Trade Kiosk System Idea: Taxes-Only Bids

silvereyes · June 2020

It's no secret that trade kiosk bids are atrociously expensive. The pressure to bid high is enormous and forces trade guilds to resort to many fund-raising activities that have nothing to do with trading, such as raffles and dues. They are even often independently financed at a loss by crown sales and/or gold earned in other more successful guilds.

I had an idea about how to combat this problem, and I wonder what others think of it.

Each guild gets a new separate gold-only bidding account

Only members with bid privileges can see the bidding account balance
Bids for kiosks can only use funds from the new bidding account.
No deposits or withdrawals are allowed between players and the bidding account.

Guild cut of sales taxes automatically deposits to the bidding account, not the guild bank

Guild cut of sales taxes is reduced to 2% from 3.5%
The game cut increased to 5% from 3.5%
The 1% listing fee remains the same.
This is all to discourage gaming the system. If you really want to indirectly transfer gold to the bidding account by selling overpriced items to an accomplice, you will lose 3g for every 1g transferred. 1% listing fee + 5% game cut = 6% = 3x the 2% guild cut.

Weekly sales totals are added to the guild roster for each member.

Every member sees their own sales totals.
A new permissions level would allow members to see other members' totals.

Benefits
This is a big change, but I think it would be good for the game because of the following benefits.

Direct correlation between selling and winning bids. The only way to get more kiosks with good listings is to make sales the determining factor for which guilds get kiosks.
More fairly priced listings for buyers. Overpriced items don't sell, don't generate tax revenue, and therefore lead to lower bid funds. Lower bid funds means they will get outbid by guilds with reasonable priced items that sell and generate tax revenue.
More items listed for buyers. All things being equal, a guild that encourages members to list more items will generate more taxes than one that does not.
Better trust between guild officers and members. Taxes that cannot be withdrawn cannot be embezzled or outright stolen.
Lower bid prices. I admire the hard work that officers do to run fund-raisers or donate personal funds so that others don't have to. However, those activities do have the unfortunate side-effect of inflating bid prices beyond what is reasonable for a location. Only allowing bids that are proportional to sales allows the market for that location to determine the maximum bids that location can sustain.
More fun for trade guild officers. Leading will revolve more around teaching members to be better traders and possibly providing top-sales / top-buyer rewards, instead of running raffles or soliciting dues. In-game tools for tracking member sales would make identifying those who don't make minimums very easy, even on console.
Less annoyance for guild members. Eliminating all the fund-raising solicitations would be a breath of fresh air for many.

Downsides
I would be remiss if I didn't mention some of the things that people may not like about the idea. The current system does have some upsides that would go away.

No more free lunch. There are many social guilds that have their traders independently financed by a benevolent GM. Eliminating that injection of outside wealth into such guilds would mean they probably can't compete for bids anymore.
Harder to break into the market. Jump starting a trader with personal funds will be 4x as costly, due to the tax structure. New guilds will need to provide buy-local incentives to their members and save up in-guild sales taxes in order to win their first bid, and then there needs to be enough kiosk sales to sustain the bids from then on.
Worse gold sink. The largest guilds only supply a fraction of their bids with tax revenues. Even ensuring taxes are 100% removed from circulation probably wouldn't come close to sinking the same vast sums of gold that are removed today. This means ZOS would need to come up with a new gold sink.

What are your thoughts? Are there any pros or cons that I've forgotten? Do you like the idea or not? Why?

Darkenarlol · June 2020

this will bring "any member must buy for X gold from guild" alongside with

increasing membership fee x4 and bringing chaos to the marker for unknown amount of time

more than that this proposed system doesn't make things easier for

any category of players - nor for sellers nor for buyers

and ofc it can blur out shady deals like selling item worth 5g for 500k (what goldsellers do)

because it gonna become the mainstream way to invest into your bid account

with this new noone-asked-for 75% tax for transfering

Kwoung · June 2020

It would be impossible for a newer guild to ever get a kiosk, the current trade guilds with a huge sales structure in place would dominate the vendors forever. Basically, nothing would change for the better as far as the average Joe is concerned, it would just make life easier on the GM's of the current trade guilds, as they wouldn't have to compete with personal wealth funding trader bids against them.

There is no way internal sales would ever be able to compete with the taxes generated by a guild that has high end traders selling to everyone in the entire game alrready.

Dusk_Coven · June 2020

Complicated systems don't always help against exploits.
And the current system already sees some guilds willing to take a net weekly loss just to secure a guild kiosk (which makes the whole system stupid -- "I start a business to lose money.") So to secure the best spots, I wouldn't put it past guilds to put gold into the bidding account using whatever exploit they can, just to secure the kiosk they want. Fundraising and fees would probably continue just to churn their listings to fill up the bidding account adding a layer of clunkiness and resulting in little change to the system.

Before looking at numbers, look at the system. The guild kiosk blind bid system really needs to go. When so many players use a third party AddOn to try to circumvent its inconveniences, that's a sign it's not wanted and something closer to the AddOn is what they want.

Taleof2Cities · June 2020

I agree with the above posters about internal sales. Separating out sales between fellow guild members would be too complicated.

Varana · June 2020

This will also hit more casual players very hard, and make the system even more difficult for them.

Want to be in the guild for social reasons, or whatever, but not a top seller? You're dead weight.
Have a lull week when you can't play much? You're dead weight.
Not a high turnover, or selling stuff that fluctuates in price and availability? Some weeks, you're dead weight.
If you dislike sales quotas now, be prepared to have them rise sky-high.
Guilds could be much less lenient with their rosters.

Apart from crown selling, things like lotteries or donations are still guild members putting money back into the guild, and usually this won't be a net loss overall. So this way of earning money for the bid is still directly connected to the sales. I don't know why you would want to abolish that.

bmnoble · June 2020

All that would change is guilds would replace weekly dues/raffle tickets auction bids basically any alternative form of raising gold for the trader bid to:

Buy x amount of golds worth of stuff off are trader each week and every guild would have sales targets.

Basically any casual trade guild member would end up being driven out or only join trade guilds for a week at a time sell their stock of items and then leave when they don't have enough stuff to sell to meet the requirements.

As for the whole guild masters funding casual trade guild bids them selves all that would happen is they would go around and buy a lot of stuff the guild has listed and re list it themselves to fund the bid, with a lot of richer guild members doing the exact same thing.

The bigger/more purely trade focused guilds would be able to hold onto their kiosks even easier while new trade guilds would have to somehow convince members to join their guild, trade exclusively in house to raise funds for a bid, limiting their customer pool, losing access to the wider market where they could get a better price for their stuff and to be honest not a lot of player are going to be willing to stick around in a fresh trade guild long enough for any meaningful taxes to be raised for the trader bid when they can just join an existing guild.

The current system is not perfect but I don't think the OP proposal is a better alternative.

zvavi · June 2020

bmnoble wrote: »

The current system is not perfect but I don't think the OP proposal is a better alternative.

This, 100 times this

VaranisArano · June 2020

You are 100% correct that ZOS would need to add another gold sink to make up for the losses.

For example: one guild bid we know about was the losing bid of 22.5 million during the week when someone sniped the Rawlkha guilds.

If you tried to make all of that with taxes, you would need a sales requirement of 129k+ every week from 500 players.

Now, I could do that. I'm sure a number of that guild's sellers could do that. But honestly, most of their members probably don't. In fact, most guilds have much lower sales requirements than they need in order to fund themselves through the guild tax.

So practically speaking, this would dramatically lower the gold sink from the trader bid, meaning that ZOS needs a new gold sink.
Were you hoping to save money from "overpriced" goods? Because I'm pretty sure ZOS will find a new way to nickel and dime you out of any savings you get.

zarocco26 · June 2020

Am I the only person that doesn’t think the trading system needs “fixing”? ESO is a 6 year old game, with a 6 year old economy that feels pretty healthy after all these years. I mean look at the prices of crafting mats, sure there has been inflation, but it’s not like they are so expensive that it becomes a real barrier to people wanting to gold out their gear. I get that the system may not be perfect, but it seems like it works well enough not to need a radical overhaul. IDK, maybe I’m missing the issue but after adventuring and writs, I put all my spoils on the guild store and they mostly sell, ones that don’t I lower the prices. I never have a hard time hitting my quota and have millions of gold, I’m by no means a power trader. Raffles, crown sales, auctions all are part of the guild I’m in, sometimes I participate, sometimes I don’t. It doesn’t seem like a huge deal to me, and finding deals in some of the off the beaten path traders is always a rewarding experience. I honestly feel like ESO has the best and most unique trading system, and I hope that we get some minor improvements/ bug fixes, but generally speaking this feels like one of the places that ESO kind of nailed it,

silvereyes · June 2020

The main design goals of the changes were to get rid of exorbitant bid prices and generally improve the quality of listings in lower tier kiosks. However, you all raise very good points.

Dusk_Coven wrote: »

Complicated systems don't always help against exploits.

Yeah, I was very happy with the entire concept until I realized the potential for fake sales to exploit it. I toyed around with various ideas, but realized there was really no way to prevent it, so I settled on just trying to discourage it with the tax structure.

Darkenarlol wrote: »

increasing membership fee x4
[snip]
it can blur out shady deals like selling item worth 5g for 500k (what goldsellers do)

because it gonna become the mainstream way to invest into your bid account

with this new noone-asked-for 75% tax for transfering

All fair points. This all just goes to show all the unintended consequences a change can have.

So the tax structure just makes things worse, and doesn't even fulfill the intended design goal of removing infusions of outside wealth that inflate bids. So I guess scratch that idea.

Kwoung wrote: »

It would be impossible for a newer guild to ever get a kiosk...
[snip]
There is no way internal sales would ever be able to compete with the taxes generated by a guild that has high end traders selling to everyone in the entire game already.

Honestly, the direct infusion of wealth into new guilds isn't really a problem, so there should probably be a way to allow direct deposits for new guilds, while disallowing them for established guilds. Not sure the best way to accomplish that. Hmm....

Rinthetharmo · June 2020

[Snip] It would make it even more imposible for a guild like mine, small and casual, to get one. I STILL havent managed to win a freaking bid and its starting to *** me off tbh, the trade system sucks, ALL guilds should be able to offer their members a trader!

[Edited for minor bash]

NavalOffisah · June 2020

The ever increasing bids is in part due to the ever increasing gold being generated in game. As mentioned by others the bids are an effective (if not necessary) gold sink to prevent insane inflation within the game

Your proposed system would almost ensure that guilds that aren't already established never land a trader

silvereyes · June 2020

Varana wrote: »

Apart from crown selling, things like lotteries or donations are still guild members putting money back into the guild, and usually this won't be a net loss overall. So this way of earning money for the bid is still directly connected to the sales. I don't know why you would want to abolish that.

I don't. I want to abolish inflating bid prices with wealth earned (or bought with crowns) from outside the sales activities of the current guild.

However, as others have mentioned, the fake trade exploit method kind of undermines the whole idea. Without a solution for that, the whole system crumbles. It restricts legit, desirable activity like reinvesting sales profits, and doesn't even solve the problem of injecting outside wealth.

idk · June 2020

Ironically this idea would further separate the better run guilds from those that want to move up. Essentially, the guilds in the best locations would and manage their memberships well would have the highest revenue and therefore be guaranteed to outbid everyone else.

In other words, it would have the opposite effect OP is looking for as it would make it much harder for guilds in secondary locations to move up. It would be most detrimental to new guilds.

Edit: Some of the changes seem totally pointless. Changing the guild take per sale is irrelevant in this suggestion. If the members wanted to game the system they would still be able to just as easily since the guild % is still a constant.

AlnilamE · June 2020

I don't think that would improve anything.

If people want to bid more than their sales, let them. They'll run out of money eventually and someone else will take over that trader.

silvereyes · June 2020

Thanks for the feedback, everyone! You all make great points. I agree it was a bad idea.

zarocco26 wrote: »

Am I the only person that doesn’t think the trading system needs “fixing”? ESO is a 6 year old game, with a 6 year old economy that feels pretty healthy after all these years.

I'm beginning to appreciate what an accomplishment that is. I'm still dissatisfied with aspects of it, but I understand the reticence to start mucking around with a legacy system that mostly works. You start pulling on one thread that you don't realize is intertwined with 20 others, and all of a sudden, the whole thing starts to unravel.

Economics is hard.

JKorr · June 2020

silvereyes wrote: »

It's no secret that trade kiosk bids are atrociously expensive. The pressure to bid high is enormous and forces trade guilds to resort to many fund-raising activities that have nothing to do with trading, such as raffles and dues. They are even often independently financed at a loss by crown sales and/or gold earned in other more successful guilds.

I had an idea about how to combat this problem, and I wonder what others think of it.

Each guild gets a new separate gold-only bidding account
Only members with bid privileges can see the bidding account balance

Bids for kiosks can only use funds from the new bidding account.

No deposits or withdrawals are allowed between players and the bidding account.

Guild cut of sales taxes automatically deposits to the bidding account, not the guild bank
Guild cut of sales taxes is reduced to 2% from 3.5%

The game cut increased to 5% from 3.5%

The 1% listing fee remains the same.

This is all to discourage gaming the system. If you really want to indirectly transfer gold to the bidding account by selling overpriced items to an accomplice, you will lose 3g for every 1g transferred. 1% listing fee + 5% game cut = 6% = 3x the 2% guild cut.

Weekly sales totals are added to the guild roster for each member.
Every member sees their own sales totals.

A new permissions level would allow members to see other members' totals.

Benefits
This is a big change, but I think it would be good for the game because of the following benefits.
Direct correlation between selling and winning bids. The only way to get more kiosks with good listings is to make sales the determining factor for which guilds get kiosks.

More fairly priced listings for buyers. Overpriced items don't sell, don't generate tax revenue, and therefore lead to lower bid funds. Lower bid funds means they will get outbid by guilds with reasonable priced items that sell and generate tax revenue.

More items listed for buyers. All things being equal, a guild that encourages members to list more items will generate more taxes than one that does not.

Better trust between guild officers and members. Taxes that cannot be withdrawn cannot be embezzled or outright stolen.

Lower bid prices. I admire the hard work that officers do to run fund-raisers or donate personal funds so that others don't have to. However, those activities do have the unfortunate side-effect of inflating bid prices beyond what is reasonable for a location. Only allowing bids that are proportional to sales allows the market for that location to determine the maximum bids that location can sustain.

More fun for trade guild officers. Leading will revolve more around teaching members to be better traders and possibly providing top-sales / top-buyer rewards, instead of running raffles or soliciting dues. In-game tools for tracking member sales would make identifying those who don't make minimums very easy, even on console.

Less annoyance for guild members. Eliminating all the fund-raising solicitations would be a breath of fresh air for many.

Downsides
I would be remiss if I didn't mention some of the things that people may not like about the idea. The current system does have some upsides that would go away.
No more free lunch. There are many social guilds that have their traders independently financed by a benevolent GM. Eliminating that injection of outside wealth into such guilds would mean they probably can't compete for bids anymore.

Harder to break into the market. Jump starting a trader with personal funds will be 4x as costly, due to the tax structure. New guilds will need to provide buy-local incentives to their members and save up in-guild sales taxes in order to win their first bid, and then there needs to be enough kiosk sales to sustain the bids from then on.

Worse gold sink. The largest guilds only supply a fraction of their bids with tax revenues. Even ensuring taxes are 100% removed from circulation probably wouldn't come close to sinking the same vast sums of gold that are removed today. This means ZOS would need to come up with a new gold sink.

What are your thoughts? Are there any pros or cons that I've forgotten? Do you like the idea or not? Why?

What if I only sell items occasionally, but donate more gold than I'd ever generate from sales in gold to the guild every week?

Theoretically overpriced items don't sell. If people are willing to pay the cost, the items aren't overpriced. Or it could lead to the gm specifying price limits, which wouldn't be a good thing.

So it seems that, for the new system, I'd have to devote a lot of my play time to farming mats and items to sell, instead of playing content to enjoy. Why would I bother at all? Why would anyone go from "sell when you want" to "constantly farm to keep selling slots filled" because that is the only way to fund the trader.

xaraan · June 2020

No, this would just lock people out of the system more and give even more control to the trade cartel that already exists.

Tandor · June 2020

I think that any changes to the trading system need to deliver on three things:-

First, there needs to be a way of opening up the system (albeit in a highly limited way) to those not in guilds, or in guilds that don't have a trader.

Second, there needs to be a way of lessening the personal pressure on the GMs in operating the system.

Third, there needs to be a way of making buying a lot easier without the need for global travel just to find what what you want, let alone where it is cheapest.

Then, any changes addressing those key issues need to be applied uniformly across the platforms.

idk · June 2020

AlnilamE wrote: »

I don't think that would improve anything.

If people want to bid more than their sales, let them. They'll run out of money eventually and someone else will take over that trader.

It would actually make it harder for a guild to move up in ranks as they would struggle to get the sales necessary to have enough to bid in the big cities.

It would make life easier for the well-run guilds in the major cities. For the most part, they go their due to having solid leadership.

Edit. Doing something about selling crowns for gold would do more for the trade guild situation. That is the actual and real issue. Players could still use the gold from selling crowns to make big purchases at their guild to give them an advantage.

silvereyes · June 2020

idk wrote: »

Doing something about selling crowns for gold would do more for the trade guild situation. That is the actual and real issue.

I don't disagree, but I doubt ZOS will ever do anything about it. They would have to spend resources on enforcement in order to earn less money. A company that cared more about the game than money might go that route, but after years of neglecting even the most basic QoL improvements for guilds, while continually slipping further down the not-so-micro-transactions slippery slope, I don't see any evidence to make me think ZOS is such a company.

DrSlaughtr · June 2020

He's an idea. Get rid of the bidding system all together. Create a zone by zone market where guild's have to buy weekly licenses.

idk · June 2020

silvereyes wrote: »

idk wrote: »

Doing something about selling crowns for gold would do more for the trade guild situation. That is the actual and real issue.

I don't disagree, but I doubt ZOS will ever do anything about it. They would have to spend resources on enforcement in order to earn less money. A company that cared more about the game than money might go that route, but after years of neglecting even the most basic QoL improvements for guilds, while continually slipping further down the not-so-micro-transactions slippery slope, I don't see any evidence to make me think ZOS is such a company.

It is the revenue they care about. In a market that is becoming less likely to pay a subscription increasing the subscription rate is not the answer. That is why we are seeing cash shops. It is not the cash shop that is the problem with the market. It is that we can "trade" crowns for gold. It really pushes the gold sellers, aka bots, to do more and inflates the economy. In ESO this is most noticeable with trader bids. In other games, it is most noticeable with items selling for millions of game currency. If Zos were to eliminate gifting bids for top locations would come down a notch or two.

Vajrak · June 2020

Retain the bidding system.

Add in a new function:
The guild that controls the trader can set a fee so that anyone can list on their market.
The tax for the sale will be essentially doubled at absolute base/no fee -- 4% will still go into the guild bank, the other 3% will be removed from the economy, and the person selling the item will receive whatever else is left of the gold (so you lose 7 gold per 100 for not being part of the guild you are selling, 4 goes into guild's bank, 3 is just removed from the game).

It still keeps a reason for having control of a trader, as well as creating another potential revenue stream for that guild via the fee for usage, akin to a consignment, though the particular items will only last through until the trader flip/resets.

It retains the goldsink of trade bids, adds another minor one with some gold just being outright removed, and has a shorter period, allowing anyone to engage in trade without having to join a trade guild at all if they do not want to or can't for whatever reason.

Related to that system, it'd also make sense to add a traveling trader to each town/city -- outside the hub proper/on the main road into the area, that has no bid, just a flat fee for posting up items of 10-15% of the price + 1k base.

silvereyes · June 2020

idk wrote: »

If Zos were to eliminate gifting bids for top locations would come down a notch or two.

That's not going to happen. First off, there are way more players that like gifting for legit reasons and would be negatively impacted by its removal than there are people negatively impacted by kiosk bid prices. Heck, I myself have gifted DLC to friends so that we can run content together.

It's not gifting that's the problem. It's the gold selling. But cracking down on that requires analysis and manual intervention. ZOS can't even keep up with their current ToS violation case load with existing staff and tools, so they'd need to invest in that division more if they were to add more cases to be investigated.

kargen27 · June 2020

"More fun for trade guild officers. Leading will revolve more around teaching members to be better traders and possibly providing top-sales / top-buyer rewards, instead of running raffles or soliciting dues. In-game tools for tracking member sales would make identifying those who don't make minimums very easy, even on console.

Less annoyance for guild members. Eliminating all the fund-raising solicitations would be a breath of fresh air for many."

There are some assumptions made with these statements. Sure setting up the raffles is a pain but the actual raffle itself is often one of the weekly highlights. Usually a good crowd in Discord with all kinds of fun being had. After the raffle players would sometimes break into groups to do pledges or other things.
Same with auctions. I know how hard the guild officers worked to plan those auctions but the actual auctions were a blast. Again a lot of members in Discord (and guild chat) having fun while we raised money to get our trader. The last big trading guild I was in the auction was always a blast even if not actually bidding. The big trade guilds I was in also had other events. We had contests for gathering mats that would be donated and then used as raffle prizes or other things. The contests were a fun break from other game activities.
Many people in the game have the mistaken impression that a trading guild does nothing else. Truth is because of the joined efforts to keep that prime spot they are some of the most social guilds in the game. And it is a foreign concept to me but I know a few players that really like the behind the scenes spreadsheets and all that stuff associated with a smooth running trade guild. That and trying to flip items for profit is what keeps them playing the game.

idk · June 2020

silvereyes wrote: »

idk wrote: »

If Zos were to eliminate gifting bids for top locations would come down a notch or two.

That's not going to happen. First off, there are way more players that like gifting for legit reasons and would be negatively impacted by its removal than there are people negatively impacted by kiosk bid prices. Heck, I myself have gifted DLC to friends so that we can run content together.

It's not gifting that's the problem. It's the gold selling. But cracking down on that requires analysis and manual intervention. ZOS can't even keep up with their current ToS violation case load with existing staff and tools, so they'd need to invest in that division more if they were to add more cases to be investigated.

First off, I did not say Zos would, just that it is the real problem with trader bids. Zos' decision to keep crown gifting in the game is for their revenue, not legit gifting.

However, since we can trade gold for crowns the ideas presented in this thread are open for exploiting. As such it really does not change anything except to make it more challenging for newer guilds to climb the ranks. Granted, if a trading guild has good leadership they will still overcome the challenges of the current system or even the one proposed.

silvereyes · June 2020

kargen27 wrote: »

There are some assumptions made with these statements.

True, I shouldn't presume what other players deem to be "fun".