I don't see how the lack of an AH would hinder gold farmers more than it would anyone else. Frankly, the system would probably be LESS of a hindrance to someone that was playing around the clock than someone who was playing recreationally, given selling goods would take more time than if using an AH. If guild stores legitimately fill the role that AHs do in other MMOs, why wouldn't gold farmers just use those?

Seriously? How do you think they make their gold? By using Bots and Multi-box programs to farm in bulk and sell on the auction house. That and hacking. They ruin economies and plague the community. They are scum of the earth. If the Guild stores help in any way to combat gold sellers, than I am all for it so long as they remotely resemble a classic auction house system. For me it all depends on the population cap of merchant guilds. If you have 500-1000 people in a merchant guild to sell and buy items from, than it won't be terrible.

Let me ask you this, where do people at launch sell their stuff minus spamming chat? there wont be any established trade guilds whatsoever. Why penalise people because of gold farmers.

As someone who played SWTOR heavily and was a lets just say "master crafter" in that game capable of producing ANYTHING, ANYONE would need (sans 1 hilt type...) I hated how impersonal it was. I WANT to be a crafter in an MMO, to feel the effects my products have upon others. I want there to be a system involving the exchange of goods across many players and I want it to mean SOMETHING to do so. I never played SWG but the SWTOR guild I run with has many members who did and with how they describe the COMMUNITY effort that crafting was in that game, I would have adored it to no end.

If you don't want to craft things thats fine, feel free to vendor them, or MAYBE make the choice to hold onto things for a little longer till you find someone willing to idk BUY it for future extraction? I already know that when the game launches I will be getting assistance from several guildies for gathering mats from the environment and other players so that I can ensure on full launch (is there an actual name for this?) whenever a fresh level 10 gets to Cryodill they will be getting as much as I can provide. (Especially pauldrons and grives as many players last beta seemed to be lacking in them) It isn't for the benefit of the alliance, it is for the benefit of future trading transactions with these powergamer types who may not be particularly interested in crafting and as such could be a future use for providing higher end mats down the road.

With an Auction House it simply becomes a case of, "well i don't need this, none of my primary guildies need it, let me just check the market value and list it just under that value to ensure MINE gets sold" There is no personal interaction, no relationships amongst the many differing groups of players, and the community remains divided on a SOCIAL level in that crafters do their own thing, pvpers do their own thing, and Dungeon clearing PVE groups do their own thing with a few forced instances of interaction when crafters need end tier mats and pvp/pvers want end tier gear. Looking at how ESO is set up they have done a great deal to push the COMMUNITY or global interaction aspect of this MMO, and the lack of a global auction house is simply reflective of that philosophy.

Personally I am hopeful that in the future, guilds will form that specialize in SPECIFIC FIELDS of crafting or operating out of different regions in the PVE regions. IE one guild focuses heavily on selling weapons, and the mats required for their production, another for armors, and still more for other pieces of crafted gear. In this way certain groups will become standouts for selling a certain line of product with perhaps an additional guild that never even focuses on crafting, rather on simply managing trading within the various guilds and this guilds members would effectively be bankers, running transactions between the various crafting and trading guilds and doing live trades with people looking for a specific item.

IE player X wants a Legendary Voidstone Greatsword, which are made only by a select group of people in a crafting guild which player X is not a part of. Player X goes to Player Z who is the "banker" who is also NOT a member of the guild which crafts the Voidstone Sword, but Z could call out over guild chat that player X is interested in obtaining said Greatsword for a crapton of gold. Answering the call, player Y who IS a member of the guild that can craft the Voidstone sword goes and assuming the transaction is both profitable and acceptable buys the sword either through Guild Store or directly from a crafter, proceeds to send item to player Z, who then sells it to player X.

Its a horrifically complex system and a serious turn off to many people, it involves a great deal of community interaction and especially trust and accountability which to many people is a serious turn off because they LIKE their anonymity, but then if you like anonymity why would you play an MMO? This kind of system will take time to get accustomed to, it is NOT a system the gamehoppers will appreciate, but I for one am appreciaitive of the complexities it offers and am hopeful that it will help to reinforce the ties between players to produce a potentially smaller, but far more dedicated community of gamers.

(Sorry for wall of text and gramatical mistakes, made post way too fast to make it perfect).

I think all the gold sellers here that are just butthurt that they won't be able to use their margin trading bots should probably go look into the latest Korean grindfest for their trade botting fix, and leave ESO alone.

Why would farmers not be able to use "merchant guilds"? That is the meat of my question.

I'm not saying the farmers are "good". However, as long as people want to buy gold, there will be farmers. I fail to see how a guild store rather than an AH would make the slightest bit of difference to a GF.

I think merchant guilds are going to get established sooner than you think. It will not take any longer than a day tops to fill a guild roster. You will see something like this being spammed in chat: Open enrollment for the Guild Store Boys! We are a trading guild focused purely on trading with each other with no obligations or expectations. Whisper me for an invite and begin your trading experience today!

They will fill up in hours because we are all going to be looking for them.

Because having access to tens of thousands of buyers allows them to move WAY more supply and profit than limiting them to smaller markets of 500-1000. They will have to work a lot harder to sell their hacked goods. Plus they can be booted at any time by a GM that gets a report of botting. And if they create their own little gold seller guild, then who are they going to sell their farmed goods to?

Wait, is there a cap on the number of members a guild can have? If so, that makes the situation even worse.

yes 500 i think

So you expect the officers of hundreds of small AHs to monitor the habits of all participants to make sure that none are botters? Why is that better than allowing built in anti-botting heuristics to slow down botters? How would it be more effective? What would stop a gathering/killing farming bot from simply passing on raw materials to selling farming/bot that followed a "normal" play schedule?

It sounds to me like it's a system that would be a substantial inconvenience for players, probably make it more difficult and expensive to get what you want (as is generally the case with smaller vs larger markets), but do very little to deter GFs.

What will happen if one player designated trade area gets overcrowded, is that players will spread out to different areas to sell their wares, where they can stand out more.

It's going to start at main cities at the bank and crafting tables, then they will go to other small towns and quest hubs with crafting tables, the starter islands, the gates inside Cyrodiil, etc. Wherever traders know a large number of people will be passing through and potentially see what they're selling.

As I understand it, they will also create new "instances" of a zone if there's too many people in it. So finding a thousand traders inside a single city sounds unlikely.

Not sure why so many people hate the idea of not having an Auction House. Do not get me wrong I have no hate for the global AH design but games have had functioning economies before with player based stores, Lineage II for example. I am actually really excited for the economy that is set up in ESO.

So if you "only" have 500,000 players, you're talking about 1,000 different merchant guilds, assuming every player wants to buy or sell something at some point.

How does this added complexity help the player? How does it hurt the gold farmer? Why is a small AH any less impersonal than a large AH?

An even bigger problem I see with this is that new players will be effectively locked out of the oldest, most mature, and likely "best" markets. Unless we go to trade chat spam, and I think the problems with that are quite obvious.

I'm not privy to gold seller activities. My experience with them is that they mostly spammed chat to sell wares as quickly as possible to make the quota. Those are the instances where you'd see excessive spamming due to the cultural differences between North America and Asia. Where here it would be considered rude, there it would not. I used to have friends who dealt with them by buying very cheaply from them and reselling it on the auction house for markup. So from my experience, gold sellers were often taken advantage of by innovative people. Of course, I'm not saying that gold sellers could not adopt the auction house as a tool (anyone could and far more legitimate users "play" the auction house). Just that in my experience they typically sold for dirt cheap. It was the people "playing" the auction house that would markup the prices (in fact I can see where a cheater who isn't a gold seller could use bots as well). So I'm not really seeing any solution to fight gold sellers in this game by avoiding the auction house.

On the other hand, as I stated in another thread, this is just like using DRM to fight piracy. It's rather pointless and only serves to annoy legitimate users. Game developers should really take lessons from the past before adopting these types of designs.

We'll see how this plays out. I have my doubts it will play out as intended and will damage trade in this game (for reasons I've expressed in a different thread). I've agrued the virtues of the auction house feature and shot down many of the irrational arguments against it already. I'm not against a different kind of system, though. It'd be nice to see a broker system similar to EQ2 (assuming that Zenimax addresses the issues with the bank and lack of inventory space). Whatever system that is used needs to be convenient for the average user to use, simplistic, and it needs to serve enough stakeholders to accommodate a thriving, robust economy. If it does turn into a bunch of smaller markets due to the guild cap, as I fear it will, then it will result in a stagnate economy where players are severely limited in the amount of potential customers and products offered for sell. If selling to other players is too inconvenient, players will naturally just vendor items instead, only exasperating the problems of a stagnate economy. At this point there will be a major clamor for improvement, even to the effect of requesting an auction house service of some sort. I am pessimistic about the current system, but will see how it plays out.

Over the beta weekend, i made a trading guild and it worked quite well. UI was a bit dodgy and it had a fair few bugs with getting and sending information. But so did guild and private messaging.

The great thing about the guild shop is you can kick out people who try to exploite or practice poor trading. (menopolising and price hiking). It also protects against farmers.

The other big thing is that I am yet to find a "soulbound" item. If there was a global AH it would just be flooded with the best gear all the time.

As long as there is no cap on guild members I can see massive trade guilds forming, which would be kinda cool in its self.

My biggest annoyance with the guild shop was MASSIVE shop cut. it was like 20-30%

The biggest issue with relying on your guild store to buy items is the finite number of people in a guild. If guilds cap at 500, that means I can only see their goods. I have the choice of joining 5 guilds. One of those will be my friends, so that leaves me the option to join 4 others. Am I supposed to start guild hopping if the people in those guilds don't have the materials I'm looking for? I also have to shop around now, because there's also the guild shops in Cyrodiil. Now if I want to find the best price on (x) item, I have to check all the different guilds I've joined, jump into a bunch of different pvp matches as a guest, and look at what everyone else is selling those items for. Oh, and I guess I should probably go to a few cities too, to see what people are spamming on the chat channel.

This is just a headache. Why can't I just see what the prices are in one easy place? I play the game to actually play, not run around shopping for 20 minutes. That's not how I want to play, I'm not roleplaying a merchant. I just want to be able to do my crafting and get back to PVE, but it's going to be a bunch of nonsense every time I want to check on prices.

Using guild stores as a substitute for an auction house or controlled NPC marketplace? That's highly inefficient. Guilds have a max of 500 accounts (not characters, accounts) and you have an entire faction to sell to and buy from.

You are going to have to stand around in town and spam chat along with every other crafter and person trying to sell loot because so far the devs have given us no other option.

I actually predict we will have some sort of auction or NPC marketplace system. Guild stores will not cut it and chat spamming will annoy everyone. It may not be WoW's or Rift's auction system but there will be a more automated way to buy and sell to your entire faction and not just a guild.

(btw, so far I'm highly against ESO's guild system. I don't like that it makes it seem that your guild is more important than your faction. I mean I'm Daggerfall Covenant or Aldmeri Dominion or Ebonheart Pact, not a Knight of Wayrest or an Untouchable or Cyrodiil's Elite or any other guild name. It's been a problem with most MMOs so far but ESO with it's guild store system instead of faction-wide economic system seems to exacerbate it. The very idea that people separate themselves from their faction in favor of their guild bothers me in a game where faction should mean everything)

+1 and I agree..

I understand that some people just want to go to the Auction House and buy/sell their stuff and be done with it, but in my opinion that is short-sighted for the community at large. A global Auction House if implemented at launch would be great, but in six months? A year? There is absolutely no point to interact with anyone or craft anything for a new player because you can essentially buy everything off the Auction House. Supply becomes so large that the AH is watered down to the point of hurting the game at large. Look at GW2's Auction House right now. Practically everything in it is a copper or two above what you would get if you sold it to a vendor.

We don't want the Auction House system mainly because what it does to the economy and community. That's our argument. Folks that do want an Auction House want it because it will be easier to access goods and people won't spam channels. Do you really think that will go away though? There are always people advertising their goods in chat channels even with an Auction house (WTS 100 ore...5gp cheaper than AH!..pst!) Granted the chat would be less, but it will always be there.

There are plenty of other good ideas that popped up on the previous thread. There are alternatives to having a global Auction House and not having a global Auction House. It doesn't have to be an either/or situation.

Opening up Guild Stores to towns in PVE and not just in PVP. Heck, even having the ability to put yourself in "merchant" mode by standing in town is an option as well like the Bazaar in Everquest. I like seeing new ideas, but not frustration because someone disagrees with another's point of view. In my opinion, if someone wants and AH because it will be easier on themselves then that's not only short-sighted, but very "me" thinking.