Competition and that's just how crapped up this *** hole of a economy turned out

But it still seems odd to me; I mean, let's assume that both guilds list a lot of the same stuff. Guild A lists for 10k; Guild B lists for 9.5k.

If Guild A wants the sale, they can turn around and relist for 9k, thus taking what amounts to a 1k hit, ORRRRR they can use a fajillion bajillion gold in a junk guild so that it can finance a high-enough bid to win Guild B's trader in the decent spot.

Of course, this is all predicated on the idea that players will always go to Guild B for the sale; the volume of players through decent trader spots basically ensures that if the item's popular enough, it'll sell anyway at the higher price as well.

I'm not seeing how if the goal is "increased sales" (read: increased gold influx) that this goal is achieved by dumping a ton of gold into a junk guild to finance a high bid for a popular trader. It seems incredibly counter productive.

Not to mention that with the amount of players who check items/prices on TTC, if they want the cheapest price they'll just go get the cheapest price.

I guess it just seems like a way to be jerks without getting really any benefit from it in the long run. I mean, I don't advocate being a jerk even if there IS a benefit, but certainly being a jerk for minimal benefit is an even more jerky thing to do.

The problem with knocking out competition is that it devalues the location. A trader city is only as good as the guilds there, and if you drive out a good guild and put a scrub dummy guild in that location (which would appear to be a somewhat regular event in Rawl on PC/NA), it might feel awesome, but you're really just devaluing the real estate that you yourself paid for.

That the guilds make the location is why EU and NA have different trading hubs--Belkarth for EU and Rawl'kha for NA. It's why Belkarth on NA fell on hard times over 2 years ago, when the main attraction in Belkarth moved.

So why do guilds do this? Not for their members, because their members don't give a rat's posterior about stuff like this--they just want to be in a place to sell. It's more of a matter of pride and ego of the guild's leadership. This is economic PvP. They want to "win", even if "winning" is nonsensical and even detrimental to their members. Not to mention expensive.

@code65536 - yeah, that's exactly what I'm getting at.

Imagine we're talking about, say, Wayrest. It's a capital city, lots of traffic, seven traders in the main hub.

Let's say Guild A wants more sales in that location, and spends the huge amount of gold to knock out another guild, so there's less competition; now there's Guild A, five other actual trading guilds, and one junk guild.

Let's take it to the logical conclusion, and imagine a hypothetical where Guild A has spent the resources to knock out ALL the other six guilds, so that in the main hub, so now it's only Guild A with relatively high prices, plus 6 junk guilds.

After the first visit to Wayrest that week - after spending allll those resources so that they're the only game in town - does Guild A expect shoppers to continue shopping in that hub when their only choices are one guild with relatively high-priced listings, and six other junk guilds with five total listings each? No one would continue shopping there; at that point Wayrest would have completely lost its value as a good trader spot.

So again, this actively trying to take out other guilds just seems like a case where guild leadership is a little too deep in their corporate intrigue roleplay.

Saucy_Jack wrote: »

Ok, so here's a scenario:

Guild A has a decent trader in a decent spot. They do good business.
Guild B has a decent trader in the same decent spot. They also do good business.

At max, Guild A can sell (500*30 = 15000) things at any one time. Guild B can do the same.

Yet I've observed multiple instances where guilds try to "take out" other guilds. Why? What's the point? Regardless of whether Guild B is there or not, Guild A can still only list 15000 things at any one time. So what's the point of malicious behaviour towards Guild B?

It's stupid since you waste your own guild funds trying to kick another guild out of their spot, with absolutely no benefit to your guild.