Hello everyone. Just like you I have been enjoying the game a lot and loved it when the guild trader system was introduced. Not only was it a good gold sink, but it also gave players more opportunities to exchange resources and, I could say, brought the community closer to each other.

While we're all enjoying opening up guild markets a few features of the guild trader system are very frustrating.

1. The flipping time: the traders change owners around maintenance time, so it's hard for leaders to make sure they secured a trader and hire one of the trader who didn't get bids this week. The problem is not that leader can't be online in the morning (For NA) - they can have an officer do that - the problem is that there's no set consistent time when servers are up. This is very inconvenient. However, this problem follows from a deeper one - blind bids.
2. Blind bids: guilds don't know how much others bid and which traders have bids at all. Only one guild can win, others get their money back and basically have to try to find and hire an empty trader faster than others. This part is very poorly thought off and is NOT fun at all. Sure, it is understood that such system encourages guilds to make safe bids and spend a lot of gold => a lot of gold is extracted from economy. However, the part with blind bids is very frustrating. Besides what I already mentioned, it is possible that a trader B standing right next to trader A will be sold for, say, 2000 gold while a guild who bids 100 000 gold on trader A loses and stays with no trader for a week (while another guild pays 2000 and gets a trader in pretty much the same location). On top of this, everyone knows about "bid spies" and how such competitive system encourages players to do dishonorable things like that.


The system is not very fun and not very fair. It favors luck a bit too much, too. Can anything be done to improve it while still serving two main goals:
1. Giving more players access to guild stores;

2. Removing gold from the game (gold sink).

The whole point of the current system is included in these two points, while having the blind bids is to make sure the gold sink will be significant. Because of that, current system doesn't cater to smaller and/or less active guilds. For some people, trading is a game itself just like pve or pvp for others, can you imagine PvEr doesn't have access to dungeons/trials or a PvPer can't enter Cyrodiil, just because the number of player slots is limited and other players/guilds paid more gold, so now he/she can't play?

I believe, all those issues can be fixed and the system can be improved if ZOS tries an approach below.

I present you an idea of the Dynamic Guild Trader system.


1. The number of traders:

To fix the first issue as well as the fact that smaller guilds (and unlucky guilds) are left out, instead of a fixed number of traders in each city why don't we introduce a flexible dynamic number of them. Which means instead of bidding for a trader guilds pay for a spot in the hub and top X bidders get spots and traders are created for them. There will be NO empty traders so that players don't feel forced to be online at a certain time to grab them. Empty traders simply won't appear. Only paid traders will.

The funny thing that can be done here is that guild masters might choose how their traders will look and what they wear (with an option to create a copy of one of the guildies).

2. The gold sink/pricing:

Now we have a system that encourages guilds to spend massive amounts of gold to get traders. One of the reasons here is that their number is limited so guilds pay a lot to secure their spot. However, no matter how "fair" this is, it leaves a lot of guilds out and it's definitely not fun for players who are in those guilds, besides those guilds are ready to dump a lot of gold too (maybe just 1g less than a guild who wins), but that gold stays in game. So what can we do here?

ZOS can analyze how much gold people spent in each city (or on each trader) over time to estimate how good of a gold sink they have. And then, keeping this number in mind set prices on traders in certain locations (stay with me!) that are fixed for a certain week and are known (and can be changed later dynamically). For example, getting a trader in:

• the wild or small quest hubs or small town but the trader isn't shown on the map until you click on that town - would cost 10 000 gold (think, Voljar Meadery, Koeglin village wayshrines.),
• a small city (quest hub or has some point of interest (bank, crafting stations, Mundus stone nearby etc) - 50 000 gold (think Fort Amol, Kragenmoor, Hoarfrost Downs, Firebrand wayshrines),
• a big city (province/zone capitals) - say, 100 000 - 500 000 gold depending on the zone and the layout of a city (think Sentinel, Shornhelm, Baandari Trading Post etc.)
• DLC cities - they are very actual when DLC is just released but then become less popular after. Also some are big and have everything (Orsinium, Hew's Bane), while others are very limited (Anvil, Kvatch) - ~100 000 - 1 000 000 gold depending on the city and how long ago the DLC was released and/or how popular it is right now.
• Capitals and elite cities - these are places where most players hang out looking for groups and chatting: Stormhaven, Elden Root, Mounrhold (they have undaunted camps as well as big quest hubs as well as banks, crafting stations); Craglorn, Rawl-kha (very convenient and traditionally has lots of players) , maybe Orsinium? (lots of people there because of dailies, well that's why prices "overlap") - starting 1 000 000 gold.

The prices depend on how much gold people have been spending on those traders lately. The numbers I used here are a VERY ROUGH estimate and of course can be different and are subject to change. Especially after One Tamriel Update is here! Also, instead of dividing them on categories based on logistics (like I did) they can just divide them on categories based on guild trader price (then some cities might change their categories every now and then).

3. Requirements
Besides different prices, different spots can have different requirements which guilds should make in order to be eligible to buy the spots:

1. The number of members (similar to having 50 to unlock the store you can have different amount to unlock the spot - 100 for small cities, 490-500 for capitals etc.)
2. The number of members active last week or month (comments aren't needed).
3. The number of items listed (shows that it's actually a guild where players try to sell items, not just a guild of a few very rich players);
4. Total sales for the previous week (shows that buyers actually buy from this guild and it's not just a random guild owned by 1 player who has millions of gold to waste),
5. The ratio of sales to the total price of items listed in the previous week (same as above);

These requirements can be used to make sure buyers will get stores to buy from, not empty stores/traders hired by some very rich players in the top spots (like what we still can see now).

4. Dynamic number of traders

But wait, that's not all. In order not to make it so that every guild just buys the cheapest trader and therefore those spots actually have all the traders (like, why would I go to Wayrest with 5 traders if Firebrand keep wayshrine has 100 traders? So the choice and price competition there is likely to be more beneficial), we should introduce hard caps for each category making sure that cheaper spots have fewer traders to encourage people to buy spots in more expensive locations as well as going there to shop (thus, indeed, making them more valuable). If we have more bids than is allowed by a hard cap, we can simply forbid more guilds to place bids or use requirements from Section 3. as tiebreakers. For example, if 10 guilds placed bids on a spot with 5 traders - guilds who are top 5 in the number of listings will get spots. If there's more than 5 guilds eligible (for example 6 guilds have the same amount or bottom 2-3 have the same number so that there's more than 5 guilds with top 5 amounts of listings), then we move to the next one, say, total sales.


E.g. Each category can have the current amount of traders times some coefficient for each category. Or basically each category can have up to N traders, where Nx is a number in the list and x is some normalization constant to make sure many guilds have enough spots. Say, traders in the wild will have small camps of 2-3 traders, small cities - up to 5, big cities - up to 10, capitals and elite cities - up to 15-20.

That way, players will know exactly how much money they need to pay and whether or not they can afford a trader this week, as well as where they have chances to get a trader.

Moreover, the price of each category can be evaluated and corrected every week and announced for the next week. That way we automatically include possible inflation and
depreciation of the gold value, thus making this system sustainable long term.

While evaluating the prices we can take into account: gold spent on traders, the popularity of each trading hub, the amount of gold ZOS wants to be removed from the game, etc.

Benefits:
1. All prices can be changed and "posted" a week in advance. And since ZOS somewhat controls them, the gold sink of such system may be even greater than the gold sink we have now.
2. Less guilds are left out, more guilds are catered for.
3. Guilds and players KNOW what they pay for and get what they pay for.
4. Instead of competing who raises more gold this week, players can actually trade and compete in prices, knowing that they only need "that much" gold on a trader this week.
5. It's also more convenient for the buyers since they will have more options and can expect more competitive pricing.
6. Guilds won't abuse the current system and get traders they don't deserve for 100g, just because bigger guilds all placed their bids on a trader nearby.
7. The major issues we have now are resolved - the flipping time is no longer relevant and players are no longer frustrated by blind bids (see 2. and 3.)

Moments that require further thinking:
1. What to do with Cyrodiil traders and how to make them relevant.
2. ZOS will need to actually work on this system and come up with the way to calculate the dynamic amount of traders and prices, which is infinitely more difficult than leaving things the way they are and looking for maximum number in a while-loop. It might not be worth it too.
3. What should be the hard caps? Can we change them and how?
4. If prices are changed dynamically, how will the system be for newly-formed guilds? Wouldn't it be too unfriendly? Well, the current system is unfriendly enough, so I don't think the proposed system will be much worse(if at all).


This thread is my feedback about the current system mixed with some constructive (I think) criticism and an idea on how to improve the system (in my opinion). Thanks for reading. And dear developers, maybe you will have time to discuss on one of your meetings and bring it to life. Please, get rid of blind bids. Thanks