do we split bank among 3 bids, and how, or do we go all in on our main trader?" and everyone would bid on 10 spots (or whatever the maximum will be).

reoskit

JHartEllis wrote: »

Only have the highest bid withdraw from the guild bank. This reduces many risks associated with high gold balances.

While I get the problem you're attempting to solve, I think the larger concept of not pre-paying for each bid made introduces issues.

I'm still firmly in the camp of "anything over 2 bids is ridiculous," but for the sake of the topic...

reoskit wrote: »

FlopsyPrince wrote: »

Why do you need the gold for each build if it is going to be refunded except in the winning case (if that happens). Allow bids below the current max and take enough money to make up the difference if a higher bid is made.

While it seems like a good idea, this leads to an even steeper slope of bid increases.

Instead of having to plan how to distribute your gold over the various bids you want to make, you can throw all your money behind the same bid on 10 kiosks. The only cap is how much you're willing/able to spend on your kiosk.

This means you can, and will, bid higher than if you were distributing your gold over various bids.

So will everyone else. Each week.

You'll know where you lost bids at that price. So, if you want to move, you'll bid higher next time.

So will everyone else. Each week.

Climb climb climb. See?

DLM

No doubt this whole patch is meant to *** off as many players as possible. And they are doing a very good job at it, as they were saying, they're killing it.

Sorcery

I'd prefer 1 or 2 bids tops as extra..10 will just be chaotic...all the new guilds also barely have enough gold to cover 2-3 bids let alone 10.

Guess we'll see what happens though..close to August.

OsManiaC

adding 2-3 more kiosks will be helpful than this cluster mess

WolfStar07

Dusk_Coven wrote: »

- they are adding a quality of life improvement in no longer having to scramble for a backup trader in case your one bid fails

I don't really see this as a QoL improvement. I can't afford 10 reasonable bids. So when I lose not only my primary bid, but also whatever backup bids I could afford, I'm still going to be scrambling for an open trader. Except with multi-bidding, the chances of any trader not being bid on and won goes down. With that, the likelihood of my guild being completely shut out that week from traders grows. At least with single bidding there have always been guaranteed some spots will be open and the potential to rectify for cheap. With the ripple down that's been discussed, I don't foresee that being possible in the future.

Also, has anyone noticed they haven't been putting traders in the wild in new zones? It's only the base game that has them, whereas every zone after that has them in 1 or 2 cities. Adding another half dozen or so traders by putting 1 in the wild of all the DLC and expac zones could help bridge the gap between demand and supply without having as big an impact on the servers as an entire new zone.

Dont_do_drugs

Actually I'd be fine if they would add additional traders into the hubs, and maybe move the open zone Single ones at least a bit better than into the complete wilderness. Zos can track were people are moving. Add those single ones into a secondary group of traders and use a secondary hub in each quest zone,, add 1 or 2 traders there maybe, all better than more single traders. Sobe dlc and chapter zones made it good. They just used second and third hubs with at least 3 or 4 traders next to the primary 5 or 6 traders hub.

reoskit

WolfStar07 wrote: »

Also, has anyone noticed they haven't been putting traders in the wild in new zones? It's only the base game that has them, whereas every zone after that has them in 1 or 2 cities. Adding another half dozen or so traders by putting 1 in the wild of all the DLC and expac zones could help bridge the gap between demand and supply without having as big an impact on the servers as an entire new zone.

Elsweyr is a Chapter. Vvardenfell and Summerset both had 3 cities with traders. Wrothgar, arguably the first "chapter" before they came up with that sales idea, had 2 cities of kiosks.

I have no idea why Elsweyr was not included in this trend, with kiosks only in Rimmen. It was treated the same way the DLCs (Clockwork, Murkmire, etc.) were with only one city of kiosks.

Khajiit are the race of peddlers and traders, no? If they wanted to be lore-specific, they'd've put little convoys of trading kiosks/wagons all over Elsweyr along the roads. Missed opportunity, IMO.

RavenSworn

Dont_do_drugs wrote: »

Actually I'd be fine if they would add additional traders into the hubs, and maybe move the open zone Single ones at least a bit better than into the complete wilderness. Zos can track were people are moving. Add those single ones into a secondary group of traders and use a secondary hub in each quest zone,, add 1 or 2 traders there maybe, all better than more single traders. Sobe dlc and chapter zones made it good. They just used second and third hubs with at least 3 or 4 traders next to the primary 5 or 6 traders hub.

Actually I rather they have more traders in the wilderness than in cities. At least, since its a non preferred spot, mega guilds don't really want that slot and it offers more places for medium to small guilds.

Well, usually anyway.

Dont_do_drugs

RavenSworn wrote: »

Dont_do_drugs wrote: »

Actually I'd be fine if they would add additional traders into the hubs, and maybe move the open zone Single ones at least a bit better than into the complete wilderness. Zos can track were people are moving. Add those single ones into a secondary group of traders and use a secondary hub in each quest zone,, add 1 or 2 traders there maybe, all better than more single traders. Sobe dlc and chapter zones made it good. They just used second and third hubs with at least 3 or 4 traders next to the primary 5 or 6 traders hub.

Actually I rather they have more traders in the wilderness than in cities. At least, since its a non preferred spot, mega guilds don't really want that slot and it offers more places for medium to small guilds.

Well, usually anyway.

The problem with bringing more unattractive spots for buyers is a growing gap of power selling and poor guilds. People are lazy, people want auction house. They don't want that solo traders in the middle of nowhere. Bad "infrastructure" leads into major guilds going on growing with low competition, whike tge rest is starving away. More equally attractive hubs leaves more room for guilds to develop in attractivity equally and helps eating away sales from the biggies. And I am a biggies gm. 😉

Dusk_Coven

Dont_do_drugs wrote: »

The problem with bringing more unattractive spots for buyers is a growing gap of power selling and poor guilds. People are lazy, people want auction house.

A store way off the beaten path is unlikely to be shopped at all without a global auction house to help people discover what's there no matter what the goods they are selling. The risk cost of going out there is TIME, which is much more precious than gold.
Many people don't have many hours per day to play and they have to choose what to do with their time. Go shopping and have a high risk of coming back empty handed, or do something more useful? Even grinding for what you want has a higher success rate than running to an out of the way store in blind hope that what you want will be there.

And once you're there, the price might be even higher than a trade hub because it turns out it's a major trader who lost a spot and just grabbed whatever was available and they didn't want to reset their auction prices.

What would really help all guilds is if losing a spot or if never even having a trader isn't so crippling.
The reason guild stores are broken is on us. But refunding the listing cost if you don't have a trader would help.

Grimm13

Dont_do_drugs wrote: »

RavenSworn wrote: »

Dont_do_drugs wrote: »

Actually I'd be fine if they would add additional traders into the hubs, and maybe move the open zone Single ones at least a bit better than into the complete wilderness. Zos can track were people are moving. Add those single ones into a secondary group of traders and use a secondary hub in each quest zone,, add 1 or 2 traders there maybe, all better than more single traders. Sobe dlc and chapter zones made it good. They just used second and third hubs with at least 3 or 4 traders next to the primary 5 or 6 traders hub.

Actually I rather they have more traders in the wilderness than in cities. At least, since its a non preferred spot, mega guilds don't really want that slot and it offers more places for medium to small guilds.

Well, usually anyway.

The problem with bringing more unattractive spots for buyers is a growing gap of power selling and poor guilds. People are lazy, people want auction house. They don't want that solo traders in the middle of nowhere. Bad "infrastructure" leads into major guilds going on growing with low competition, whike tge rest is starving away. More equally attractive hubs leaves more room for guilds to develop in attractivity equally and helps eating away sales from the biggies. And I am a biggies gm. 😉

This is why I advocate for zone ah's, makes all spots equal while keeping it still broken to multiple markets. Could also be a stabilizing factor in bid prices as all locations are equally valuable.

MandyMae

I'm curious to know if anyone has tested unbid on stalls, do they still go up for hire?

Ek1

ZOS_GinaBruno wrote: »

Do you have any other general feedback?

Hey ZOS, thanks for asking.

While there have been several examples already about how multipidding helps guilds in general to get a kiosk, some vague comments how supply and demand works, even couple comedian ones about guild reputation and how hard job it is while guilds need to sell crowns to uphold the price puble of kiosk that is their own making, I find very few ones addressing the system itself.

As it was feedbacked in beta forums already, the limited number of guilds, the limited number of members in guilds, the lack of server wide language/custom/trade channels, the limited number of kiosk, guilds not representing anything and guilds not offering anything all together make the use of guilds really, really different than in any other game thus also affecting the trading. And not in the positive way.

I have been long waiting for a dev interview on the person who was in charge of designing the kiosk system and to hear his thoughts. What was the underlying idea and what was the things it is addressing compared to auction house or server wide brokers? Immersion or story telling or septim sinking or something else? Anycase, back to topic.

So trading systems are generally speaking one of games bestest (no typo there) ways to reduce the ever growing amounts of gold players generate. In ESO the kiosk bidding and the weekly fee for it keeps chunking gold out off guilds pocket and guilds then collect taxes and/or donations to fund this service. So all the cash collected goes to guild bank that only very limited number of persons have access and thus the power deciding where it is used. Usually it is used to fund the kiosk activity and that is the only thing a guild can use those cashes. There is no guilds houses to buy or build (while other guilds can build houses and even offer services, I am looking at you Undaunted), there are no expanded services for bigger or active or wealthier guilds be it in form of better deals with the well established banking services or better selling prices or faster.
The guilds sole purpose seems to be fundraising tool for a kiosk and for that the multibidding feature works just fine.

If the guilds purpose would be to collect like minded persons, then it is a quite a thorn to limit the number of members. Especially when you got only five guilds.
You can't fit all French players to one guild that's for sure and I know you can't fit all Finnish ones to five guilds. Sure, playing with others than your own country (wo)men is mind opening but so is having a meetings with those playmates you have gotten and sometimes talking in 3rd language is just too much.
So opening the limits of members or number of guilds would allow the social aspect to flourish in the game but it would quickly break the whole trading system as bigger guilds would simply generate more cash to be burned and as established above, there is nothing else to burn the cash except to kiosk so there would be no chance for smaller guilds at all to get a kiosk.
Rising the number of guilds you can be would alleviate the social problems a lot but also underline the total member limit. Because then you would soon have guilds named countryname1, countryname2 and still there would people that can't reach a person because they don't share a guild.

In some other games the resources the guild collects, be it donated undaunted keys, materials, gold, exp or the like, they can't be pulled out from the guilds bank and they can only be used to create services for the guild members. Be it a NPC merchant in a self selected location, training dummys, crafting stations, transportation services and so on but in anycase the guild itself has a strong presence and purpose. Unlike in ESO and it is a shame.

This was a snippet to the five and half years old feedback to the guild system and kiosk's. The present guild system forces players to use their precious five guilds to either commerce, socialization, ideological action (United Imperials , raiding, Tamriel Hookers, ect) or a mix of these and that sucks. Big time.

So my feedback is to separate commerce from guilds or at least ease the number of guilds an account can be member of.

As if commerce is separated from guild's then member limit could be removed to offer the function of custom/server wide language channel and the five guilds slots could be used for more social things.

As the designer has not shared his thoughts it's hard to guess what is the aim but if the kiosk as a gold sink is the main point, then it could be created with a slightly different way while allowing guilds work, well, as guilds and not like supply chain for the kiosk.

The separation could be made easily and cleanly by simply removing guilds ability to collect taxes and allowing several guilds to use same NPC. Instead the tax would be dynamically adjusted by the number of guilds using the same NPC and then the NPC uses the tax revenues to get his kiosk. Being loyal to the same NPC merchant could increase number of slots for selling.
Even better would be that the player chooses a NPC retailer to his account with the above mechanics and guilds would be cut out of the market system totally. At least, until they build their own kiosk and recruit a NPC of their own that would enter the circulation.
And also, each 24h passed drops the items current price by 1%.

So yeah, any kind of change to the system would make it better.

silvereyes

Ek1 wrote: »

So yeah, any kind of change to the system would make it better.

Except, they are trying to change the system, and are arguably making it worse. I'd much rather have no changes at all than what ZOS is doing with multi-bidding this patch.

silvereyes

That said, I imagine that the disbanded guild kiosk change introduced this week will be an unvarnished improvement for the system. So, 1 step forward, 2 steps back, I suppose.