Rising Trader Costs

Artis · January 2017

JezzaAKTT wrote: »

You know why the best deals are found in the outlier area's? Because the trader bid is low enough so that the guild doesn't have to force it's members to over price items just make to make a high sales minimum. So whether your guild is in a high traffic area or not your members may or may Not make more gold, depending on what the guild requires of its members. I'm sure that some guild masters are only in it for the gold that comes to their pockets, not how much they can help their members make. There has to be a happy medium where the guild AND the members are actually making gold. The only way I can see this happening to put in more trader kiosks. There are plenty of places where that could happen. All the capital cities have room for more kiosks and that certainly would reduce the cost of the traders in those area's. But look around in the game and you will find places for more or new kiosks everywhere. As the game ages there are bound to be more and more guilds and I feel the number of trader kiosks needs to reflect that. The only new trader kiosks that have been added since the game came online are the few that were added with the DLC's and oh hey, they added 1 trader in each outlaw refuge! Cause everyone wants a trader there. As it is now if you lose your trader bid, there are NO other options than to wait until next week, since ALL trader kiosks are full.

Not true. No one forces people to overprice items, guilds force them to sell a lot of items instead. Can hardly call it "forcing" since that's why they are in a trading guild to begin with. You find best deals in the outlier areas because those guilds are poor, don't have requirements all that much and therefore have a lot of noobs. Like, I saw kuta and aetherial cipher go for less than 100g. It's not deals, it's players who didn't know the market and that they could change the price of their listing.

OP, what you encountered is normal and natural. Look at it from a different angle. Other guilds couldn't get your guild's trader before consistently. And they were upset that the prices are high etc, while your guild would win the bids. Well now things turned so that they made/raised more money and can afford to spend more than you.

mvffins · January 2017

Artis wrote: »

Not true. No one forces people to overprice items, guilds force them to sell a lot of items instead. Can hardly call it "forcing" since that's why they are in a trading guild to begin with. You find best deals in the outlier areas because those guilds are poor, don't have requirements all that much and therefore have a lot of noobs. Like, I saw kuta and aetherial cipher go for less than 100g. It's not deals, it's players who didn't know the market and that they could change the price of their listing.

OP, what you encountered is normal and natural. Look at it from a different angle. Other guilds couldn't get your guild's trader before consistently. And they were upset that the prices are high etc, while your guild would win the bids. Well now things turned so that they made/raised more money and can afford to spend more than you.

Agree 100%

-Those outlier areas don't consistently have good deals, they just once and awhile have a noob post something for way too cheap. The best deals I get consistently are still from cities, not the major ones but ones like Shornhelm and Sentinel.

-Older guilds *usually* get surpassed by newer ones in terms of traders, with some exceptions. The influx of new players allows this, as well as saving up money from those that don't have a trader yet. Your guild may have spent a mil or so getting a trader last week, but another guild may have just kept hoarding and is about to outbid you this week. This scenario is happening a lot more often as I am seeing a couple of the guilds I'm in atm rotating on weeks when they bid to save gold.

Narvuntien · January 2017

It is hard to consider the game like a real economic system because we have reserve banking in the real world for starters. There is no leading systems in game.

People in the real world can't just go farm skyreach catacombs for gold. In game gold does in fact grow in zombies.

MMOs need very different economic systems from real life ones. Gold sinks being the major one. With gold generation literially appearing out of nowhere without some way to pull gold out of the economy inflation quickly gets out of control.

Trader costs, taxes, repair etc. And soon housing.

I expect there to be quite the crash of the economy with the addition of housing I am supprised it hasn't already started happening, but I guess everytime i spend a lot of gold i just shrug and think well I'll just get a smaller house. I think it won't effect the richest players they can just buy whatever they want. It wont effect the more casual players they don't need BIS gear, they will just use something worse. Serious PVE and PVPs don't care about housing with no storage. It is the people in the middle, that wish to have a vareity of experiences that are going to struggle with gold. Which is going to hurt the medium sized more causal trading guilds more when thier members are just not going to be able to put up the money, for raffles and auctions and donations. Because their memebers are trading for fun not to make money, they just want to experience it.

I think this system is fine, it seems bit odd and it is certainly in favor of sellers rather than the buyer who has to put in work to find things at a lower price. And without addons it can also be super confusing to both navigate the guild stores and you straight up have no idea how much things are worth. I think there needs to be some tweaking that could really help with this such as some of the suggetions in the suggestion post above.

Okay as I see it there is two clear issues with the current system.
1. There is some reports of colusion and deals between traders and trader guilds over thier spots or as proxy trader guilds. This is really really hard to police because the majory of this is happening outside of the game. I am not sure what the soultion to this is.
2. Some places/cities are more popular than other places/cities. This is the key to the trader issues right? Everyone is fighting over particular locations. Writs go in at Belkath, Rwalh is convient (or used to be before you lagged out), Elden root, mournhold, wayrest have the undaunted camps and daily quests. Why is there a bunch of traders in Ebonheart when everyone is in Davon's watch? For example. I have no reason to ever go to Ebonheart. Why are the traders in skywatch and not vulkel guard? I am certain that ZoS has the data for the popularity of locations and they should do one of two things. change the locations of traders to reflect this or... give us reasons to visit these places and not all congregate in certain locations. Why not spread out where the daily quests are for example? the new life festival was a good example of this although it actually crashed eastmarch. What if there was basically a "secret" daily quest that moved around and could be acessed from less popular locations.

code65536 · January 2017

ZOS designed the guild trader bid system to be a gold sink. And it's a very effective one, because as there is more gold circulating, rich guilds can afford to bid more, and that drives bid prices up. It's a gold sink that scales up with the amount of gold sloshing around in the economy. In contrast, all the other gold sinks in the game are a fixed size and don't get larger as the amount of circulating gold grows.

So rising bid costs are fine. I say that despite being a trade guild GM who has to deal with the nuisance of rising bid costs.

The problem isn't that the bid costs are rising. It's that we have no tools to effectively deal with rising bid costs. This is what it costs you to sell an item via the guild trader system:

1% listing fee: gold sink that goes to ZOS
7% "house cut"
- 3.5% is lost as a gold sink to ZOS
- 3.5% goes to the guild's coffers

Guilds have zero control over these numbers. And 3.5% going to the guild is just not enough. And the 4.5% that goes to ZOS is just the tip of the iceberg, since the amount sunk into the bidding gold sink is much more than the 4.5% transaction cost gold sink.

For example, over a year ago, I was in a powerhouse guild that could sustain its bids from taxes alone ("Loots R Us" in NA/PC Craglorn). Eventually, the rising bid costs made this unsustainable, and they had to find new sources of revenue. Raffles, auctions... and sales quotas. It caused some prominent members to leave (some were offended by the quotas) and it burned out the management (it meant a lot more work). It was all downhill from there for that guild.

The solution would've been simple: Let guilds set their own tax rates. It means that people, when looking for trade guilds, have a simple choice: join a guild in Rawl and pay high taxes for that prime location, or join a guild in some dusty backwater but pay virtually no taxes. It means people, when buying from guilds, have a choice too: buy from Rawl where there is a wide selection and great convenience, but face higher prices because sellers have to compensate for higher taxes, or buy from a dusty backwater where the selection is low and where it's inconvenient, but the seller won't have a high markup. It means that guild leadership can raise funds by just increasing the tax rate, without devoting hours to fundraiser activities or going through the tedium of tracking sales to enforce cumbersome quotas.

And it would still be just as effective of a gold sink, since it would still scale with the saturation of the economy. Except now running a trade guild won't be a high-stress job that causes people to quit. It's a game. Let us have fun. Give us this one vital tool to manage a trade guild properly so that it doesn't feel like an effing job.

TL;DR: Rising bid cost isn't the root problem. The root problem is guilds not being able to adjust their tax rate appropriately. It's a small problem with a huge impact: fix it, and most of the complaints about the system would go away.

@ZOS_JessicaFolsom @ZOS_GinaBruno @ZOS_RichLambert

techprince · January 2017

1) All tax should goto guild.
2) Implement ingame global trading index showing whos selling the item and where. TTC does this job out of the game but this functionality should be added by the game itself.

Panomania · January 2017

I honestly think, after talking to some friends in other guilds, and doing simple math, that few traders out there come anywhere near making their bid amounts from guild taxes. I think a lot of you spouting off here simply dont know your own guild's numbers. Maybe I am wrong. Regardless, from talking to people in 11 different guilds (granted, not a massive sample) who have traders in the "Big Five" trade cities none of them do, nor do the other 7 I spoke to who deal in smaller areas.

If you dont see that as a flawed system....well, lets just put it nice and say I cannot see your point of view. I understand people thinking this is a "free market", but its anything but...and I think ZOS needs to take a genuine look at it as only they can.

Silver_Strider · January 2017

Really only the Traders in the important cities (Mournhold, Wayrest, Rawl, etc.) are that expensive and Trader Guilds have no one to blame but themselves.

I recently got a guild trader in Stormhold for about 100k which has already paid off thru the crap I sell Than again, when I see stuff like Red Mountain and Spriggans jewelry selling for 30-60k+, I realize that I'm just underselling those prices with my 15-20k price range. I see people selling Spriggan Swords on the market for 600k+ and yet I have found 2 Sharpened 1h Axes and a Mace and sold them all for 50k each.

Money isn't exactly something you need stupid excessive amounts of in this game (Homesteads not withstanding) so really I never saw a point in hoarding massive amounts of it. It's not even much of a profit to use the Guild Traders anymore because you can just put the item into Chat and it will sell much quicker than in a Trader. Sure, spamming an item in chat is somewhat inefficient but so is leaving it in a trader for a month and it not selling due to people undercutting you constantly, as you just loss out repeatedly with getting the item back in a month and having to repost it at a lower rate, cutting into your profits even more.