It’s clear that trading within ESO needs some love. There are many potential improvements that could be developed to improve player experiences regarding trading and the economy.

In having to set pricing for their listings, there ends up being an insurmountable burden on sellers to know the fair market price of items. Even near market equilibrium, players should expect a good chunk of their listings to come back as Expired, which are then a big pain to deal with. The newest items are especially tricky. A good chunk of players just sell low and miss out, a few price too high and get burned by listing fees, but the biggest problem is that most players just don’t bother.

The current Guild Store system asks too much of players.

A better way to handle this would be to add a parallel auction system. This puts pricing in the buyer’s court through actual bid action. This system could simply be a copy-paste of the Guild Store system but with slightly different rules.

Well-tuned rules would be 7-day listings with a 200g starting bid and each bid at least 15% higher than the prior. Buyers would use their account banked gold instead of character currency gold for bidding, and sellers would have an option to accept the current bid to end the auction early.

The store UI would still display the Item name and the Time left. Beyond that, the UI could be quite compact with just a single Bid column that would display the price of the next bid plus a button to input a custom bid. The last placed bid would be implicitly backtrackable and unnecessary to display.

For example, the seller puts up a listing for a runebox, which removes it from their inventory. A would-be bidder coming along could see the auction lot sorted by newly listed items or by lowest bid or through search filters. The player could just click or use a hotkey to bid 200g. The gold would count against the bidder’s banked gold, but not withdrawn unless they win. The bid price would then show 230g to the next player to come along.

If the initial player were to win, the gold would then be deducted from their account, the item would be mailed to them, and the seller would receive a mail with the gold (less fees).

Why 7-day listings? This system is mostly about addressing seller pain points of liquidity (items not moving), so a relatively short window would be ideal. For consideration, guild auction lots can be as quick as ~1-2 minutes. For this system, as few as 1-3 days could be great, especially since bidders wouldn’t want to wait very long to get their items (they could always look on the Guild Store for separate instantly delivered listings). However, short windows may not fit schedules as well and may seem overly FOMOish from the buyer perspective. A week would allow great visibility and discovery of interesting items and would allow sellers to have a good cadence that might better fit life schedules. Something like 164 hours instead of the full 168 may be a bit better to accommodate the actual time of managing listings. It could be tempting to allow sellers to choose from a list of different times, but this would make search messy and may scramble pricing signals (we got a taste of this when 14- and 30-day listings intermingled, and it was not good).

Why the 200g starting bid? Unless players use the Custom Bid button, each auction would be generating many data points across multiple accounts that could be heavy on the server. There is a trade-off here between bypassing the bulk of this data generation and having players feel bad if their items don’t sell. The point of this system is to reduce the burden of expired items, so it may make sense if the system were to simply destroy auctioned items ending with 0 bids. An alternative option would be to have the unsold item be returned via System Mail with an encouragement to put it on the Guild Store at a low price or to just use/decon/vend it.

Why 15% increments? Prices in ESO span many orders of magnitude, so logarithmic bids best accommodate this. Exponential increments also reduce the potential data that the server has to process. With the Custom Bid feature, bidders could input their maximal bid and walk away knowing they’d have to bid a lot more if they were to be outbid. The main benefit for bidders is they wouldn’t have to worry about last-minute sniping. This would also be great for sellers since fair bids would likely come in quickly, and the seller could just end auctions early to get their gold and free up space to put more listings up. Increments anywhere between ~10-20% would probably be reasonable before they start causing problems one way or another.

Why use banked gold? Auctions could potentially just use the same system as the Guild Store: gold would be taken from current character gold with each bid, but then would have to be returned via System Mail if outbid. However, this would be a LOT of System Mails that would need to be processed, and it would mostly be a big pain to deal with. It would make a lot more sense if the player account just had a list of current winning bids and that players had to keep at least that much in their bank. This would make things run more fluidly. It would be understandable if it became necessary to limit the amount of active bids a player could have out.

Why allow sellers to end auctions early? Bidders would benefit from putting in their maximal bid early since sellers would likely often just accept fair offers. Sellers would get their gold early and free up listing slots, and bidders would get their items sooner.

Such a system would be worth developing and would greatly improve the player experience. It would address several pain points and help get the economy on the right track.

I’d be happy to answer questions or provide additional feedback.