Is ESO’s Trading System Run by the Mafia?

DragonRacer · December 5

Some of these attacks being leveled towards trading guild GMs is wild.

I've never had 15 mill at once in my life. 10 mill is about the best I've managed to average because - despite the fact that I am a donation-based independent trading guild GM therefore apparently the only thing I should be capable of is Wallstreet 24/7 - I... also actually play the game? Shocking, I know. But I'm pretty into housing, have even entered a few housing contests and have a few houses on Home Tours. I am also, apparently, a somewhat decent vet trial tank. I'm currently main tanking a vSS HM prog for EoF.

But please, all, do carry on about how I am a worthless drain on the game contributing nothing and only hyper-focusing on one singular aspect. You definitely can't replace the word "trading" with "trial", "PvP", "housing" etc and make similar arguments if you just so happen to not be into trials or PvP or housing. That doesn't mean those who are are useless misers.

frogthroat · December 5

Vaqual wrote: »

Not only that, but also the chance to find a real bargain on an obscure trader would basically be eliminated with a centralised system.

Exactly. I do feel some level of accomplishment when I manage to hunt down a great bargain at some remote, single trader in a dead zone.

But yeah, the listings could be improved if you could see what is sold and where. And some statistics for sales so trade guilds can easier see what sells and at what price. Well, the remaining trading guilds after the great exodus of the biggest trading alliance of PCEU. (They quit at least partially because ZOS is not fixing the bot-problem. Resource farming bots that are killing the economy.)

wolfie1.0. · December 5

Furyous wrote: »

Gabriel_H wrote: »

The difference is you can be part of 5 guilds in ESO. In WoW, FFXIV, and SW you are limited to 1, and 2 for EQ2.

I suspect the original intent was that most trading would happen inter-guild and NPC traders were basically just flavour.

Obviously player actions have altered things, and worsened a broken system (the amount of the bids).

Being part of 5 guilds doesn’t solve the frustration points I raised.
It doesn’t take the grind out of running from zone to zone only to find the item you wanted is already sold out. It doesn’t make blind bidding any clearer or less punishing.

I find no benefit from the 5 guild allowance when it comes to the issues in my original post:
Endless travel just to check kiosks.

No way to know the items gone before you get there.

Blind bids with no guidance.

Reliance on third‑party sites and add‑ons.

Whether you’re in 1 guild or 5, the system is still tedious, confusing, and inaccessible. Multiple guild slots don’t fix the design flaws, they just spread the frustration across more groups.

To answer some of your questions, first you can't win more than one trader per guild per week. Once you win it, you are stuck with it for that week.

Blind bids are in place for competition and fairness reasons. If bids were public then you would have players place bids at the last second, giving advantage to players being online at the time of the switch vs those that dont.

As for player guidance, basically due to the above trader bids are one of the few closely guarded secrets in the game. But think of it this way, the more convenient the trader location and more popular the zone is, the more expensive the bidding.

Regarding finding items and 3rd party sites, well ya the point of the decentralized system is that you dont know if it will be there when you get there, you have to be there to get it. Similar to irl in person shopping.

Keep in mind that the trading economy was an addition to the game after it was created. The only reason it exists is because players demanded it. If zos really had done what they wanted then the entire game would be a bind on pickup grind fest

Which in ways it already is.

Mackinsar · December 5

I hate the fragmented trading system. Dark Age of Camelot, which had the best PVP of any MMORPG ever, had one that was even worse. A unified trade system is badly needed.

And what I want for Christmas is for identical transmutation geodes and identical glyphs to finally stack. After all these years they still don’t stack???

LalMirchi · December 5

Excuse me for asking but why is is a thread with such a toxic title allowed to run rampant?

What mafia? Is there evidence of any criminal collusive activity?

Are guild leaders somehow suspect now? Asking for me as I have no friends.

ESO_Nightingale · December 5

I have no stake in this argument for i just wanna buy the stuff i need off it

Furyous · December 5

spartaxoxo wrote: »

Horny_Poney wrote: »

What ruins the overall experience far more is having to visit 288 fracking traders to find 1 thing. That’s not what I call fun. An auction house is the only way.

You don't. Almost every item can be found in the base game capital cities of the alliances (Stormhaven, Grahtwood, and Mournhold) or the capital city of the various dlc, especially Vvardenfell and Alinor.

I can probably count on one hand the number of times that I found something in some small area that wasn't also on the big traders from the 10 years that I have been playing. It's not that it never happens but it's very rare and only for extremely rare items. The vast majority of people who are selling the stuff worth having also are in a trading guild. The other guild stores are mostly just casual sellers pawning off whatever they happened to find while playing the game.

There's a lot of FOMO in this thread being passed around as actual difficulty finding things. But, it's actually really easy to find the vast majority of items already.

You are actually proving the point I was making. If almost everything worth buying is found in the main capital cities, then the other traders are not serving a real purpose. That means most of the system is dead space.

When all meaningful trading happens in a few premium locations, only a small group of guilds can afford to stay there. Everyone else is pushed into traders where items do not sell. That is exactly the problem. It shows the system is built in a way that concentrates all economic activity into a tiny part of the map while the rest becomes irrelevant.

So when you say you almost never find anything outside the big traders, you are not showing that the system works. You are describing how uneven it has become. That is the issue I am trying to highlight.

Furyous · December 5

SerafinaWaterstar wrote: »

Faltasë wrote: »

ofc the people in the ESO forum are the first to fight for a system that only benefits stockbroker hobbyists, cosplaying businesspeople and people who don't want to play the actual game but instead wanna focus on a system that loopholes to... literally no end goal. What are these gold hoarders and guild typhoons going to provide or progress for the game as a whole? The money they spend surely goes to useful progression if you are investing in your account(motifs, furniture), but clearly it doesn't have an end goal besides trading it endlessly into other trades that they then trade endlessly into a void... where the end of the MMO and their uncanny money sinks don't really accomplish anything but "i build the ESO economy with my smarts!"

I get that the way the system is right now is just a "natural" formulation to the system that they put in place, but it doesn't make the system a good system. I think OP is right. Why do we need to rely on an addon? Why is that not an in game feature? There not being a central auction house is a problem, and the economy in ESO does not need to be so inflated that a single guild trader costs upwards of 15 mil.

You know who has 15 mil in the game? People who have been trading from the start and don't do anything else but trade. That isn't exactly accessibility.

And another thing, most guilds that are trading guilds are just the same people operating all of the guilds. Like a big in game monopoly... for crying out loud.

So of course people who benefit from this system are going to love it. They're good at it, and don't want to see it change. That's not a valid argument for why it shouldn't change.

Politely disagree with everything you say.

I have over 15 million, but I am not a mad trader. Some weeks I even forget to fill my slots in my trading guild. And I basically only sell motifs.

3 of my guilds are social guilds & work on donations only but they manage to get traders. So not difficult, like the OP suggests.

And if I desperately want something? Then I go shopping. Doesn’t take that much time. And you can find interesting bargains at out of the way traders, thus spreading the gold around in a way one main auction house would not allow.

Changing the current system to the one place only system would be an unnecessary waste of time and resources. And would create a whole new set of issues & complaints.

Saying it’s “not difficult” because a few smaller guilds have traders misses the bigger picture. Even when they get a trader, they are usually locked out of prime locations where meaningful trading happens. Most traders are in mediocre or out-of-the-way spots that see little activity.

ESO has 288 public trader slots and roughly 3,850 guilds. That means only about 7.5 percent of guilds can hold a trader at any given time. Only the top 20 to 30 guilds realistically secure the prime locations, less than 1 percent of all guilds. This naturally concentrates trading power in a tiny number of guilds.

It is like limiting access to Trials and Dungeons by bid. Low bidders get the least desirable content and losing bidders must wait a week to try again. Only the top bidders get the prime trials. That is exclusionary.

Forcing players to join other guilds to sell items limits gameplay. Players should be able to trade independently, not be forced into someone else’s guild to participate.

JavaRen · December 5

LalMirchi wrote: »

Excuse me for asking but why is is a thread with such a toxic title allowed to run rampant?

What mafia? Is there evidence of any criminal collusive activity?

Are guild leaders somehow suspect now? Asking for me as I have no friends.

Well, based on my historic observations it is socially acceptable to accuse all members of every trade guild of racketeering and collusion.

katanagirl1 · 5:36AM

Furyous wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

Horny_Poney wrote: »

What ruins the overall experience far more is having to visit 288 fracking traders to find 1 thing. That’s not what I call fun. An auction house is the only way.

You don't. Almost every item can be found in the base game capital cities of the alliances (Stormhaven, Grahtwood, and Mournhold) or the capital city of the various dlc, especially Vvardenfell and Alinor.

I can probably count on one hand the number of times that I found something in some small area that wasn't also on the big traders from the 10 years that I have been playing. It's not that it never happens but it's very rare and only for extremely rare items. The vast majority of people who are selling the stuff worth having also are in a trading guild. The other guild stores are mostly just casual sellers pawning off whatever they happened to find while playing the game.

There's a lot of FOMO in this thread being passed around as actual difficulty finding things. But, it's actually really easy to find the vast majority of items already.

You are actually proving the point I was making. If almost everything worth buying is found in the main capital cities, then the other traders are not serving a real purpose. That means most of the system is dead space.

When all meaningful trading happens in a few premium locations, only a small group of guilds can afford to stay there. Everyone else is pushed into traders where items do not sell. That is exactly the problem. It shows the system is built in a way that concentrates all economic activity into a tiny part of the map while the rest becomes irrelevant.

So when you say you almost never find anything outside the big traders, you are not showing that the system works. You are describing how uneven it has become. That is the issue I am trying to highlight.

You can find just about everything in the three capital cities, but you might pay more for the convenience than looking in other areas for better deals. You can sell things outside the three capital cities, but you will sell fewer items and for less than in the best spots.

Horny_Poney · 8:26AM

katanagirl1 wrote: »

You can find just about everything in the three capital cities

You can’t find everything, that’s one of the problems of this system. This means less sells, which makes buyers unhappy and sellers unhappy.

Zodiarkslayer · 9:09AM

I feel like some contributers to this thread are just venting their real life frustration with economics and capitalism.

Greed can corrupt the soul. But so does envy.

Estin · 9:43AM

Only going to drop my opinion about Guild Traders and Guilds as a whole instead of reading everything.

Honestly I think the entire aspect of guild traders is terrible. There's so many spread out, but only ~10% of them are worth visiting. It's also terrible that wanting to buy something can be locked behind DLC. "Oh, I found a listing for this rare furnishing plan that I want! But wait, the guild trader is in Southern Elseweyr/Newest Chapter Zone and I don't have ESO+/Newest Chapter to go and buy it. Bummer." That's absolute trash and I know I'm not the only person that has happened to on a frequent basis. That alone is grounds for terminating the exists trader system and centralizing it in a free zone. Will it kill cities? No, because non chapter DLC zones are already dead, and the players you see sitting around in places like Rimmen or Vivec City aren't there because they're using the guild trader. The only thing centralizing will damage is the ability to flip items because now everybody will see the low priced items instead of needing to trek to Markarth's Outlaws Refuge to see that someone listed a 200k motif for 5k gold. And while I do partake in doing such a thing, the game's trading system is better off without that.

The other thing that I feel should be done away with is needing to be in a guild in order to trade. Nothing is worse about taking a break and coming back needing to join 1-3 trading guilds (Some which are very picky) just so you can start to sell items again. Not to mention deciding which items should go to which guild because location can affect the sale. Just let me list 150 item without needing to juggle what goes where. Would this hurt the guild system? No, not at all. ~90% of the guilds in this game are just a way to sell items, which means ~90% of the players in a guild are not going to talk or participate or do anything to interact with the guild system. They're only there because the game forces them to be there. Guilds should be there for specialty reasons, not as a front for trading. Other MMOs have thriving Clan/Guild systems and don't have trading tied to them. ESO's guild system will still survive and get players who will want to join guilds for specific reasons, whether it be casual chatrooms, pvp, pve, housing, crafting, etc.

Gabriel_H · 2:00PM

Estin wrote: »

It's also terrible that wanting to buy something can be locked behind DLC. "Oh, I found a listing for this rare furnishing plan that I want! But wait, the guild trader is in Southern Elseweyr/Newest Chapter Zone and I don't have ESO+/Newest Chapter to go and buy it. Bummer." That's absolute trash and I know I'm not the only person that has happened to on a frequent basis

There is another side to that coin.