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Central Guild trader for all in one place, or a central market

  • Marginis
    Marginis
    ✭✭✭✭✭
    Sting864 wrote: »
    Gythral wrote: »
    Why the hell doest ZOS not sticky a list of 'Flogging a dead horse' topics and the reason they will not look at them

    Auction House like every WoW clone
    vDungeons
    GroupFinder
    gear levels
    PvP - lag/disconnects/balance

    & then ban anyone flogging those horses out of said thread

    this horse does not have enough material left to even render for glue

    :)

    Hmmm.... do you think it's possible that *new* players join the forums?? Perhaps they haven't heard things that some consider "dead horses..."

    hungary-puszta-horse-sitting.jpg

    Hey look, new players. I wonder how long it'll take them to figure out the horses aren't gonna go anywhere...
    Edited by Marginis on May 10, 2018 5:13PM
    @Marginis on PC, Senpai Fluffy on Xbox, Founder of Magicka. Also known as Kha'jiri, The Night Mother, Ma'iq, Jane Shepard, Damia, Kintyra, Zoor Do Kest, You, and a few others.
  • Cryptical
    Cryptical
    ✭✭✭✭✭
    Cpt_Teemo wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    Cpt_Teemo wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    Cryptical wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    With a central trader, the market manipulation would be way too easy and this is not up for a debate. You can google market cornering or market manipulation in MMORPGs and hit several pages explaining it. But for the lazy ones, I'll give a quick run down how it works:

    You decide a quite rare, but useful item to manipulate, let's say a potent nirncrux. And let's say it sells for 4 000 gold at the moment, but you want to sell it at 40 000 gold, what do you do? Well, you open the centralised store, put your potent nirncrux for sale for 40 000 gold and then, you buy everything under the price, every single 4 000 gold nirncrux. You do not have to sell them right away, you can stockpile 'em. Now others do not see those 4 000 gold nirncruxes, because you're buying them right away. The cheapest price others see is your stupid high 40 000 gold price and now some unfortunate people with a moderate amount of gold in their pocket and a need for a potent nirncrux will buy it for the lowest cost of 40 000 gold. You will as a seller use all the gold you earn to buy the low priced potent nirncruxes from the list, upkeeping the facade of "40 000 gold is the lowest price for potent nirncrux". At some point other sellers starts to sell them at 40 000 gold, because that is the selling point for potent nirncrux and no one wants to lose 36 000 profits. You will have thousands of poten nirncruxes in your pocket and you can keep selling them.

    Now this is not possible on the current system because you can't buy easily every single low costing item, because you'd need to travel everywhere. And if you'd try to corner a single guild trader, everybody would stop buying the item from that trader.

    As I explained earlier, this fantasy of yours has already failed on Xbox NA when some people bought up every aetherial dust and increased the prices from ~75k to a new price point of 100 to 110k.

    They successfully kept buying all the lower listed dust. They kept relisting the items at their new desired price. They even convinced zone chat sellers that their price was valid because the inflated price was the only listing out there.

    AND THEY FAILED.

    They managed to corner the market on console, where the economy is even more decentralized than pc because we don’t have the automated harvesting of data from MM and TTC add ons smoothing out the jagged outliers.

    And they still failed because this fantasy of yours does not take into consideration that the general public has the choice of buying or farming it themselves or finding a substitute. With any widespread commodity in eso, there are too many farmers for the market to be controlled like you imagine. It won’t happen with mats, there are too many subscribers with mats just piling up in the craft bag and more are as close as a farming route.

    The arguments against a public trader have been debunked by how the real world attempts at manipulation failed - by not seeing that 5% cannot control the market created by the 95%.

    As usual, this manipulation idea only works in theory until someone actually starts running the numbers on a population size scale. Using temp alloys for example, running like 9k each on Xbox NA. If I’m the 5% that is the wealthy manipulators looking to make them 15k, I’m trying to buy up all the alloys under that. But because I’m sucking up so many from the market, I’ve got 5% of the slots with 100% of the product. I need to sell them in pairs and fours and eights and in piles. If I don’t, I’m pumping huge amounts of gold into the economy and not bringing it back to me = inflation as more gold is sloshing around. A serious problem is the rise in price has inspired many people to take up farming, increasing supply and acting as a driver toward lower prices. And most fatal to my plan is those thousands of players with the craft bag, sitting there with hundreds of alloys doing nothing, or tens of thousands of various ore to refine into alloys, that get retrieved and starts getting listed at 14k, putting my deficit into overdrive.

    This market manipulation theory is just that - a fantastical theory that does not actually function in THIS economy outside of fevered imaginative brains.

    You missed my last paragraph: this manipulation is not possible on the current system. It is however possible on a central trading system, where you can see every single trade in a one single list and it works even better if you can search for spesific item in a said trade system. And with the example I gave with a theorised single global trader, I'd need to sell 1 potent nirncrux for 40 000 gold to cover 10x bought nirncruxes with the pricetag of 1. This kind of market manipulation is common in the AH/global singular trader system and there is tons of material and evidence that it has happenes before. The market manipulation is the primary reason for me to want to stay with the current ESO trade system, because the current system prevents it quite well.

    Ok, think about this what if some major whale guilds decide to show up and bid out all the top end spots in every single go to spot so no one could have a trading guild there at all while they own it you won't be able to sell to the public at all, and its legit because ZoS allows it?
    Your post is quite off topic, but I'll bite. (I think major whale guilds have very little to do about the topic: central market)

    Ain't the major spots already owned by said whale guilds? I mean, all the big trade guilds owns a kiosk in either Rawl'Kha, Wayrest, Mournhold, Elden Root or Belkarth. If you mean that only a couple of guilds forms sub-guilds and buys every single major spot, well, they'd have to have a huge inventory of goodies and lots of time to make it profitable, else, they'd lose gold in millions.

    And yes, it is legit to pay 10 million+ gold per trader spot which prevents smaller bids from getting the said trader, where's the problem? If my guild loses their bid, I'll either stockpile on goodies till our trade guild gets a good spot to sell, or find another trade guild to sell my goods.

    Just saying this system is far worse than any centralized market system tbh

    no it isn't.... it's far better because it makes it impossible for a single player to game the market.

    anyway didn't you quit, aren't you supposed to be playing lotro now?

    Are people not catching this?

    I watched a small cabal completely conquer the small obstacle of having to go to a bunch of traders.

    This barrier of a bunch of trader carts is not nearly as high as you think.

    This is how easy it is:
    Take 12 people. Divide up the carts so each person monitors 16 carts. Those 16 carts are that person’s patrol route.

    12 people is a normal trial group. Is anyone going to tell me they can’t group together 12 people with a lot of gold to tilt the market into making more gold? I bet any platform could come up with 3 full trial groups of wealthy trading-minded players willing to form a cabal to control the market, each person patrolling 5 or 6 carts.

    Right fracking there is the plan that destroys your decentralization protection. Gone. In the puff of a few sentences with a simple idea. Too many carts to monitor them all? Then get help so the task of patrolling carts is easy.

    You were never protected by decentralized traders. It was always that the population can easily farm for what they want or use a substitute.
    Xbox NA
  • Armatesz
    Armatesz
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    As an xbox one user I honestly would love a way to search a universal store page for guild traders. I don't like how some blueprints I am looking for are so unheard of by the majority of the people that I can't find it easily at all. Some of the blueprints I have been actively looking for over a year... over a year. Something has to be done to make it easier to search. I don't want to be searching all day at all the guild traders for just one item.
    Ärmätèsz
    Xbox NA
    Guildless (by choice)
  • Avalon
    Avalon
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    AlnilamE wrote: »
    There is different value in having different traders. If you put all the traders in the same place, then there will be no way for new guilds to work their way up, or for smaller guilds to find a trader that suits their needs.

    Love comments like these lol, implying that you can start a new guild, work your way up, and one day, YOU can have a trader in the middle of the biggest town!

    Yeah, right... I'm on Xbox, I have taken months-long breaks due to college, going back about 3 years. The exact same guilds own the exact same traders now, and at every moment I have played. They are overly rich, bloated entities that cannot be budged. The system caters to GOUGING prices, not competitive pricing. A universal AH leads to people performing that always-hated tactic of 1-undering: Oh, they sell for 2000? I will sell for 1999!... however, the next person sells for 1998, then 1997, so on so forth. Eventually, prices reach a minimum point.

    People crying the sky will fall if we do this, are most likely the ones gouging prices, and love the monopoly they have. Yes, I say players currently have monopolies, because it currently takes a remarkably few people (compared to the entire population) to set a price.

    In most MMOs a monopoly occurs when a group of people buy EVERY item of a type, then put it back up for sale at the price THEY choose. In ESO, it occurs by a group of people owning every trader in the most popular spots, and knowing that the time it takes to go through all of them will keep sane players from going to other places after that (because they would like to actually PLAY the game, not just surf through the traders for a few hours). By doing this, they effectively have a monopoly, and can charge whatever they like.

    A universal AH actually would build an economy. The one right now is the absolute extreme situation of robber baron form of capitalism, where the rich continue to become even more absurdly rich, and the poor just continue being, relatively, penniless.
  • jedtb16_ESO
    jedtb16_ESO
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    ✭✭
    Cryptical wrote: »
    Cpt_Teemo wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    Cpt_Teemo wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    Cryptical wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    With a central trader, the market manipulation would be way too easy and this is not up for a debate. You can google market cornering or market manipulation in MMORPGs and hit several pages explaining it. But for the lazy ones, I'll give a quick run down how it works:

    You decide a quite rare, but useful item to manipulate, let's say a potent nirncrux. And let's say it sells for 4 000 gold at the moment, but you want to sell it at 40 000 gold, what do you do? Well, you open the centralised store, put your potent nirncrux for sale for 40 000 gold and then, you buy everything under the price, every single 4 000 gold nirncrux. You do not have to sell them right away, you can stockpile 'em. Now others do not see those 4 000 gold nirncruxes, because you're buying them right away. The cheapest price others see is your stupid high 40 000 gold price and now some unfortunate people with a moderate amount of gold in their pocket and a need for a potent nirncrux will buy it for the lowest cost of 40 000 gold. You will as a seller use all the gold you earn to buy the low priced potent nirncruxes from the list, upkeeping the facade of "40 000 gold is the lowest price for potent nirncrux". At some point other sellers starts to sell them at 40 000 gold, because that is the selling point for potent nirncrux and no one wants to lose 36 000 profits. You will have thousands of poten nirncruxes in your pocket and you can keep selling them.

    Now this is not possible on the current system because you can't buy easily every single low costing item, because you'd need to travel everywhere. And if you'd try to corner a single guild trader, everybody would stop buying the item from that trader.

    As I explained earlier, this fantasy of yours has already failed on Xbox NA when some people bought up every aetherial dust and increased the prices from ~75k to a new price point of 100 to 110k.

    They successfully kept buying all the lower listed dust. They kept relisting the items at their new desired price. They even convinced zone chat sellers that their price was valid because the inflated price was the only listing out there.

    AND THEY FAILED.

    They managed to corner the market on console, where the economy is even more decentralized than pc because we don’t have the automated harvesting of data from MM and TTC add ons smoothing out the jagged outliers.

    And they still failed because this fantasy of yours does not take into consideration that the general public has the choice of buying or farming it themselves or finding a substitute. With any widespread commodity in eso, there are too many farmers for the market to be controlled like you imagine. It won’t happen with mats, there are too many subscribers with mats just piling up in the craft bag and more are as close as a farming route.

    The arguments against a public trader have been debunked by how the real world attempts at manipulation failed - by not seeing that 5% cannot control the market created by the 95%.

    As usual, this manipulation idea only works in theory until someone actually starts running the numbers on a population size scale. Using temp alloys for example, running like 9k each on Xbox NA. If I’m the 5% that is the wealthy manipulators looking to make them 15k, I’m trying to buy up all the alloys under that. But because I’m sucking up so many from the market, I’ve got 5% of the slots with 100% of the product. I need to sell them in pairs and fours and eights and in piles. If I don’t, I’m pumping huge amounts of gold into the economy and not bringing it back to me = inflation as more gold is sloshing around. A serious problem is the rise in price has inspired many people to take up farming, increasing supply and acting as a driver toward lower prices. And most fatal to my plan is those thousands of players with the craft bag, sitting there with hundreds of alloys doing nothing, or tens of thousands of various ore to refine into alloys, that get retrieved and starts getting listed at 14k, putting my deficit into overdrive.

    This market manipulation theory is just that - a fantastical theory that does not actually function in THIS economy outside of fevered imaginative brains.

    You missed my last paragraph: this manipulation is not possible on the current system. It is however possible on a central trading system, where you can see every single trade in a one single list and it works even better if you can search for spesific item in a said trade system. And with the example I gave with a theorised single global trader, I'd need to sell 1 potent nirncrux for 40 000 gold to cover 10x bought nirncruxes with the pricetag of 1. This kind of market manipulation is common in the AH/global singular trader system and there is tons of material and evidence that it has happenes before. The market manipulation is the primary reason for me to want to stay with the current ESO trade system, because the current system prevents it quite well.

    Ok, think about this what if some major whale guilds decide to show up and bid out all the top end spots in every single go to spot so no one could have a trading guild there at all while they own it you won't be able to sell to the public at all, and its legit because ZoS allows it?
    Your post is quite off topic, but I'll bite. (I think major whale guilds have very little to do about the topic: central market)

    Ain't the major spots already owned by said whale guilds? I mean, all the big trade guilds owns a kiosk in either Rawl'Kha, Wayrest, Mournhold, Elden Root or Belkarth. If you mean that only a couple of guilds forms sub-guilds and buys every single major spot, well, they'd have to have a huge inventory of goodies and lots of time to make it profitable, else, they'd lose gold in millions.

    And yes, it is legit to pay 10 million+ gold per trader spot which prevents smaller bids from getting the said trader, where's the problem? If my guild loses their bid, I'll either stockpile on goodies till our trade guild gets a good spot to sell, or find another trade guild to sell my goods.

    Just saying this system is far worse than any centralized market system tbh

    no it isn't.... it's far better because it makes it impossible for a single player to game the market.

    anyway didn't you quit, aren't you supposed to be playing lotro now?

    Are people not catching this?

    I watched a small cabal completely conquer the small obstacle of having to go to a bunch of traders.

    This barrier of a bunch of trader carts is not nearly as high as you think.

    This is how easy it is:
    Take 12 people. Divide up the carts so each person monitors 16 carts. Those 16 carts are that person’s patrol route.

    12 people is a normal trial group. Is anyone going to tell me they can’t group together 12 people with a lot of gold to tilt the market into making more gold? I bet any platform could come up with 3 full trial groups of wealthy trading-minded players willing to form a cabal to control the market, each person patrolling 5 or 6 carts.

    Right fracking there is the plan that destroys your decentralization protection. Gone. In the puff of a few sentences with a simple idea. Too many carts to monitor them all? Then get help so the task of patrolling carts is easy.

    You were never protected by decentralized traders. It was always that the population can easily farm for what they want or use a substitute.

    in every other post you have made on the topic of people trying to game the current system you say they fail (we already knew that) now you are saying they succeed.... a tad confusing.
  • MattT1988
    MattT1988
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    ✭✭
    There’s been literally hundreds of threads about this. The devs still haven’t changed their minds. What makes you think this thread will?
  • Sting864
    Sting864
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    there is a search function. admittedly it's fairly crude but it does work.

    I doubt newbies come into the forums searching for specific information.... There's too much... I usually peruse the forums without specific search criteria in mind...
    Edited by Sting864 on May 10, 2018 6:23PM
  • Cpt_Teemo
    Cpt_Teemo
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    ✭✭✭
    MattT1988 wrote: »
    There’s been literally hundreds of threads about this. The devs still haven’t changed their minds. What makes you think this thread will?

    Cause gameplay may change whenever you like it or not
  • EvilAutoTech
    EvilAutoTech
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    So, how many slots will I get? Are you going to tell people they have to give up 80 percent of their trading slots?

    If everyone gets 150 slots, how long will it take to load the page?

    A single source per server would be ridiculous. I think it would break the game.
  • NewBlacksmurf
    NewBlacksmurf
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    ✭✭✭✭✭
    Here is what I will say on all of these types of topics.


    IF HOUSING were a zone, then I'd be all for asking that we have a way to earn a NPC to stand outside our own houses to sale items we list. Not to take away from traders but this would be another "way" however being that housing wasn't done this way, the only idea left would be to still allow such an NPC within the home like our assistants.

    -PC (PTS)/Xbox One: NewBlacksmurf
    ~<{[50]}>~ looks better than *501
  • Cryptical
    Cryptical
    ✭✭✭✭✭
    Cryptical wrote: »
    Cpt_Teemo wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    Cpt_Teemo wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    Cryptical wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    With a central trader, the market manipulation would be way too easy and this is not up for a debate. You can google market cornering or market manipulation in MMORPGs and hit several pages explaining it. But for the lazy ones, I'll give a quick run down how it works:

    You decide a quite rare, but useful item to manipulate, let's say a potent nirncrux. And let's say it sells for 4 000 gold at the moment, but you want to sell it at 40 000 gold, what do you do? Well, you open the centralised store, put your potent nirncrux for sale for 40 000 gold and then, you buy everything under the price, every single 4 000 gold nirncrux. You do not have to sell them right away, you can stockpile 'em. Now others do not see those 4 000 gold nirncruxes, because you're buying them right away. The cheapest price others see is your stupid high 40 000 gold price and now some unfortunate people with a moderate amount of gold in their pocket and a need for a potent nirncrux will buy it for the lowest cost of 40 000 gold. You will as a seller use all the gold you earn to buy the low priced potent nirncruxes from the list, upkeeping the facade of "40 000 gold is the lowest price for potent nirncrux". At some point other sellers starts to sell them at 40 000 gold, because that is the selling point for potent nirncrux and no one wants to lose 36 000 profits. You will have thousands of poten nirncruxes in your pocket and you can keep selling them.

    Now this is not possible on the current system because you can't buy easily every single low costing item, because you'd need to travel everywhere. And if you'd try to corner a single guild trader, everybody would stop buying the item from that trader.

    As I explained earlier, this fantasy of yours has already failed on Xbox NA when some people bought up every aetherial dust and increased the prices from ~75k to a new price point of 100 to 110k.

    They successfully kept buying all the lower listed dust. They kept relisting the items at their new desired price. They even convinced zone chat sellers that their price was valid because the inflated price was the only listing out there.

    AND THEY FAILED.

    They managed to corner the market on console, where the economy is even more decentralized than pc because we don’t have the automated harvesting of data from MM and TTC add ons smoothing out the jagged outliers.

    And they still failed because this fantasy of yours does not take into consideration that the general public has the choice of buying or farming it themselves or finding a substitute. With any widespread commodity in eso, there are too many farmers for the market to be controlled like you imagine. It won’t happen with mats, there are too many subscribers with mats just piling up in the craft bag and more are as close as a farming route.

    The arguments against a public trader have been debunked by how the real world attempts at manipulation failed - by not seeing that 5% cannot control the market created by the 95%.

    As usual, this manipulation idea only works in theory until someone actually starts running the numbers on a population size scale. Using temp alloys for example, running like 9k each on Xbox NA. If I’m the 5% that is the wealthy manipulators looking to make them 15k, I’m trying to buy up all the alloys under that. But because I’m sucking up so many from the market, I’ve got 5% of the slots with 100% of the product. I need to sell them in pairs and fours and eights and in piles. If I don’t, I’m pumping huge amounts of gold into the economy and not bringing it back to me = inflation as more gold is sloshing around. A serious problem is the rise in price has inspired many people to take up farming, increasing supply and acting as a driver toward lower prices. And most fatal to my plan is those thousands of players with the craft bag, sitting there with hundreds of alloys doing nothing, or tens of thousands of various ore to refine into alloys, that get retrieved and starts getting listed at 14k, putting my deficit into overdrive.

    This market manipulation theory is just that - a fantastical theory that does not actually function in THIS economy outside of fevered imaginative brains.

    You missed my last paragraph: this manipulation is not possible on the current system. It is however possible on a central trading system, where you can see every single trade in a one single list and it works even better if you can search for spesific item in a said trade system. And with the example I gave with a theorised single global trader, I'd need to sell 1 potent nirncrux for 40 000 gold to cover 10x bought nirncruxes with the pricetag of 1. This kind of market manipulation is common in the AH/global singular trader system and there is tons of material and evidence that it has happenes before. The market manipulation is the primary reason for me to want to stay with the current ESO trade system, because the current system prevents it quite well.

    Ok, think about this what if some major whale guilds decide to show up and bid out all the top end spots in every single go to spot so no one could have a trading guild there at all while they own it you won't be able to sell to the public at all, and its legit because ZoS allows it?
    Your post is quite off topic, but I'll bite. (I think major whale guilds have very little to do about the topic: central market)

    Ain't the major spots already owned by said whale guilds? I mean, all the big trade guilds owns a kiosk in either Rawl'Kha, Wayrest, Mournhold, Elden Root or Belkarth. If you mean that only a couple of guilds forms sub-guilds and buys every single major spot, well, they'd have to have a huge inventory of goodies and lots of time to make it profitable, else, they'd lose gold in millions.

    And yes, it is legit to pay 10 million+ gold per trader spot which prevents smaller bids from getting the said trader, where's the problem? If my guild loses their bid, I'll either stockpile on goodies till our trade guild gets a good spot to sell, or find another trade guild to sell my goods.

    Just saying this system is far worse than any centralized market system tbh

    no it isn't.... it's far better because it makes it impossible for a single player to game the market.

    anyway didn't you quit, aren't you supposed to be playing lotro now?

    Are people not catching this?

    I watched a small cabal completely conquer the small obstacle of having to go to a bunch of traders.

    This barrier of a bunch of trader carts is not nearly as high as you think.

    This is how easy it is:
    Take 12 people. Divide up the carts so each person monitors 16 carts. Those 16 carts are that person’s patrol route.

    12 people is a normal trial group. Is anyone going to tell me they can’t group together 12 people with a lot of gold to tilt the market into making more gold? I bet any platform could come up with 3 full trial groups of wealthy trading-minded players willing to form a cabal to control the market, each person patrolling 5 or 6 carts.

    Right fracking there is the plan that destroys your decentralization protection. Gone. In the puff of a few sentences with a simple idea. Too many carts to monitor them all? Then get help so the task of patrolling carts is easy.

    You were never protected by decentralized traders. It was always that the population can easily farm for what they want or use a substitute.

    in every other post you have made on the topic of people trying to game the current system you say they fail (we already knew that) now you are saying they succeed.... a tad confusing.

    No, there are two different variables at issue - centralization and public access. Apples and oranges, 2 separate things.

    Over and over people cry alarm at the idea of making a centralized way to access the guild traders, claiming that one person could buy up everything and re-list. Using hard numbers, I argue that their fear is not possible to succeed, primarily because of inventory bottleneck and the way those deficits would bankrupt the tryhard in the ballpark of 30 million-plus each month. Also, people have already overcome the obstacle of running to many traders, so the argument in favor of protection by decentralization is a failure.

    The actual defense against manipulation has always been the public’s participation. It is too easy to farm anything in this game for anyone to actually control the market. Look no further than the recent motif event and the impact on buoyant Armiger prices to see how the general public’s farming cannot be held at bay. Making a trader where all of the general public could list things would even further prevent market tampering. It doesn’t seem like it to the naked eye, but by the numbers 90% of the population only ever buys things from the trader carts.

    If people love the decentralized trader model even though it does not protect them like they think, then surely they would STFU and be fine with a general public trader that EVERYONE could access at a bank or at a cart in every town, right? Like, at every multi cart town there is Dibbler, the public trader, the npc where every person can go list things for sale. Same npc in each area, but all are linked to the public access store, just like how you can have Tythis in all your houses but it’s always linked to your bank.
    Edited by Cryptical on May 10, 2018 7:15PM
    Xbox NA
  • Marginis
    Marginis
    ✭✭✭✭✭
    Cryptical wrote: »
    Cryptical wrote: »
    Cpt_Teemo wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    Cpt_Teemo wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    Cryptical wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    With a central trader, the market manipulation would be way too easy and this is not up for a debate. You can google market cornering or market manipulation in MMORPGs and hit several pages explaining it. But for the lazy ones, I'll give a quick run down how it works:

    You decide a quite rare, but useful item to manipulate, let's say a potent nirncrux. And let's say it sells for 4 000 gold at the moment, but you want to sell it at 40 000 gold, what do you do? Well, you open the centralised store, put your potent nirncrux for sale for 40 000 gold and then, you buy everything under the price, every single 4 000 gold nirncrux. You do not have to sell them right away, you can stockpile 'em. Now others do not see those 4 000 gold nirncruxes, because you're buying them right away. The cheapest price others see is your stupid high 40 000 gold price and now some unfortunate people with a moderate amount of gold in their pocket and a need for a potent nirncrux will buy it for the lowest cost of 40 000 gold. You will as a seller use all the gold you earn to buy the low priced potent nirncruxes from the list, upkeeping the facade of "40 000 gold is the lowest price for potent nirncrux". At some point other sellers starts to sell them at 40 000 gold, because that is the selling point for potent nirncrux and no one wants to lose 36 000 profits. You will have thousands of poten nirncruxes in your pocket and you can keep selling them.

    Now this is not possible on the current system because you can't buy easily every single low costing item, because you'd need to travel everywhere. And if you'd try to corner a single guild trader, everybody would stop buying the item from that trader.

    As I explained earlier, this fantasy of yours has already failed on Xbox NA when some people bought up every aetherial dust and increased the prices from ~75k to a new price point of 100 to 110k.

    They successfully kept buying all the lower listed dust. They kept relisting the items at their new desired price. They even convinced zone chat sellers that their price was valid because the inflated price was the only listing out there.

    AND THEY FAILED.

    They managed to corner the market on console, where the economy is even more decentralized than pc because we don’t have the automated harvesting of data from MM and TTC add ons smoothing out the jagged outliers.

    And they still failed because this fantasy of yours does not take into consideration that the general public has the choice of buying or farming it themselves or finding a substitute. With any widespread commodity in eso, there are too many farmers for the market to be controlled like you imagine. It won’t happen with mats, there are too many subscribers with mats just piling up in the craft bag and more are as close as a farming route.

    The arguments against a public trader have been debunked by how the real world attempts at manipulation failed - by not seeing that 5% cannot control the market created by the 95%.

    As usual, this manipulation idea only works in theory until someone actually starts running the numbers on a population size scale. Using temp alloys for example, running like 9k each on Xbox NA. If I’m the 5% that is the wealthy manipulators looking to make them 15k, I’m trying to buy up all the alloys under that. But because I’m sucking up so many from the market, I’ve got 5% of the slots with 100% of the product. I need to sell them in pairs and fours and eights and in piles. If I don’t, I’m pumping huge amounts of gold into the economy and not bringing it back to me = inflation as more gold is sloshing around. A serious problem is the rise in price has inspired many people to take up farming, increasing supply and acting as a driver toward lower prices. And most fatal to my plan is those thousands of players with the craft bag, sitting there with hundreds of alloys doing nothing, or tens of thousands of various ore to refine into alloys, that get retrieved and starts getting listed at 14k, putting my deficit into overdrive.

    This market manipulation theory is just that - a fantastical theory that does not actually function in THIS economy outside of fevered imaginative brains.

    You missed my last paragraph: this manipulation is not possible on the current system. It is however possible on a central trading system, where you can see every single trade in a one single list and it works even better if you can search for spesific item in a said trade system. And with the example I gave with a theorised single global trader, I'd need to sell 1 potent nirncrux for 40 000 gold to cover 10x bought nirncruxes with the pricetag of 1. This kind of market manipulation is common in the AH/global singular trader system and there is tons of material and evidence that it has happenes before. The market manipulation is the primary reason for me to want to stay with the current ESO trade system, because the current system prevents it quite well.

    Ok, think about this what if some major whale guilds decide to show up and bid out all the top end spots in every single go to spot so no one could have a trading guild there at all while they own it you won't be able to sell to the public at all, and its legit because ZoS allows it?
    Your post is quite off topic, but I'll bite. (I think major whale guilds have very little to do about the topic: central market)

    Ain't the major spots already owned by said whale guilds? I mean, all the big trade guilds owns a kiosk in either Rawl'Kha, Wayrest, Mournhold, Elden Root or Belkarth. If you mean that only a couple of guilds forms sub-guilds and buys every single major spot, well, they'd have to have a huge inventory of goodies and lots of time to make it profitable, else, they'd lose gold in millions.

    And yes, it is legit to pay 10 million+ gold per trader spot which prevents smaller bids from getting the said trader, where's the problem? If my guild loses their bid, I'll either stockpile on goodies till our trade guild gets a good spot to sell, or find another trade guild to sell my goods.

    Just saying this system is far worse than any centralized market system tbh

    no it isn't.... it's far better because it makes it impossible for a single player to game the market.

    anyway didn't you quit, aren't you supposed to be playing lotro now?

    Are people not catching this?

    I watched a small cabal completely conquer the small obstacle of having to go to a bunch of traders.

    This barrier of a bunch of trader carts is not nearly as high as you think.

    This is how easy it is:
    Take 12 people. Divide up the carts so each person monitors 16 carts. Those 16 carts are that person’s patrol route.

    12 people is a normal trial group. Is anyone going to tell me they can’t group together 12 people with a lot of gold to tilt the market into making more gold? I bet any platform could come up with 3 full trial groups of wealthy trading-minded players willing to form a cabal to control the market, each person patrolling 5 or 6 carts.

    Right fracking there is the plan that destroys your decentralization protection. Gone. In the puff of a few sentences with a simple idea. Too many carts to monitor them all? Then get help so the task of patrolling carts is easy.

    You were never protected by decentralized traders. It was always that the population can easily farm for what they want or use a substitute.

    in every other post you have made on the topic of people trying to game the current system you say they fail (we already knew that) now you are saying they succeed.... a tad confusing.

    No, there are two different variables at issue - centralization and public access. Apples and oranges, 2 separate things.

    Over and over people cry alarm at the idea of making a centralized way to access the guild traders, claiming that one person could buy up everything and re-list. Using hard numbers, I argue that their fear is not possible to succeed, primarily because of inventory bottleneck and the way those deficits would bankrupt the tryhard in the ballpark of 30 million-plus each month. Also, people have already overcome the obstacle of running to many traders, so the argument in favor of protection by decentralization is a failure.

    The actual defense against manipulation has always been the public’s participation. It is too easy to farm anything in this game for anyone to actually control the market. Look no further than the recent motif event and the impact on buoyant Armiger prices to see how the general public’s farming cannot be held at bay. Making a trader where all of the general public could list things would even further prevent market tampering. It doesn’t seem like it to the naked eye, but by the numbers 90% of the population only ever buys things from the trader carts.

    If people love the decentralized trader model even though it does not protect them like they think, then surely they would STFU and be fine with a general public trader that EVERYONE could access at a bank or at a cart in every town, right? Like, at every multi cart town there is Dibbler, the public trader, the npc where every person can go list things for sale. Same npc in each area, but all are linked to the public access store, just like how you can have Tythis in all your houses but it’s always linked to your bank.

    Keep in mind that intentional market manipulation is only one concern. I personally am much more concerned with the effect bots and gold farmers would have on a centralized system.
    @Marginis on PC, Senpai Fluffy on Xbox, Founder of Magicka. Also known as Kha'jiri, The Night Mother, Ma'iq, Jane Shepard, Damia, Kintyra, Zoor Do Kest, You, and a few others.
  • Cryptical
    Cryptical
    ✭✭✭✭✭
    So, how many slots will I get? Are you going to tell people they have to give up 80 percent of their trading slots?

    If everyone gets 150 slots, how long will it take to load the page?

    A single source per server would be ridiculous. I think it would break the game.

    I just want a trader everyone can use to list their stuff. An additional thing, not replacing anything currently here. So keep your 30 slots in each of your current 5 guilds. The argument here has been about whether such a thing should be done at all.

    Beyond getting a public trader, the rest is all a matter of what’s feasible from the backstage perspective. Minor details and decisions made in the interest of making it function. Maybe break up the categories for sale into two or three separate npc’s. Maybe break it up so there’s one npc trader in each alliance and you list with only 1, the others tell you that you already have chosen a public trader. Whichever the mechanism involved, getting an access point open to the general public can only add items to the market and provide further defense against any domination attempts
    Xbox NA
  • AlnilamE
    AlnilamE
    ✭✭✭✭✭
    ✭✭✭✭✭
    Avalon wrote: »
    AlnilamE wrote: »
    There is different value in having different traders. If you put all the traders in the same place, then there will be no way for new guilds to work their way up, or for smaller guilds to find a trader that suits their needs.

    Love comments like these lol, implying that you can start a new guild, work your way up, and one day, YOU can have a trader in the middle of the biggest town!

    Yeah, right... I'm on Xbox, I have taken months-long breaks due to college, going back about 3 years. The exact same guilds own the exact same traders now, and at every moment I have played. They are overly rich, bloated entities that cannot be budged. The system caters to GOUGING prices, not competitive pricing. A universal AH leads to people performing that always-hated tactic of 1-undering: Oh, they sell for 2000? I will sell for 1999!... however, the next person sells for 1998, then 1997, so on so forth. Eventually, prices reach a minimum point.

    People crying the sky will fall if we do this, are most likely the ones gouging prices, and love the monopoly they have. Yes, I say players currently have monopolies, because it currently takes a remarkably few people (compared to the entire population) to set a price.

    In most MMOs a monopoly occurs when a group of people buy EVERY item of a type, then put it back up for sale at the price THEY choose. In ESO, it occurs by a group of people owning every trader in the most popular spots, and knowing that the time it takes to go through all of them will keep sane players from going to other places after that (because they would like to actually PLAY the game, not just surf through the traders for a few hours). By doing this, they effectively have a monopoly, and can charge whatever they like.

    A universal AH actually would build an economy. The one right now is the absolute extreme situation of robber baron form of capitalism, where the rich continue to become even more absurdly rich, and the poor just continue being, relatively, penniless.

    Does this system cater go gouging? Then explain to me how every new item introduced to the game has a downward price curve (with the exception of event items, which go back up in price after the end of the event).

    And even with event items. This morning I was looking for Worm Cult Belts, which one of my guildies still needs and he was very generous in giving away duplicate pages of motifs during the anniversary event. Within my 5 guilds (2 of which have a trader and 3 of which who don't at the moment), I was able to find several copies with a price spread of about 20-30%. The one I ended up buying was in a guild that hasn't actually had a trader for about a year now because they are a social guild and don't bother with it. How is that price gouging?

    Now, mind you, everybody who likes the trader system agrees that the AwesomeGuildStore interface should be part of the game UI. It makes searching each trader much easier and should be available to console players as well.

    But I maintain that the trader system gives trading in ESO a more immersive feeling than the TP in GW2 or the MP in BDO, for example.
    The Moot Councillor
  • ZeroXFF
    ZeroXFF
    ✭✭✭✭✭
    Marginis wrote: »
    Cryptical wrote: »
    Cryptical wrote: »
    Cpt_Teemo wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    Cpt_Teemo wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    Cryptical wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    With a central trader, the market manipulation would be way too easy and this is not up for a debate. You can google market cornering or market manipulation in MMORPGs and hit several pages explaining it. But for the lazy ones, I'll give a quick run down how it works:

    You decide a quite rare, but useful item to manipulate, let's say a potent nirncrux. And let's say it sells for 4 000 gold at the moment, but you want to sell it at 40 000 gold, what do you do? Well, you open the centralised store, put your potent nirncrux for sale for 40 000 gold and then, you buy everything under the price, every single 4 000 gold nirncrux. You do not have to sell them right away, you can stockpile 'em. Now others do not see those 4 000 gold nirncruxes, because you're buying them right away. The cheapest price others see is your stupid high 40 000 gold price and now some unfortunate people with a moderate amount of gold in their pocket and a need for a potent nirncrux will buy it for the lowest cost of 40 000 gold. You will as a seller use all the gold you earn to buy the low priced potent nirncruxes from the list, upkeeping the facade of "40 000 gold is the lowest price for potent nirncrux". At some point other sellers starts to sell them at 40 000 gold, because that is the selling point for potent nirncrux and no one wants to lose 36 000 profits. You will have thousands of poten nirncruxes in your pocket and you can keep selling them.

    Now this is not possible on the current system because you can't buy easily every single low costing item, because you'd need to travel everywhere. And if you'd try to corner a single guild trader, everybody would stop buying the item from that trader.

    As I explained earlier, this fantasy of yours has already failed on Xbox NA when some people bought up every aetherial dust and increased the prices from ~75k to a new price point of 100 to 110k.

    They successfully kept buying all the lower listed dust. They kept relisting the items at their new desired price. They even convinced zone chat sellers that their price was valid because the inflated price was the only listing out there.

    AND THEY FAILED.

    They managed to corner the market on console, where the economy is even more decentralized than pc because we don’t have the automated harvesting of data from MM and TTC add ons smoothing out the jagged outliers.

    And they still failed because this fantasy of yours does not take into consideration that the general public has the choice of buying or farming it themselves or finding a substitute. With any widespread commodity in eso, there are too many farmers for the market to be controlled like you imagine. It won’t happen with mats, there are too many subscribers with mats just piling up in the craft bag and more are as close as a farming route.

    The arguments against a public trader have been debunked by how the real world attempts at manipulation failed - by not seeing that 5% cannot control the market created by the 95%.

    As usual, this manipulation idea only works in theory until someone actually starts running the numbers on a population size scale. Using temp alloys for example, running like 9k each on Xbox NA. If I’m the 5% that is the wealthy manipulators looking to make them 15k, I’m trying to buy up all the alloys under that. But because I’m sucking up so many from the market, I’ve got 5% of the slots with 100% of the product. I need to sell them in pairs and fours and eights and in piles. If I don’t, I’m pumping huge amounts of gold into the economy and not bringing it back to me = inflation as more gold is sloshing around. A serious problem is the rise in price has inspired many people to take up farming, increasing supply and acting as a driver toward lower prices. And most fatal to my plan is those thousands of players with the craft bag, sitting there with hundreds of alloys doing nothing, or tens of thousands of various ore to refine into alloys, that get retrieved and starts getting listed at 14k, putting my deficit into overdrive.

    This market manipulation theory is just that - a fantastical theory that does not actually function in THIS economy outside of fevered imaginative brains.

    You missed my last paragraph: this manipulation is not possible on the current system. It is however possible on a central trading system, where you can see every single trade in a one single list and it works even better if you can search for spesific item in a said trade system. And with the example I gave with a theorised single global trader, I'd need to sell 1 potent nirncrux for 40 000 gold to cover 10x bought nirncruxes with the pricetag of 1. This kind of market manipulation is common in the AH/global singular trader system and there is tons of material and evidence that it has happenes before. The market manipulation is the primary reason for me to want to stay with the current ESO trade system, because the current system prevents it quite well.

    Ok, think about this what if some major whale guilds decide to show up and bid out all the top end spots in every single go to spot so no one could have a trading guild there at all while they own it you won't be able to sell to the public at all, and its legit because ZoS allows it?
    Your post is quite off topic, but I'll bite. (I think major whale guilds have very little to do about the topic: central market)

    Ain't the major spots already owned by said whale guilds? I mean, all the big trade guilds owns a kiosk in either Rawl'Kha, Wayrest, Mournhold, Elden Root or Belkarth. If you mean that only a couple of guilds forms sub-guilds and buys every single major spot, well, they'd have to have a huge inventory of goodies and lots of time to make it profitable, else, they'd lose gold in millions.

    And yes, it is legit to pay 10 million+ gold per trader spot which prevents smaller bids from getting the said trader, where's the problem? If my guild loses their bid, I'll either stockpile on goodies till our trade guild gets a good spot to sell, or find another trade guild to sell my goods.

    Just saying this system is far worse than any centralized market system tbh

    no it isn't.... it's far better because it makes it impossible for a single player to game the market.

    anyway didn't you quit, aren't you supposed to be playing lotro now?

    Are people not catching this?

    I watched a small cabal completely conquer the small obstacle of having to go to a bunch of traders.

    This barrier of a bunch of trader carts is not nearly as high as you think.

    This is how easy it is:
    Take 12 people. Divide up the carts so each person monitors 16 carts. Those 16 carts are that person’s patrol route.

    12 people is a normal trial group. Is anyone going to tell me they can’t group together 12 people with a lot of gold to tilt the market into making more gold? I bet any platform could come up with 3 full trial groups of wealthy trading-minded players willing to form a cabal to control the market, each person patrolling 5 or 6 carts.

    Right fracking there is the plan that destroys your decentralization protection. Gone. In the puff of a few sentences with a simple idea. Too many carts to monitor them all? Then get help so the task of patrolling carts is easy.

    You were never protected by decentralized traders. It was always that the population can easily farm for what they want or use a substitute.

    in every other post you have made on the topic of people trying to game the current system you say they fail (we already knew that) now you are saying they succeed.... a tad confusing.

    No, there are two different variables at issue - centralization and public access. Apples and oranges, 2 separate things.

    Over and over people cry alarm at the idea of making a centralized way to access the guild traders, claiming that one person could buy up everything and re-list. Using hard numbers, I argue that their fear is not possible to succeed, primarily because of inventory bottleneck and the way those deficits would bankrupt the tryhard in the ballpark of 30 million-plus each month. Also, people have already overcome the obstacle of running to many traders, so the argument in favor of protection by decentralization is a failure.

    The actual defense against manipulation has always been the public’s participation. It is too easy to farm anything in this game for anyone to actually control the market. Look no further than the recent motif event and the impact on buoyant Armiger prices to see how the general public’s farming cannot be held at bay. Making a trader where all of the general public could list things would even further prevent market tampering. It doesn’t seem like it to the naked eye, but by the numbers 90% of the population only ever buys things from the trader carts.

    If people love the decentralized trader model even though it does not protect them like they think, then surely they would STFU and be fine with a general public trader that EVERYONE could access at a bank or at a cart in every town, right? Like, at every multi cart town there is Dibbler, the public trader, the npc where every person can go list things for sale. Same npc in each area, but all are linked to the public access store, just like how you can have Tythis in all your houses but it’s always linked to your bank.

    Keep in mind that intentional market manipulation is only one concern. I personally am much more concerned with the effect bots and gold farmers would have on a centralized system.

    Firstly, bots would be banned. But even if they aren't, it would only help people who aren't sitting on 10M+ gold, because that would cause prices to drop. The ironic thing is, those who are sitting on 10M+ would also benefit in buying power on the player market. The only disadvantage of dropping prices is the acquisition of multi-million mansions. So in essence, it would make gold sinks more effective while allowing less wealthy players to get what they need... I can't see a single negative thing about a centralized AH.
  • Jhalin
    Jhalin
    ✭✭✭✭✭
    ✭✭✭✭
    ZeroXFF wrote: »
    Marginis wrote: »
    Cryptical wrote: »
    Cryptical wrote: »
    Cpt_Teemo wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    Cpt_Teemo wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    Cryptical wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    With a central trader, the market manipulation would be way too easy and this is not up for a debate. You can google market cornering or market manipulation in MMORPGs and hit several pages explaining it. But for the lazy ones, I'll give a quick run down how it works:

    You decide a quite rare, but useful item to manipulate, let's say a potent nirncrux. And let's say it sells for 4 000 gold at the moment, but you want to sell it at 40 000 gold, what do you do? Well, you open the centralised store, put your potent nirncrux for sale for 40 000 gold and then, you buy everything under the price, every single 4 000 gold nirncrux. You do not have to sell them right away, you can stockpile 'em. Now others do not see those 4 000 gold nirncruxes, because you're buying them right away. The cheapest price others see is your stupid high 40 000 gold price and now some unfortunate people with a moderate amount of gold in their pocket and a need for a potent nirncrux will buy it for the lowest cost of 40 000 gold. You will as a seller use all the gold you earn to buy the low priced potent nirncruxes from the list, upkeeping the facade of "40 000 gold is the lowest price for potent nirncrux". At some point other sellers starts to sell them at 40 000 gold, because that is the selling point for potent nirncrux and no one wants to lose 36 000 profits. You will have thousands of poten nirncruxes in your pocket and you can keep selling them.

    Now this is not possible on the current system because you can't buy easily every single low costing item, because you'd need to travel everywhere. And if you'd try to corner a single guild trader, everybody would stop buying the item from that trader.

    As I explained earlier, this fantasy of yours has already failed on Xbox NA when some people bought up every aetherial dust and increased the prices from ~75k to a new price point of 100 to 110k.

    They successfully kept buying all the lower listed dust. They kept relisting the items at their new desired price. They even convinced zone chat sellers that their price was valid because the inflated price was the only listing out there.

    AND THEY FAILED.

    They managed to corner the market on console, where the economy is even more decentralized than pc because we don’t have the automated harvesting of data from MM and TTC add ons smoothing out the jagged outliers.

    And they still failed because this fantasy of yours does not take into consideration that the general public has the choice of buying or farming it themselves or finding a substitute. With any widespread commodity in eso, there are too many farmers for the market to be controlled like you imagine. It won’t happen with mats, there are too many subscribers with mats just piling up in the craft bag and more are as close as a farming route.

    The arguments against a public trader have been debunked by how the real world attempts at manipulation failed - by not seeing that 5% cannot control the market created by the 95%.

    As usual, this manipulation idea only works in theory until someone actually starts running the numbers on a population size scale. Using temp alloys for example, running like 9k each on Xbox NA. If I’m the 5% that is the wealthy manipulators looking to make them 15k, I’m trying to buy up all the alloys under that. But because I’m sucking up so many from the market, I’ve got 5% of the slots with 100% of the product. I need to sell them in pairs and fours and eights and in piles. If I don’t, I’m pumping huge amounts of gold into the economy and not bringing it back to me = inflation as more gold is sloshing around. A serious problem is the rise in price has inspired many people to take up farming, increasing supply and acting as a driver toward lower prices. And most fatal to my plan is those thousands of players with the craft bag, sitting there with hundreds of alloys doing nothing, or tens of thousands of various ore to refine into alloys, that get retrieved and starts getting listed at 14k, putting my deficit into overdrive.

    This market manipulation theory is just that - a fantastical theory that does not actually function in THIS economy outside of fevered imaginative brains.

    You missed my last paragraph: this manipulation is not possible on the current system. It is however possible on a central trading system, where you can see every single trade in a one single list and it works even better if you can search for spesific item in a said trade system. And with the example I gave with a theorised single global trader, I'd need to sell 1 potent nirncrux for 40 000 gold to cover 10x bought nirncruxes with the pricetag of 1. This kind of market manipulation is common in the AH/global singular trader system and there is tons of material and evidence that it has happenes before. The market manipulation is the primary reason for me to want to stay with the current ESO trade system, because the current system prevents it quite well.

    Ok, think about this what if some major whale guilds decide to show up and bid out all the top end spots in every single go to spot so no one could have a trading guild there at all while they own it you won't be able to sell to the public at all, and its legit because ZoS allows it?
    Your post is quite off topic, but I'll bite. (I think major whale guilds have very little to do about the topic: central market)

    Ain't the major spots already owned by said whale guilds? I mean, all the big trade guilds owns a kiosk in either Rawl'Kha, Wayrest, Mournhold, Elden Root or Belkarth. If you mean that only a couple of guilds forms sub-guilds and buys every single major spot, well, they'd have to have a huge inventory of goodies and lots of time to make it profitable, else, they'd lose gold in millions.

    And yes, it is legit to pay 10 million+ gold per trader spot which prevents smaller bids from getting the said trader, where's the problem? If my guild loses their bid, I'll either stockpile on goodies till our trade guild gets a good spot to sell, or find another trade guild to sell my goods.

    Just saying this system is far worse than any centralized market system tbh

    no it isn't.... it's far better because it makes it impossible for a single player to game the market.

    anyway didn't you quit, aren't you supposed to be playing lotro now?

    Are people not catching this?

    I watched a small cabal completely conquer the small obstacle of having to go to a bunch of traders.

    This barrier of a bunch of trader carts is not nearly as high as you think.

    This is how easy it is:
    Take 12 people. Divide up the carts so each person monitors 16 carts. Those 16 carts are that person’s patrol route.

    12 people is a normal trial group. Is anyone going to tell me they can’t group together 12 people with a lot of gold to tilt the market into making more gold? I bet any platform could come up with 3 full trial groups of wealthy trading-minded players willing to form a cabal to control the market, each person patrolling 5 or 6 carts.

    Right fracking there is the plan that destroys your decentralization protection. Gone. In the puff of a few sentences with a simple idea. Too many carts to monitor them all? Then get help so the task of patrolling carts is easy.

    You were never protected by decentralized traders. It was always that the population can easily farm for what they want or use a substitute.

    in every other post you have made on the topic of people trying to game the current system you say they fail (we already knew that) now you are saying they succeed.... a tad confusing.

    No, there are two different variables at issue - centralization and public access. Apples and oranges, 2 separate things.

    Over and over people cry alarm at the idea of making a centralized way to access the guild traders, claiming that one person could buy up everything and re-list. Using hard numbers, I argue that their fear is not possible to succeed, primarily because of inventory bottleneck and the way those deficits would bankrupt the tryhard in the ballpark of 30 million-plus each month. Also, people have already overcome the obstacle of running to many traders, so the argument in favor of protection by decentralization is a failure.

    The actual defense against manipulation has always been the public’s participation. It is too easy to farm anything in this game for anyone to actually control the market. Look no further than the recent motif event and the impact on buoyant Armiger prices to see how the general public’s farming cannot be held at bay. Making a trader where all of the general public could list things would even further prevent market tampering. It doesn’t seem like it to the naked eye, but by the numbers 90% of the population only ever buys things from the trader carts.

    If people love the decentralized trader model even though it does not protect them like they think, then surely they would STFU and be fine with a general public trader that EVERYONE could access at a bank or at a cart in every town, right? Like, at every multi cart town there is Dibbler, the public trader, the npc where every person can go list things for sale. Same npc in each area, but all are linked to the public access store, just like how you can have Tythis in all your houses but it’s always linked to your bank.

    Keep in mind that intentional market manipulation is only one concern. I personally am much more concerned with the effect bots and gold farmers would have on a centralized system.

    Firstly, bots would be banned. But even if they aren't, it would only help people who aren't sitting on 10M+ gold, because that would cause prices to drop. The ironic thing is, those who are sitting on 10M+ would also benefit in buying power on the player market. The only disadvantage of dropping prices is the acquisition of multi-million mansions. So in essence, it would make gold sinks more effective while allowing less wealthy players to get what they need... I can't see a single negative thing about a centralized AH.

    And I can’t see anything negative about ESO’s trader system. It’s not prone to “someone has already bought that listing”, all common items worth less than you can vendor them, all good deals immediately gone before a casual player even has a chance at them, a central system that practically invites botting by sticking every listing in the same place, completely destroying the market for uncommon or slow moving items due to undercutting from the entire playerbase instead of /maybe/ 100 of them in a guild.

    If you want that sort of mess most of us are incredibly and uncomfortably familiar with, you’re welcome to go play a different game, instead of trying to change this one for the worse.
  • DuskMarine
    DuskMarine
    ✭✭✭✭✭
    this horse is gonna be a pile of organs and blood by the time people are done beating it the poor things already deader than dead XD
  • MLGProPlayer
    MLGProPlayer
    ✭✭✭✭✭
    ✭✭✭✭✭
    Knowledge wrote: »
    A system like this would help console players immensely that have no access to addons.

    I would juat stop playing the game on consoles if I had to use the guild store system. I can't imagine the game without the TTC search database and AGS add-on. Not sure how you guys do it.
    Edited by MLGProPlayer on May 11, 2018 12:44AM
  • kargen27
    kargen27
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    Cryptical wrote: »
    Cpt_Teemo wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    Cpt_Teemo wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    Cryptical wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    With a central trader, the market manipulation would be way too easy and this is not up for a debate. You can google market cornering or market manipulation in MMORPGs and hit several pages explaining it. But for the lazy ones, I'll give a quick run down how it works:

    You decide a quite rare, but useful item to manipulate, let's say a potent nirncrux. And let's say it sells for 4 000 gold at the moment, but you want to sell it at 40 000 gold, what do you do? Well, you open the centralised store, put your potent nirncrux for sale for 40 000 gold and then, you buy everything under the price, every single 4 000 gold nirncrux. You do not have to sell them right away, you can stockpile 'em. Now others do not see those 4 000 gold nirncruxes, because you're buying them right away. The cheapest price others see is your stupid high 40 000 gold price and now some unfortunate people with a moderate amount of gold in their pocket and a need for a potent nirncrux will buy it for the lowest cost of 40 000 gold. You will as a seller use all the gold you earn to buy the low priced potent nirncruxes from the list, upkeeping the facade of "40 000 gold is the lowest price for potent nirncrux". At some point other sellers starts to sell them at 40 000 gold, because that is the selling point for potent nirncrux and no one wants to lose 36 000 profits. You will have thousands of poten nirncruxes in your pocket and you can keep selling them.

    Now this is not possible on the current system because you can't buy easily every single low costing item, because you'd need to travel everywhere. And if you'd try to corner a single guild trader, everybody would stop buying the item from that trader.

    As I explained earlier, this fantasy of yours has already failed on Xbox NA when some people bought up every aetherial dust and increased the prices from ~75k to a new price point of 100 to 110k.

    They successfully kept buying all the lower listed dust. They kept relisting the items at their new desired price. They even convinced zone chat sellers that their price was valid because the inflated price was the only listing out there.

    AND THEY FAILED.

    They managed to corner the market on console, where the economy is even more decentralized than pc because we don’t have the automated harvesting of data from MM and TTC add ons smoothing out the jagged outliers.

    And they still failed because this fantasy of yours does not take into consideration that the general public has the choice of buying or farming it themselves or finding a substitute. With any widespread commodity in eso, there are too many farmers for the market to be controlled like you imagine. It won’t happen with mats, there are too many subscribers with mats just piling up in the craft bag and more are as close as a farming route.

    The arguments against a public trader have been debunked by how the real world attempts at manipulation failed - by not seeing that 5% cannot control the market created by the 95%.

    As usual, this manipulation idea only works in theory until someone actually starts running the numbers on a population size scale. Using temp alloys for example, running like 9k each on Xbox NA. If I’m the 5% that is the wealthy manipulators looking to make them 15k, I’m trying to buy up all the alloys under that. But because I’m sucking up so many from the market, I’ve got 5% of the slots with 100% of the product. I need to sell them in pairs and fours and eights and in piles. If I don’t, I’m pumping huge amounts of gold into the economy and not bringing it back to me = inflation as more gold is sloshing around. A serious problem is the rise in price has inspired many people to take up farming, increasing supply and acting as a driver toward lower prices. And most fatal to my plan is those thousands of players with the craft bag, sitting there with hundreds of alloys doing nothing, or tens of thousands of various ore to refine into alloys, that get retrieved and starts getting listed at 14k, putting my deficit into overdrive.

    This market manipulation theory is just that - a fantastical theory that does not actually function in THIS economy outside of fevered imaginative brains.

    You missed my last paragraph: this manipulation is not possible on the current system. It is however possible on a central trading system, where you can see every single trade in a one single list and it works even better if you can search for spesific item in a said trade system. And with the example I gave with a theorised single global trader, I'd need to sell 1 potent nirncrux for 40 000 gold to cover 10x bought nirncruxes with the pricetag of 1. This kind of market manipulation is common in the AH/global singular trader system and there is tons of material and evidence that it has happenes before. The market manipulation is the primary reason for me to want to stay with the current ESO trade system, because the current system prevents it quite well.

    Ok, think about this what if some major whale guilds decide to show up and bid out all the top end spots in every single go to spot so no one could have a trading guild there at all while they own it you won't be able to sell to the public at all, and its legit because ZoS allows it?
    Your post is quite off topic, but I'll bite. (I think major whale guilds have very little to do about the topic: central market)

    Ain't the major spots already owned by said whale guilds? I mean, all the big trade guilds owns a kiosk in either Rawl'Kha, Wayrest, Mournhold, Elden Root or Belkarth. If you mean that only a couple of guilds forms sub-guilds and buys every single major spot, well, they'd have to have a huge inventory of goodies and lots of time to make it profitable, else, they'd lose gold in millions.

    And yes, it is legit to pay 10 million+ gold per trader spot which prevents smaller bids from getting the said trader, where's the problem? If my guild loses their bid, I'll either stockpile on goodies till our trade guild gets a good spot to sell, or find another trade guild to sell my goods.

    Just saying this system is far worse than any centralized market system tbh

    no it isn't.... it's far better because it makes it impossible for a single player to game the market.

    anyway didn't you quit, aren't you supposed to be playing lotro now?

    Are people not catching this?

    I watched a small cabal completely conquer the small obstacle of having to go to a bunch of traders.

    This barrier of a bunch of trader carts is not nearly as high as you think.

    This is how easy it is:
    Take 12 people. Divide up the carts so each person monitors 16 carts. Those 16 carts are that person’s patrol route.

    12 people is a normal trial group. Is anyone going to tell me they can’t group together 12 people with a lot of gold to tilt the market into making more gold? I bet any platform could come up with 3 full trial groups of wealthy trading-minded players willing to form a cabal to control the market, each person patrolling 5 or 6 carts.

    Right fracking there is the plan that destroys your decentralization protection. Gone. In the puff of a few sentences with a simple idea. Too many carts to monitor them all? Then get help so the task of patrolling carts is easy.

    You were never protected by decentralized traders. It was always that the population can easily farm for what they want or use a substitute.

    Twelve people having to cover 16 carts each so that is going to mean wayshrine usage. And those 12 can not go get a drink take a nap or anything else for days on end with no break. I'm going to go out on a limb and say if they were successful ( and I seriously doubt they were) it was a very short lived success and was with an extremely rare item. There has been limited success with players going to the PTS to find out what the hot item is going to be then they go to the live server and start hoarding that item. Then day of release they jack up the price and flood the market taking advantage of people that have to have the latest stuff now. Thing is usually that same day others realize what is happening and the undercutting begins. A group of players might be able to cause the market on some rare items to swing in their favor for a day or two but not for the huge profits they would be able to generate with a central market.

    With a central market three people working together with only one of them watching the market at a time could control rare items for days or maybe even weeks. One or two items might slip through but not enough to stop them from controlling prices.
    and then the parrot said, "must be the water mines green too."
  • Avalon
    Avalon
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    AlnilamE wrote: »
    Does this system cater go gouging? Then explain to me how every new item introduced to the game has a downward price curve (with the exception of event items, which go back up in price after the end of the event).

    And even with event items. This morning I was looking for Worm Cult Belts, which one of my guildies still needs and he was very generous in giving away duplicate pages of motifs during the anniversary event. Within my 5 guilds (2 of which have a trader and 3 of which who don't at the moment), I was able to find several copies with a price spread of about 20-30%. The one I ended up buying was in a guild that hasn't actually had a trader for about a year now because they are a social guild and don't bother with it. How is that price gouging?

    Now, mind you, everybody who likes the trader system agrees that the AwesomeGuildStore interface should be part of the game UI. It makes searching each trader much easier and should be available to console players as well.

    But I maintain that the trader system gives trading in ESO a more immersive feeling than the TP in GW2 or the MP in BDO, for example.

    The reason for the downward price curve should be obvious, it is a new item. No matter what item it is, when it is new, people will charge outrageous prices hoping for a lucky score, but over time the price will decrease. That does not mean that the eventual stopping point is fair market value. There are items sold in the Wayrest trader market for 20K, that I have found on personal guild's markets (traders are out in the boonies, but near shrines!) for 7K or under. It is literally gouging because they know no one is going to go shrining around to look at one vendor here, then another over there, etc. People come to the main markets to get a lot of shots at finding stuff without load screens involved.

    Further, because there is no search functionality at ALL, people would have to spend hours finding a decent price, or they can just buy at the gouged price, just so they can get back to actually PLAYING the game. Why does it take so long because of that? Because the only two sorting methods are by price or time left. No alphabetical. No search bar. No way to turn the pages upon pages of crap into a reasonable list. People love to bring up how it makes it feel more immersive? BS. I go to a farmer's market, and I can easily SEE what I am looking for in under 30 seconds. If I go to any store, and don't know where the thing I want is (even in an middle-ages market) can easily ask, "Hey, do you have any carrots?" the vendor won't go, "Maybe, but, you have to look through EVERY vegetable I have" no, they show you the friggin carrots. The system is clunky and unwieldy to say the least. Which those power guilds use to their advantage.

    So, yeah, the current system is robber baron style monopolies, where the most powerful guilds can perma-buy traders in the best locations, and then use that to charge double to quadruple the price of what it should be at, which only goes to further make the trader permanently bought, because they now have a much larger bank account than the small guilds. This system is not set up for any form of competition, it is set up to create god-like merchant empires with NO competition.

    Btw, I'm on Xbox, so, no add ons, or anything. I want a universal search function. I will travel to whatever vendor I need to go to, does not matter how long that trip is. But, I want to know who has the cheapest, and who actually has the item I need. Something needs to be fixed, otherwise, congrats, you guys get to hear this subject come up over and over and over... because it needs changed.
  • MaxwellC
    MaxwellC
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    @Masume
    I feel that this game needs a Grand exchange akin to Runescapes' design. It is a central trading hub with prices having a typical range based on what players have been selling the items during the past week. All items sold in the G.E is hidden so you cannot see what player X is selling it for and undercut them but you're able to make an offer and maybe someone has one lesser than the offer you gave.

    Example: Player A puts a weapon in for 10k gold, Player B offers to buy the weapon in the G.E for 11k. The weapon is sold to Player B for 10k gold and they retain 1k.
    不動の Steadfast - Unwavering
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    Band Camp statements: To state "But this one time I saw X doing X... so that justifies X" Refers to the Band camp statement.
    Coined by Maxwel
    l
  • ZeroXFF
    ZeroXFF
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    Jhalin wrote: »
    ZeroXFF wrote: »
    Marginis wrote: »
    Cryptical wrote: »
    Cryptical wrote: »
    Cpt_Teemo wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    Cpt_Teemo wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    Cryptical wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    With a central trader, the market manipulation would be way too easy and this is not up for a debate. You can google market cornering or market manipulation in MMORPGs and hit several pages explaining it. But for the lazy ones, I'll give a quick run down how it works:

    You decide a quite rare, but useful item to manipulate, let's say a potent nirncrux. And let's say it sells for 4 000 gold at the moment, but you want to sell it at 40 000 gold, what do you do? Well, you open the centralised store, put your potent nirncrux for sale for 40 000 gold and then, you buy everything under the price, every single 4 000 gold nirncrux. You do not have to sell them right away, you can stockpile 'em. Now others do not see those 4 000 gold nirncruxes, because you're buying them right away. The cheapest price others see is your stupid high 40 000 gold price and now some unfortunate people with a moderate amount of gold in their pocket and a need for a potent nirncrux will buy it for the lowest cost of 40 000 gold. You will as a seller use all the gold you earn to buy the low priced potent nirncruxes from the list, upkeeping the facade of "40 000 gold is the lowest price for potent nirncrux". At some point other sellers starts to sell them at 40 000 gold, because that is the selling point for potent nirncrux and no one wants to lose 36 000 profits. You will have thousands of poten nirncruxes in your pocket and you can keep selling them.

    Now this is not possible on the current system because you can't buy easily every single low costing item, because you'd need to travel everywhere. And if you'd try to corner a single guild trader, everybody would stop buying the item from that trader.

    As I explained earlier, this fantasy of yours has already failed on Xbox NA when some people bought up every aetherial dust and increased the prices from ~75k to a new price point of 100 to 110k.

    They successfully kept buying all the lower listed dust. They kept relisting the items at their new desired price. They even convinced zone chat sellers that their price was valid because the inflated price was the only listing out there.

    AND THEY FAILED.

    They managed to corner the market on console, where the economy is even more decentralized than pc because we don’t have the automated harvesting of data from MM and TTC add ons smoothing out the jagged outliers.

    And they still failed because this fantasy of yours does not take into consideration that the general public has the choice of buying or farming it themselves or finding a substitute. With any widespread commodity in eso, there are too many farmers for the market to be controlled like you imagine. It won’t happen with mats, there are too many subscribers with mats just piling up in the craft bag and more are as close as a farming route.

    The arguments against a public trader have been debunked by how the real world attempts at manipulation failed - by not seeing that 5% cannot control the market created by the 95%.

    As usual, this manipulation idea only works in theory until someone actually starts running the numbers on a population size scale. Using temp alloys for example, running like 9k each on Xbox NA. If I’m the 5% that is the wealthy manipulators looking to make them 15k, I’m trying to buy up all the alloys under that. But because I’m sucking up so many from the market, I’ve got 5% of the slots with 100% of the product. I need to sell them in pairs and fours and eights and in piles. If I don’t, I’m pumping huge amounts of gold into the economy and not bringing it back to me = inflation as more gold is sloshing around. A serious problem is the rise in price has inspired many people to take up farming, increasing supply and acting as a driver toward lower prices. And most fatal to my plan is those thousands of players with the craft bag, sitting there with hundreds of alloys doing nothing, or tens of thousands of various ore to refine into alloys, that get retrieved and starts getting listed at 14k, putting my deficit into overdrive.

    This market manipulation theory is just that - a fantastical theory that does not actually function in THIS economy outside of fevered imaginative brains.

    You missed my last paragraph: this manipulation is not possible on the current system. It is however possible on a central trading system, where you can see every single trade in a one single list and it works even better if you can search for spesific item in a said trade system. And with the example I gave with a theorised single global trader, I'd need to sell 1 potent nirncrux for 40 000 gold to cover 10x bought nirncruxes with the pricetag of 1. This kind of market manipulation is common in the AH/global singular trader system and there is tons of material and evidence that it has happenes before. The market manipulation is the primary reason for me to want to stay with the current ESO trade system, because the current system prevents it quite well.

    Ok, think about this what if some major whale guilds decide to show up and bid out all the top end spots in every single go to spot so no one could have a trading guild there at all while they own it you won't be able to sell to the public at all, and its legit because ZoS allows it?
    Your post is quite off topic, but I'll bite. (I think major whale guilds have very little to do about the topic: central market)

    Ain't the major spots already owned by said whale guilds? I mean, all the big trade guilds owns a kiosk in either Rawl'Kha, Wayrest, Mournhold, Elden Root or Belkarth. If you mean that only a couple of guilds forms sub-guilds and buys every single major spot, well, they'd have to have a huge inventory of goodies and lots of time to make it profitable, else, they'd lose gold in millions.

    And yes, it is legit to pay 10 million+ gold per trader spot which prevents smaller bids from getting the said trader, where's the problem? If my guild loses their bid, I'll either stockpile on goodies till our trade guild gets a good spot to sell, or find another trade guild to sell my goods.

    Just saying this system is far worse than any centralized market system tbh

    no it isn't.... it's far better because it makes it impossible for a single player to game the market.

    anyway didn't you quit, aren't you supposed to be playing lotro now?

    Are people not catching this?

    I watched a small cabal completely conquer the small obstacle of having to go to a bunch of traders.

    This barrier of a bunch of trader carts is not nearly as high as you think.

    This is how easy it is:
    Take 12 people. Divide up the carts so each person monitors 16 carts. Those 16 carts are that person’s patrol route.

    12 people is a normal trial group. Is anyone going to tell me they can’t group together 12 people with a lot of gold to tilt the market into making more gold? I bet any platform could come up with 3 full trial groups of wealthy trading-minded players willing to form a cabal to control the market, each person patrolling 5 or 6 carts.

    Right fracking there is the plan that destroys your decentralization protection. Gone. In the puff of a few sentences with a simple idea. Too many carts to monitor them all? Then get help so the task of patrolling carts is easy.

    You were never protected by decentralized traders. It was always that the population can easily farm for what they want or use a substitute.

    in every other post you have made on the topic of people trying to game the current system you say they fail (we already knew that) now you are saying they succeed.... a tad confusing.

    No, there are two different variables at issue - centralization and public access. Apples and oranges, 2 separate things.

    Over and over people cry alarm at the idea of making a centralized way to access the guild traders, claiming that one person could buy up everything and re-list. Using hard numbers, I argue that their fear is not possible to succeed, primarily because of inventory bottleneck and the way those deficits would bankrupt the tryhard in the ballpark of 30 million-plus each month. Also, people have already overcome the obstacle of running to many traders, so the argument in favor of protection by decentralization is a failure.

    The actual defense against manipulation has always been the public’s participation. It is too easy to farm anything in this game for anyone to actually control the market. Look no further than the recent motif event and the impact on buoyant Armiger prices to see how the general public’s farming cannot be held at bay. Making a trader where all of the general public could list things would even further prevent market tampering. It doesn’t seem like it to the naked eye, but by the numbers 90% of the population only ever buys things from the trader carts.

    If people love the decentralized trader model even though it does not protect them like they think, then surely they would STFU and be fine with a general public trader that EVERYONE could access at a bank or at a cart in every town, right? Like, at every multi cart town there is Dibbler, the public trader, the npc where every person can go list things for sale. Same npc in each area, but all are linked to the public access store, just like how you can have Tythis in all your houses but it’s always linked to your bank.

    Keep in mind that intentional market manipulation is only one concern. I personally am much more concerned with the effect bots and gold farmers would have on a centralized system.

    Firstly, bots would be banned. But even if they aren't, it would only help people who aren't sitting on 10M+ gold, because that would cause prices to drop. The ironic thing is, those who are sitting on 10M+ would also benefit in buying power on the player market. The only disadvantage of dropping prices is the acquisition of multi-million mansions. So in essence, it would make gold sinks more effective while allowing less wealthy players to get what they need... I can't see a single negative thing about a centralized AH.

    And I can’t see anything negative about ESO’s trader system. It’s not prone to “someone has already bought that listing”, all common items worth less than you can vendor them, all good deals immediately gone before a casual player even has a chance at them, a central system that practically invites botting by sticking every listing in the same place, completely destroying the market for uncommon or slow moving items due to undercutting from the entire playerbase instead of /maybe/ 100 of them in a guild.

    If you want that sort of mess most of us are incredibly and uncomfortably familiar with, you’re welcome to go play a different game, instead of trying to change this one for the worse.

    *better
  • Korah_Eaglecry
    Korah_Eaglecry
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    Cryptical wrote: »
    Motherball wrote: »
    Casual players are largely excluded from trading in this game imo. I dont like using guild traders to sell stuff. Im not always active in the game and Id rather just sell my stuff to a vendor than have to find a new guild for a couple weeks, especially considering the guild is likely not even going to have a trader every week.

    That’s not opinion, it is a fact that the great majority of players are excluded due to there being more people than guild traders could have.

    1 trader cart = 500 people.

    There are 191 carts in the game. 44 in each alliance and 59 in the neutral areas.

    If zero people double up into more than one trader, and no guild masters used multiple accounts to buff their membership up to get a bank, that’s 95500 persons per server NA or EU, which is 191000 persons per gaming platform: pc or PlayStation or Xbox.

    Last player count announcement I recall was 8million players, roughly even between Xbox / pc / PlayStation. That’s roughly 2.5 mill per platform.

    There are enough trader carts per platform to give 191k people a public store. But there are 2500k people.

    7.6% of the players can get in a trading guild before there simply aren’t any more chairs. AND that’s if there is zero doubling up on traders (there is), AND presuming all traders are shopped equally (they aren’t).

    Again, I say the reason a public trader cannot be manipulated like some people fear is because more than 90% of the public currently has no voice in the market. With a public trader, the number of people listing things is times 10.

    10 times as many people listing perfect roe. 10 times as many listing wax, kuta, alloy, motifs, intricates, furnishings, trophies, runeboxes, sets, general mats, recipes, and so on.

    A cabal couldn’t manipulate the rarest dropped mat in the game when the general public was 90% excluded from the market, and the cabal still lost. There is not an ice warden’s chance in bloodroot that any group could pull it off when the entire 100% of the general public speaks in the marketplace.

    In the past I've pointed out the fact that the vast majority of players are excluded and that that alone is reason to take a second look at the system. If not to consolidate into a single AH than to look for ways to include more players. Because at this rate, no matter how many traders they add. They will never reach a point where a majority of players have access to the player economy the way these powerhouse trader guilds do. But the excuse is always "If they want to participate all they have to do is join a guild". Always ignoring the fact that there is a limited number of Guild Traders and a limited number of slots in those Guilds. And often enough those participating already are hogging multiple slots by utilizing their access to multiple Trade Guilds. Theyre either ignoring this fact or willfully ignorant of it.

    I've all but given up the hope of seeing a new system implemented that would be fair for all. Its funny how so many defend the current system claiming to be protecting the economy from being manipulated. While simultaneously defending a system that in fact manipulates the economy by keeping certain guilds in prime locations while smaller ones have a snowballs chance in hell of ever competing. When certain guilds, with the same members continuously maintain the most frequented locations. They get to set the prices and they get to decide what is and isnt available. In what manner is that not manipulating the market? Sure you can go to one of the smaller guild traders and cross your fingers they have something cheap and worth your time. But theres a very very good chance youre not the first one to search that guild and so its very unlikely youll find what you want outside of places like Elden Root, Wayrest and Mournhold. Unless you have all the time in the world to search every Guild Trader. You will always find yourself turning back to the major trade locations to accept the reality that you WILL pay those prices.
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  • kind_hero
    kind_hero
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    I guess this proposal comes from someone who is not active in a trading guild, or does not see that many trading guilds are formed around their trader and what position it has on the market. Many guilds have lotteries, ranks, contests and social activities based on their trading performance. So having a few NPCs with a single auction house, like in WoW, would destroy all those guilds, just for the sake of easier browsing of stuff.

    Speaking of easier browsing... MMOs like WoW, where this system works well (former wow player here), have their players spread across many servers, but imagine having all the daedric benches or hollowjack motifs from everyone, in one auction house! You would have hundreds of pages with the same thing.

    The only thing the devs have to do with this system is to improve the UI, to allow us to have more filters, like crafting styles, known/unknown recipes, mostly stuff that awesome guild store does. I could do without a search function if more filters could be used.
    [PC/EU] Tamriel Hero, Stormproof, Grand Master Crafter
  • DieAlteHexe
    DieAlteHexe
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    Cpt_Teemo wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    Cryptical wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    With a central trader, the market manipulation would be way too easy and this is not up for a debate. You can google market cornering or market manipulation in MMORPGs and hit several pages explaining it. But for the lazy ones, I'll give a quick run down how it works:

    You decide a quite rare, but useful item to manipulate, let's say a potent nirncrux. And let's say it sells for 4 000 gold at the moment, but you want to sell it at 40 000 gold, what do you do? Well, you open the centralised store, put your potent nirncrux for sale for 40 000 gold and then, you buy everything under the price, every single 4 000 gold nirncrux. You do not have to sell them right away, you can stockpile 'em. Now others do not see those 4 000 gold nirncruxes, because you're buying them right away. The cheapest price others see is your stupid high 40 000 gold price and now some unfortunate people with a moderate amount of gold in their pocket and a need for a potent nirncrux will buy it for the lowest cost of 40 000 gold. You will as a seller use all the gold you earn to buy the low priced potent nirncruxes from the list, upkeeping the facade of "40 000 gold is the lowest price for potent nirncrux". At some point other sellers starts to sell them at 40 000 gold, because that is the selling point for potent nirncrux and no one wants to lose 36 000 profits. You will have thousands of poten nirncruxes in your pocket and you can keep selling them.

    Now this is not possible on the current system because you can't buy easily every single low costing item, because you'd need to travel everywhere. And if you'd try to corner a single guild trader, everybody would stop buying the item from that trader.

    As I explained earlier, this fantasy of yours has already failed on Xbox NA when some people bought up every aetherial dust and increased the prices from ~75k to a new price point of 100 to 110k.

    They successfully kept buying all the lower listed dust. They kept relisting the items at their new desired price. They even convinced zone chat sellers that their price was valid because the inflated price was the only listing out there.

    AND THEY FAILED.

    They managed to corner the market on console, where the economy is even more decentralized than pc because we don’t have the automated harvesting of data from MM and TTC add ons smoothing out the jagged outliers.

    And they still failed because this fantasy of yours does not take into consideration that the general public has the choice of buying or farming it themselves or finding a substitute. With any widespread commodity in eso, there are too many farmers for the market to be controlled like you imagine. It won’t happen with mats, there are too many subscribers with mats just piling up in the craft bag and more are as close as a farming route.

    The arguments against a public trader have been debunked by how the real world attempts at manipulation failed - by not seeing that 5% cannot control the market created by the 95%.

    As usual, this manipulation idea only works in theory until someone actually starts running the numbers on a population size scale. Using temp alloys for example, running like 9k each on Xbox NA. If I’m the 5% that is the wealthy manipulators looking to make them 15k, I’m trying to buy up all the alloys under that. But because I’m sucking up so many from the market, I’ve got 5% of the slots with 100% of the product. I need to sell them in pairs and fours and eights and in piles. If I don’t, I’m pumping huge amounts of gold into the economy and not bringing it back to me = inflation as more gold is sloshing around. A serious problem is the rise in price has inspired many people to take up farming, increasing supply and acting as a driver toward lower prices. And most fatal to my plan is those thousands of players with the craft bag, sitting there with hundreds of alloys doing nothing, or tens of thousands of various ore to refine into alloys, that get retrieved and starts getting listed at 14k, putting my deficit into overdrive.

    This market manipulation theory is just that - a fantastical theory that does not actually function in THIS economy outside of fevered imaginative brains.

    You missed my last paragraph: this manipulation is not possible on the current system. It is however possible on a central trading system, where you can see every single trade in a one single list and it works even better if you can search for spesific item in a said trade system. And with the example I gave with a theorised single global trader, I'd need to sell 1 potent nirncrux for 40 000 gold to cover 10x bought nirncruxes with the pricetag of 1. This kind of market manipulation is common in the AH/global singular trader system and there is tons of material and evidence that it has happenes before. The market manipulation is the primary reason for me to want to stay with the current ESO trade system, because the current system prevents it quite well.

    Ok, think about this what if some major whale guilds decide to show up and bid out all the top end spots in every single go to spot so no one could have a trading guild there at all while they own it you won't be able to sell to the public at all, and its legit because ZoS allows it?

    What in the blue blazes is a "whale guild"?


    Dirty, filthy casual aka Nancy, the Wallet Warrior Carebear Potato Whale Snowflake
  • Marginis
    Marginis
    ✭✭✭✭✭
    MaxwellC wrote: »
    @Masume
    I feel that this game needs a Grand exchange akin to Runescapes' design. It is a central trading hub with prices having a typical range based on what players have been selling the items during the past week. All items sold in the G.E is hidden so you cannot see what player X is selling it for and undercut them but you're able to make an offer and maybe someone has one lesser than the offer you gave.

    Example: Player A puts a weapon in for 10k gold, Player B offers to buy the weapon in the G.E for 11k. The weapon is sold to Player B for 10k gold and they retain 1k.

    The grand exchange, especially as it was initially implemented, probably isn't the best inspiration to use. I've written entire papers on the subject of the Runescape economy, and suffice it to say, it was better when merching was a thing in Falador garden than how it ever was with the grand exchange.

    The market, since the GE became a thing, has been relatively unstable, competition became substantially less of a market force, bots continually cause problems even though there aren't many left, and effects from when the bots were a flood/avalanche/swarm are still able to be seen, years later. This is completely putting aside the fact that the market is extremely easily manipulated now, and benefits the rich significantly more than the less wealthy players, increasing the wealth gap. Even unintentional market manipulation has led to several market crashes through the years since the GE. This was even worse when there was a limit on how much you could sell items for. Intentional market manipulation then is obviously even worse, partially because people - people in RS, people in ESO, and people in any game - are inherently selfish, greedy, and short-sighted, and don't realize that what they do hurts the market, and even themselves (at least relatively) in the long run. It's the same as what happened with the US market irl, like the crash in 2008, or the crash in the 1920s.

    Basically, all the things that people are saying are bad with ESO's current system, would likely only be intesified with a Runescape Grand Exchange-type system. This is not to say that another or a similar system would have the effects I described, but as someone with intimate knowledge of Runescape's economy from 2002 to today, I can easily tell you RS is worse off than it was, even for those who don't know it (even the extremely well to do in RS would probably be better off than they are, believe it or not), so the GE probably is not a good thing for ESO to base their market off of.
    @Marginis on PC, Senpai Fluffy on Xbox, Founder of Magicka. Also known as Kha'jiri, The Night Mother, Ma'iq, Jane Shepard, Damia, Kintyra, Zoor Do Kest, You, and a few others.
  • Marginis
    Marginis
    ✭✭✭✭✭
    Cpt_Teemo wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    Cryptical wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    With a central trader, the market manipulation would be way too easy and this is not up for a debate. You can google market cornering or market manipulation in MMORPGs and hit several pages explaining it. But for the lazy ones, I'll give a quick run down how it works:

    You decide a quite rare, but useful item to manipulate, let's say a potent nirncrux. And let's say it sells for 4 000 gold at the moment, but you want to sell it at 40 000 gold, what do you do? Well, you open the centralised store, put your potent nirncrux for sale for 40 000 gold and then, you buy everything under the price, every single 4 000 gold nirncrux. You do not have to sell them right away, you can stockpile 'em. Now others do not see those 4 000 gold nirncruxes, because you're buying them right away. The cheapest price others see is your stupid high 40 000 gold price and now some unfortunate people with a moderate amount of gold in their pocket and a need for a potent nirncrux will buy it for the lowest cost of 40 000 gold. You will as a seller use all the gold you earn to buy the low priced potent nirncruxes from the list, upkeeping the facade of "40 000 gold is the lowest price for potent nirncrux". At some point other sellers starts to sell them at 40 000 gold, because that is the selling point for potent nirncrux and no one wants to lose 36 000 profits. You will have thousands of poten nirncruxes in your pocket and you can keep selling them.

    Now this is not possible on the current system because you can't buy easily every single low costing item, because you'd need to travel everywhere. And if you'd try to corner a single guild trader, everybody would stop buying the item from that trader.

    As I explained earlier, this fantasy of yours has already failed on Xbox NA when some people bought up every aetherial dust and increased the prices from ~75k to a new price point of 100 to 110k.

    They successfully kept buying all the lower listed dust. They kept relisting the items at their new desired price. They even convinced zone chat sellers that their price was valid because the inflated price was the only listing out there.

    AND THEY FAILED.

    They managed to corner the market on console, where the economy is even more decentralized than pc because we don’t have the automated harvesting of data from MM and TTC add ons smoothing out the jagged outliers.

    And they still failed because this fantasy of yours does not take into consideration that the general public has the choice of buying or farming it themselves or finding a substitute. With any widespread commodity in eso, there are too many farmers for the market to be controlled like you imagine. It won’t happen with mats, there are too many subscribers with mats just piling up in the craft bag and more are as close as a farming route.

    The arguments against a public trader have been debunked by how the real world attempts at manipulation failed - by not seeing that 5% cannot control the market created by the 95%.

    As usual, this manipulation idea only works in theory until someone actually starts running the numbers on a population size scale. Using temp alloys for example, running like 9k each on Xbox NA. If I’m the 5% that is the wealthy manipulators looking to make them 15k, I’m trying to buy up all the alloys under that. But because I’m sucking up so many from the market, I’ve got 5% of the slots with 100% of the product. I need to sell them in pairs and fours and eights and in piles. If I don’t, I’m pumping huge amounts of gold into the economy and not bringing it back to me = inflation as more gold is sloshing around. A serious problem is the rise in price has inspired many people to take up farming, increasing supply and acting as a driver toward lower prices. And most fatal to my plan is those thousands of players with the craft bag, sitting there with hundreds of alloys doing nothing, or tens of thousands of various ore to refine into alloys, that get retrieved and starts getting listed at 14k, putting my deficit into overdrive.

    This market manipulation theory is just that - a fantastical theory that does not actually function in THIS economy outside of fevered imaginative brains.

    You missed my last paragraph: this manipulation is not possible on the current system. It is however possible on a central trading system, where you can see every single trade in a one single list and it works even better if you can search for spesific item in a said trade system. And with the example I gave with a theorised single global trader, I'd need to sell 1 potent nirncrux for 40 000 gold to cover 10x bought nirncruxes with the pricetag of 1. This kind of market manipulation is common in the AH/global singular trader system and there is tons of material and evidence that it has happenes before. The market manipulation is the primary reason for me to want to stay with the current ESO trade system, because the current system prevents it quite well.

    Ok, think about this what if some major whale guilds decide to show up and bid out all the top end spots in every single go to spot so no one could have a trading guild there at all while they own it you won't be able to sell to the public at all, and its legit because ZoS allows it?

    What in the blue blazes is a "whale guild"?

    A whale is someone with a lot of money, specifically money to spend. Usually this refers to irl cash that is able to be tapped for microtransactions, but my guess is that here it simply refers to a guild that has a lot of money.
    @Marginis on PC, Senpai Fluffy on Xbox, Founder of Magicka. Also known as Kha'jiri, The Night Mother, Ma'iq, Jane Shepard, Damia, Kintyra, Zoor Do Kest, You, and a few others.
  • Armatesz
    Armatesz
    ✭✭✭✭✭
    Marginis wrote: »
    Cryptical wrote: »
    Cryptical wrote: »
    Cpt_Teemo wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    Cpt_Teemo wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    Cryptical wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    With a central trader, the market manipulation would be way too easy and this is not up for a debate. You can google market cornering or market manipulation in MMORPGs and hit several pages explaining it. But for the lazy ones, I'll give a quick run down how it works:

    You decide a quite rare, but useful item to manipulate, let's say a potent nirncrux. And let's say it sells for 4 000 gold at the moment, but you want to sell it at 40 000 gold, what do you do? Well, you open the centralised store, put your potent nirncrux for sale for 40 000 gold and then, you buy everything under the price, every single 4 000 gold nirncrux. You do not have to sell them right away, you can stockpile 'em. Now others do not see those 4 000 gold nirncruxes, because you're buying them right away. The cheapest price others see is your stupid high 40 000 gold price and now some unfortunate people with a moderate amount of gold in their pocket and a need for a potent nirncrux will buy it for the lowest cost of 40 000 gold. You will as a seller use all the gold you earn to buy the low priced potent nirncruxes from the list, upkeeping the facade of "40 000 gold is the lowest price for potent nirncrux". At some point other sellers starts to sell them at 40 000 gold, because that is the selling point for potent nirncrux and no one wants to lose 36 000 profits. You will have thousands of poten nirncruxes in your pocket and you can keep selling them.

    Now this is not possible on the current system because you can't buy easily every single low costing item, because you'd need to travel everywhere. And if you'd try to corner a single guild trader, everybody would stop buying the item from that trader.

    As I explained earlier, this fantasy of yours has already failed on Xbox NA when some people bought up every aetherial dust and increased the prices from ~75k to a new price point of 100 to 110k.

    They successfully kept buying all the lower listed dust. They kept relisting the items at their new desired price. They even convinced zone chat sellers that their price was valid because the inflated price was the only listing out there.

    AND THEY FAILED.

    They managed to corner the market on console, where the economy is even more decentralized than pc because we don’t have the automated harvesting of data from MM and TTC add ons smoothing out the jagged outliers.

    And they still failed because this fantasy of yours does not take into consideration that the general public has the choice of buying or farming it themselves or finding a substitute. With any widespread commodity in eso, there are too many farmers for the market to be controlled like you imagine. It won’t happen with mats, there are too many subscribers with mats just piling up in the craft bag and more are as close as a farming route.

    The arguments against a public trader have been debunked by how the real world attempts at manipulation failed - by not seeing that 5% cannot control the market created by the 95%.

    As usual, this manipulation idea only works in theory until someone actually starts running the numbers on a population size scale. Using temp alloys for example, running like 9k each on Xbox NA. If I’m the 5% that is the wealthy manipulators looking to make them 15k, I’m trying to buy up all the alloys under that. But because I’m sucking up so many from the market, I’ve got 5% of the slots with 100% of the product. I need to sell them in pairs and fours and eights and in piles. If I don’t, I’m pumping huge amounts of gold into the economy and not bringing it back to me = inflation as more gold is sloshing around. A serious problem is the rise in price has inspired many people to take up farming, increasing supply and acting as a driver toward lower prices. And most fatal to my plan is those thousands of players with the craft bag, sitting there with hundreds of alloys doing nothing, or tens of thousands of various ore to refine into alloys, that get retrieved and starts getting listed at 14k, putting my deficit into overdrive.

    This market manipulation theory is just that - a fantastical theory that does not actually function in THIS economy outside of fevered imaginative brains.

    You missed my last paragraph: this manipulation is not possible on the current system. It is however possible on a central trading system, where you can see every single trade in a one single list and it works even better if you can search for spesific item in a said trade system. And with the example I gave with a theorised single global trader, I'd need to sell 1 potent nirncrux for 40 000 gold to cover 10x bought nirncruxes with the pricetag of 1. This kind of market manipulation is common in the AH/global singular trader system and there is tons of material and evidence that it has happenes before. The market manipulation is the primary reason for me to want to stay with the current ESO trade system, because the current system prevents it quite well.

    Ok, think about this what if some major whale guilds decide to show up and bid out all the top end spots in every single go to spot so no one could have a trading guild there at all while they own it you won't be able to sell to the public at all, and its legit because ZoS allows it?
    Your post is quite off topic, but I'll bite. (I think major whale guilds have very little to do about the topic: central market)

    Ain't the major spots already owned by said whale guilds? I mean, all the big trade guilds owns a kiosk in either Rawl'Kha, Wayrest, Mournhold, Elden Root or Belkarth. If you mean that only a couple of guilds forms sub-guilds and buys every single major spot, well, they'd have to have a huge inventory of goodies and lots of time to make it profitable, else, they'd lose gold in millions.

    And yes, it is legit to pay 10 million+ gold per trader spot which prevents smaller bids from getting the said trader, where's the problem? If my guild loses their bid, I'll either stockpile on goodies till our trade guild gets a good spot to sell, or find another trade guild to sell my goods.

    Just saying this system is far worse than any centralized market system tbh

    no it isn't.... it's far better because it makes it impossible for a single player to game the market.

    anyway didn't you quit, aren't you supposed to be playing lotro now?

    Are people not catching this?

    I watched a small cabal completely conquer the small obstacle of having to go to a bunch of traders.

    This barrier of a bunch of trader carts is not nearly as high as you think.

    This is how easy it is:
    Take 12 people. Divide up the carts so each person monitors 16 carts. Those 16 carts are that person’s patrol route.

    12 people is a normal trial group. Is anyone going to tell me they can’t group together 12 people with a lot of gold to tilt the market into making more gold? I bet any platform could come up with 3 full trial groups of wealthy trading-minded players willing to form a cabal to control the market, each person patrolling 5 or 6 carts.

    Right fracking there is the plan that destroys your decentralization protection. Gone. In the puff of a few sentences with a simple idea. Too many carts to monitor them all? Then get help so the task of patrolling carts is easy.

    You were never protected by decentralized traders. It was always that the population can easily farm for what they want or use a substitute.

    in every other post you have made on the topic of people trying to game the current system you say they fail (we already knew that) now you are saying they succeed.... a tad confusing.

    No, there are two different variables at issue - centralization and public access. Apples and oranges, 2 separate things.

    Over and over people cry alarm at the idea of making a centralized way to access the guild traders, claiming that one person could buy up everything and re-list. Using hard numbers, I argue that their fear is not possible to succeed, primarily because of inventory bottleneck and the way those deficits would bankrupt the tryhard in the ballpark of 30 million-plus each month. Also, people have already overcome the obstacle of running to many traders, so the argument in favor of protection by decentralization is a failure.

    The actual defense against manipulation has always been the public’s participation. It is too easy to farm anything in this game for anyone to actually control the market. Look no further than the recent motif event and the impact on buoyant Armiger prices to see how the general public’s farming cannot be held at bay. Making a trader where all of the general public could list things would even further prevent market tampering. It doesn’t seem like it to the naked eye, but by the numbers 90% of the population only ever buys things from the trader carts.

    If people love the decentralized trader model even though it does not protect them like they think, then surely they would STFU and be fine with a general public trader that EVERYONE could access at a bank or at a cart in every town, right? Like, at every multi cart town there is Dibbler, the public trader, the npc where every person can go list things for sale. Same npc in each area, but all are linked to the public access store, just like how you can have Tythis in all your houses but it’s always linked to your bank.

    Keep in mind that intentional market manipulation is only one concern. I personally am much more concerned with the effect bots and gold farmers would have on a centralized system.

    Bots already have influenced the market place. Your concern over bots affecting the market is by far too late. It is already happening. The damage is done, I'm guildless, I don't sell and I make more money than what I hear people at a good trading spot make in a week of selling. I don't even sell stuff to boot.
    Ärmätèsz
    Xbox NA
    Guildless (by choice)
  • Marginis
    Marginis
    ✭✭✭✭✭
    Armatesz wrote: »
    Marginis wrote: »
    Cryptical wrote: »
    Cryptical wrote: »
    Cpt_Teemo wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    Cpt_Teemo wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    Cryptical wrote: »
    aaisoaho wrote: »
    With a central trader, the market manipulation would be way too easy and this is not up for a debate. You can google market cornering or market manipulation in MMORPGs and hit several pages explaining it. But for the lazy ones, I'll give a quick run down how it works:

    You decide a quite rare, but useful item to manipulate, let's say a potent nirncrux. And let's say it sells for 4 000 gold at the moment, but you want to sell it at 40 000 gold, what do you do? Well, you open the centralised store, put your potent nirncrux for sale for 40 000 gold and then, you buy everything under the price, every single 4 000 gold nirncrux. You do not have to sell them right away, you can stockpile 'em. Now others do not see those 4 000 gold nirncruxes, because you're buying them right away. The cheapest price others see is your stupid high 40 000 gold price and now some unfortunate people with a moderate amount of gold in their pocket and a need for a potent nirncrux will buy it for the lowest cost of 40 000 gold. You will as a seller use all the gold you earn to buy the low priced potent nirncruxes from the list, upkeeping the facade of "40 000 gold is the lowest price for potent nirncrux". At some point other sellers starts to sell them at 40 000 gold, because that is the selling point for potent nirncrux and no one wants to lose 36 000 profits. You will have thousands of poten nirncruxes in your pocket and you can keep selling them.

    Now this is not possible on the current system because you can't buy easily every single low costing item, because you'd need to travel everywhere. And if you'd try to corner a single guild trader, everybody would stop buying the item from that trader.

    As I explained earlier, this fantasy of yours has already failed on Xbox NA when some people bought up every aetherial dust and increased the prices from ~75k to a new price point of 100 to 110k.

    They successfully kept buying all the lower listed dust. They kept relisting the items at their new desired price. They even convinced zone chat sellers that their price was valid because the inflated price was the only listing out there.

    AND THEY FAILED.

    They managed to corner the market on console, where the economy is even more decentralized than pc because we don’t have the automated harvesting of data from MM and TTC add ons smoothing out the jagged outliers.

    And they still failed because this fantasy of yours does not take into consideration that the general public has the choice of buying or farming it themselves or finding a substitute. With any widespread commodity in eso, there are too many farmers for the market to be controlled like you imagine. It won’t happen with mats, there are too many subscribers with mats just piling up in the craft bag and more are as close as a farming route.

    The arguments against a public trader have been debunked by how the real world attempts at manipulation failed - by not seeing that 5% cannot control the market created by the 95%.

    As usual, this manipulation idea only works in theory until someone actually starts running the numbers on a population size scale. Using temp alloys for example, running like 9k each on Xbox NA. If I’m the 5% that is the wealthy manipulators looking to make them 15k, I’m trying to buy up all the alloys under that. But because I’m sucking up so many from the market, I’ve got 5% of the slots with 100% of the product. I need to sell them in pairs and fours and eights and in piles. If I don’t, I’m pumping huge amounts of gold into the economy and not bringing it back to me = inflation as more gold is sloshing around. A serious problem is the rise in price has inspired many people to take up farming, increasing supply and acting as a driver toward lower prices. And most fatal to my plan is those thousands of players with the craft bag, sitting there with hundreds of alloys doing nothing, or tens of thousands of various ore to refine into alloys, that get retrieved and starts getting listed at 14k, putting my deficit into overdrive.

    This market manipulation theory is just that - a fantastical theory that does not actually function in THIS economy outside of fevered imaginative brains.

    You missed my last paragraph: this manipulation is not possible on the current system. It is however possible on a central trading system, where you can see every single trade in a one single list and it works even better if you can search for spesific item in a said trade system. And with the example I gave with a theorised single global trader, I'd need to sell 1 potent nirncrux for 40 000 gold to cover 10x bought nirncruxes with the pricetag of 1. This kind of market manipulation is common in the AH/global singular trader system and there is tons of material and evidence that it has happenes before. The market manipulation is the primary reason for me to want to stay with the current ESO trade system, because the current system prevents it quite well.

    Ok, think about this what if some major whale guilds decide to show up and bid out all the top end spots in every single go to spot so no one could have a trading guild there at all while they own it you won't be able to sell to the public at all, and its legit because ZoS allows it?
    Your post is quite off topic, but I'll bite. (I think major whale guilds have very little to do about the topic: central market)

    Ain't the major spots already owned by said whale guilds? I mean, all the big trade guilds owns a kiosk in either Rawl'Kha, Wayrest, Mournhold, Elden Root or Belkarth. If you mean that only a couple of guilds forms sub-guilds and buys every single major spot, well, they'd have to have a huge inventory of goodies and lots of time to make it profitable, else, they'd lose gold in millions.

    And yes, it is legit to pay 10 million+ gold per trader spot which prevents smaller bids from getting the said trader, where's the problem? If my guild loses their bid, I'll either stockpile on goodies till our trade guild gets a good spot to sell, or find another trade guild to sell my goods.

    Just saying this system is far worse than any centralized market system tbh

    no it isn't.... it's far better because it makes it impossible for a single player to game the market.

    anyway didn't you quit, aren't you supposed to be playing lotro now?

    Are people not catching this?

    I watched a small cabal completely conquer the small obstacle of having to go to a bunch of traders.

    This barrier of a bunch of trader carts is not nearly as high as you think.

    This is how easy it is:
    Take 12 people. Divide up the carts so each person monitors 16 carts. Those 16 carts are that person’s patrol route.

    12 people is a normal trial group. Is anyone going to tell me they can’t group together 12 people with a lot of gold to tilt the market into making more gold? I bet any platform could come up with 3 full trial groups of wealthy trading-minded players willing to form a cabal to control the market, each person patrolling 5 or 6 carts.

    Right fracking there is the plan that destroys your decentralization protection. Gone. In the puff of a few sentences with a simple idea. Too many carts to monitor them all? Then get help so the task of patrolling carts is easy.

    You were never protected by decentralized traders. It was always that the population can easily farm for what they want or use a substitute.

    in every other post you have made on the topic of people trying to game the current system you say they fail (we already knew that) now you are saying they succeed.... a tad confusing.

    No, there are two different variables at issue - centralization and public access. Apples and oranges, 2 separate things.

    Over and over people cry alarm at the idea of making a centralized way to access the guild traders, claiming that one person could buy up everything and re-list. Using hard numbers, I argue that their fear is not possible to succeed, primarily because of inventory bottleneck and the way those deficits would bankrupt the tryhard in the ballpark of 30 million-plus each month. Also, people have already overcome the obstacle of running to many traders, so the argument in favor of protection by decentralization is a failure.

    The actual defense against manipulation has always been the public’s participation. It is too easy to farm anything in this game for anyone to actually control the market. Look no further than the recent motif event and the impact on buoyant Armiger prices to see how the general public’s farming cannot be held at bay. Making a trader where all of the general public could list things would even further prevent market tampering. It doesn’t seem like it to the naked eye, but by the numbers 90% of the population only ever buys things from the trader carts.

    If people love the decentralized trader model even though it does not protect them like they think, then surely they would STFU and be fine with a general public trader that EVERYONE could access at a bank or at a cart in every town, right? Like, at every multi cart town there is Dibbler, the public trader, the npc where every person can go list things for sale. Same npc in each area, but all are linked to the public access store, just like how you can have Tythis in all your houses but it’s always linked to your bank.

    Keep in mind that intentional market manipulation is only one concern. I personally am much more concerned with the effect bots and gold farmers would have on a centralized system.

    Bots already have influenced the market place. Your concern over bots affecting the market is by far too late. It is already happening. The damage is done, I'm guildless, I don't sell and I make more money than what I hear people at a good trading spot make in a week of selling. I don't even sell stuff to boot.

    It's not a matter of damage being done or not, it's a matter of how much damage you want to be done. It's just like having bots in the game in the first place - you can never fully stop them; there WILL be bots, it's just a matter of how much will you try to limit them.
    @Marginis on PC, Senpai Fluffy on Xbox, Founder of Magicka. Also known as Kha'jiri, The Night Mother, Ma'iq, Jane Shepard, Damia, Kintyra, Zoor Do Kest, You, and a few others.
  • Odnoc
    Odnoc
    ✭✭✭✭
    The only thing the system needs is a HUGE update to UI, searches being the first thing needed. I don't know how many hours I've searched through pages and pages of motifs looking for a single one. Almost makes me not want to play.
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