This game DOES NOT need an auction house....

jimredtalon

@Mortelus @Tiyamel @Razzak‌
Since I have gotten a bit off the OP topic I decided to make a thread based around the idea of a player run market so please help me in getting the community to help itself.

http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/80919/player-run-market-in-lieu-of-ah?new=1

Wolfpaw

Makkir wrote: »

huytorwb17_ESO wrote: »

Auction houses are an essential part of any MMO.

If you don't see the use of an Auction house, either because you don't trade/sell stuff or for any other reason then that is fine. However there are a lot of players who do use auction houses in MMO's and see it as an integral part of an Online game.

Lol. New generation MMO-gamer I take it?

Most of us grew up without Auction Houses. We sat in East Commonlands spamming chat all day with our wares.
The WoW Auction House promotes under cutting and deflation. At least in TESO I have an opportunity find AWESOME deals, and make AWESOME deals.

As a gamer in my mid thirties lets not categorize our generation how you have done in your posts, ok? Speak for yourself.

"Era of entitlement" brought into a discussion about trade and optimizing the current subpar setup? Entitlement, one of the most overused displaced words in gaming today describes nothing & brings nothing to the topic.

Like many of us responsible gamers of age we have a career, kids, wife/husband, & many more real life responsibilities. No longer do we (old school gamers) have time to sit in commonlands spamming chat all day to "earn" our digital currency, do we?

Undercutting and deflation, so what? Did it crash other game economies, nope. So that casual (a term not based on skill but available time spent ingame imo) that has a real world life can get that bis item a lil easier, what does it matter to you? More geared players equals more players to do endgame content with. That's the point of gaming is it not? Enjoying the game content, combat, community, friends, pvp, etc..

Lets leave currency out of the focus of this game, instead let the AH be a tool to open up content for players & future new players.

I don't play games to feel better about myself as if it was a hard day work, real life fills that void nicely, I play to relax and have fun. Spamming chat for hours on end in competition w/hundreds of other players & gold sellers, no thanks.

I want to drop my goods in a faction wide market/AH, not think about it, and continue to play the actual game.

If implementing a faction AH/market keeps the masses subbed, than yes they should. Does not break my play time in PvE or PvP. It's not like you have to use it either, in person trades will still happen to avoid tax anyhow.

jimredtalon

@wolfpaw You do bring up an interesting point. Not all have the time or interest in competing in an open market without the game mechanics in place to do it for you. But why not have a guild do it for you. Just ask one of your guild mates or even form a schedule were some one can sell goods from your guilds store in the open market.

Drachenfier

Mortelus wrote: »

Drachenfier wrote: »

Mortelus wrote: »

I don't want to see one globally-wide AH. It would make everything so cheap in this game, rare would be costing next to nothing.

/sigh

If it costs nothing, then its not rare.

Ok so say there is one server, with one aution house. Say there is 1'000'000 people connected to this one MEGASERVER all with access to this 1 global AH.

There is a rare blue item that drops 0.0001% in every mob killed in a set area. This is a pretty darn rare item correct?

Now lets say during the day that mob is killed by 1% of the population at an average of 10 kills per player. 10 x 10'000 = 100'000 that means that item would drop on average 10 times per day.

Now these numbers are way off and probably estimated way too low.

The point being, any rare item with a random chance to drop ceases to become rare when you are talking about millions of players on 1 megaserver.

People used to think earth like planets were rare... Well they still are, but there is still thousands if not millions estimated within our own galaxy alone.

What makes an item rare? When demand exceeds supply, the item is rare. When demand exceeds supply, the prices rise. If the supply exceeds the demand, then the item obviously is not rare and the price will reflect that. Once again, these are basic economic principles that even the least educated should be able to understand.

Wolfpaw

I'm not sure it would be the end of Tamriel economy doomsday as some players seem to believe.
Lets take two examples GW2 & WoW. Now I want to start and say these are just examples of two highly populated games, not promoting to go play.
ESO fan here

GW2
A market that spans across all 51 servers NA & Euro
Place item in market, and set the price per unit. No bidding.
A 15% total tax on sales, helps as a gold sink & keeping players from listing items at an exorbitant amount w/o a loss.
Listings are anonymous.
Person to person trades are not optional
Trading through the mail system offers no security (cod). Usually leading to scams or being taken for said item or gold.

The way this is setup, have to take in considerations of rarity, has kept endgame tier materials, weapons, & armor from crashing. Actually for some players a mini game in itself of buy low sell high market manipulation.

Not my favorite mmo market to tell the truth, w/the option to buy ingame currency directly from Anet, rarity/rng based materials, and being so vast world wide market it has done quite the opposite of deflating anything. Actually has kept quite stable for some time now, and w/new content skyrocketing some prices of items for periods of time due to demand, rarity, and manipulation.

WoW
Server wide Faction based & Server neutral (all faction) based AH
Place item in market, and set a starting bid price & buy out price per unit.
A 5-15% total tax on listing, and a refunded fee for duration of listing.
Listing not anonymous- Allows players to send a message to player of listing opening up personal trades outside of the market.
Person to Person trades allowed and safe (cod)
Trading through the mail system allowed and safe (cod)
Overall a good setup and stable.

Both are examples of large scale markets that haven't crashed economies. Should ESO do some carbon copies of these, no, but that does not mean they can't come up w/their own version better suited for this game than we have now.

I would like to see a faction based AH, bid & buyout. Unlike WoW, ESO three faction setup.
Listing not anonymous- Allowing players to gain a reputation through their trade practices, opening up more personal trades.
A tax, of course.
Person to person trades kept and safe, of course we all want that option.
Trading through mail option safely, of course.
Guild stores, far to many variables for such a small grouping of players to make productive.

Cascade_V

Wolfpaw wrote: »

I would like to see a faction based AH, bid & buyout. Unlike WoW, ESO three faction setup.
Listing not anonymous- Allowing players to gain a reputation through their trade practices, opening up more personal trades.
A tax, of course.
Person to person trades kept and safe, of course we all want that option.
Trading through mail option safely, of course.
Guild stores, far to many variables for such a small grouping of players to make productive.

Something like this, I'd rather see faction based AH but with no buyout only bid options. This prevents insta sales and some effort.

Brennan wrote: »

Sure I'm an ass.

trinta

jimredtalon wrote: »

Why not. Selling through chat is fun when its in a place were people have the time to stop and chat. Zone and Yell are not the places for selling just like the middle of the interstate is not a good place for a tea party. But Say chat in a common area were people are already buying from NPC merchants is fun and interesting.

Why not?

Because selling through chat is not fun. Killing mobs and finishing quests and gathering crafting materials is fun. I can't do that while I'm standing around spamming /say (Seriously, /say? Talk about massive limitation of audience!) in hopes of offloading one or two items from my seriously overloaded inventory.

By all means, having an auction house wouldn't stop you from playing Medieval Marketplace Online, so if they implement one, you can still have your variety of fun and I can have mine, too.

Also, while it might make the city feel more "real and alive" to have people shouting out what they have for sale as you walk by, I can't say I enjoy the experience of walking through Detroit's beggars and street vendors, and wouldn't feel that it adds anything to the in-game experience, either.

trinta

Cascade_V wrote: »

Something like this, I'd rather see faction based AH but with no buyout only bid options. This prevents insta sales and some effort.

Can you explain the effort this generates, and the benefit of eliminating instant sales?

jimredtalon

trinta wrote: »

jimredtalon wrote: »

Why not. Selling through chat is fun when its in a place were people have the time to stop and chat. Zone and Yell are not the places for selling just like the middle of the interstate is not a good place for a tea party. But Say chat in a common area were people are already buying from NPC merchants is fun and interesting.

Why not?

Because selling through chat is not fun. Killing mobs and finishing quests and gathering crafting materials is fun. I can't do that while I'm standing around spamming /say (Seriously, /say? Talk about massive limitation of audience!) in hopes of offloading one or two items from my seriously overloaded inventory.

By all means, having an auction house wouldn't stop you from playing Medieval Marketplace Online, so if they implement one, you can still have your variety of fun and I can have mine, too.

Also, while it might make the city feel more "real and alive" to have people shouting out what they have for sale as you walk by, I can't say I enjoy the experience of walking through Detroit's beggars and street vendors, and wouldn't feel that it adds anything to the in-game experience, either.

Okay do you have a better solution in the mean time. This is really pathetic that every one is so quick to pick apart peoples solutions or ideas without actually contributing any thing useful. If you don't have a better idea then just keep your opinion to yourself. No matter what idea any one, ever, comes up with some one, some were will be able to pick it apart with personal opinions that cant be argued. Stop bemoaning your situation then whining about the solutions with no attempt to solve it yourself that's just being a counter productive member of the community.

ShinChuck

trinta wrote: »

jimredtalon wrote: »

Why not. Selling through chat is fun when its in a place were people have the time to stop and chat. Zone and Yell are not the places for selling just like the middle of the interstate is not a good place for a tea party. But Say chat in a common area were people are already buying from NPC merchants is fun and interesting.

Why not?

Because selling through chat is not fun. Killing mobs and finishing quests and gathering crafting materials is fun. I can't do that while I'm standing around spamming /say (Seriously, /say? Talk about massive limitation of audience!) in hopes of offloading one or two items from my seriously overloaded inventory.

By all means, having an auction house wouldn't stop you from playing Medieval Marketplace Online, so if they implement one, you can still have your variety of fun and I can have mine, too.

Also, while it might make the city feel more "real and alive" to have people shouting out what they have for sale as you walk by, I can't say I enjoy the experience of walking through Detroit's beggars and street vendors, and wouldn't feel that it adds anything to the in-game experience, either.

Well said, on all accounts. It doesn't leave much room for responses of any real substance from the naysayers.

I like questing and crafting. Buying and selling, however, is a barrier to them. Therefore, I (and many other players) want that hurdle as small and easily-surmountable as possible.

As of right now, an AH is the smallest possible barrier.

Mortelus

Drachenfier wrote: »

Mortelus wrote: »

Drachenfier wrote: »

Mortelus wrote: »

I don't want to see one globally-wide AH. It would make everything so cheap in this game, rare would be costing next to nothing.

/sigh

If it costs nothing, then its not rare.

Ok so say there is one server, with one aution house. Say there is 1'000'000 people connected to this one MEGASERVER all with access to this 1 global AH.

There is a rare blue item that drops 0.0001% in every mob killed in a set area. This is a pretty darn rare item correct?

Now lets say during the day that mob is killed by 1% of the population at an average of 10 kills per player. 10 x 10'000 = 100'000 that means that item would drop on average 10 times per day.

Now these numbers are way off and probably estimated way too low.

The point being, any rare item with a random chance to drop ceases to become rare when you are talking about millions of players on 1 megaserver.

People used to think earth like planets were rare... Well they still are, but there is still thousands if not millions estimated within our own galaxy alone.

What makes an item rare? When demand exceeds supply, the item is rare. When demand exceeds supply, the prices rise. If the supply exceeds the demand, then the item obviously is not rare and the price will reflect that. Once again, these are basic economic principles that even the least educated should be able to understand.

Of course I understand the principals that make items rare.

Problem is, you are trying to relate real life to a game. Gold is rare because there is a limited supply, until someone finds a more abundant resource or figures out transmutation of metal to gold, we are stuck with the tiny amount we have here on Earth.

Now items in this game, and most others have a % chance to drop, meaning there is an unlimited supply of these items, they are created out of thin air.

When you have a million players playing on one server you would need a pretty small chance to make it extremely rare, something like 0.0000000000001% (1 in 1 trillion) which would make it an almost impossible drop.

One way Zeni could do is to put timers on world drop legendary items and crafting mats, say once per day on the server. This would make sure there is a limited supply


Obviously there will still be some fairly rare and expensive items in the game. Not every single rare will become cheap, but the market would become flooded with cheap rare items of the colours blue, purple and possible some legendary, because as it stands this thing can be crafted pretty easily, and drop pretty frequently, well at least blue and purple do.

Drachenfier

Point is, if its flooding the market its not rare. But you, like many others here, want to keep it rare by limiting the supply to small localized markets so that you can continue to charge more than its worth. What makes it rare is how rare it really is. If there's lots of it, its not rare, by any definition.

Greydog

Drachenfier wrote: »

Point is, if its flooding the market its not rare. But you, like many others here, want to keep it rare by limiting the supply to small localized markets so that you can continue to charge more than its worth. What makes it rare is how rare it really is. If there's lots of it, its not rare, by any definition.

Except that the limited markets also have the effect of making rare items prematurely obsolete. Once everyone has it, no-one is left to buy it.

Methinks they may have overlooked that in their zeal to limit the markets,

LadyInTheWater

ShinChuck wrote: »

I like questing and crafting. Buying and selling, however, is a barrier to them. Therefore, I (and many other players) want that hurdle as small and easily-surmountable as possible.

As of right now, an AH is the smallest possible barrier.

The people who craft, build, buy, sell, and trade have to deal with those hurdles.
The people who kill, loot, raid, and dungeon-crawl have their own hurdles to deal with as well.

If you want to remove the marketplace barriers for the "adventurers", then why not make a suggestion to remove the adventuring barriers for the "shopkeepers".

I personally wouldn't mind being able to auto-target NPCs, hit one button to kill them, and have a 30-yard range on my automatic aoe looting. Especially since I suck at combat, can't dodge to save my life, always miss my interrupts, and die about 9 times out of 10 when I'm fighting a monster. But I'd never post a request/poll/suggestion that the devs change things just because it's difficult/tedious/obnoxious for me.


In short; It would be unfair, arrogant, selfish, and narcissistic of me to suggest changing other peoples' gameplay simply to conform to my own personal playstyle.

It's equally unfair, arrogant, selfish, and narcissistic of other people making the same suggestions towards my gameplay in regards to their own playstyles.

As I've said before; the level of hypocrisy on these forums is astounding.

TheBloodartist

I agree that the game does not need auction house. It is a nice touch from developers that creates more social interaction.

knightblaster

Drachenfier wrote: »

Point is, if its flooding the market its not rare. But you, like many others here, want to keep it rare by limiting the supply to small localized markets so that you can continue to charge more than its worth. What makes it rare is how rare it really is. If there's lots of it, its not rare, by any definition.

Actually, ZOS wants certain items to be rare in practice. That can be achieved by having a global AH with a super-efficient redistribution system of drops coupled with an extremely low drop rate, or it can be achieved by having much less efficient redistribution systems in guild stores, and a low but not extremely low drop rate. The "rarity" is determined by the average players ability to source the item using the available in game mechanics (self-found or buying on the market). So drop rates and the efficiency of the market distribution system are linked. If ZOS were to introduce the hyper-efficient drop redistribution system that is a global AH, they would need also to adjust drop rates sharply downward in order to maintain the same practical degree of "rarity" for the average player, in terms of the average players ability to source the item (i.e., it would still be available on the global AH, but in such high demand and in such short supply that it would be extremely expensive and still difficult to obtain for the average player for that precise reason). Drop rates are directly tied to the efficiency of the loot redistribution system. When you have a super-efficient redistribution system, you need to ratchet drop rates sharply downward and introduce other elements like bind on pickup (or, following GW2's example, gating behind multiple levels of drops and items and RNGs to craft the "bestest" gear, costing thousands of RL $ to buy on the global AH -- which they are happy to design given that they sell currency themselves) to keep the supply of rare items rare.

The design they were going for here was to have drops not be rare, but to cap supply by inventory space and ensure practical rarity by having relatively inefficient redistribution systems in place -- with the added carrot of being able to have a somewhat more efficient redistribution system by taking and holding keeps in Cyrodiil. If they were to alter either of those things, or both of them, the drop rates and loot/crafting systems would all need to be ratcheted sharply downward, and likely a BOP system introduced, to keep things "rare" in practical terms which are intended to be rare in practical terms.

Pretext

Totally agree with OP.

Vantor

Ladies & Gents there already many AH threads. Why make a new one again?

rzombie44

You can fix rarity of items by using drop rates, no trades whether its armor, weapon or TS items. Make sought after items LORE so that each player can only own 1 of said item.

If they opened an auction house, then they can actually tie the auction house the experience level and have huge commission and buying fees. That way the auction house is there for people that really need something now, but trading guilds would still serve a great service for getting items. It also would help from trading guilds gouging.

ShinChuck

LadyInTheWater wrote: »

ShinChuck wrote: »

I like questing and crafting. Buying and selling, however, is a barrier to them. Therefore, I (and many other players) want that hurdle as small and easily-surmountable as possible.

As of right now, an AH is the smallest possible barrier.

The people who craft, build, buy, sell, and trade have to deal with those hurdles.
The people who kill, loot, raid, and dungeon-crawl have their own hurdles to deal with as well.

If you want to remove the marketplace barriers for the "adventurers", then why not make a suggestion to remove the adventuring barriers for the "shopkeepers".

I personally wouldn't mind being able to auto-target NPCs, hit one button to kill them, and have a 30-yard range on my automatic aoe looting. Especially since I suck at combat, can't dodge to save my life, always miss my interrupts, and die about 9 times out of 10 when I'm fighting a monster. But I'd never post a request/poll/suggestion that the devs change things just because it's difficult/tedious/obnoxious for me.


In short; It would be unfair, arrogant, selfish, and narcissistic of me to suggest changing other peoples' gameplay simply to conform to my own personal playstyle.

It's equally unfair, arrogant, selfish, and narcissistic of other people making the same suggestions towards my gameplay in regards to their own playstyles.

As I've said before; the level of hypocrisy on these forums is astounding.

I'm unfair, arrogant, selfish, and narcissitic to suggest making a change in an MMO? With all due respect, you're making a mountain out of a molehill. You're trying to turn suggestions on what paying customers would like to see in an MMO into some kind of weird morality issue.

The argument that YOUR playstyle shouldn't have to change for other people's tastes is arrogant, selfish, and so forth as well following your logic - why is YOUR playstyle more important than someone who might prefer to have those hurdles removed, just because it's already implemented that way? You deserve to have gameplay your way; nobody else does if they disagree with you?

I know many "shopkeepers" who would disagree with you. Isn't it a bit arrogant to claim to speak for them? I spoke only for myself. I know many crafters who want an AH, who feel it would be conducive to their playstyle, and I know some "adventurers" who don't want

You don't speak for crafters any more than I speak for every single adventurer out there (as a fun fact: I love doing both; I have stakes in both sides, and I'd still prefer an AH for crafting).

Suggestions are vital and important. That's how games, particularly MMOs, grow. They're fluid creatures, community efforts between developers and players. It's why Diablo III lost it's cash-shop auction house; it's why Final Fantasy XIV was retooled over the course of three years into a vastly-improved A Realm Reborn.

There were people who loved vanilla FFXIV, who didn't like the ARR changes. Yes, players made drastic suggestions, and yes, the game was intrinsically altered. But on the whole, it was a better game and many, many more people liked the changes. And so, all we can do is voice our opinions, and Zenimax (neither you nor I!) will decide if they want to go that route.

Now, if you do want a one-button win... sounds like an AH might be up your alley. You don't need to one-hit creatures or press an instant win button, because it's already all available to you!