Guild Trader Improvement Ideas

valenwood_vegan

Northwold wrote: »

The objections people raise to a game-controlled, deliberately crippled trader to allow players who don't want to use guild traders to trade are daft.

That's one opinion. While as I've said I'm not personally against some kind of trader option for people who aren't in a guild, I think you have to try and understand that some might be afraid of having their trading guilds harmed or ruined by such a change. These are communities of hundreds of players and friends that many worked / work very hard to create / maintain.

Although such concerns may be misplaced *if* ZoS were to implement a "guildless trader" well (and they are not guaranteed to implement such a change well should they decide to), the concerns don't seem daft to me.

Meanwhile, others might say that a stubborn unwillingness to participate in the trading system as it has existed for ten years is daft.

Necrotech_Master

there is already a built in search for the guild store, however, its not great and kind of limiting

addons help improve that though if have access to them

on the ideas listed:

-a trading hub or whatever you want to call it is literally just asking for a central auction house/market style thing and would not help the in game economy as it would be a central place for flippers to go to buy deals and just resell at a higher value, prices would not go down, only up

-as noted the guild stores themselves already have a built in search even if its not great, unless your implying for a global search to at least point out the trader that has the item in question, which i dont think it would work due to the sheer number of items that it might have to search through

picture this, a single guild with 500 members all have 30 slots filled, thats 15,000 individual listings to search through, if there are over 100 guild trader NPCs that could be potential 1,500,000 potential listings to search through, which while it is a database that its searching through is still going to take a long time to run a query

-a non-guild trader option might be the most feasible, but it would still be limited to a number of accounts and number of sales slots and probably have higher fees to use than a normal guild trader

karthrag_inak

Khajiit would change every week trader bid to every 4 weeks trader bid.

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

picture this, a single guild with 500 members all have 30 slots filled, thats 15,000 individual listings to search through, if there are over 100 guild trader NPCs that could be potential 1,500,000 potential listings to search through, which while it is a database that its searching through is still going to take a long time to run a query

8 years ago Khajiit was datascientist at Internet Advertising company and routinely composed cron jobs that had to scour tables with -billions- of records repeatedly very quickly, with many many queriers at the same time. And this company was substantially smaller than ZOS.



1.5 million records is kind of trivial.

Necrotech_Master

karthrag_inak wrote: »

Khajiit would change every week trader bid to every 4 weeks trader bid.

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

picture this, a single guild with 500 members all have 30 slots filled, thats 15,000 individual listings to search through, if there are over 100 guild trader NPCs that could be potential 1,500,000 potential listings to search through, which while it is a database that its searching through is still going to take a long time to run a query

8 years ago Khajiit was datascientist at Internet Advertising company and routinely composed cron jobs that had to scour tables with -billions- of records repeatedly very quickly, with many many queriers at the same time. And this company was substantially smaller than ZOS.



1.5 million records is kind of trivial.

if its set up correctly sure its possible

but this game is running on a setup that is 10 years old and i dont think was designed for "big data" searches in mind

if you look at how the guild traders operate right now, even running a search can take some minutes to go through 1000-1500 listings if its a bigger trade guild and thats 1 single guild its searching through with a simple keyword search (if using the base game UI)

loosej

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

if its set up correctly sure its possible

but this game is running on a setup that is 10 years old and i dont think was designed for "big data" searches in mind

if you look at how the guild traders operate right now, even running a search can take some minutes to go through 1000-1500 listings if its a bigger trade guild and thats 1 single guild its searching through with a simple keyword search (if using the base game UI)

Databases aren't exactly a new technology, I was running database queries this size 20+ years ago, without much of a problem. Trader searches run slow because the api is artificially limited, not because the technology doesn't allow for it.

I'm not discarding the possibility that this game wasn't designed for big db searches, but I would find it hard to imagine any company designing an mmo without considering the need for that. Even if that company is zos.

valenwood_vegan

I definitely don't claim to know the first thing about how the game's databases are set up, but I feel like it's a red flag in that regard that database size / performance was given as a reason for implementing accountwide achievements in a way that eliminated the achievement data for individual characters.

FlopsyPrince

valenwood_vegan wrote: »

I definitely don't claim to know the first thing about how the game's databases are set up, but I feel like it's a red flag in that regard that database size / performance was given as a reason for implementing accountwide achievements in a way that eliminated the achievement data for individual characters.

Large database searches were common when the game was originally developed. I would strongly suspect other factors get in the way, even the desire to not do much more than is needed to keep the game making money, without huge changes.

That is very common in many areas of life today, so it would not be a surprise and commonly keeps many enhancements from happening in many types of systems, not just games.

ComboBreaker88

Guild trader npcs for housing. Not the specific guilds, the kiosk npc itself.