Guild trader listings being changed to 14 days??!?

h9dlb

CrashTest wrote: »

This will tank prices.

No it won't - it will increase prices because so much stuff will get lost in the mail system, supply will be reduced but demand will stay the same

ADarklore

Or is it the lack of player population causing items to remain in the Guild Trader for so many days? What's next, reducing our amount to sell from 30 slots to 20 'to help the servers'?

NoticeMeArkay

Perhaps it would help taking care of the huge gold inflation on PC.

DenverRalphy

NoticeMeArkay wrote: »

Perhaps it would help taking care of the huge gold inflation on PC.

At best, it would curb some of Trade Flipping. Traders scooping up all the reasonably priced items and listing them for obsurd prices will have to reconsider their new listing prices since they are typically those who's listings sit for longer than 14 days. Usually items that most players are smart enough to hold off on purchasing until cost isn't an issue and they can't find it anywhere else. These items are priced due to supply/rarity, and often picked up and held ransom by whales.

General inflation though? Not so much. Mats that sell for insane prices still sell rapidly because players are still buying them up as fast as they can put the gold together. They sell within hours, days, or one week. These items are priced due to demand and what players are willing to pay.

code65536

dmnqwk wrote: »

I think this is a wonderful idea.

They looked at the numbers, then acted without letting individual personal bias taint by people decrying it going 'oh but for ME I will use confirmation bias and a failure to accept this because ONE item out of HUNDREDS sold after longer'.

I am glad they used data and not the personal opinions of the forums.

But did they properly contextualize that data?

I'm pretty sure that commodities sell relatively quickly: materials, potions, etc.

There are over 1500 different motif chapters, and the market for a specific chapter of a specific motif is far smaller.

And there are thousands of BoE gear pieces, and the market for a specific piece of a specific set, if that set is off-meta, is also pretty small.

It would be interesting to see how their stats look like if they broke it down into categories. How fast do materials move? How fast does gear move? How fast do motifs move? How fast do furnishings move?

If they lumped everything together, they have data, sure, but I'm not sure how useful that interpretation really is.

KlauthWarthog

dmnqwk wrote: »

I am glad they used data and not the personal opinions of the forums.

A decision can be informed by data and still be hilariously wrong.

nenekotanb16_ESO

Let's now pretend we're a mail provider and use the same reasoning as ZOS: "We've done data analysis and discovered users mainly read emails they received in the last two weeks. We have decided to automatically remove all older emails to reduce strain on our databases."

Just because a use case is less common, doesn't mean it should not be considered. That is the whole point of things like accessibility. I bet that only a small amount of the users use the accessibility settings, but that doesn't mean it's reasonable to not consider them based on some simple data analysis!

People take holidays, some items like style motifs don't sell as fast. You should provide options, not try to fit people into a solution that is caused by a technical problem. The database struggling with entries is a problem on your software and hardware architecture side, not on the player's usage of the guild store.

Rishikesa108

It will end up that no one will turn the items yellow to sell them at a high price, and those who need to buy them because they don't know/can't craft them themselves will unfortunately find nothing.

tom6143346

I still don’t get why people believe game company’s care for players . The want min maxing the money they earn with us gamers and zos is no different to other companies. As long as we will continue to pay for new chapters and crowns, they will slowly shorten out the hardware they need to run the game . Smaller server = smaller cost to run it and more profit for the company. But here is the good thing, we can vote with our purse! At least I will

Varana

LaintalAy wrote: »

The very harsh reality is that if your item has not sold within seven (7) days, then you have priced it incorrectly. If I see an item that is ageing in the trader, as a purchaser, my gut feeling is that it is over priced. Otherwise it would have been bought by someone else...

Anything that takes 3 months to sell, is overpriced and will only be bought by someone who has nothing better to waste their money on. This is not competitive pricing; if it was competitive, it would sell within 3 days.

For example, I keep finding 'Hardwood' lying around.

Your analysis is biased for the example you used.
What you wrote is mostly true for high-volume, high-frequency items like materials (for instance, Hardwood).
It is not true for specialised items like high-end furnishings or plans, outfit pages like monster mask styles, and things like that where there is only a very low supply and/or relatively low demand. Those may sit at the trader for a good while without being overpriced, they just need to wait for a customer to need and look for them. If you sell them fast, chances are good that you've sold them to someone who will re-list the item at a higher price.

Dawnblade

This game needs more item supply availability, not less.

A not insignificant amount of inflation is due to the highly limited nature of available sales slots, and this change does not address that issue and may lead to having fewer items available.

What the game (players and player economy in general - disregarding what any 1 percenter 24/7 traders want) need are more available slots to sell items - such as increased selling slots, increased guild limits, more traders, multiple guild traders, alternative ways to asynchronously trade both low-value and high-value items, etc.

But of course this change isn't designed to meet player needs or increase player satisfaction in any way - it is designed to help ZOS reduce their costs.

ShadowPaladin

Well... That is a stupid change ! The 30 days were good. At least for me. Most of my items sold between day 20 and 30.

At least we can be happy that the devs will only reduce the listing time from 30 days to 14 days. It could have been worse. We could have gotten a time like the one from SWToR - 3 days . There it was always a pain to list and re-list items .

BetweenMidgets

Freilauftomate wrote: »

Instead of taking away stuff from the game all the time, maybe it would be worth a try to just add to the server hardware? Or would that be too expensive?

They've made 2billion in 10 years. I'll let you all do the math but I'll just say "Not in the budget."

allochthons

LaintalAy wrote: »

The very harsh reality is that if your item has not sold within seven (7) days, then you have priced it incorrectly. If I see an item that is ageing in the trader, as a purchaser, my gut feeling is that it is over priced. Otherwise it would have been bought by someone else...

Anything that takes 3 months to sell, is overpriced and will only be bought by someone who has nothing better to waste their money on. This is not competitive pricing; if it was competitive, it would sell within 3 days.

For example, I keep finding 'Hardwood' lying around. ATT tells me that the current value (according to the sales data from my five guilds) is '910' gold pieces.

A few things:
1) I'm on console. We don't have TTC to assist us. To check prices, we have to go to every trader, individually. A friend tested it. To check the prices on 2 items, it took 5 HOURS to check every trader in the game. And that was a few DLC ago. They add more traders every year. As a result, when pricing things, I only check the current prices in the capital cities, and I check more than most console traders. Many people only check the price in their own trader.

2) I'm not selling heartwood. I'm selling much rarer things, which don't have nearly the same number of people buying. Motifs, furniture plans and overland gear (like Briarheart) have a much, much smaller market than crafting materials. When I'm selling a clockwork reliquary (the factotum polymorph that only comes from vAS+2) or the timber crow costume, there may only be 1-2 people on console total who are interesting in buying it every 3 months or so. Materials and consumables are bought all the time, repeatedly. Runeboxes, motifs and the like are only sold to each player once (usually).

When I do sell mats like mundane runes or dragon's blood, they do sell within a few hours. But that's not what I usually sell. It's maybe 5% of what I sell.

(What is ATT?)

KlauthWarthog

allochthons wrote: »

(What is ATT?)

Arkadius' Trade Tools. A trading addon.

BuffNukem

This is such a misguided change by ZoS. What they have shared of their analysis on this is so one dimensional that it baffles me how they think this will help their cause in the way they think it will.

Shortening the days for items on traders does not directly decrease the number of item in their guild trader system database. Most active players will continue to fill their traders to the same capacity as they have before. If you list 30/30 before, you will likely still list 30/30 after, thus the same number of items in the database.

Instead the actual differences will be:
- More server and database traffic load because the turnover of items is greater so there will be more listings and expirations database actions that will take place.
- Increase in player frustration due to more time spent doing trader & inventory management rather than playing the content in the game they want.
- More players will take to zone chat to sell rarer or non-basic commodity items, creating far more text spam for everyone and increasing the number of player-to-player trades that might not have equal protections for both parties involved.

For those players that treat trading and their favorite End-Game activity, those players will perceiver and adapt. But for everyone else this will become a significant extra burden that further takes them away from their desired activity.

I see several PC players expressing how they don't see a problem because they use 3rd party tools to search all traders for a desired items in a matter of seconds, or add-ons to help with current pricing to list items, these activity are far more involved for the other 2/3rds of the ESO player base. On console, I can have by far the cheapest item across the entire server on a trader, but if the right buyer doesn't search that specific guild trader for that item, it won't sell regardless of how well I did with pricing. Cutting the listing days by more than half significantly decreases the odds of the right buyer finding it.

QoL's that are desperately needed, especially if this change goes forward anyways.
- Reduce the listing fee to match the reduction in days a listing is on the trader
- Expired item mails include the previous listing amount or a UI based way to directly relist an expired item in the trader window without dealing with using the mail system all together
- Add an in-game search method to search for any available items on any trader quick and conveniently.

Without these QoL improvements to help counter-act the additional tedious work this change will bring if it goes live, in the long run will actually succeed it decreasing database size and increasing server performance because people will start leaving ESO for something else that actually values their limited play time.

ZoS - Please do better at respecting our time!

allochthons

@LaintalAy

KlauthWarthog wrote: »

Arkadius' Trade Tools. A trading addon.

Thank you.

chessalavakia_ESO

FluffyBird wrote: »

I don't get it. You'll have same amount of items, they just move between players and guild stores more, no? Or do they expect players just to destroy everything that wasn't sold in 14 days?

People might also not bother listing items in the first place.

I don't enjoy dealing with Guild Trader listings or dealing with the mail.

Every few months I spend my Tel Var to get the boxes with the Tel Var sets. I then list the duplicate items.

Many of them aren't that popular so they don't sell for that much and they don't sell fast even if I am the cheapest listing.

Under the new system, I'm possibly not going to bother listing any item I don't think will sell fast for under 15k.

Omegacron

This is gonna suck. Bad.

JustLovely

Kevin's assessment is correct with most items. The problem is it doesn't hold true for the top dollar items. Items that cost over 1 million often don't sell quickly. And items that are over 5 million often don't sell in a 30 day period. And, the listing fees on these items are way higher. So if you have a high dollar item listing fees are going to become a major extra expense.

@ZOS_Kevin

How about we also make it so listing fees go to the guild bank instead of never never land?

furiouslog

ClowdyAllDay wrote: »

So you expect us to believe that the guild traders and the mail are whats responsible for bad server performance?

Really?

Is that some kind of toilet pokemon?

reazea

Why can't I quote the original post?

SaintSubwayy

Just looking at the server and database load problems.

Why does any item bought have to come trough mail?
Just add the damm thing to the inventory like anything you loot and remove this load completley.

Maybe collect items and gold before returning them to the player via mail, or directly put them into the bank. (add overcapacity for this situation)

The planned changes are simply useless and do not adress the issues efficiently in any way.

Maybe there are other reasons behind this change, but as always....communication is key.
If the players dont have certain importent infos to understand the changes, then they will react accordingly

Desiato

SaintSubwayy wrote: »

Maybe there are other reasons behind this change, but as always....communication is key.
If the players dont have certain importent infos to understand the changes, then they will react accordingly

I think the real reason is that their main audience plays ESO like a single player game and most of this audience doesn't engage in the player economy.

The MMO audience is secondary to them and this is why they so often seem to ignore our concerns. We're basically a value add. The immortal homer simpson sums it up best.

So from a big picture perspective, this is probably a good way for them to cut costs.

All IMO, of course.

Hamish999

Horrible change IMO. Expensive/rare items (20 million +) take between 3 and 6 weeks to sell on PC EU in my experience.
That will mean having to potentially relist items twice and cut into profits, the whole point of listing on a trade guild in the first place.

Rishikesa108

We will end up seeing the trading guilds emptied, while we will have more and more barkers shouting in zone chats

SilverBride

I doubt trade guilds will empty. It probably won't affect traders much at all because items don't normally sit for more than 2 weeks without selling, and if they do they need to be priced differently.

DragonRacer

furiouslog wrote: »

ClowdyAllDay wrote: »

So you expect us to believe that the guild traders and the mail are whats responsible for bad server performance?

Really?

Is that some kind of toilet pokemon?

I believe the image may be of a gaslight.

I_killed_Vivec

BetweenMidgets wrote: »

Freilauftomate wrote: »

Instead of taking away stuff from the game all the time, maybe it would be worth a try to just add to the server hardware? Or would that be too expensive?

They've made 2billion in 10 years. I'll let you all do the math but I'll just say "Not in the budget."

I think there have been recent changes to the budget...

Presumably they have been monitoring the mail and listing issues for the last ten years, so why the change now? Has there been a sudden increase in people not reading their emails? Are people now wilfully listing items that just don't sell (surely not, "most" already sell in 14 days)? Has there been a huge increase in new payers and the servers just can't cope?

More confusingly though, there are aspects about the listing change that don't add up.

If "most" items do sell within 14 days, then what real performance benefit can be gained by setting the time out to 14 days? For all but a minority of items it won't change a thing.

Come to think about it, returning unsold items takes effort and clogs up the system with unnecessary emails. What's wrong with just leaving those items on sale for another two weeks? They can't take up extra space on the server, because we are always limited to 30 items on sale at a time. Same space is used up whether they are there for 30 days, 14 days, or sold within minutes, assuming the empty slots are quickly filled.

Now let's consider an expensive furnishing design that I want to sell. I know it's valuable so I'd like to get some gold for it. I put it up for sale, 14 days later it's returned. I'm going to sell it, and I'm holding out at the price, so I just relist it. Now, instead of a single listing ZoS are faced with two listings and a return email, and a perpetually filled trader slot. More work, not less. More strain on the server.

All things considered, I can't see how the change improves performance.

Except...

Suppose you don't play for a month or so. With U42 all your emails will be dumped, all your listings will have been sold or returned - in emails that have been dumped. Before the change you'd still have your emails and most of your items would still be listed. Go away for a month and you lose nothing, but with U42 you lose it all.

ZoS is pruning accounts that have been idle for 30 days.

The change to the budget is some manager asking "how can we reduce our storage overhead?"

StihlReign

Awesome. Next the Queen will sell Dreugh Wax...