Artmetis wrote: »

EllieBlue wrote: »

Utter madness. At this point, what would a reasonably serious trading guild need to do in order to survive, and to continue to be able to afford to make winning bids on that one spot, weekly, weeks in weeks out? Something that is needed in order to have stability, which is paramount for any serious trading guild. Because with this new change taking place, stability will go the Dodo bird way, really fast.

1. Raise sales requirement
2. Raise the amount of gold donation/fees for those not hitting weekly sales requirement
3. OR replace no 2 with mandatory fees for all members
4. Be more restrictive with rules, duration of offline days, no-sales grace period

because bid costs are going to rise by at least double, if not triple on normal weeks. On DLC and new chapter week, bids will go up by x10, and for the next 3-4 weeks after that initial week.

So the one that loses the most here will be guild members/regular players. New players want to join the main hub's trading guilds? Only if you are able to produce sales good enough from the get-go. Those players that only want to donate 5k weekly but not sell anything when they don't feel up to it? Sorry, can't afford to keep you anymore. Community? What community?

Meanwhile, trading guild GMs are going to continue getting the fat cat, thieving, scamming scums title from players that felt like they have been wronged after being removed from their trading guild. At the same time, (disgruntled) trading guild GMs are trying, desperately to raise gold weekly in order to be able to afford the rising amount needed for winning bids, in between trying to deal with the guild history data troubles, demands and questions about all the changes from their members, all in 7 days, week in week out.

Good luck everyone, both regular traders and trading guild GMs!

Disclaimer: The scenario only, possibly, applies to the trading guilds in the major hubs - Craglorn, Mournhold, Wayrest, Elden, Rawl and possibly even the next tier locations. Will not apply, much, to waaaaaay out in the woods single trader casual guilds, maybe.

The ones that will benefit from this new change will be the jumper guilds. Put 10 bids on 10 different guilds, one will surely stick! It's open season, betches!

Well said, and yes it HAS to happen. There is no way to raise the $ to bid, for mid/small guilds. So hey, us larger guilds have to kick out ppl that don't do a ton of sales/donating. to make sure the 'best sellers' stay with us, cause we would have a stall! I for one, will have to start kicking out ppl. Guildies that been with us for years, and are helpful to the guild at times, but don't have deep pockets. Sorry, DAS BOOT! We need to bid a ton more now... BYE! Maybe they will find a home in a new guild somewhere... someday... but can't sell cause no stall.. or quit the game... donno...

@artmetis they can come join us plebs in the smaller guildS!!!!!

:-)

oooooooooooooooo = long term conspiracy theory = this is the true aim of the update = to force trading guilds to be 100% get every BIS trader in the game! :-)

Artmetis wrote: »

Well said, and yes it HAS to happen. There is no way to raise the $ to bid, for mid/small guilds. So hey, us larger guilds have to kick out ppl that don't do a ton of sales/donating. to make sure the 'best sellers' stay with us, cause we would have a stall! I for one, will have to start kicking out ppl. Guildies that been with us for years, and are helpful to the guild at times, but don't have deep pockets. Sorry, DAS BOOT! We need to bid a ton more now... BYE! Maybe they will find a home in a new guild somewhere... someday... but can't sell cause no stall.. or quit the game... donno...

That seems a little extreme, and I am not sure why people think that they need to bid on 10 every week. I mean, it isn't like you are going to be getting 10 traders.

In addition to considering part of the bid non-refundable, maybe 10 bids is too many. Perhaps 2 or 3? I wonder if PTS will be long enough for ZOS to assess that. Perhaps what ZOS needs to do is consider 2 or 3 bids to start, then increase as needed?

Personally, I am wondering how many will bid on more than that, or even more than 1. That sort of data won't come from PTS.

I'm bidding on 10 every week...!

Rushinator wrote: »

lordrichter wrote: »

Artmetis wrote: »

Well said, and yes it HAS to happen. There is no way to raise the $ to bid, for mid/small guilds. So hey, us larger guilds have to kick out ppl that don't do a ton of sales/donating. to make sure the 'best sellers' stay with us, cause we would have a stall! I for one, will have to start kicking out ppl. Guildies that been with us for years, and are helpful to the guild at times, but don't have deep pockets. Sorry, DAS BOOT! We need to bid a ton more now... BYE! Maybe they will find a home in a new guild somewhere... someday... but can't sell cause no stall.. or quit the game... donno...

That seems a little extreme, and I am not sure why people think that they need to bid on 10 every week. I mean, it isn't like you are going to be getting 10 traders.

In addition to considering part of the bid non-refundable, maybe 10 bids is too many. Perhaps 2 or 3? I wonder if PTS will be long enough for ZOS to assess that. Perhaps what ZOS needs to do is consider 2 or 3 bids to start, then increase as needed?

Personally, I am wondering how many will bid on more than that, or even more than 1. That sort of data won't come from PTS.

It's quite simple, the more bids you can place the more likely you will be able to secure a Trader. Since other guilds will also be able to place 10 bids, it's gonna be a game of domino each week with guilds being bumped then bumping others who then bump someone else.

Some people will see their first 5 or so bids fail due to a number of reasons including not estimating the correct amount to bid to win.

The guilds in that situation will probably be the small-medium guilds. The large guilds will probably win their 2nd bid or 3rd if their 1st bid fails.

Even though I run a large guild, I'll be putting as many bids out as I can to avoid the worst case scenario. Having 10 bids, means I can also gamble with the first few & place Bids #2-5 in the same city (high-end) for example. I can then place bids 6-10 in less trafficked areas but where I'm sure I can win in case bids 1-5 fail.

Yeah, I am not sure it is going to be going like you think. At least, not on a large scale. Most of the responses that I see in here are very insular, mainly dealing with how they will behave, making assumptions about how others will impact them, if at all.

It is going to cost gold to bid on those #1 to #5 kiosks, and if you don't bid enough gold, you are going to find yourself in the 6-10 range. It is going to cost more per week to bid on 10 locations than you spend on the one, now. (This is why I think part of the bid should be non-refundable, by the way... add more risk to the venture and limit the carry-over effect)

Your solution to getting gold is to increase dues and kick out under-performing traders and hope high performing traders replace them, but those kicked traders don't just vanish from the game. They are going to go to other trade guilds (likely), and some of your new traders are going to be under-performing traders from better guilds than yours. This can only serve to spread out the players across multiple guilds, increasing competition and bids. The way I see to manage this is with a consortium, moving players between guilds in the group, and then coordinating bids.

There might be a few guilds that have the cash to significantly increase their weekly bids, but they are only going to get one trader, like today, and the failed extra bids have no impact on the other bids for the same location, even if they are the largest bid. If the guild bidding 1 million for a location gets another location, then if the next largest bid is 1000 gold, that bid wins.

This is what I think is going to end up happening. First, being able to bid on 10 locations doesn't do anything but tie up guild gold until the bids are processed and they get the gold back. The big trade guilds already get their kiosk almost every week, and I don't see that changing. I think that guilds will go all out on the main location, like they do today, and then place a couple lesser bids in case someone tries to disrupt them. This system will allow guilds to attempt to disrupt, if they have the cash on hand, by placing a disruptive bid as #1, and their normal weekly bid as #2 or bidding on some place out in the sticks as backup, but target guilds don't have to have 10 bids to mitigate that risk. In the end, I suspect that the aggregate data will show guilds bidding on fewer than 5 locations per week, and possibly as few as 2 or 3, with almost no one bidding on 10.

I was just wondering how are guilds classified as big, small or medium? Trader location, member count, gold in bank or profit margin each week?

JezzaAKTT wrote: »

I was just wondering how are guilds classified as big, small or medium? Trader location, member count, gold in bank or profit margin each week?

All of the above. They correlate with each other. A good location will attract good sellers which in turn will raise the guild's sales. This will have positive effects on the amount of gold in the bank. Profit margin is slightly more tricky as it depends on how much you have to bid weekly and during new dlc/chapter weeks. Most trading guilds don't have cushy numbers sitting in their guild bank or profit margin to speak of. However, you need to have good enough gold in the bank in order to stay at the spot in a good location.

Unless the GM is ultra-rich, most of the trading guild will start from the lower-tier location or mid-tier location and build their guild from there. Some are happy to stay mid-tier because to get to the top tier is not easy and they are happy with the level of investment they put out. Some dont make it at all because they find the mental, financial and time investment just not worth it.

Pevey wrote: »

f047ys3v3n wrote: »

Not sure why people are pissed about this or why they don't think the change will help small guilds.

The effects should be:

1) Smaller guilds will rarely loose their spot to a big dog since the big dogs will no longer have to buy up secondary spots on weeks they don't loose their primary and they rarely loose their primary.

2) Overall trader costs will lower as there are now fewer total guilds bidding for a spot (this is because you just removed all those shadow guilds of the big dogs.) Simple supply and demand here.

3) Week to week prices for specific traders will become more consistent and possibly also lower because the severe negative effect of loosing your bid (no trader at all) has been removed. You will now likely still get a lesser trader. (A secondary effect of this will be that spying will offer less advantages than it previously did.)

4) Guilds trader locations will move more often because, with a less disastrous worst case scenario, guilds will take more chances on bids to save money and will also take more chances on improving their location. This should be really pronounced right after the change as guilds currently have little data on how much location effects their sales and at least some of them will be adventuresome enough to want to find out if a move up or down in location is more profitable.

5) I expect the competition between guilds to become more dynamic and involve less cartel behavior (ie. getting other guilds leaders banned right before the bid to prevent them from bidding). In effect, being able to explore multiple options for trader locations based on price should bring the market closer to free market ideals and decrease the benefits of anti-competitive behavior. It certainly greatly lowers the barriers to entry to start and especially to grow a trade guild.

In short, I think the changes will make things dramatically better for almost all players in the market and that they should completely solve the problem of shadow trade guilds.

Some advice to many of you who have posted.... Just put your investments in index funds IRL. The lack of basic understanding about how markets work in here is just staggering.

Logic is flawed. This does not address shadow guild issue. Shadow guilds are mainly created for additional revenue.

This might actually make the issue of shadow guilds worse. Present an obstacle to people and they will find the easiest way around it eventually. Pushing Guilds to spend more will force them to need new sources of gold. Extorting other guilds could be an alternative.

Also this is never something that can be properly tested on the PTS no.

The PTS is great for testing scripts, animations etc.

What it never will be able to test is behaviour - because travellers simply do not behave the same way on the PTS when they are not taking a risk for real.

The trading system is fuelled by behaviour. You will not see the potentially devastating impact of this change until it hits live - which this one hopes it never, ever will.

Yours with paws
Santie Claws

Dont_do_drugs wrote: »

SantieClaws wrote: »

Also this is never something that can be properly tested on the PTS no.

The PTS is great for testing scripts, animations etc.

What it never will be able to test is behaviour - because travellers simply do not behave the same way on the PTS when they are not taking a risk for real.

The trading system is fuelled by behaviour. You will not see the potentially devastating impact of this change until it hits live - which this one hopes it never, ever will.

Yours with paws
Santie Claws

I hope you ambassador guys are raising your voice on Slack. Everything concerning trade guilds has been overheard so often, since trade guild gm are quite a low number, but this is massive, this isn't something u can bring live and change months later,still knowing zos behavior and ignorance towards such issues, as with backup and ghost exploits, it will only start to bother thrm, when the casual guild members start to be affected, annoyed and *** into the forums about the chaotic and still exploit-open situation months later.... But then the damage is already done.

This one has raised her voice on this issue by every means that she can yes

Yours with paws
Santie Claws

DragonRacer wrote: »

No. It merely needs the minimum 50 members to unlock guild store and, thus, have the ability to bid.

That’s why it’s so easy for ghost guilds to exist on PS4. When one can essentially make unlimited alt accounts to meet that 50 member mark, you make a new ghost guild(s) each week to replace the one(s) you disbanded last week when you sold the spot(s) to someone.

There is a way to make using ghost guilds cumbersome. Membership requirement has to be reached, and sustained, for a few weeks prior to making the bid. Joining a new guild should also lock the player to that guild for the same period. This would avoid a new guild falling at the last fence, if one of its 50 members left the day before the bid is submitted.

This won't eradicate the problem. It will make using ghost guilds less straightforward. If the ghost guild has 50 players who are in on it, that's one of every member's guild slots locked up for a few weeks. Keeping the ghost guild means permanently locking up a guild slot. If the ghost guild disbands, whoever was behind it will have to wait another, few weeks before the same trick can be tried again.

No-one would be prevented from making a genuine bid; they would simply have to plan ahead. Setting up a trade guild needs a bit of lead-in time anyway. Members have to be recruited, stock accumulated and so on.

Some inconvenience for players seems worth it, if ghost guilds suddenly find it's a lot more cumbersome to operate. Genuine players should be willing to make the commitment and the sacrifice if they really want a trade guild.

Maybe instead of forcing this blind bid system that nobody seems to like anyways, ZOS could instead try a different approach.

Each trader location no longer provides separate kiosks like now, but instead the NPCs all show the same interface and players can select the guilds like at a banker. That way the number of guilds can easily be adjusted for each location to handle increased demand due to more players entering the game. The tabards could just be placed as banners around the trader stalls or something.

Guilds no longer place a bid, but instead they have to pay a stall fee after the trading week finished. If they cannot pay it, they will be blocked from trading for a week. If they cannot pay the fee three times, they will be blocked from that location for a longer time, or maybe until they do some guild wide quest or something. The fee is dynamically adjusted based on the sales in that location. Spots with bigger guilds and more sales will cost more to maintain.

Selecting which location a guild is in would then need a different mechanic. My suggestion is to allow guilds to freely select (and deselect) the location they want during the week and show a public list of which guilds are applying for that spot. The order is based on their sales during the current week and only the top X guilds will be able to set up shop for the next week.

This way it would directly depend on how well the trading guild operates and no longer be p2w like it is now. It would also solve the problem of empty ghost guilds entirely.

juttaa77b16_ESO wrote: »

I like the kiosk system we have. I just don't like how easy it is to manipulate, and how little vendors are available. ZOS could expand existing trade areas and add new kiosks to them. They could find a way to stop guilds from disbanding and changing GM while they own a vendor spot. I'm pretty sure. The dev team didn't intend for players to form guilds solely to hire traders, and then disband them the same day to sell the vendor to a real guild. This should have been branded as an exploit, the minute they found out it happened. They should've informed the players to immediately stop, or face consequences if they did it again, while they worked on a fix for the problem. I need to ask. How can a MMO dev team let something that impacts it's game economy negatively continue on so long?

I like the kiosk system too. It could be expanded as we've all talked through over the least, few days. A global AH does have a certain appeal, but I don't like the idea of genuine guilds being left in the lurch - unfair.

The ghost guild shenanigans is nothing more than sleight of hand. ZoS could wipe it out with ease, without any major negatives for genuine players and guilds.

martinhpb16_ESO wrote: »

And I would say that even reducing it to 2-3 bids will still create mayhem.

Yes and this is something very important:

Even IF developers consider that "as a compromise they will reduce the bid amount from 10 down to 3", this should be kept in mind:

Practically it does NOT matter how many back up bids guilds have a possibility to place. 3, 10 or even 50.
Every single time when a guild looses their primary bid and will land to alternative spot, that always will cause a domino effect which goes down to the bottom of the chain, where the weakest guild will be tossed out of the map.
As long as every guild have a possibility to place back up bids, this is gonna happen every week.

lordrichter wrote: »

Fiktius wrote: »

martinhpb16_ESO wrote: »

And I would say that even reducing it to 2-3 bids will still create mayhem.

Yes and this is something very important:

Even IF developers consider that "as a compromise they will reduce the bid amount from 10 down to 3", this should be kept in mind:

Practically it does NOT matter how many back up bids guilds have a possibility to place. 3, 10 or even 50.
Every single time when a guild looses their primary bid and will land to alternative spot, that always will cause a domino effect which goes down to the bottom of the chain, where the weakest guild will be tossed out of the map.
As long as every guild have a possibility to place back up bids, this is gonna happen every week.

To some extent, it probably will happen every week. Just as today, every week guilds don't get a spot because their bid failed and they were unable to log in fast enough to secure a secondary location because someone else got to it faster, or there were no secondary locations available.

You are right with that. However situation goes worse when back ups are part of the system:

What we have now on live servers is the intention to bid on place X and you either win or loose and there is no chain reaction for that week.
Yet lost guilds have a chance to find an open spot right after the trade week reset, if they are quick and have some luck to hire open one fast enough.

What we seem to get if everyone have a chance to bid alternative back ups:
Guilds have a chance to bid on max 10 spots they select (depends of their gold funding of course) and they have a chance to win one spot, yet domino will always happen if others did bid on those same spots and the chain goes down to the bottom of the system where small guild couldn't afford even one bid high enough to make it.
What they could afford currently is very likely that they can't afford anymore due more wealthy guild did value that spot as their back up and happened to bid much higher, for securing even one trader.
New system also makes it very possible that none of the traders will be left for open for hiring after the reset is done.
So in this case, from perspective of medium/small tier guilds, the system is becoming even worse.

Grimm13 wrote: »

Why complicate it, make it a simple solution. A Guild disbands, the Trader is still locked up until the next bid just as if the disbanded guild was still there. No benefit from disbanding then they stop doing this. Simple, problem solved, eludes ESO logic apparently.

Simplest is almost always best.

I was thinking of the scenario where someone new made a new ghost guild every week. If your solution would stop a myriad of new guilds springing up every week, then, yes, it would be much easier to implement. In that case, I'd say go for it.

Whichever way it's implemented, the aim should be to make it really hard to game the system with ghost guild trickery.