Glurin wrote: »

FinneganFroth wrote: »

I have not heard this term before. Can someone explain ghost guilds to me? Kthx

The general idea is that a guild will buy up a spot for the sole purpose of selling that spot to another guild or ransoming it to the guild that normally has it or otherwise try to profit from surrendering the spot later.

They typically won't have anything for sale in their store. The point is not to sell items. It's to extort money from other guilds, sometimes in the form of game cards (ie. RL money), which is wildly in violation of the ToS.

Although sometimes the motives are less malevolent. Some large trade guilds will use a ghost guild to buy a less desirable spot as a backup if they lose their primary spot. If they lose the primary spot, they just take the less desirable one from the ghost guild. Different motives, but same result nonetheless.

I've also heard that some of these guilds are run by larger guilds to stop competition. Kinda like the conspiracy theory that oil companies are buying up water powered car technology specifically to make sure it never sees the light of day. Fortunately there are way too many traders for any one guild to pull that one off. At least not without a massive level of coordination and way more gold than they could hope to earn back for the investment required. Not to mention ZoS would likely step in and break that up if that ever happened.

Franieck wrote: »

Glurin wrote: »

FinneganFroth wrote: »

I have not heard this term before. Can someone explain ghost guilds to me? Kthx

The general idea is that a guild will buy up a spot for the sole purpose of selling that spot to another guild or ransoming it to the guild that normally has it or otherwise try to profit from surrendering the spot later.

They typically won't have anything for sale in their store. The point is not to sell items. It's to extort money from other guilds, sometimes in the form of game cards (ie. RL money), which is wildly in violation of the ToS.

Although sometimes the motives are less malevolent. Some large trade guilds will use a ghost guild to buy a less desirable spot as a backup if they lose their primary spot. If they lose the primary spot, they just take the less desirable one from the ghost guild. Different motives, but same result nonetheless.

I've also heard that some of these guilds are run by larger guilds to stop competition. Kinda like the conspiracy theory that oil companies are buying up water powered car technology specifically to make sure it never sees the light of day. Fortunately there are way too many traders for any one guild to pull that one off. At least not without a massive level of coordination and way more gold than they could hope to earn back for the investment required. Not to mention ZoS would likely step in and break that up if that ever happened.

that is genius! asswhole move but.. kindda admirable at the same time.

Tyralbin wrote: »

Have heard that ZOS are looking into doing some improvements for the guild system.

Hopefully sorting out this mess with the traders is part of that.

One idea I have stated in the past is that if they come up with some form of guild housing a trading post could appear outside the guild house. The guild would have to firstly purchase the trader expansion for the house (depending on what you pay for the trader gives slots per member) and then have to pay the trader a weekly fee just like we do now.

These traders could be on top of those that already exist

What are your thoughts on this?

Ohtimbar wrote: »

Yeah, I don't think the average player knows how incredibly consolidated the guild traders have become. It's very difficult to get established when you're expected to compete with individual guilds that in reality are networks of 3, 5, 10 guilds all sharing a large pool of resources. There are good reasons why the guild system failed in real life.