Eifleber wrote: »

When I started playing I was quite surprised that ESO didn't have any centralized buying and selling mechanic. Which I found rather strange since I don't see the added value: ESO has instant travel - unlike EVE where local markets and transport are quite a thing. I just hate to waste hours of my life traveling around to find something that may not even be available on the whole server at all, like rare furniture. Often the guild trader doesn' t even exist in the place TTC mentions.

How would trading be if it were up to you?

Before I started playing when I was looking into the game, reading about the guild traders was a huge draw for me. As someone who has spent a lot of time trading in MMOs with globalized market boards, and to great success, the added layer of smaller localized markets sounded fascinating to me, and being run by guilds made it even more of a draw.

I'm not disappointed.

I find it far more immersive, as this is how I imagine trading would be done in an old-worldy type universe without access to online shopping.

It also rewards people who stay in the loop and support the economy by frequenting traders as both buyers and sellers. The more you see how prices fluctuate, the more you understand the value of items, and the less running around you have to do. I can log into FF14, and make a million my first day back without having even any ideas what's changed over the past year, because everything is layed out in front of me like spreadsheet. But here, that knowledge is aquired through experience, which makes it a much deeper system and more rewarding for people who choose to put in the time with it. That's not to say it punishes people who choose to be more self-sufficient only stopping by a trader when they absolutely need to, but there is a certain amount of "you get what you put into it" at play, and to me that's a good thing.

I'm on console so I don't have TTC or whatever other advantages PC users have, and I still like the system. It did take me a bit of time to start selling, which was frustrating since I'm usually selling day 1 in an MMO, or as early as the game will allow, but I'm glad I didn't give up on it.

My only complaints are with the UI. I'd like to be able to sell directly from my bank and craft bag, having to go back and forth between menus feels clunky and unnecessary. I'd also like to not have to worry about my screen freezing up any time I push a button, I swear sometimes I think this game trying to program us to be afraid to push buttons. This game has tons of UI problems though not just the guild traders, most of their menus look like they were ported directly from a dos game.

I vote we should ban posts concerning auction houses in ESO...

There's a reason there's a meme out there about the so-called "Auction HORSE"...cos there are a million different threads about auction house, to the point where it might be the dictionary definition of the phrase "beating a dead horse"...and even after Zeni said "no auction house".

Dead horses should be placed strategically throughout the land and these should act as stores. Flogging your wares at a dead horse seems fitting

ZaroktheImmortal wrote: »

As for those saying it'll never happen. For ages people said there would be no dragons yet we have dragons. They said we'd never get a vampire lord form and shouldn't yet we got it in some sense at least. There's been a lot of things people said would 'never happen' yet end up happening. So who knows how it'll turn out maybe some day they will change it.

There is a bit of a difference in putting a different skin and changing stats/mechanics on something and reworking an entire economy.

as much as I hate shopping and load screens (and I just blew 4m on housing, and another 2.5m on top of that completing my motif collection from post-jubilee), I dont want a global auction house by any means. tedious as the shopping may be, it's much harder to monopolize items with it.

I firsthandly experienced someone trying to do this by trying to run around and buy up a certain motif that went for about 10-15k, and he attempted to try and crank it up to 150k. Unfortunately, people kept listing them faster than he could scoop them up, and eventually he gave up. if it was an auction house he could have just snapped them all up then and there.

and Im speaking as someone with enough millions that I could do something similar.and as greedy as I might be, I have no desire to do this.

Knightpanther wrote: »

The current system is utter rubbish.

Why should i spend my valuable time wandering zones to find the best deal?
Add-ons (which i don't use - i look up items on said site) are consistently wrong and it just means select guilds can rig the prices.
Why should we pay a fee (Guilds need the dosh to set up traders) to sell our hard earned loot?

The only reason i am in a trading guild is because i have a lot of respect for the leader who spends a lot of time keeping the guild going but for the life of me i have no idea why.

Auction House is the only way.

Be Safe

And on this, you make a point :

Why should i spend my valuable time wandering zones to find the best deal?

Well, indeed, if you don't want to spend your time that way, you don't, it's as simple as that.
Don't wanna search? Buy it for a little more than you'd have if you lokked a little.

Too bad you also delved into the "big guilds rigs price" lunacy, cause I'll tell you something :
There are NO guilds that keep tabs on what their 500 (500!) sellers put on listing. That would need an inordinate amount of time. Every player is perfectly free to put their own prices. The guild leaders can secure their spot by promising they won't snipe each others, but they absolutely cannot rig any price.

Also, I don't know for you, but I'm in 2 big guilds in fought after location, and I never paid any fee.
There's a sale quota, sure, but there never was a fee.

Zulera301 wrote: »

as much as I hate shopping and load screens (and I just blew 4m on housing, and another 2/5m on top of that completing my motif collection from post-jubilee), I dont want a global auction house by any means. tedious as the shopping may be, it's much harder to monopolize items with it.

This is patently false. Some items are cornered regularly, maybe not by 1 person, but still bought up and reposted at a premium. Rare motifs (DLC dungeon chests and legs for example), potent nirncrux, high-demand alchemy ingredients, all are picked up and reposted at a profit. There is NOTHING to prevent this other than the need to visit other guild stores. Travel in ESO is trivial, as opposed to other games where you can't simply port from one zone to the next. It's inconvenient and boring AF, especially when the game starts serving you long loading screens, but still trivial.

If market cornering is such a concern, then the focus should never be on guild store vs. auction house. The difference between them is negligible. To prevent market cornering you'd need high enough taxes to discourage reposting items, or an outright ban (temporary or permanent) on reposting store-bought items.

preevious wrote: »

Don't wanna search? Buy it for a little more than you'd have if you lokked a little.

"A little more"? Have you actually spent time visiting different traders looking for the best currently-available price? There isn't just some small variation between the prices being asked for by different players; there is often an incredibly huge variation between prices-- like, in some cases as much as tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands. If all you do is run to the nearest trader and buy from the player who's offering the lowest price, you could end up spending a lot more money than if you'd shopped around for a while-- and shopping around can be very tedious if you're using TTC, because you have to sort the search results in ascending order by price, then start visiting the indicated traders one by one, and the listings with the best prices are usually several hours old, if not days old, and have long since been bought out but not yet removed from TTC's database, so you might have to go through two or three pages of listings before you finally find the lowest currently-available one, and it's usually at some trader you'd already visited five times to see if one of the older listings with a better price was still available.

preevious wrote: »

daemonios wrote: »

Zulera301 wrote: »

as much as I hate shopping and load screens (and I just blew 4m on housing, and another 2/5m on top of that completing my motif collection from post-jubilee), I dont want a global auction house by any means. tedious as the shopping may be, it's much harder to monopolize items with it.

This is patently false. Some items are cornered regularly, maybe not by 1 person, but still bought up and reposted at a premium. Rare motifs (DLC dungeon chests and legs for example), potent nirncrux, high-demand alchemy ingredients, all are picked up and reposted at a profit. There is NOTHING to prevent this other than the need to visit other guild stores. Travel in ESO is trivial, as opposed to other games where you can't simply port from one zone to the next. It's inconvenient and boring AF, especially when the game starts serving you long loading screens, but still trivial.

If market cornering is such a concern, then the focus should never be on guild store vs. auction house. The difference between them is negligible. To prevent market cornering you'd need high enough taxes to discourage reposting items, or an outright ban (temporary or permanent) on reposting store-bought items.

This is not "cornering the market". This is "taking opportunities".

Of course I'll buy and repost an item if it's on sale for a fraction of it's usual price. It's not that I corner the market, it's just that the initial seller made a mistake, or had no clues about the market.

If I buy a ferrari for the price of a lada, and then sell it back at a ferrari's price, I'm not cornering the ferrari's market.

How is an oligopoly different from a monopoly from the buyer's standpoint? You decried monopolies, yet if it's just players "taking opportunities" you suddenly embrace it? You're not even trying to argue any more.

[EDIT] Also, spare me the real world examples. This is a game. I happen to believe games don't have to emulate the real world, and are often better when they don't. The in-game economy should serve the game as a whole, not the players who choose to dedicate themselves to it.

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

preevious wrote: »

Don't wanna search? Buy it for a little more than you'd have if you lokked a little.

"A little more"? Have you actually spent time visiting different traders looking for the best currently-available price? There isn't just some small variation between the prices being asked for by different players; there is often an incredibly huge variation between prices-- like, in some cases as much as tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands. If all you do is run to the nearest trader and buy from the player who's offering the lowest price, you could end up spending a lot more money than if you'd shopped around for a while-- and shopping around can be very tedious if you're using TTC, because you have to sort the search results in ascending order by price, then start visiting the indicated traders one by one, and the listings with the best prices are usually several hours old, if not days old, and have long since been bought out but not yet removed from TTC's database, so you might have to go through two or three pages of listings before you finally find the lowest currently-available one, and it's usually at some trader you'd already visited five times to see if one of the older listings with a better price was still available.

Hundred of thousands? Yeah, sure, and if you pull the other one, it plays Judas Priest ..

Most items are sold at market value +/- 20 %. On most expensive items, it's what .. 1k-5k more? On common items (tempers, mats, most motifs) .. the difference isn't even 500g.
For a difference only in the 10s of k, you are already searching for ultra rare stuff, so you'll fork over loads of gold anyway.

Talk about bad faith -_-

preevious wrote: »

Hundred of thousands? Yeah, sure, and if you pull the other one, it plays Judas Priest ..

Yes, in some cases hundreds of thousands. Don't believe me? Then you've obviously not spent any time shopping for motifs, because some of them can vary by outrageous amounts.

EDIT-- And just to be clear, I mean a specific page of a specific motif, not different pages of the same motif, or different motifs.

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

preevious wrote: »

Hundred of thousands? Yeah, sure, and if you pull the other one, it plays Judas Priest ..

Yes, in some cases hundreds of thousands. Don't believe me? Then you've obviously not spent any time shopping for motifs, because some of them can vary by outrageous amounts.

EDIT-- And just to be clear, I mean a specific page of a specific motif, not different pages of the same motif, or different motifs.

I spent millions buying motifs, I actually have them all, since crafting is an aspect of the game I value very much.

Most motifs are reasonably priced (jubilee event). Motif pages that reach 100k can be numbered on your right hand's digits. (sure, new motifs pages reach that price .. just wait 2 weeks, and they'll be at 10-50k, like all the others)
NO motif is expensive enough to have hundreds of k of difference. Not a single page.
Gold books? maybe, but it's downright moronic to buy them for learning. That's collector's stuff.

So, yeah, hundred's of k of difference makes probably 0.01% of the search cases, and then only for things like ciphers, runeboxes and ayleid/dwemer plans. For something so rare, put in a little work, will you?

daemonios wrote: »

preevious wrote: »

daemonios wrote: »

preevious wrote: »

daemonios wrote: »

Zulera301 wrote: »

as much as I hate shopping and load screens (and I just blew 4m on housing, and another 2/5m on top of that completing my motif collection from post-jubilee), I dont want a global auction house by any means. tedious as the shopping may be, it's much harder to monopolize items with it.

This is patently false. Some items are cornered regularly, maybe not by 1 person, but still bought up and reposted at a premium. Rare motifs (DLC dungeon chests and legs for example), potent nirncrux, high-demand alchemy ingredients, all are picked up and reposted at a profit. There is NOTHING to prevent this other than the need to visit other guild stores. Travel in ESO is trivial, as opposed to other games where you can't simply port from one zone to the next. It's inconvenient and boring AF, especially when the game starts serving you long loading screens, but still trivial.

If market cornering is such a concern, then the focus should never be on guild store vs. auction house. The difference between them is negligible. To prevent market cornering you'd need high enough taxes to discourage reposting items, or an outright ban (temporary or permanent) on reposting store-bought items.

This is not "cornering the market". This is "taking opportunities".

Of course I'll buy and repost an item if it's on sale for a fraction of it's usual price. It's not that I corner the market, it's just that the initial seller made a mistake, or had no clues about the market.

If I buy a ferrari for the price of a lada, and then sell it back at a ferrari's price, I'm not cornering the ferrari's market.

How is an oligopoly different from a monopoly from the buyer's standpoint? You decried monopolies, yet if it's just players "taking opportunities" you suddenly embrace it? You're not even trying to argue any more.

[EDIT] Also, spare me the real world examples. This is a game. I happen to believe games don't have to emulate the real world, and are often better when they don't. The in-game economy should serve the game as a whole, not the players who choose to dedicate themselves to it.

Indeed, game mechanics should serve the game as a whole, not the players who dedicate themselves to them.

Then, I'll take an emperor title and a godslayer achievement, please. Don't feel like working for them, so just give them to me, already ! I want my "emperor's red" !

Why would I need to excel/spend time in anything to reap the benefits? ***, I suppose that's not the same, heh?

How would giving away titles serve the game? Can you compare things that are actually comparable? You're just being dishonest, as demonstrated by your recent replies to me and @SeaGtGruff. I know this topic has been beaten to death but I still think discussion can be positive. Not with you, though.

I'm not being dishonnest, I'm just saying that farming / raising gold / mastering a system takes time and dedication. How and why would the market be different?