Continued from this post which was closed due to post limit reached:

http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1489070-auction-house/

Lets keep discussing the AH here!

I don't really want an auction house, but rather what I heard SWG had. I don't know the details but I would like to be able to use or hire NPCs or shops to sell my wares in a browseable market.

I want anything that doesn't make me spam trade or rely on guild stores.

No auction house, but do you really think there won't be websites brokering deals? There have been trade websites in every single game that allows any sort of item transfer.

Trade websites are definitely not the answer.

I hope they don't do the cash Auction House like in Diablo that would be the worst thing ever

I agree, but I was just pointing out that they WILL happen. That is one of the reasons that I didn't understand the decision to not have an auction house.

Is there a limit on how many members can be in a guild? I thought I heard we can be in up to 5 guilds. I imagine some will exist for the sole purpose of trade.

I believe it's to counter bots farmers. Denying them a universal market place will make it a little harder to sell their stuff

Or they'll just infest guilds everywhere and be spread all over the server. It'll probably be quite handy to have a bot in your guild, they'll sell tons of mats regularly.

You cant eradicate bots of gold seller irrespective of the system. Guild wars 2 did a silly thing at launch where they introduced massive diminishing returns on loot and karma to counter gold sellers and faced a huge backlash. This should be less about gold sellers and more about what is more convenient for majority of the player base. Very few people are going to want to run around and swap guilds to peddle their wares and this is going to cause massive issues for the game past the first free month.

Most of the mats I sold in WoW etc, weren't needed by anyone really. they were for power gamers who wanted a crafting perk for raids or people alting. UO was a little different as you needed spell reagents and needed to replace armor. EQ, a lot of it was driven by altingand raiding, though you did need runes and some rare spell scroll drops. So, I guess I'm curious how crafting/gathering plays into ESO. Needed materials or alting OCD? I crafted myself a full set of armor. But I could do that in WoW by level 10 too. By level cap, it was all drops. Though even in early WoW there would be that one guy with that One rare epic pattern that people wanted. But we had forum lists with who had what item even in WoW so people could find them.

Now with the mega server, people could friend that person and port to their keep/shard? Forget trade guild... merchant shard!

I for one am incapable of understanding the violent opposition to an AH. It almost seems like there is a reactionary backlash in this community to any feature, no matter how useful, ubiquitous, or minor that is in WoW. (See also: buff/tracker, some indication that an ability has hit a target, hot bar instead of awful clunky q wheel, etc).

The game simply cannot support a robust player driven economy without something like an AH. It's basic design is antithetical to "old fashioned" trading, and here's why:
-Mega server = mega spam. If there is one area per factiom that's a player designated trade hub, there will simply be too many people spamming chat to even follow what is being said, unless the game pop falls to the point that only a dozen or two people are buying\selling at once.
-Instancing, and issues getting other players into your instance. Even grouping with another player doesn't always phase you into the same instance.
-No /target command or nameplates makes it very challenging to find a single person in a crowd.
-Crafting that requires a ton of materials to level (unless they've rebalanced smithing and clothing to be more in line with other trade skills)= huge demand and potentially huge volume of trading, contributing to problem 1.
-Overpriced vendor gear and mediocre quest rewards contributing to volume related problems.

Imagine it this way: There are "only" a thousand players buying and selling at a trade hub. Each sends a meassge only every 30 seconds. That's still over 30 lines of chat per second. Hell, people could only send one message a minute, and that'd still be a complete page of chat per second.

If you instance chat to keep it to one or two messages per second, you neuter the size of the market.

A high population MMO, especially one without lots of smaller servers, is absolutely incapable of supporting a robust economy without an AH.

Keep based guild AHs are not a viable solution. The number of players that can participate in a campaign (instance) of Cyrodil are capped. It would be beyond annoying to be trying to PvP, have the system think the teams were balanced, and be outnumbered 4:1 because 75% of your alliance is trying to use an AH. It also encourages guilds that don't hold keeps to allow keeps to fall so that they can then recapture to set up an AH.

The proposed "system" of using chat and keep based guild AHs WILL be a disaster, unless the game flops horribly and has a low enough population to make it viable. Quite frankly, I think the system will be frustrating enough to drive players away.

I know everyone has fond memories of the early days of MMOs. Back then, population levels were a miniscule fraction of what we're expecting to see in this game, and people were separated onto small servers to boot. Such a system works for dozens, or perhaps even a hundred players buying/selling. It simply cannot for many thousands. If this game ends up with "only" half a million players, if even 1% of those are trying to trade with other players at the same time, the current system does not even border on viable.

That's not a matter of opinion either. I contend that it is objectively impossible for a system utilizing trade chat in hubs to function with hundreds to thousands of players at once.

The only solution I can think of is using an addon to parse chat. Ie: enter item you are selling and price into addon, addon sends a formatted message to chat, addon used by other players stores the message in local cache, you sort through cache to find item you want, and hitting the "buy" button puts you in touch with the selling player, while sending a chat message telling others' addon to delete the item from their listing.

In other words, an AH using an add-on instead of a native function that renders chat unusable for those that don't have it, and makes buying/selling impossible for those that don't have, making it a defacto requirement for participation in the economy and rendering the lack of a native system pointless.

+1

+2. This is exactly what I'm thinking. You'll either get too few people in an instance to be able to get good prices/buyers, or the chat window will be spammed. A lot.

So glad they aren't putting in an auction house. If you don't understand why, you haven't played enough MMOs or don't really understand the ramifications of a global auction house.

One of the best decisions ZOS has made, full stop.

+3 completely agreed

Devs need to see this!

I am going to wait and reserve judgement until I see for myself how effective Guild Stores are. It's easy to speculate about it, but the truth is that none of us know because it's a new concept. If they svck then I will be the first one to scream from the mountain tops because I love using auction houses.

The guild stores could prove to be an amazing revolutionary concept. Only time will tell.

A lot of global auction house exploiters/manipulators here I guess.

There are dozens of MMOs that are all about "playing" the UI auction house "game", we don't need another.

Translation: I'm so glad that they didn't put in an auction house in this game. I don't really have any rational reason or good argument as to why I feel this way. I just do.

Seems to be the typical stance from the anti auction house crowd. It's difficult to argue for the irrational point of view.

Having a global AH will certainly make guild stores pointless. I think it is an interesting concept and deserves a chance before we kill it stillborn.

And from what I can see, Guild stores actually more closely mimic "real life" and provides for more RPG options such as a player merchant using Arbitrage to his benefit. Or even in future, player caravans that needs to be guarded but enables huge amount of goods to be transported.

An AH will remove all those.

I see both sides of the debate. I use the AH constantly, so I usually support and defend their presence. But you cannot deny that the auction house is the most potent tool in a gold seller's bag of tricks. They make it easy and profitable for Bot and Mutli-box farming.

The guild store system will make things more challenging for gold sellers and bots in general while still giving us a market to trade in. So I am willing to wait and see.

Translation of your post: I'm mad I won't get to run my tradebot and destroy the game economy so that I can sell gold.

Boo hoo. Some people want to play the game, not exploit it to sell gold for real money.

Luckily for people who actually want to play the game, ZOS actually has intelligent game designers and so isn't catering to tradebot exploiters and gold sellers.

Booooo hoooooo.

Gold sellers will be there no matter what. People should focus less on gold sellers and focus on what is better for the game in the long term. Guild stores might work, but for the average person on launch day when there are no established trade guilds and they want to sell stuff they are going to detest it. Why give people a reason to quit the game before the 30 day trial period expires?

Auction houses are a gold seller's paradise.

Just go grab a margin trading bot off of a script kiddy website, let it rip and watch your in game gold flood in. No matter that it destroys the in game economy in a matter of weeks, as long as the tradebot script kiddies can sell their gold for real money, everyone's happy right?

Too bad ZOS isn't catering to gold sellers with ESO. /s

It's not just for people who enjoy "playing" the AH (not that there's anything wrong with that, in fact it's generally healthy for a game's economy to have a larger number of suppliers in a given market), it's also for people that like crafting, people that like gathering to sell to crafters, or even just people that want to buy gear/weapons from other players instead of overpriced NPCs.

I've explained above why I believe that the current system will be problematic for people that want to take part in any of those activities. A chat based system simply CANNOT support more than a few dozen people buying and selling at any given point in time. Most likely, populations will be 7 digits for at least a month or so after launch. With a population of 1 million, if .00001% of the population were trying to buy/sell at the same time, each sending a chat message once every 30 seconds, you would have 3 messages per second. That's probably a bit more than most people can keep up with, but you might be able to spot something you want.

If a whopping ONE ONE THOUSANDTH OF ONE PERCENT of a conservative first month's population guess of 1mil is trying to trade at the same time in whatever the established "trade area" is, each sending a message every 30 seconds, chat will be going by at nearly TWO PAGES per second.

Can you tell me how on Earth that is even borders on being more functional than an AH?

I have fond memories of the good old days too. This isn't the good old days. There will be several orders of magnitude more players than the good old days.