Dennizon wrote: »

That idea holds if, and when, there are more kiosks in desirable locations. I would support this idea if there was a way to search all kiosks from one location; you still need to bid on and pay for a location to play, but you don't penalize the buyer. As long as places like Rawl'ka are considered premium spots due to convenience, then I think its better to keep the bids closed so that the superpower guilds face at least some disadvantage.

^ THIS!@#

All I'm seeing are sour grapes smaller guilds having a bloody whine over the fact that they can't get a Guild Trader for 50k. Boo hoo. It's an auction. That's how Auctions work. Even if it was an open bid and displayed, you would STILL have mega-guilds sniping at the last minute going 'oh that was your bid? 50k? aww that's cute!'

That's not the issue, the issue is spending 2-3 hours visiting every damn Guild Trader in Tamriel just to find one specific item!

The focus should be on a centralised search system that encompasses searching ALL Trader listings. Whilst it might be laggier than the current model to do these searches, it could be sped up by requiring a minimum of say 3 criteria in each search. For example Im looking for Apparel -> Accessories -> Rings. Bam theres my search criteria now give me results. Maybe port sales to an SQL DB, Sync the tables hourly.

Hell it could even be something simple like this as a lookup function Zenimax -

SELECT Accessory, Price, Trait
FROM GuildTraders,
WHERE Accessory = Ring
AND Trait = 'Robust'

Meh you get the idea.. Just pretty up a GUI around it..

I don't think any of the options presented in the poll are good ones, tbh. I'd rather see an interactable notice near the vendors that lists average price for a vendor for last week, 4 weeks, and 8 weeks. This would give people an idea of what they would need to bid, and enough data to see how bids were trending.

Let's face it, showing current bid amounts on a stall sounds good in practice, but as it has already been pointed out would do nothing to "fix" the system. already, any GM worth their salt is waiting until the last minute to place bids on stalls; showing current bid amounts isnt going to fix that.

In addition to posting last weeks/4 week/8 week AVERAGES, adding more vendor locations (there seem to be multiple open and vendorless stalls in the starting zones such as Mistral and Bleakrock) would be a benefit to guilds trying to get their foot in the door. It wouldn't make the competition for super hubs like Rawl any less fierce, but not every guild wanting a vendor has what it takes to compete and be successful in a place like Rawl anyway. More vendors in the world may help bring down the prices on vendors in other areas, though.

Also, Eyevea seems like a giant waste of space. Is there anything there except a couple set crafting stations? It could be a great location for open world vendors: traders with whom anyone could list their items for sale, without the neccesity of belonging to a guild. We have a guild vendor hub in Coldharbour, there isnt any reason to not have that on Eyevea, and even at the Earth Forge, for that matter.

From my perspective, the only reason to list current bids open for all to view (with or without guild information) would be for the purpose of targetting specific guilds/vendors. That is certainly not a fix for the current system. There are better suggestions out there.

Giles.floydub17_ESO wrote: »

Alphashado wrote: »

squidgod2000b14_ESO wrote: »

I imagine people might be surprised how much of the tax/raffle money which supposedly goes towards vendor bids ends up in the guild leaders pocket.

This is an insult to all the GMs out there that bust their arse and often use their own money to support their guild and keep it successful.

I am in 4 very good trading guilds and I am an officer in one of them. I can assure you that these guilds aren't run by crooks. They are run by honest people that work very hard for no other reason than to supply a great trading guild for the other 495 people on the roster. Most of whom have no clue how much work is involved and have very little appreciation for it.

OrdainedFaun wrote: »

Indeed it does. It really hurts when you get outbid by someone with less than 3 pages of items in their guild store because they had spies in your guild looking at history > bank > withdrawals. I play this game to have fun, not to have to constantly search my guild roster for potential spies trying to see my bids.

Yes, that does indeed suck. We have resorted to withdrawing various random amounts the night before the bid in order to prevent spies from knowing how much we bid that week and we fluctuate the bid amount each week with a secret pattern. It sucks that we have to resort to such tactics.

My biggest complaint with the system is that after losing a bid, that guild is likely stuck w/o a trader. Any trader. For a week.

You may be fortunate enough to scramble around right after maint and find one if you are lucky, but that is a crap shoot. There should be a way for guilds with losing bids to still acquire a trader in some crappy location so they at least have one for the week. A big part of the problem (as mentioned by someone earlier in this thread) is that right now there are too many rich individuals with nothing better to spend their gold on than kiosk bids. So then you end up with some dude and his 3 friends taking a kioks and filling it with 2 pages of rubbish since they are limited to 30 listings each. That is bad for the market and just wastes the time of all the people looking for a good kiosk to buy from.

I am certainly not opposed to a free market and everyone is entitled to give it a go with a guild trader, but the prime locations should be going to full guilds rather than one bored rich guy that has a spy in an established guild.

They eliminated the spy aspect in that being able to view bids can be restricted.

All that did was make it a little harder. There is still plenty of information a spy can use. For example, what amount of money did the GM withdraw from the guild bank just before bid deadline. They can also still see past bid amounts.

The point I'm making is that there are still ways for spies to gain useful info.

maryriv wrote: »

None of the arguments against changing it are strong. Something needs to be changed.

So you think that last minute bid scrambles by the GM's are a good thing? I'm quite happy that GM's don't have to get up at 7am anymore and can more safely bid throughout the week. A vote for this change is a vote for an entire week of nothing followed by 1 minute of bids Monday morning. While I agree that the current system needs work, the proposed change to show the current high bid solves nothing and instead pushes us back where we were a few months ago except you don't need spies to tell you the bid. It's right there in front of you.

maryriv wrote: »

redspecter23 wrote: »

maryriv wrote: »

None of the arguments against changing it are strong. Something needs to be changed.

So you think that last minute bid scrambles by the GM's are a good thing? I'm quite happy that GM's don't have to get up at 7am anymore and can more safely bid throughout the week. A vote for this change is a vote for an entire week of nothing followed by 1 minute of bids Monday morning. While I agree that the current system needs work, the proposed change to show the current high bid solves nothing and instead pushes us back where we were a few months ago except you don't need spies to tell you the bid. It's right there in front of you.

You, like most here, are totally misunderstanding what the pole is suggesting.

- He is NOT saying that the bid should be shown in guild history.
- He IS saying that the HIGHEST bid (no naming of the guild who is bidding it) be displayed AT each guild trader.
- He is NOT asking in any of the options to have the bid each guild puts to be revealed once again.
- Last minute bidding STILL occurs in literally every guild we know of.

I understand completely what he's asking. My personal opinion is that the suggestion is worse than what we have currently. It accomplishes nothing but forcing GM's to make last second bids.

Last minute bidding still occurs because the system (while better than it was previously) is still broken. Bank totals can be monitored very closely and bid amounts can be very accurately tracked if someone was so inclined to do so.

Sadly, They, being ZOS, will probably never fix this or the abysmal trading in this game simply because as it stands - it is the LARGEST gold sink in the game, or any other game I've ever played. It would be quite interesting to see how much gold is taken out of circulation every week when new kiosks are bid on...I truly shudder to think about the amount.

black-gryphonb14_ESO wrote: »

Sadly, They, being ZOS, will probably never fix this or the abysmal trading in this game simply because as it stands - it is the LARGEST gold sink in the game, or any other game I've ever played. It would be quite interesting to see how much gold is taken out of circulation every week when new kiosks are bid on...I truly shudder to think about the amount.

Gold sinks need to be in MMORPG's in order to keep a healthy economy. That's not really the issue here, the main issue is that great guilds are not getting spots but terrible guilds are.

As a shopper I want a good selection, not 3 page guilds taking up space.

Trader bidding needs some kind of improvement

newtinmpls wrote: »

It's interesting to "listen" to this conversation as i still have no real idea how the bid/guild/trader system works.

People in a guild that have permissions to "Hire Guild Trader" have an option to "Bid on Trader" when they interact with a trader.

Each Guild can only have one bid active at a time, and a bid cannot be withdrawn after it has been made. When you bid, the money is sequestered from the Guild Bank until bidding closes. If the guild wins, the money is gone. If the guild loses, the money goes straight back into the bank.

When bidding closes, any trader that has not had any bids in that week can be hired for 100g by the first guild that gets to them.