Feedback: Housing Vendors that act as Traders

bathynomusESO · August 2022

Dawnblade wrote: »

[snip]

Or there is a technical limitation, which we we don't know about. Instanced housing traders/vendor could help to resolve this issue.

[edited to remove quote]

spartaxoxo · August 2022

bathynomusESO wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

They don't want trade centralized.

The primary issue with a centralized auction house appears to be with database issues. With player housing, instanced traders would be less of an issue.

It isn't. The game was designed from the ground up with the guild trader system.

This one of the earliest justifications for it, cited before the games' release.

You don’t necessarily want to do a global auction house for a game with one giant server because that generally leads to all the best gear being available at very, very cheap prices. A lot of times that can trivialize the game... You cannot have a healthy economy when there are no restrictions on getting the best stuff in the game.”

https://www.polygon.com/2014/4/11/5604470/the-elder-scrolls-online-players-can-trade-in-this-third-party

While their concerns around gear have clearly changed, they've made clear that they want the game to have decentralized trading hubs rather than a central auction. They said this around Markarth.

GM: So now that you bring up the economy, are there plans to support a universal auction house or like something a bit more nuanced than just the guild traders?

RL: You know, we’ve had lots of back and forth internally about that. We really like the concept of, you know, individual trade hubs. And, you know, I think that the guild traders do that for us. You know, again, we keep kind of going back and forth and having those discussions right now, we’re pretty set on the guild traders, but who knows?

https://www.dualshockers.com/elder-scrolls-online-interview-rich-lambert-talks-markarth-performance-improvements-and-more/

Their concern is primarily with economic health, having this be a benefit to joining guilds, and having individualized hubs rather than a centralized auction house. I'm sure all these years later they are happy they went this route, if there are indeed database issues with a centralized auction house, but that was not a primary concern.

VaranisArano did a good collection of some their responses here.

VaranisArano wrote: »

Before we rehash all the pros/cons of Auction Houses and Guilds, here's ome reminders of ZOS' intentions and official comments for Guild Traders.

March 2013: "Will there be an auction house?" asked of Creative Director Paul Sage @5:00 into the video: https://www.buffed.de/TESO-The-Elder-Scrolls-Online-Spiel-15582/News/The-Elder-Scrolls-Online-Creative-Director-Paul-Sage-aeussert-sich-zur-Item-Progression-zu-Mounts-und-zum-Gildensystem-im-Video-1072227/

August 2014: Benefits of Guilds - "The Road Ahead" https://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/news/post/1059

August 2014: Introduction of PVE Guild Traders - Creating ESO: Identity and Update 3 https://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/news/post/1087

May 2014: Lack of an Auction House - Ask Us Anything Variety Pack # 14: https://www.elderscrollsonline.com/en-us/news/post/947

April 10, 2015: ESO Live @ https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/3924079#Comment_3924079

April 28,2015 : ESO Live "Ask Us Anything" @37:40 "Player guilds are actually an integral part of our world and trader access is a key benefit to guild membership. We don't have any plans to change this at this time." Also, the transcripte: https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/1760019#Comment_1760019
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N17KZ_ZCK0&list=PLZng8hzxXSt6-402bM1G2UuZbtnlrMn0z&index=23
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/2875274#Comment_2875274

There well may be more. I don't regularly watch ESO Live, so I only pick up those comments when someone on the forums referenced a specific ESO Live.

Are those going to convince the pro-AH crowd? Probably not. Hope springs eternal, and there's all sorts of arguments about "Well, they said they weren't and then they did!" or "But all of those are old quotes!"

Sure. Whatever. If you really want an Auction House, I don't expect the Devs' thinking to convince you. You want what you want. To be frank, I'm pretty sure an undated "Nope, still not doing it" wouldn't stop the debate.

The above links are for the people going "What have the Devs actually said about the possibility of an Auction House?"

So far? A resounding "No."

kargen27 · August 2022

Dawnblade wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

bathynomusESO wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

bathynomusESO wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

as it did NOT have a central system of search.

How would they every find their stuff then? We are not allowed to have a central auction house. So, this is an alternative.

People willing to put in the time will advertise, same as they do furniture shops now.

I block most trade posts. I dont want see that stuff in chat, ever. IMO, that is way to messy and annoying. A central screen where we can browse house vendors, find and visit a link to their home to buy things would be my preferred option. This is far different than a central auction house and would have far less stress on the current capabilities of the current system.

It isn't far different to an auction house. With a centralized search, it is an auction house. The issue with an auction house isn't the location, the issue with auction house is the centralized trade.

They don't want trade centralized.

[snip]

Or it is simply a much better and more engaging system that many players thoroughly enjoy.

[edited to remove quote]

ZOS_Icy · August 2022

Greetings,

We have recently removed some unnecessary back-and-forth and non-constructive posts from this thread. This is a reminder to keep the discussion civil and constructive. Please keep our Community Rules in mind moving forward.

Thank you for your understanding.

preevious · August 2022

Your idea is fine, but the technical limitation still applies, and there is absolutely no way around it.

If you have a lot of vendors with a central research tool to find wich one sells the stuff you need, you are effectively searching lots of little databases at once.

Performance-wise, it's effectively the same as searching through one gigantic base.
Actually, it's even worse, since each little base will have some performance overhead that scales with number of bases. (even empty ones, do, since each base is a running program).

The littles bases will takes more resources than the single big one. (the benefit being that you can still query if SOME bases fail, .. with a single base, if it fails, there's nothing left to search. Another benefit is that little bases can be set up as a distributed system, but that's really complicated stuff).
It's the kind of problems I'm dealing with at work.

So, all in all :
Personal vendors : might be possible.
Central search tool : impossible.

Kiralyn2000 · August 2022

Yes, because what this game needs is for the trading market to be even more splintered. The current dumpster fire of a system already encourages people not to bother, with dozens of traders across dozens of loading screens, it doesn't need to be made even worse.

JKorr · August 2022

bathynomusESO wrote: »

Ragnarok0130 wrote: »

server wide auction house

The devs refuse to do that and the bot/elite guilds have fought against it for years. They make billions of gold, while most casuals have so much less. House traders/vendors would be a nice alternative, especially if there is technical limitations that the devs are not able to overcome.

I will have to let my guildmasters know they run elite guilds. This will be quite a surprise for them.

1 trading guild that actually focuses on trading. No dues, no sales requirements, log in once every two weeks.

4 social guilds that do not focus on trading. All of them usually get traders when they want to get one. No dues, no sales requirements. One is log in every 2 weeks, 2 are once a month, and one doesn't have a log in requirement.

None of this reeks of "elitism". All of them are "Sell when you want, IF you want, set whatever price you want." Some of the people in the trading guild are the "Trading is the endgame" people, and they do a lot of selling. The social guilds? Very casual trading, get rid of excess mats or that motif you found when you feel like it. The fact my social guilds get traders when they want to, without charging dues or requiring members to sell a million gold a day kind of shows the "casuals" aren't really blocked out of trading if they want to do so, despite some people repeatedly stating they are.

bathynomusESO · August 2022

preevious wrote: »

If you have a lot of vendors with a central research tool to find wich one sells the stuff you need, you are effectively searching lots of little databases at once.

True, I did not consider this. However, I still think that ESO has the hardware to make it work or at least I hope they do.

NettleCarrier · August 2022

bathynomusESO wrote: »

Ragnarok0130 wrote: »

server wide auction house

The devs refuse to do that and the bot/elite guilds have fought against it for years. They make billions of gold, while most casuals have so much less. House traders/vendors would be a nice alternative, especially if there is technical limitations that the devs are not able to overcome.

This is definitely not the first time I've heard this but I don't really understand the argument. The market being the way it is already is equal opportunity. I think people have this idea that the top sellers must be cheating/botting in order to stay ahead. The secrets are simple, the drop rate for materials or refining has never been lowered, in fact you could easily argue it's easier than it used to be. As prices go up, so does the value of farming. I make millions a week just surfing guild traders picking up things I can sell for 10% more in the city, it takes about 2 hours maybe of the roughly 7-8 hours I fit in per week of playtime. The rest of my money comes from just "cycling" event items, buying them at the end of the event and selling 10 months later - or in some cases a lot later if it's not an annual event. With even just one of these things I've had enough to buy whatever I wanted in the game, plus put 1-3m per week towards our guild bank for trader bids.

JKorr · August 2022

NettleCarrier wrote: »

bathynomusESO wrote: »

Ragnarok0130 wrote: »

server wide auction house

The devs refuse to do that and the bot/elite guilds have fought against it for years. They make billions of gold, while most casuals have so much less. House traders/vendors would be a nice alternative, especially if there is technical limitations that the devs are not able to overcome.

This is definitely not the first time I've heard this but I don't really understand the argument. The market being the way it is already is equal opportunity. I think people have this idea that the top sellers must be cheating/botting in order to stay ahead. The secrets are simple, the drop rate for materials or refining has never been lowered, in fact you could easily argue it's easier than it used to be. As prices go up, so does the value of farming. I make millions a week just surfing guild traders picking up things I can sell for 10% more in the city, it takes about 2 hours maybe of the roughly 7-8 hours I fit in per week of playtime. The rest of my money comes from just "cycling" event items, buying them at the end of the event and selling 10 months later - or in some cases a lot later if it's not an annual event. With even just one of these things I've had enough to buy whatever I wanted in the game, plus put 1-3m per week towards our guild bank for trader bids.

I think some players want to believe the top sellers are secretly cheating or botting because that is far easier than picking flowers, mushrooms, and even the "trash" worms people leave behind in nodes and finding out that they can actually make gold. It does take an effort on the player's part. Mundane runes, heartwood, and furnishing mats all have great prices, mostly because not a lot of players want to put in the time farming. Limited supply, higher prices. I used my not-elite-not-in-a-hub-city trading guild to sell some flowers, mushrooms, mundane runes, heartwood, and worms and cleared a little over 500k. Imagine what that total could be if I were actually ambitious enough to farm mats and sell in more than just my focused on trading guild. 30 slots per guild, 5 guilds...yeah, I'd have a lot more gold.

Northwold · August 2022

An aside (I'm all talked out on trading matters for the mo), but honestly from the way people talk about databases one would be amazed that real IT infrastructure in the real world even functions at all. Huge databases, many times more demanding than anything ESO could ever require, are absolutely normal. Yes, there may be issues with ESO's engine or hardware, but it is not actually the case that trading searches are some kind of computational impossibility, nor is it necessarily the case that trading databases even need to run on the same servers as the game itself since once server can query another.

oldbobdude · August 2022

I don’t know. It would be pretty tough for everybody to keep their own vendor stocked with items people want.

DMuehlhausen · August 2022

Things like this should never happen.

I don't even think Housing should be a thing. When you just let everyone go to their house and do everything the world feels dead. that's never a good thing for a game that you are suppose to see 1000s of other people running around.

Ph1p · August 2022

Northwold wrote: »

An aside (I'm all talked out on trading matters for the mo), but honestly from the way people talk about databases one would be amazed that real IT infrastructure in the real world even functions at all. Huge databases, many times more demanding than anything ESO could ever require, are absolutely normal. Yes, there may be issues with ESO's engine or hardware, but it is not actually the case that trading searches are some kind of computational impossibility, nor is it necessarily the case that trading databases even need to run on the same servers as the game itself since once server can query another.

It's obviously not a technical impossibility, but you get what you (can or want to) pay for. Credit card companies have systems that can settle tens of thousands of transactions per second, but Visa spent also 730 million on "Network and processing" last year.

Obviously, ESO does not need that level of sophistication, but ESO's past technological issues with traders and WOW's performance problems with their auction houses last year suggest that this isn't trivial for MMOs. I'm sure ZOS could do it within their requirements and constraints, but we are talking about investing into a secondary feature of the game. Regardless of my stance on central trading, I'd much rather have ZOS put their resources into bug-fixing, loading times, PVP performance, and so on.