grom1024 wrote: »

jedtb16_ESO wrote: »

grom1024 wrote: »

Makkir wrote: »

I guess its how we grew up with gaming. I believe in rewards behind hard work. Others want to be spoonfed selffishly because their content is more important than content for merchants (us, the group that enjoys haggaling, bargain hunting, maximizing our profit potentials).

Then there will be no problem with situation when two system co-exists. Currently you are defending the fun for few out of inconvenience for many.

how do you know it is only fun for a few and an inconvenience for many?

I was talking to people. And even in this thread almost every casual that comes there says that he or she wants AH. And there are much more casuals than hardcore traders. For buyer to reach seller too much effort is required. This is bad user experience, not speaking of the fact that choice offered by guild is too poor because of limited marked size. Only hardcore traders said that they like the guild trade system so far. They still could have their own guild trade playground if they want.

But you could try running a poll like:

1. I want trade system to stay the way it is.
2. I want Auction House added to the system with appropriate anti-botting measures with saving guild traders.
3. I want Auction House with appropriate anti-botting measures to replace the current guild traders.

I would choose a second option.

grom1024 wrote: »

jedtb16_ESO wrote: »

grom1024 wrote: »

jedtb16_ESO wrote: »

grom1024 wrote: »

Makkir wrote: »

I guess its how we grew up with gaming. I believe in rewards behind hard work. Others want to be spoonfed selffishly because their content is more important than content for merchants (us, the group that enjoys haggaling, bargain hunting, maximizing our profit potentials).

Then there will be no problem with situation when two system co-exists. Currently you are defending the fun for few out of inconvenience for many.

how do you know it is only fun for a few and an inconvenience for many?

I was talking to people. And even in this thread almost every casual that comes there says that he or she wants AH. And there are much more casuals than hardcore traders. For buyer to reach seller too much effort is required. This is bad user experience, not speaking of the fact that choice offered by guild is too poor because of limited marked size. Only hardcore traders said that they like the guild trade system so far. They still could have their own guild trade playground if they want.

But you could try running a poll like:

1. I want trade system to stay the way it is.
2. I want Auction House added to the system with appropriate anti-botting measures with saving guild traders.
3. I want Auction House with appropriate anti-botting measures to replace the current guild traders.

I would choose a second option.

it takes some effort to find what you need so everything must change?

perhaps you should also be requesting that every toon created be cp510 with all skill lines maxed and a choice of full sets of end game gear? after all it does take some effort to get those things too.

The problem that there is no efforts to spend on looking up item, as operations are too simple and even more so with addons. But there is just a lot of time to spend on walking between stores and working with stores, some of it even non-touching keyboard as addons downloads content of the store. So it is just useless timewaster rather rather interesting challenge for me. Some play meta-game around guild stores maximizing gold, good luck to you, you will be able to play your games on AH too. But for purpose of moving goods from seller to buyer the current system is horrible. It is only good for intermediates who concentrate on this aspect of the game by exploiting its defects. UX design team would have been fired for it IRL.

Beyond wasting time, the system has additional defect, extremely the poor diversity of items in stores. Because market sizes are very small, only limited set of items sell. And not because there are no potential buyers, but because it does not worth buyers to browse items in stores. It does not makes sense to search 2 hours for specific level crafted or chest set item in stores when it would expire in 3 hours. Crafters could not sell their goods (except for high-level alchemy and enchantments), and even low level characters have to invest precious skill points into crafting. This disconnect between buyer and seller is horrible.

grom1024 wrote: »

jedtb16_ESO wrote: »

you are contradicting yourself now......in the post i responded to you said "For buyer to reach seller too much effort is required" and then in your response to my post you say "The problem that there is no efforts to spend on looking up item, as operations are too simple and even more so with addons"

so which is it?

too much effort or too little effort?

it can't be both. (and if it takes too little effort what are you complaining about?)

also - the guild traders are sellers markets..... people offer what they want (and hope) to sell. that is not a fault of 'the system'. possibly a fault of your expectation though. that sellers market is self regulating - you offer something for sale and get a buyer, fine try it again. if you offer something for sale and it dosn't sell you withdraw it and try something else. it is a simple system requiring little external regulation and it prevents the abuses possible in a global ah.

You see, there are two categories of efforts:

• Challenging and rewarding efforts is what we come here for.
• Too much trivial, boring, and unrewarding effort IRL is why we come to game. And I do not want to do that in the game.

I have posted a lot on it above: the smaller the market, the less possible diversity. This is just pure math, and there is little way around it. Any market self regulates to diversity optimal for it. For small markets the poor diversity is optimal. For larger markets, greater diversity is optimal. It is just like petrol station kiosks (poor diversity and only most common goods) and Wallmart (great diversity with a lot of niche goods). Greater amount of guilds does not solves problems, what matter is size of individual market. We have a lot of pertol station kiosk, but the diversity in them is still poor, they are almost carbon copy of each other despite of different owners. Guild stores are also almost carbon copy of each other if we take goods that sells in the system.

grom1024 wrote: »

jedtb16_ESO wrote: »

what you call lack of diversity is simply the way the market regulates itself - people sell things that are going to net a profit - that's how trading anywhere works. having an auction house is not going to change that. the current system limits the number of members in a guild and the number of trade slots available to each member and the total number of trade posts - do you think that is an accident? or perhaps something to do with server load - a sound(ish) practical limitation.

when i trade i offer the things that i know will sell and net me the biggest profit - i suspect (though i do not know for certain) that other people do the same. i am not going to waste time selling low level gear for the simple reason that if i got that as a drop there is a good chance the several hundred thousand other people did too. so there is an ah - it will have a limited number of slots per player and (it seems reasonable to suppose) players will try to make the most of those slots by offering the things that are likely to make them the highest return exactly the same as it is now. your argument for ah increasing diversity has so many holes in it you could use it to catch fish.

For lower-level set gear, I have seen only some pieces, and I have never seen a complete set at right level. I would have liked to how some sets work. For low level set items likely reaction will be "I have interesting set piece from chest, lets look for others on AH". For low-level set items situation complicates by that you need all or nothing. Guild stores do not provide non-time expensive way to check if all items are available somewhere. So search is time consuming. I would like to see statistics on complete sets actually used.

And I only could only guess that you have skipped some economics classes if you have visited any at all. Your reasoning is right only if you reason within fixed market size. Market size is defined more by amount of visitors.

Lets say that 0.01% would buy the specific gear piece if they will see it (assuming appropriate price). So if you have 100 visitors per day, you will sell about 3.5 items per year. This is typical guild store w/o trader. So there will be no sales for you. With trader you will get about 1000 visitors per day, so you could sell 35 items per year, or about 4 per month. There is now small chance to sell, but mats will be still better. For auction house there will be much greater amount of visitors per day (lets assume 10000), so about 40 items will sell. It will might make sense to put item on AH if there is less than 20 available and price is good. This is how the diversity is formed. IRL mechanisms are a bit more complex because of greater amount of factors in play, but still these factors have major effect. Walmart could allow great diversity because it designed for large number of visitors and makes a lot from different niche goods.

And if you see holes, you could point to them.

grom1024 wrote: »

Grao wrote: »

grom1024 wrote: »

wayfarerx wrote: »

Averya_Teira wrote: »

wayfarerx wrote: »

ScottK1994 wrote: »

Above are some people with hundreds of thousands of gold and are worried that they'll seem less rich in a working system.

People say this a lot and it's nonsense. I'm in a good trade guild with a prime spot and I don't see any collusion or exploiting the system, just weekly raffles and such like any other guild.

What supporters of the global auction house overlook is that people like me will game the holy hell out of a global store front. I've done it in other MMOs and I'd do it here as well. I wouldn't need a guild or raffles or any of that nonsense, just me and a couple hours hacking some LUA and boom, your markets belong to me. The current system makes such market domination infeasible for the solo individual and difficult for large guilds. A global auction house would make it trivial for everyone.

Your cure is worse than the disease.

Wouldn't that get you a ban though ? Well, with ZOS, a 3 day suspension I guess....

You could fully automate the process and yes, that would be a TOS violation... but it's not necessary to do so. I was thinking of a modified Master Merchant addon to scan the AH and an extension to AwesomeGuildStore that would automatically surface the best deals. I'd keep a laptop running ESO around and every half hour or so run a scan of the AH, buy up any good deals and immediately realist them for higher prices.

And it would not just be me, hundreds of people would do this. Many of them wouldn't just play the buy-low-sell-high game either, they would actively seek to control entire chunks of the market. And as long as people were not automating the process there would not be a single suspension or ban.

If there is account-wide limit 100 buy and sell deals per day, or 50 deals per day accumulated for 12 days max like enlightenment now, then your script will stop to work and load up servers with queries. And you assume that API would allow you doing it. It is not necessary so. Requiring human confirmation for sale or buy fill force you to sit near notebook, or violate ToS with perma-ban possibility by using third party program to skip this step. For each too-smart-for-own-good, there is possible improvement in the code that would make it worthless. Normal users will not notice such restrictions, only market players. They will have to play smart to squeeze any speculation income in such situation and focus on high-level goods.

That is a stupid idea no MMO worth its name would go with. Controlling the market, playing the market is considered a valid play style in MMOs. Creating silly rules to limit players from playing would be same as saying 'Oh you can only kill up to 20 people in PvP per day'. It is stupid.

Playing and controlling the market by few players reduce fun for other players and it even might make them quit. ZOS as owner of server might take any measures to prevent that. A lot of risk of unrestricted AH were outlined in this thread. This only means that reasonably restricted AH will be better solution. Daily transaction limit looks like a good solution to reduce many of outlined risks. Also this would make life difficult for gold sellers. IRL there are no unrestricted markets too, there are rules an regulation that prevent at least some market abuse scenarios.

I do not mind of leaving guild stores as they are, so might play into market control in them, leaving AH more tailored to casual players.

grom1024 wrote: »

jedtb16_ESO wrote: »

grom1024 wrote: »

jedtb16_ESO wrote: »

what you call lack of diversity is simply the way the market regulates itself - people sell things that are going to net a profit - that's how trading anywhere works. having an auction house is not going to change that. the current system limits the number of members in a guild and the number of trade slots available to each member and the total number of trade posts - do you think that is an accident? or perhaps something to do with server load - a sound(ish) practical limitation.

when i trade i offer the things that i know will sell and net me the biggest profit - i suspect (though i do not know for certain) that other people do the same. i am not going to waste time selling low level gear for the simple reason that if i got that as a drop there is a good chance the several hundred thousand other people did too. so there is an ah - it will have a limited number of slots per player and (it seems reasonable to suppose) players will try to make the most of those slots by offering the things that are likely to make them the highest return exactly the same as it is now. your argument for ah increasing diversity has so many holes in it you could use it to catch fish.

For lower-level set gear, I have seen only some pieces, and I have never seen a complete set at right level. I would have liked to how some sets work. For low level set items likely reaction will be "I have interesting set piece from chest, lets look for others on AH". For low-level set items situation complicates by that you need all or nothing. Guild stores do not provide non-time expensive way to check if all items are available somewhere. So search is time consuming. I would like to see statistics on complete sets actually used.

And I only could only guess that you have skipped some economics classes if you have visited any at all. Your reasoning is right only if you reason within fixed market size. Market size is defined more by amount of visitors.

Lets say that 0.01% would buy the specific gear piece if they will see it (assuming appropriate price). So if you have 100 visitors per day, you will sell about 3.5 items per year. This is typical guild store w/o trader. So there will be no sales for you. With trader you will get about 1000 visitors per day, so you could sell 35 items per year, or about 4 per month. There is now small chance to sell, but mats will be still better. For auction house there will be much greater amount of visitors per day (lets assume 10000), so about 40 items will sell. It will might make sense to put item on AH if there is less than 20 available and price is good. This is how the diversity is formed. IRL mechanisms are a bit more complex because of greater amount of factors in play, but still these factors have major effect. Walmart could allow great diversity because it designed for large number of visitors and makes a lot from different niche goods.

And if you see holes, you could point to them.

the big hole?

the amount of slots available for sales is unlikely to increase per player - my guess is it would fall for entirely practical reasons (server load). limited sales slots...

The amount of sell slots does not needs to increase. Every AH I know of out there limits it and still supports goods diversiity. It is amount of visitors what needs to increase. I might choose wether to post cp100 Lich helm from dolmen for 700g or stamina potions for 600g. Now lich helm goes to deconstructing. I would have even introduced additional limits like limiting daily amount of buy and sell transactions to suppress bots and gold sellers and load off the server.