My trade guild technically has 1k dues but its paid in raffle tickets so every now and then you get all your money back. Reasonably good trade location.

I really like it here and i pay way more than mandatory. In fact i pour in all my sales mon-friday and keep all my weekend sales. So unlike dues systems i pay more when i sell more. All volitary of course but i remember the tough times and appriecate having a guildstore everyweek.

My guildmisteress is clearly making a ton of money (which she spends on her amazing house) but I am making a ton of money despite all that i pour into the guild. I spend 30k on the guild then make an additional 15k... thats still more gold than i had last week!

This thread just seems like an extention of USA national tax phobia. The man (guild) is wasting my hard earned money!

What is the in game gold even for? It is so easy to get way more than you'll ever need for gear purposes (since its mostly BoP sets anyway). Homestead is a HUGE gold sink but its all a vanity project. You can build towards it slowly. Mofits aren't particular useful although crafted sets are popular.

To make gold trading you have to be a trader. Its just another way to "win" the game. If you are a casual and open some sweet loot you don't have use for... you can sell it in zone chat or to your traderless PVE guild, someone might want it.

Blanco wrote: »

It's just a way to take advantage of members. None of the guilds that ask for dues actually need them to keep their trader or to keep the guild running. It's just a form extortion really , oftentimes for the benefit of RL $$.

This is such BS...^^^^

Dapper Dinosaur wrote: »

People that know nothing about running a trade guild should keep their mouth shut and stop saying it's greed and nothing more. You try taking a trader in the middle of Mournhold without MILLIONS of gold.

Go ahead, I'll wait.

The reason dues are required for massive trader guilds is just so they can continue to function. You can VERY easily make your weekly deposit back and then some by selling even one item in the store for over 5k or whatever your due is, then everything after that is straight profit..

Totally agree....^^^^
Lets break this down shall we? Lets take a guild that has NO dues, requirements, etc.. They have a trader in Mournhold..
It takes 5-7 million gold a week for a spot.
Guild makes 3.5% tax on sales off trader.
Said guild would have to sell 142,857,143g in sales a week to keep the trader at 3.5% tax.

Enough said. Any one who says guilds that charge dues are just so the GM's can get rich has never run a guild.
Granted, I have 2 large trade guilds and a mid size trade guild. Non have mandatory dues, but the guildies are more than happy to donate on their own, have raffles, have auctions, what ever it takes to make enough to keep our trader.

Plan on starting your own trade guild? Plan on using up to a million+ a month in gold of YOUR own gold to support it!
Huzzah!!

Taleof2Cities wrote: »

I'm in two (2) trade guilds that don't have dues ... one is in a capital city and the other is in a zone city.

If you're in a guild that requires dues then find another guild that doesn't.

It's as simple as that ...

Well put.

As members of the guilds.... we have to stand up against the SCAMMERS who feel it okay to force their members to give them gold .

So basically the answer is "because people pay them." You see how many people think this is normal, when there are also plenty of no-dues guilds with decent trader locations. So it's pretty much that enough people think it's okay and are willing to pay it. If people stopped joining guilds with high dues, they'd die out.

This is not one of those questions with a simple answer, as there are a lot of factors that play into it. I have been a GM on the pc where i started and continue to run trade guilds on the xb1.

First pc and console have two very different systems. On the pc you can get add on that track the amount of sales that a person gets, so if a person is not selling anything, you can track this remove them if they are inactive. However on the console this is not something you can do easily. i do not have the time to record every transaction by hand to see how much an individual member is selling in the trader, or if they are selling at all. i would have to record hundreds of pages of sales history. However if on the xbox you have each member donate gold to the guild bank, well then at least for that week you can see that they were active, and contributed to the trader cost.

Second there are sales taxes or "house cut". The house cut is 7% of what the item sell at, HOWEVER only half of that goes to the guild. The other half is a gold sink.

Third, it really depends on how the guild is run. I have my guild bank open in all my guilds. I do not hide gold and you can see the withdrawals in the guild history. I may move gold from one guild to another, but i have no need to move gold to my own personal pocket for my own personal gain. I can sell just as well as any member. Some guild are run differently, but to each their own. I prefer to keep my guild and personal wealth separated. i do use guild funds for things, such as a guild house with all attainable stations, but even that i covered half of the stations from my own pocket, on top the mundus stones i bought for the guild.

Fourth, there are the uses of the guild gold to consider. The only thing you need the gold for as a guild is to change your tabard, or to bid. If you are not in a trading guild that needs to bid on a trader weekly. Then i see no point in dues.

Lastly, the reason for the dues. Lets say you are in a guild with 100 members, and in a week you sell 10 listings and all items are on a trader for an average 10k each, (low but it will keep the numbers simple.) that means in a week each member made 300k. and each member made the guild 3,500 in taxes for each member. now if you consider all 100 members, that is 350k total for the guild bank without dues. Now you have to throw your bid, and you throw 350k, you get the trader and you are back to 0 for the next week. If you have one member who sells 10 listings out of his 5 guilds at the same amount, he will have made 465k after taxes. if he has a pvp guild that doesn't regularly have a trader, he can go ahead and use all his gold, dump it into the guild bank because he doesn't need the gold personally, and buy a guild trader for the week for his guild. Now the guild that has been bidding 350k for his trading guild, has to figure out a way to make up the remaining 115k. if the Gm wants to donate the amount they can compete with someone who wants to buy a trader for himself. HOWEVER if that guild starts charging 10k for the 100 members, now you have the guild pulling in the 350k, plus the 1m for the dues. at 1,350,000 that is a much more of a waste for an individual to buy a trader for their guild that doesn't necessary sell from a trader on a regular basis. This gives trading guilds with consistent members and consistent trader the ability to keep doing that for their members.

Ultimately, how your guild uses the gold is up to them, and its your decision to go with a guild that fits your needs. There are lot of great traders on xbox, some with hidden banks, some without. In the end, the only thing that matters is if you got what you wanted out of the guild or not. When you hav eso pay your taxes to the government most people don't sit there and think about how the government spent their tax dollars efficiently or not, and even if they do, not much can be done, except move to a different country.

Bonus: Doing all 6 max level writs once a week gives you 4k gold. Doing them 7 days a week gives you 28k gold per week, per character. Even if all you do are the provisioning, and alchemy writs, which can be precrafted and done within 15 seconds, you can still make 9.3k without taking more time out of your day than it takes a person to mail an item to someone else. It is very easy to make 10k in a week to cover a guild fee.

Brittany_Joy wrote: »

This concept of guild dues is new to me. I honestly think guild dues paint the community of ESO in a bad light and it deters casual players from a good trading experience.

Not even elite guilds in wow have guild dues except for skill requirements. This monthly/weekly Guild Dues for being in a guild just showcases the greed in the community and prevents casual players from the full guild store experience. So what is the cause for the influx of distasteful greed known as guild dues that average a cost of 6k weekly just to be in a guild?

Unfortunately for big trading guilds we have to pay dues. If Zeni would let us function with a regular global auction house, we wouldn't have to throw money in the toilet. Plain and simple......

Guild dues are there for the really badly implented guild trader system zenimax was persistent on having over a global market system every other successful mmo has.

Bhaal5 wrote: »

Guild dues are there for the really badly implented guild trader system zenimax was persistent on having over a global market system every other successful mmo has.

I think they want us to explore more...

1- player gets/loots items
2- player wants to sell these items to get gold, in order to use for another purpose

• can prefer to sell in zone (might take ages and costs a lot of effort / no guild fee cost)
• can prefer to sell in guild (several advantages, easy, quick / has a guild fee cost)

3- if prefers the guild option, guild trader has a huge amount of cost which GM can't afford alone
4- player has to contribute to this cost, else there will be no trader > no sale > no player income

Shortly, this. If you don't want to spent more time, no need to read the rest.


We want to trade our items to gain gold and to buy the stuff we need. Guilds are the best and most efficient place for this purpose. There are many guilds in the game, whereas there are very with limited number of spots available to present our goods to the market. So there is a big competition. To win this competition, guild has to be powerful, and must have more gold than other guilds, because it is an auction to get the trader.

Meanwhile, there is another point which actually is not the reason, but in the end is tied to the point.
We all spent our time and effort in Tamriel and we produce. Thanks to the endless resources provided to us by the game. And then we sell all these materials to someone or to the NPC and we convert *nothing* to gold. There is a huge creation of gold by all of us, where very little of that gold goes out of the game (buying from NPCs, etc...) and majority is happening all through the guild stores. The gold has to be sucked out of the game.

I believe the guild trader bids and the tax cuts on the guild sales are used as the main tool for this operation, along with the houses and furnishing trader NPC's where people spend most gold to a non player, where the gold disappears.

In my opinion it is the natural outcome of the game economics. I see it as the tax payment in advance for your "possible" income, which actually have to happen by some means.

Some serious mis-information on this thread. Im on xbox eu, run 3 of the biggest trade guilds on the server....all 3 based permanently in Mournhold (xbox eu busiest spot by far) bids cost more than we bring in in sales taxes most of the time but generous donations (entirely voluntary) help us get our spots week after week. I know all other trade guild gm's and there is not 1 trade guild on our server that charges weekly dues. Infact, we all agreed we never will.

Saying that, I can understand why guilds do on other servers as the best spots cost a fortune and I, like many other gm's have used a lot of our own gold to secure spots in the past, and will in the future.

Blanco wrote: »

Taleof2Cities wrote: »

I'm in two (2) trade guilds that don't have dues ... one is in a capital city and the other is in a zone city.

If you're in a guild that requires dues then find another guild that doesn't.

It's as simple as that ...

Well put.

As members of the guilds.... we have to stand up against the SCAMMERS who feel it okay to force their members to give them gold .

Are you on PC?
If yes its a different matter than console. Where GM dont have fancy addons that show who is selling what

I play on PS4 EU. I am a GM with a fair amount of experience with both the game and guilds. I have been a part of minor alternative guilds, veteran trials guilds, Cyrodiil guilds and large trading guilds, for example.

The bids on the top 3-5 Traders is around 8 million per week, the bids on the next 20-30 Traders goes from 1 million to 4 million. Anyone can get lucky and acquire one of those for 10k but not consistently.

Sales from Store earn the Guild 3.5%. The charge for listing is 7% but somehow half of that is lost to the void.

So a guild would have to sell for 100,000,000 (100 million) coin to have enough for a 3.5 million Trader without any fees or donations.

My Guild is active, partly a Trader Guild (it has PvE, PvP, trade and social). We have a Trader regularly in Daggerfall, sometimes in one of the 3 capitals or Belkarth. Once in a while we fail to secure a Trader.
We charge nothing so people can trade and list without donations, though there is a lot of incentive to contribute as people feel the goodwill of the help, events and support in our guild. Plus there are ranking incentives too (though members can achieve those through claims in Cyrodiil and recruiting).

We rely on donations for our Traders, we ask for nothing but average 2-3k per member, per week. Most Trader Guilds ask for 5k per week. My impression (apart from a few, and I know who they are) is that Trader Guilds are using their money on Traders only.

Buffler wrote: »

Some serious mis-information on this thread. Im on xbox eu, run 3 of the biggest trade guilds on the server....all 3 based permanently in Mournhold (xbox eu busiest spot by far) bids cost more than we bring in in sales taxes most of the time but generous donations (entirely voluntary) help us get our spots week after week. I know all other trade guild gm's and there is not 1 trade guild on our server that charges weekly dues. Infact, we all agreed we never will.

Saying that, I can understand why guilds do on other servers as the best spots cost a fortune and I, like many other gm's have used a lot of our own gold to secure spots in the past, and will in the future.

Berky or Dowie?

Brittany_Joy wrote: »

This concept of guild dues is new to me. I honestly think guild dues paint the community of ESO in a bad light and it deters casual players from a good trading experience.

Not even elite guilds in wow have guild dues except for skill requirements. This monthly/weekly Guild Dues for being in a guild just showcases the greed in the community and prevents casual players from the full guild store experience. So what is the cause for the influx of distasteful greed known as guild dues that average a cost of 6k weekly just to be in a guild?

The more interesting thing @Brittany_Joy is that this is an NA thing on the whole.

Xbox EU top trading guilds have none. Donations appreciated is all. So perhaps a gaming culture thing.