What I suggested in the other big thread about a centralized auction house was that instead of wiping the guild vendors completely each main city in every hub will have multiple marketer's cause you know its going to be crowded, so gives everyone a chance to click on them.

Was to have each marketer pool together all the info in that zone into one centralized area so you don't have to go in the thieves guild area or go off to some random island in the same zone every time but just click on the marketer and buy what you wanted from that zone.

This way people will get to keep the guild merchants and have an upkeep per week and make it so much less of a hassle going everywhere.

Looking at the backend of this. ZOS would have to create a large database the same as they always could have. And aggressively manage the Indexes & Access Paths to attached Storage (Hard Drive Farms like vendor EMC etc) to make queries as fast as possible.

And Yes when you make your Guild Store selections you are running a SQL query to the specific Guild Store Database to return what is available per your selections "In that Store". The time it takes to return the available items data to your screen is limited by several factors, CPU, Database Indexes, Network latency, Spindle speed on the Hard Drive, and less so if SSD, but one of the most important things is the size of the database or scope that your query has to look into.

If it's only 30K rows of product data that's one thing in a single store. If its millions of rows due to it being 1 Stores for the entire game, totally different ballgame and you have to have Staff that knows what they are doing for Enterprise level database otherwise you have Pain for the users until someone figures it out.

Combining all guild stores in the game or even per Zone makes each individual database much more complicated to Manage due to it's size. That's what anyone technical could tell you. The amount of frank bitching and complaining would be monstrous if there was any period of Auction House tuning where there was some lag or massive lag. Especially at night where support hours don't have a full staff online.

That said, the technical means to do so are commonplace in IT IE 15 years ago this was commonplace for ANY large and medium sized IT shop.

While other MMO's can do it successfully and painlessly. Zos Chose to go their own way in this. So we have the mechanism of 5 guilds plus Add-ons that help all the sellers keep tabs on prices and take proact measures so in effect I'm not sure it helped per their Desire at all.

Back to hard drives: If your Database administrator (DBA) works with your Storage Administrator and actually talks to each other (Rare) they'll plan when setting up the database so you don't have different classes of data sharing Hard Drive spindles.

I've seen so many time a team pulled into a War Room (my job for 22 years) where an enterprise application was slow for no known reason. 10 separate teams in the war room checking Servers, Network, Firewall, Storage, Application, Backups (don't get me started on backups running during the business day killing performance) and no one could figure out why the Database queries were slow yet the DBA and Storage guys were both saying there's no errors on my system.

Turns out they didn't plan, and ended up put two separate application classes (PROD for production) & (DEV for Development on the same Storage frame). When you look inside either of the Prod or Dev servers, neither could access each others data as they were logically separated, but were in reality sharing "Some" of the same Hard Drive spindles and all it took was someone running an aggressive query in the DEV environment which is supposed to be "Do what you want land", but it was killing performance to Queries for production affecting the companies Live Sales.

I know this is too much but it comes down to People working together. Quality results are ONLY provided by people doing the due diligence and knowing what they are doing. Someone has to pay the price and do the intelligent thing. Zos knows also what they are willing to pay for and what they consider is good enough for "their" end result.

Sorry, I returned to my prior job there for a minute...

I do wonder if the frog is boiling slow (Yes us) but that's a separate subject...