No AH (Auction House) = crap

SFBryan18 · July 2014

:P

Vahrokh · July 2014

There are hundreds of factors that determine which "AH model" is best suited for a MMO, beginning with its underlying economy.

Let's start with some considerations:

- markets exist to make it possible to participants to exchange goods that (for any reason) they can't or don't want to directly acquire themselves.

- markets basic functionalities are:

self optimizing over time (due to competition), that is spread between the bid and ask tends to reduce.
moderation price change and value. Self healing.
allow economy of scale.
very often, the more the participants the bigger the amounts of items made available.
the more a market becomes liquid, the higher the velocity of money
wallets (and even AHs) segregation heavily affect the velocity of money

All the properties above become consistently stronger by raising the number of participants. Money velocity in particular

On the other side we have MMO properties:

- items have little to no scarcity, that is they can be farmed forever
- items have no underlying value beyond the time it takes to farm them.
- over time supply strongly outpaces demand => prices tend to crash (also a consequence of the above).
- mudflation

Botters and gold farmers properties:

- endless play time on hand, as bots are automated.
- endless accounts, as bots are stolen accounts (or other cheat ways).
- the more botters are allowed, the more join a game => the more they spam items => the more the server CPU / database are overtaxed (a big issue that plagued EvE Online for years).
- the more botters are allowed, the more join a game => the more they spam items => the more item prices crash hard.

A game designer has to take all those variables into careful consideration, expecially since some combinations of them may quickly cause a MMO economy to get irreversibly destroyed.

No MMO worth of note can allow botters to run unchecked as their behavior is always highly disruptive towards the game economy and also towards the hardware.

There are many way to implement a compromise that will function as MMO economy. The allusions done to EvE and GW2 as "models of working megaserver AH" are incomplete and misleading.

EvE Online
Wallet segregation is very high. That is people acquire a lot of money but won't put it back into circulation very easily. This is due by many mechanics (including the fact that money is always at huge risk the second an EvE player trusts another with it - scamming etc. etc. is fully allowed there).
Wallet segregation helps giving players the feeling of being very wealthy while not drowning EvE's economy with endless supply of money.

Items MUST be slowly ferried over to their destination. This adds friction into spreading of goods and players want a (small) reward for the time they take to carry over the stuff. The same friction also helps keeping prices different in the various regions.

Players themselves can't just teleport to the nearest AH. Outside Jita and an handful of important trading hubs, they have to travel for quite some time to go buy / sell their stuff, if they want to see it sold anytime soon (local systems often won't do, I won't bore you with missioning systems, FW markets etc. etc.).

Despite Jita accounts for a lot of transactions, there's not a "central AH" in EvE. Every solar system actually has one per planet. Various skills let players consolidate price viewing from a certain range and within a certain radius.

There are NPC costs involved into making items: blueprints must be purchased, skill books too. Then blueprints have to be researched and this costs even months of time and money (research is paid for).

Items WILL be constantly destroyed, EvE is a pervasive, unconsensual PvP game where a lot of stuff gets constantly blown. This allows for a very powerful control against endless supply vs decreasing demand. This allows also to avoid "gear reset", which is just a quick way to artificially reset and re-fuel demand.

EvE comes with a great invention called PLEX, which alone allows the economy to stay more in control than if it did not exist. I won't expand further.

All of the above, plus other factors I won't stress you about (this is a wall of text already) make EvE a very, VERY different kind of economy that can't be compared with ESO.

Guild Wars 2

Very important: sets don't have "killer stats syndrome". That is, you are not going to get the super-duper PvP set that ravages everybody just by sheer stats. Actually, GW2 sets (at the time I played it) don't give competitive advantages by farming the next tier.

The AH fees are otrageous and single handedly act as NPC money sinks more than EvE's.

GW2 and EvE were both built ground up to support a global AH. EvE in particular gives ways for programmers to obtain markets data without stressing the server.

GW2 has the ability to convert gold into their copycat version of PLEX.

GW2 relies less than EvE on a solid economy, thus its model is weaker and subject to more anomalies, bubbles etc.

ESO

ESO is incomplete under many aspects, including economy. Implementing what in other games work, would just kill it.

The game has too few money sinks. Past bank, bags, horses and repairs there's nothing relevant to physically remove gold from circulation, the risk of hyperinflation is present.

Items "magically" teleport from the to the guild store and then "magically" teleport to the buyer. This means there's no friction and thus no "control knob" to slow down transactions.

Items don't get destroyed (deconstructing is just a "material change of state" with limited loss). Even at 0% durability they keep existing and all it takes to get them back to new is to sink a small amount of easily farmed gold. Materials may accumulate over time. The outcome is the need to peform a gear reset sooner or later.

No PLEX or other "unconventional economy control knobs" are available.

As of now ESO relies on segregated AHs to obtain wallets segregation and avoid some of the market principles listed above, beginning with gradual spreads reduction and ending with velocity of money.

Remove segregation and:

- AH items download mods will require hours to update the markets listing AND the ESO server will suffer what GW2 suffered (months of blocked and crashing AH due to overload due to people downloading market data).

- Botters won't have any control against spamming thousands of items.

- Removing barriers will let enough items on the markets to brutally reduce their spreads. When spread hits about zero, price usually crashes hard.

- Again, for the principles above, plus because items don't get destroyed and even ignoring botters: put together thousands of items whose intrinsic value is zero and all you get is those items prices trending down towards zero. The same gold component today worth 3.8k, would become worth 500g.
This causes items "WoWification": purples that are the new greens, blues only good as deconstruction material and so on.

- Spreads reduction would allow (as said above) easy economy of scale, further worsening a number of situations. People would not sink money in "intermediate, non optimal" gear while gathering their ultimate stufff. More money in circle, higher velocity of money, shortened subscriber expected lasting as they achieve quicker what they want.

- A global AH would make useless to join trading guilds. This would diminish the social aspect ZoS wanted to put in by implenting them and would also make more superfluous their innovation about joining up to 5 guilds.

- A global AH would kill a meta-profession called "arbitrage", that is the ability to buy cheap stuff in one guild and sell it in another at a profit.

- There are probably another dozen of consequences but I am too tired typing now.

Phantax · July 2014

Vahrokh wrote: »

EvE Online
Players themselves can't just teleport to the nearest AH. Outside Jita and an handful of important trading hubs, they have to travel for quite some time to go buy / sell their stuff, if they want to see it sold anytime soon (local systems often won't do, I won't bore you with missioning systems, FW markets etc. etc.)

Not exactly correct, players can use jump clones to travel around to any station/AH they have based their clones near. (and possible to jump to mobile locations too, with the correct ship/gear)
Also.... every planet/system does not have it's own AH. there is just one per region, its the players ability to use it that is restricted by distance (how many systems away you are) and this increases with skills/time.
The rest of your EVE analysis was basically correct.

Vahrokh wrote: »

EvE Onlinethe ESO server will suffer what GW2 suffered (months of blocked and crashing AH due to overload due to people downloading market data).

And when did this happen? I played GW2 from pre-launch and still log in once a week or so, never remember this?

Vahrokh wrote: »

A global AH would kill a meta-profession called "arbitrage", that is the ability to buy cheap stuff in one guild and sell it in another at a profit.

Rubbish ! A global AH would open up far more trading opportunities than it would restrict. Simply for the reason that 50,000 buyers/sellers offer more choice and variation than 500 !

sotonin · July 2014

Mordria wrote: »

diamondeyethunderbow_ESO wrote: »

Phantax wrote: »

Oh and on a slightly different note not.

The most successful, dynamic economy in an MMO is EVE Online.
Which BTW is a global AH on a mega-server !

Except that EVE doesn't have a global AH; it has regional markets. They also don't mail your stuff to you; you have to move it to where you want to sell it, and the buyer has to move it from where it was sold to where he needs it, all subject to PVP attack.

Learn to EVE.

Yeah!

Anyway...

We do not need auction houses. The way it's set up, if you join 5 thriving guilds, is very good. it keeps the markets competitive and prevents the things you want to sell from being worthless. Besides, they aren't going to change it so

Except many many folks can not join 5 "thriving" guilds. In fact the more casual players can't join ANY good guilds. Because in reality, due to the very limited *** guild store system guilds are very picky about who they let in and very actively boot the least active players from the guild.

So yeah the system sounds fine on paper but in reality it's very very very broken for a lot of their customers.

Soloeus · July 2014

The only people who don't want an Auction House are people who want scarcity and exclusivity. Usually they have already rushed to the top and want to burn all the ladders to block anyone else from reaching it. Then they can stand alone as iron money gods on top of the pile.

These same people also want limits on harvesting nodes, gold to be spent when crafting, no returns on deconstruction, I am surprised they haven't just proposed making every item worth 0 gold and blob monster loot with your new 0gold junk items.

Holycannoli · July 2014

Star Trek Online has a global AH that works fine. Why wouldn't it work here? We have three factions in ESO, STO has two. STO's AH combines both factions into one AH so you have to be careful you're buying an item for your faction; ESO's AH doesn't have to be combined like that.

STO's crafting system is so worthless there might as well not even BE a crafting system, and the AH still works. With a vibrant crafting system an AH is essential. Crafters want to sell their goods and farmers want to sell their materials.

Plus the simple fact is that in ESO we have guilds that exist solely to mimic AH access, only that access is for a small percentage of a faction. What is the point in limiting access like that?

Should I mention Rift's AH? The last time I played that game it worked great. As a crafter you had a reasonable chance to find the materials you needed, and if you crafted a high level desirable item you had a good chance of selling it. If you found a rare item you weren't going to use you posted it on the AH, and so long as you weren't asking for an obscene amount for it you would make some money.

I really don't understand why they're so against faction-wide AH in ESO. The only real reason I can think of is to deter botters and chinese farmers.

Allyah · July 2014

Holycannoli wrote: »

Star Trek Online has a global AH that works fine. Why wouldn't it work here?

Because they are two different games. Because even if an AH would work in ESO doesn't mean it would work well. People have already given more in-depth reasons why an AH wouldn't work well in ESO. I suggest reading through them to find more specific answers.

Blackwidow · July 2014

Allyah wrote: »

Holycannoli wrote: »

Star Trek Online has a global AH that works fine. Why wouldn't it work here?

Because they are two different games. Because even if an AH would work in ESO doesn't mean it would work well. People have already given more in-depth reasons why an AH wouldn't work well in ESO. I suggest reading through them to find more specific answers.

And then you can read the reasons why they were wrong after that.

Holycannoli · July 2014

Allyah wrote: »

Holycannoli wrote: »

Star Trek Online has a global AH that works fine. Why wouldn't it work here?

Because they are two different games. Because even if an AH would work in ESO doesn't mean it would work well. People have already given more in-depth reasons why an AH wouldn't work well in ESO. I suggest reading through them to find more specific answers.

And I don't agree with their reasons.

Vahrokh · July 2014

Phantax wrote: »

Vahrokh wrote: »

EvE Online
Players themselves can't just teleport to the nearest AH. Outside Jita and an handful of important trading hubs, they have to travel for quite some time to go buy / sell their stuff, if they want to see it sold anytime soon (local systems often won't do, I won't bore you with missioning systems, FW markets etc. etc.)

Not exactly correct, players can use jump clones to travel around to any station/AH they have based their clones near. (and possible to jump to mobile locations too, with the correct ship/gear)

I did not want to go down to the tiniest details, because from wall of text my "treaty" would become a Chinese Wall of text! And ESO players are not interested into those super-details the least.

Anyway jump clones have a cooldown so you can't use them as true teleport (like in ESO) nor you can place them everywhere so that leaves with residual logistics costs. Also, unlike ESO own inventory, in EvE you can't teleport anything with a jump clone so you still have ALL the logistics to be done at the destination location, like having to have fitted transport ships and more.

Phantax wrote: »

Also.... every planet/system does not have it's own AH. there is just one per region, its the players ability to use it that is restricted by distance (how many systems away you are) and this increases with skills/time.

They have, I can put an item for sale everywhere I want.
A simple EvE Central query will prove you that you can put up for sale everything and all over the same region.
Another thing is actually seeing the item sold, but the possibility is there.

Phantax wrote: »

Vahrokh wrote: »

EvE Onlinethe ESO server will suffer what GW2 suffered (months of blocked and crashing AH due to overload due to people downloading market data).

And when did this happen? I played GW2 from pre-launch and still log in once a week or so, never remember this?

It happened from game release for several weeks. AH was rewritten because it couldn't just keep up with the amount of people using it. In the meanwhile (it's a complex piece of software so it took weeks), we had all sorts of issues and outages, including very "roleplay atmosphere breaking" blatant HTTP error pages shown inside the AH window frame.

Furthermore it was implemented as a web service accessible from outside of ArenaNet servers so a LOT of people implemented their own market scraping software (ab)using of it and ultimately crashing it once a day. I have briefly collaborated with GW2 Spidy's website creator so maybe I know which problem we faced?

Don't forget that markets are my specialty, I have provided market formulas to EvE Marketeer website (the charts algorythms) and the charts CCP Economist Dr. Eyjo has shown at last Fanfest come from my own drafts posted since years on EvE's Market Discussion forum.

Phantax wrote: »

Vahrokh wrote: »

A global AH would kill a meta-profession called "arbitrage", that is the ability to buy cheap stuff in one guild and sell it in another at a profit.

Rubbish ! A global AH would open up far more trading opportunities than it would restrict. Simply for the reason that 50,000 buyers/sellers offer more choice and variation than 500 !

I think you are missing on the "arbitrage" meaning. It's a market activity based on having multiple exchanges / AHs. It consists on buying the same item / security on an AH where it's sold for cheap and reselling it on another AH where it sells for high price. It's NOT regular trading and it requires at least 2 AHs, therefore your statement about "global (that is 1) AH" cannot work.

Vahrokh · July 2014

Holycannoli wrote: »

I really don't understand why they're so against faction-wide AH in ESO. The only real reason I can think of is to deter botters and chinese farmers.

Besides taking Star Trek Online into any "success" story is a bit far fetched, ESO is just not engineered to resist against the disruptive factors I have listed above.

ZoS would need to invest super-substantial resources into re-creating a different and robust economy model that would not crack with a global AH implementation. I doubt they are going to do this, ArenaNet (not a minor company nor without MMO experience) barely managed to fix the front end for the already existing global AH, imagine ZoS having to ALSO re-code a non existing global AH backend. It's really, REALLY rough.

Holycannoli · July 2014

Vahrokh wrote: »

Holycannoli wrote: »

I really don't understand why they're so against faction-wide AH in ESO. The only real reason I can think of is to deter botters and chinese farmers.

Besides taking Star Trek Online into any "success" story is a bit far fetched, ESO is just not engineered to resist against the disruptive factors I have listed above.

ZoS would need to invest super-substantial resources into re-creating a different and robust economy model that would not crack with a global AH implementation. I doubt they are going to do this, ArenaNet (not a minor company nor without MMO experience) barely managed to fix the front end for the already existing global AH, imagine ZoS having to ALSO re-code a non existing global AH backend. It's really, REALLY rough.

What would crack in ESO's economy? What would be the problem? Rare items aren't rare enough with an AH? So what? It would make people happy if they could find what they want on the AH. Crafters would be able to sell their wares without having to join and browse multiple AHs. We wouldn't have to stand around town and spam "WTB this" or "WTS that" for hours at a time.

Not enough money sinks? STO has no money sinks at all and yet some extremely rare items are worth so much money they can't even be listed on the AH because of a pricing limit. That's with no money sinks and money being fairly easy to acquire.

It's not enough to just say ESO's economy wasn't designed with an AH in mind. What exactly would be the problem? Give specifics.

Cogo · July 2014

Vahrokh wrote: »

There are hundreds of factors that determine which "AH model" is best suited for a MMO, beginning with its underlying economy.

Let's start with some considerations:

- markets exist to make it possible to participants to exchange goods that (for any reason) they can't or don't want to directly acquire themselves.

- markets basic functionalities are:
self optimizing over time (due to competition), that is spread between the bid and ask tends to reduce.

moderation price change and value. Self healing.

allow economy of scale.

very often, the more the participants the bigger the amounts of items made available.

the more a market becomes liquid, the higher the velocity of money

wallets (and even AHs) segregation heavily affect the velocity of money

All the properties above become consistently stronger by raising the number of participants. Money velocity in particular

On the other side we have MMO properties:

- items have little to no scarcity, that is they can be farmed forever
- items have no underlying value beyond the time it takes to farm them.
- over time supply strongly outpaces demand => prices tend to crash (also a consequence of the above).
- mudflation

Botters and gold farmers properties:

- endless play time on hand, as bots are automated.
- endless accounts, as bots are stolen accounts (or other cheat ways).
- the more botters are allowed, the more join a game => the more they spam items => the more the server CPU / database are overtaxed (a big issue that plagued EvE Online for years).
- the more botters are allowed, the more join a game => the more they spam items => the more item prices crash hard.

A game designer has to take all those variables into careful consideration, expecially since some combinations of them may quickly cause a MMO economy to get irreversibly destroyed.

No MMO worth of note can allow botters to run unchecked as their behavior is always highly disruptive towards the game economy and also towards the hardware.

There are many way to implement a compromise that will function as MMO economy. The allusions done to EvE and GW2 as "models of working megaserver AH" are incomplete and misleading.

EvE Online
Wallet segregation is very high. That is people acquire a lot of money but won't put it back into circulation very easily. This is due by many mechanics (including the fact that money is always at huge risk the second an EvE player trusts another with it - scamming etc. etc. is fully allowed there).
Wallet segregation helps giving players the feeling of being very wealthy while not drowning EvE's economy with endless supply of money.

Items MUST be slowly ferried over to their destination. This adds friction into spreading of goods and players want a (small) reward for the time they take to carry over the stuff. The same friction also helps keeping prices different in the various regions.

Players themselves can't just teleport to the nearest AH. Outside Jita and an handful of important trading hubs, they have to travel for quite some time to go buy / sell their stuff, if they want to see it sold anytime soon (local systems often won't do, I won't bore you with missioning systems, FW markets etc. etc.).

Despite Jita accounts for a lot of transactions, there's not a "central AH" in EvE. Every solar system actually has one per planet. Various skills let players consolidate price viewing from a certain range and within a certain radius.

There are NPC costs involved into making items: blueprints must be purchased, skill books too. Then blueprints have to be researched and this costs even months of time and money (research is paid for).

Items WILL be constantly destroyed, EvE is a pervasive, unconsensual PvP game where a lot of stuff gets constantly blown. This allows for a very powerful control against endless supply vs decreasing demand. This allows also to avoid "gear reset", which is just a quick way to artificially reset and re-fuel demand.

EvE comes with a great invention called PLEX, which alone allows the economy to stay more in control than if it did not exist. I won't expand further.

All of the above, plus other factors I won't stress you about (this is a wall of text already) make EvE a very, VERY different kind of economy that can't be compared with ESO.

Guild Wars 2

Very important: sets don't have "killer stats syndrome". That is, you are not going to get the super-duper PvP set that ravages everybody just by sheer stats. Actually, GW2 sets (at the time I played it) don't give competitive advantages by farming the next tier.

The AH fees are otrageous and single handedly act as NPC money sinks more than EvE's.

GW2 and EvE were both built ground up to support a global AH. EvE in particular gives ways for programmers to obtain markets data without stressing the server.

GW2 has the ability to convert gold into their copycat version of PLEX.

GW2 relies less than EvE on a solid economy, thus its model is weaker and subject to more anomalies, bubbles etc.

ESO

ESO is incomplete under many aspects, including economy. Implementing what in other games work, would just kill it.

The game has too few money sinks. Past bank, bags, horses and repairs there's nothing relevant to physically remove gold from circulation, the risk of hyperinflation is present.

Items "magically" teleport from the to the guild store and then "magically" teleport to the buyer. This means there's no friction and thus no "control knob" to slow down transactions.

Items don't get destroyed (deconstructing is just a "material change of state" with limited loss). Even at 0% durability they keep existing and all it takes to get them back to new is to sink a small amount of easily farmed gold. Materials may accumulate over time. The outcome is the need to peform a gear reset sooner or later.

No PLEX or other "unconventional economy control knobs" are available.

As of now ESO relies on segregated AHs to obtain wallets segregation and avoid some of the market principles listed above, beginning with gradual spreads reduction and ending with velocity of money.

Remove segregation and:

- AH items download mods will require hours to update the markets listing AND the ESO server will suffer what GW2 suffered (months of blocked and crashing AH due to overload due to people downloading market data).

- Botters won't have any control against spamming thousands of items.

- Removing barriers will let enough items on the markets to brutally reduce their spreads. When spread hits about zero, price usually crashes hard.

- Again, for the principles above, plus because items don't get destroyed and even ignoring botters: put together thousands of items whose intrinsic value is zero and all you get is those items prices trending down towards zero. The same gold component today worth 3.8k, would become worth 500g.
This causes items "WoWification": purples that are the new greens, blues only good as deconstruction material and so on.

- Spreads reduction would allow (as said above) easy economy of scale, further worsening a number of situations. People would not sink money in "intermediate, non optimal" gear while gathering their ultimate stufff. More money in circle, higher velocity of money, shortened subscriber expected lasting as they achieve quicker what they want.

- A global AH would make useless to join trading guilds. This would diminish the social aspect ZoS wanted to put in by implenting them and would also make more superfluous their innovation about joining up to 5 guilds.

- A global AH would kill a meta-profession called "arbitrage", that is the ability to buy cheap stuff in one guild and sell it in another at a profit.

- There are probably another dozen of consequences but I am too tired typing now.

@Vahrokh
YO Zenimax! Hire this guy to work with the ESO economy system!!!!!!

Edit: Removed a friendly gesture to a user I know on the forums. Sorry if it broke any rule?

[Moderator Note: Edited per our rules on Rude and Insulting comments]

Makkir · July 2014

@Vahrokh gets it. He eloquently has put in to words what I have said over and over again in many AH related threads. He gets my props.
I have suggested many times you can really hit the botters/farmers hard by banning the foreign/Chinese IPs from the American servers. Not sure how well that would fly though

Blackwidow · July 2014

Cogo wrote: »

I know you want it....but read his post. It makes a lot of sense.

I have read it and disproven all those points already.

Vahrokh · July 2014

Holycannoli wrote: »

What would crack in ESO's economy? What would be the problem? Rare items aren't rare enough with an AH? So what? It would make people happy if they could find what they want on the AH. Crafters would be able to sell their wares without having to join and browse multiple AHs. We wouldn't have to stand around town and spam "WTB this" or "WTS that" for hours at a time.

Not enough money sinks? STO has no money sinks at all and yet some extremely rare items are worth so much money they can't even be listed on the AH because of a pricing limit. That's with no money sinks and money being fairly easy to acquire.

It's not enough to just say ESO's economy wasn't designed with an AH in mind. What exactly would be the problem? Give specifics.

The problem is that a functional economy helps a MMO in the long term, while a "melted" economy with rampant hyperinflation, mudflation and so on, makes players unhappy. Modern players are fickle enough as is, figures if you annoy them.
I'll tell you just one of many things that happen and that personally happened to me.
I have played two MMOs that at a certain moment had their economy *slightly* changed and that started a snowball effect that made prices decuplicate every 3 months.
It seems something marginal, expecially since the average Joe does not even care about a MMO AH... but when the MMO producer delivers a succesful marketing campaign and gets a nice number of returning players, these try to get back in the game but they can't buy anything, feel discomfort, frustration and defeat, give up and quit again (this actually happened to those 2 MMOs), in a quite similar way to how people found a "wall" entering in VR levels.
In both games I was quite wealthy (as I said, markets are my specialty, I even trade them in real life) yet when I came back, every time my efforts at gathering money to buy consummables and items would be vain. I'd leave for 6 months and when I'd come back everything would be unaffordable.
I still recall buying epic enchantment materials for 10g, then quitting, getting back and seeing them each listed for 1000g, more than what I had gained in years of playing.

MMOs economies are delicate things, ESO still does not have got the robustness to implement a global AH.

I am not saying a global AH is a bad thing, just that now the game is not ready for it.

About STO: I don't know it except for when STO fans would spam our EvE forums with EvE doom prophecies... and now we see how it went.

But by your description, it looks like STO is one of those MMOs where the economy went bad: if there are no money sinks (you say it) then money rapidly loses value and things indeed become super-expensive. Because you want a tangible advantage (an item) but the currency to acquire it is worthless.

And here we go: a 3 seconds Google about STO economy reveals:

therealfluffy wrote:

Isn't the biggest problem with STO's economy right now its inflation? Free rewards and loot drops, not tied to any production cost, has injected more and more EC and other currencies into the system from day one. Any economist can tell you what that scenario leads to and I think everyone can see that for himself with a quick glance at the Exchange. If anything, this game needs a closed and balanced economy where we pay some kind of tax that will balance all the "free" items we're rewarded.

Please do NOT bring in a game that failed on several issues as example to a new game we love!

Revy · July 2014

I dont think a global AH should be implemented

Allyah · July 2014

Holycannoli wrote: »

Allyah wrote: »

Holycannoli wrote: »

Star Trek Online has a global AH that works fine. Why wouldn't it work here?

Because they are two different games. Because even if an AH would work in ESO doesn't mean it would work well. People have already given more in-depth reasons why an AH wouldn't work well in ESO. I suggest reading through them to find more specific answers.

And I don't agree with their reasons.

Whether you agree or not isn't the point. The point is to communicate why the arguments are good or bad. In any case, you asked why an AH wouldn't work because of certain circumstances and now you know why.

Blackwidow · July 2014

Allyah wrote: »

Holycannoli wrote: »

Allyah wrote: »

Holycannoli wrote: »

Star Trek Online has a global AH that works fine. Why wouldn't it work here?

Because they are two different games. Because even if an AH would work in ESO doesn't mean it would work well. People have already given more in-depth reasons why an AH wouldn't work well in ESO. I suggest reading through them to find more specific answers.

And I don't agree with their reasons.

Whether you agree or not isn't the point. The point is to communicate why the arguments are good or bad. In any case, you asked why an AH wouldn't work because of certain circumstances and now you know why.

Not if he read the whole thread. Those points have been countered.

Allyah · July 2014

Blackwidow wrote: »

Allyah wrote: »

Holycannoli wrote: »

Allyah wrote: »

Holycannoli wrote: »

Star Trek Online has a global AH that works fine. Why wouldn't it work here?

Because they are two different games. Because even if an AH would work in ESO doesn't mean it would work well. People have already given more in-depth reasons why an AH wouldn't work well in ESO. I suggest reading through them to find more specific answers.

And I don't agree with their reasons.

Whether you agree or not isn't the point. The point is to communicate why the arguments are good or bad. In any case, you asked why an AH wouldn't work because of certain circumstances and now you know why.

Not if he read the whole thread. Those points have been countered.

Points can be countered all day long. Doesn't make one opinion right over another. Hence the near uselessness of forums. The only good that can come from them is people willing to actually "listen" instead of taking the stance that their opinion is right and trying to force that down others throats. Of course, the effectiveness of that comes down to people's ability to communicate themselves politely and effectively and we all know that will never happen 100% on the internet.

The point of a forum is to learn, think, and communicate about ideas.

Nazon_Katts · July 2014

@Vahrokh

I agree, ESO's economy is poorly designed and a global AH would make that more apparent. So at first, ZOS has to admit that fact and start working on it, if they want to get any long term benefits out of their economical design. Currently, it drives people off for multiple reasons. (eg. inaccessible market, too tiny markets, too easy to gear up, etc)

Their current solution doesn't stop the economy from being badly designed. It does slow down the effects, but ultimately it will show anyways. While I agree that a Global Auction House currently would be a very bad idea, the very segregated, inaccessible and guild/seller favoriting markets only add to a bad experience.

If they just detached stores from guilds and made kiosks available to everyone to buy and sell from (limited reach by listings/sell and buy orders), we'd have a much more enjoyable experience, which would still buy ZOS enough time to fix the economy.

It is just so, that they keep hiding behind the assertion that their current system is the best for the game and the social experience and that I vehemently disagree with. Many others have already shown how this just did not work out as planned.

It is detrimental to the guild experience and a bother and a chore. But yet again, I agree, all in all most are not really complaining about the absence of an global AH, but rather that there's nothing robust enough to replace it.