Auctions Houses have to come despite megaserver

Mishoniko · April 2014

Brennan wrote: »

Look at the Eve Online economy. Buyers put up orders for items they want and sellers put up orders for stuff they want to offload. It is also regional so you can have one for every zone or one each for the three Alliances.

The thing people forget about EVE is that there is market inefficiency -- you have to travel to the trade point to drop off & pick up the items and that takes _real_time_ as there is no galactic teleportation technology. This has a HUGE effect on how well the market works, and acts as a built-in brake against corruption.

In that travel time the prices could wildly fluctuate. That haul of ore you picked up last week from the outer fringe when it was worth more than the value of the ship hauling it could drop through the floor in the travel time and be worthless by the time you get to market.

Most MMO markets are exclusive and too efficient which makes it easy to corner the market on a wide variety of items and defend against sellers trying to undercut you on the one market that is available.

Thankfully most market exploiters aren't that smart and end up inflating their prices too high too fast; the market just shuts down until they get bored and move on, which can happen in the span of 2-3 days.

Drachenfier · April 2014

Ragnar_Lodbrok wrote: »

No they dont. Only a crying minority who are too anti-social to join a guild want them.

Recent poll respondents shows that its actually the majority. Don't have to look far to find it, either.

There needs to be faction wide AH, at the very least. This current system is godawful.

Catches_the_Sun · April 2014

The lack of an Auction House was one of the main selling points of ESO for me. Why? Because if I wanted features that discouraged socialization, I would be playing Skyrim.

Jirki88 · April 2014

Catches_the_Sun wrote: »

The lack of an Auction House was one of the main selling points of ESO for me. Why? Because if I wanted features that discouraged socialization, I would be playing Skyrim.

Please explain how the lack of an AH "encourages socialization". Do you define "socializing" as WTT/WTS/WTB spam? Or as selling to/buying from only a few people instead of anyone?

bbadeau · April 2014

Just a thought really...
Why not give players the ability to set up a small shop/booth either in a town or just outside the walls and sell their wares?
The game could lease space and provide an NPC shop clerk that would act in the same manner as the merchants do. Sellers would have to compete in the world (so to speak) and would have to adjust their prices in the same way that real shops do.
Maybe even a merchant skill?

Putok · April 2014

Subana wrote: »

The guild AH system seems backwards to me. Sure, you can join up to a few guilds and trade stuff to the other members, but this is exclusive to the guild. To set up an analogy, lets have the guilds Reebok and *** in ESO. They'd be in a guild together, but they would be selling each other their shoes, not to the populace and at a loss because of the built in fees. Players Converse and Adidas, on the other hand, opt out of the guild AH structure and are able to reach whichever shard instance they're in and sell shoes to the masses, without fees.

A global AH system, however, would break the shard barrier. Meaning the whole of either megaserver would dump its goods into the AH and prices would normalize just above merchant fodder for gathered materials. Crafting would become easy for anyone not wanting to take the time to actually gather their materials and everyone would be able to make everything over time, leaving those who spend their game time focused on crafting with no real purpose.

What is needed is a way for guilds to sell/trade with non guildies. An opt-in directory for the guild AHs where people can browse the various stores and purchase what they'd like. This would allow for competitive marketing and collaboration among trade guild members. It could also afford reputation for fairly priced guilds as you could give them the ability to track the number of successful transactions and profits (yes, profits could be fed into the guild's bank if also a system to set the fee themselves was in place instead of letting Oblivion take it).

Opening up the guild store system seems like a workable solution. Maybe let it work something like the AvA campaign system, where you're allowed to pick a "home" AH that is not your guild, and charge a fee to switch home AHs sooner than X period of time.

Reducing the 25% fee would be nice too.

Being able to search and sort wouldn't just be nice, it should be considered a requirement.

rnehrlichub17_ESO · April 2014

I liked the idea of the guild store, and wanted so much for it to work. As an officer in a full crafting/trading guild, I was one of the guild store's biggest promoter, and encouraged everyone to use it rather than WTS spam.

Many who used the guild store to sell crafting materials were able to make a decent profit the first few days of early access, but when the prices for most goods dropped, people stopped using the store because the 25% fee was so great that they could sell it to a vendor and make greater profits.

The fees are detrimental to the economy because if I want to sell some iron to a guildie, it would have to be out of kindness of not wanting to make a greater profit from a much faster trip to the nearest vendor.

Aside from that, we have the option to be in 5 guilds, and means I can be in a social/casual guild, hardcore PVP guild, group PVE content guild, and still have room for 2 trading guilds. Even if the 2 trading guilds were converted to a larger Auction House that had a much better profit margin, I would still be sociable with 3 other guilds.

ironvosneb18_ESO · April 2014

NO global auction house please.
Improvements on the guild store system or player run shops, yes.
But no global auction house.

washlov · April 2014

ironvosneb18_ESO wrote: »

NO global auction house please.

why? guildstores are useless atm. and actually a real guild dont need them. there are a bank guildchat ts3...
there will be traderguildjumping, pricechecking and so on...
it is all, but surely not funny or interresting!

carazvaneb17_ESO · April 2014

I do think that he guild shops need to become more prominent somehow and fees there be lowered but I certainly think that an AH is not the answer.
The reason is that having an AH makes trades a lot less personal which takes away from the experience. Just stating efficiency for trading isn't the answer. Efficient then would be for each town to have just 1 NPC buyer/seller for everything ... but that doesn't fit the story/setting and neither does an AH.
Currently the system works by no fees if in same area, small CoD cost if trading between 2 people and 25% if posting an item to a large group via guild store (I haven't used them so not sure here).
I like the way I currently have some players in my friends list that after a WTS/WTB message I can add and contact directly for a trade. However I do agree that this makes chat in towns very crowded but then again it's a town so it's suppose to be a center for commerce.