Ever since I first encountered the system, I've always thought that hired NPCs were a good compromise in terms of MMO trading. They're more immersive than a server-wide auction house, more accessible than guild traders, and you don't need to be online in order to trade ... which, nostalgia aside, is a downside of individual player shops that I remember quite vividly.

You may want to rephrase your poll to avoid confusion

The question your asking:
Nah, this is no change Thread, just a bit of Nostalgia… "But hey, here is a Poll, which trading Methode was your favorite in MMO history?"

Is not the same as:
Remember how you would have actual Market places in old MMOs, with hundrets of people trying to sell

One asks what you prefered. One asks what you remember

I prefer: NPCs who sell for you
I remember: Standing around afk

Trading in chat and trading face to face is not a good system, it never really was.

I played Runescape initially, back in like '01 - You had to go to Falador park to trade and there were just player accepted "segments" in this park that were for specific item trades. I.e. Up by the back cages were the rares, outside the front of the bank was herbs and so on.

The problems were that it wasn't always exact and people could and would be everywhere, you'd have chat going at 100miles an hour with peoples auto typers and trade requests, you had the slippery fellas trying to rob people and trick people into using items accidentally by declining trades and all the rest.

In WoW, I used the AH system, unanimously better, didn't need to wait around trading pointlessly, can leave your item in and carry on, or conversely stop what you're doing very briefly to buy an item then return, without having to wait for anyone or have someone waste your time.

I don't like that ESO traders aren't server wide as spending 45m travelling about looking for something that doesn't exist is a waste of my time imo but I imagine that's a fun part of it for other people.

AH was my fave by miles.

If you want fair prices, guild traders are the way to go. Items in AHs are so manipulated that they are wildly overpriced or they are completely bottomed out due to an undercut war. That's not good or fair for both buyers and sellers. More convenient, sure, but hardly fair.

The fact that guild traders don't let you see absolutely every copy of a particular item in existence is a good thing. That forces you to look for a price that you think is fair and that you're willing to pay rather than perpetuating the mindset that the only fair price is the rock bottom minimum at any given time. Even with things like TTC, the market is still diversified just enough to discourage manipulation and undercutting. This creates more of an actual market and trade environment than something like an AH ever could.

So, FFXI had a serverwide auction house, but they also had a system that I really wish ESO would implement, and actually ESO already has the perfect tool built in to do it through.

It was called the Bazaar. Any chacter could designate up to I think 10 inventory slots to have items up for sale in their bazaar. You simply click on an item in your inventory and select add to bazaar, and then set your price. Whenever you had items in your bazaar you would get a little coinpurse icon next to your character so anyone passing by could see you had items for sale, and they could click on you and say view bazaar and if they saw something they wanted they would just click on it and buy it and you'd get a message in your log saying "such&such bought X item from your Bazaar for Y price". Simple.

Probably similar to the marketplace you described, but there was no designated area, it was always active, you could be out questing in the middle of nowhere and get that message on your screen. Endgame guilds would even use it as a simple way of handing out necessary potions and things for events, just put them in someone's bazaar at 1 gold each.

The reason I think it would be perfect in ESO is because, one we already have merchants we can summon, just make it so other people can interact with our merchants and allow us to give the merchant a few items to sell. Actually when I first heard we could hire merchants this was what I assumed their purpose was. Also it gives people who don't sell through guild traders for whatever reason an alternative other than zone shouts, but not one that would put the guild trader system out of business the way any sort of auction house would. And I know there is a lot of people who would like an alternative. In fact I think it even sort of fits with the theme that ZOS was going for when they came up with the guild trader system.

I've never enjoyed trading in games, for me it's purely a necessity, like food shopping in real life. I sell stuff because I want to get rid of it and want gold, and I buy stuff because I cannot reasonably get it any other way. And like food shopping it's something I want to get done as quickly as possible with a minimum of fuss, not drag out indefinitely for the sake of the 'experience'.

Therefore my favourite trade systems are the ones which are quickest and easiest to use. I'm not fussed on auctioning items off vs. selling for a fixed price so I'm not necessarily attached to the idea of an auction house - but I've come to realise that on this forum that just means an automated trade system so that's why I picked that option.

Of the games I've played my favourite trade system is the one in Guild Wars 2. Anywhere in the world I can open the Trading Post menu, click the sell tab and see the current highest offers for all the tradable items in my inventory and what price other people are selling for, and choose to either list mine for sale at whatever price I think is reasonable or sell it immediately to the current highest bidder.

Likewise if I want to buy any item I open the menu, type the name into the search box or use filters to find it, and I can see all the ones currently for sale or put in a buy offer if I think those are too expensive. From there the process is automated - sooner or later the sale goes through - which could be to anyone, anywhere in the game - and the money or item/s are waiting for me to collect them from an NPC when I'm ready.

What makes that system really nice for me is that it will automatically split or combine bulk purchases. If I want to buy 200 Iron Ingots for example I don't have to find 1 person selling 200 in one go, I just have to put that number in for my transaction and then it will either auto-buy the 200 cheapest (if I choose that option) or fufill my buy order in bits as people sell them - so I might get 10 from one person, 50 from another, 3 from a 3rd and so on until I've got 200. But I don't need to worry about it, I just wait until it's gone through. (Same for sellers, but other way around of course.)

Kiralyn2000 wrote: »

mann9753b16_ESO wrote: »

I dont know why, but for some reason I just remembered the good old days, where instead of an autcion house or guild traders, we had a real market place, where you could enter a "selling" mode, and go AFK, or actually had to offer your wares… (though you can still do this in ESO)

I've only ever seen that in variously-awful Eastern f2p's. Like Perfect World.

Most MMOs I've played have had server-wide auction house systems (WoW, STO, NW, SWTOR, CoH, TSW/SWL, etc)



(That said, I basically don't participate in the economy in this game. I've never had enough worth selling to join a guild for it, and until that recent UI patch - and even with it, since everything is fragmented - it's been too hard to find anything on a trader. anything I don't use I vendor to NPCs, dismantle, or destroy.)

I think you have to go back to pre-WoW MMOs to see a system like that in Western MMOs. When I played Ultima Online that was the only option - no guild traders, not trade chat channel, no map-wide chat (no chat channels at all), you had to stand in a populated area and spam a message advertising what you were selling, or buying, and only people close enough to see the chat bubble over your head would see it. The latest game I saw with that system was Guild Wars 1 which was released about a month after WoW (and therefore in development at the same time). That game has a trade channel but otherwise it's the same system.

I remember this in final fantasy 11. You would see a bunch of characters parked in the major citiesand they were actually markets. You could could into their trade menu and they would have a text message box that would advertise their wares or welcome you to their store or whatever.

Used to be great to leave my PS2 running all day and come home to enough money to buy the next expensive ring set or whatever for my character.

Until it wasn't. Leaving a PS2 on all day was not exactly good for it. I kinda miss having a personal store front like that though.


Edit: I see Wandering_Immigrant remembers it too, but in greater detail. It really was a great little system. And I agree with using the merchant assistant with the same system, even if it is limited to our player homes.

mann9753b16_ESO wrote: »

I dont know why, but for some reason I just remembered the good old days

I hated the open market. In EQ, people would camp a bard with full buffs on so that the people in the general area would lag and crash, just to remove competition. There wasn't anything fun about AFKing, and leaving your comp on all night just to sell a few items.

Much prefer the AH/Broker style of hawking your goods.

Zathras wrote: »

Glurin wrote: »

If you want fair prices, guild traders are the way to go. Items in AHs are so manipulated that they are wildly overpriced or they are completely bottomed out due to an undercut war. That's not good or fair for both buyers and sellers. More convenient, sure, but hardly fair.

The fact that guild traders don't let you see absolutely every copy of a particular item in existence is a good thing. That forces you to look for a price that you think is fair and that you're willing to pay rather than perpetuating the mindset that the only fair price is the rock bottom minimum at any given time. Even with things like TTC, the market is still diversified just enough to discourage manipulation and undercutting. This creates more of an actual market and trade environment than something like an AH ever could.

Price manipulation, overpricing, and undercutting doesn't happen in ESO with the guild traders?




Ok.

Didn't say it doesn't happen. I said it's discouraged, which is the exact opposite of what AHs do.

Gythral wrote: »

Donny_Vito wrote: »

The Good ol' Days.

The bad ol'days of anything you want to sell being valueless and anything you want to be being priced so high, due to a few churning for profit, that you stop looking!
Guess all the Auction House votes are market churners...

Or they just understand how supply and demand works.

Perfect world was the most pay to win game I ever played but it was cool to set up my shop while I was afk or a second account running. I remember this one town was *** covered in stalls. After playing ESO though I don't think servers today could handle it.

I made this suggestion in a forum discussion already bc I always thought it was cool to walk in a market area in town and see a bunch of players with stalls up. Made it seem more real but you also had the guild traders for the people that just wanted to post and forget method.

But as my concern and many other the serve performance probably couldn't handle it sadly. I wish ZOS would figure out there server issues and make that a priority over anything else.

I remember when they implemented the Bazaar in EQ and the only way to navigate it was to stare at the ground when walking in first person because it was like 1 frame per 15 minutes lol

I was pretty heavily involved with this type of trader in the Forza Motorsport scene up until FM5 came out. (Microsoft/T10 destroyed the franchise with that one)

It worked well. I miss it.