I am personally against the auction house but it seems such a polarising issue I am curious of the support both sides have.

I'm up for a action house for each faction.

Well, looks pretty much 50/50, I was expecting more swing.

I am not saying that the system the devs will have in place is going to be perfect. But before clamoring for an AH I would like to see how things evolve.

Things are not going to be pretty at launch , thats all i can say and for the average gamer who hasnt been following these forums as much as the rest of us here, its going to come as a rude surprise.Not having an auction house i mean

Let's give the guild stores a chance before bashing them, if they don't work, then an auction feature of some sort will likely be implemented.

I am not bashing the guild stores, but i think majority of the players at launch will.

This game simply won't feel like an MMO to me without an AH.

1) I cant stand monitoring a chat channel being spammed with people selling stuff

2) I don't wanna sit around monitoring a chat channel and/or drop everything to go meet someone to buy/sell something

3) I like searching for upgrades, etc.. especially if I've had a lot of RNG bad luck which I did during beta

4) If I'm crafting and I'm missing something I gotta go farm it or hope my guildies have posted said item

5) I don't like charging guildies for stuff

6) I got off work late and just in time for a raid but need consumables and other supplies

7) I accidentally destroyed the wrong item, now I have no weapon and can't go farm for a new one

8) I like to farm. I would be considerably less interested in doing that if I had no viable way to sell my wares

9) What about lone wolves that don't like guilds?

I'm sure I can think of a bunch more bullet points but this is a start after 30 seconds of though.

Needs a third option:

Irrelevant because the devs aren't going to implement a global auction house.

I'm quite happy that the devs understand good game design and aren't going to listen to the auction house exploiter/bot runners, because AHs ruin MMO economies in a matter of days and are one of the laziest excuses for "game design" ever created, right up there with WoW-style faceroller combat.

i dont like the current auction house set in guilds that they have done.

but, the reason i dont like it is only because i made 90% of my income in other mmo's by buying and selling items in the global auction house. since they have removed that method i am struggling to come up with a new way to make my cold hard cash ..

The fact that you made 90% of your in game money by "playing" the auction house instead of the game itself is not a good endorsemant of global auction houses (they're garbage anyway as anyone who understands MMO economies and doesn't have a vested interest will recognize).

It's refreshing to see developers that have a grasp on these things, rather than them just being lazy and slapping in a global auction house to support real-money gold sales, then just shrugging when the economy is destroyed in a matter of weeks by trade bots.

So why are there so many games with perfect functioning auction houses with no problems? (GW2, LOTRO, Tera, Secret World) Honestly even Wow isn't that bad. You're always gonna have tools posting stuff too high. That doesn't mean it sells. Besides having to incur a cost to sell stuff mitigates people pricing stuff to high.

The bottom line is this - if players can trade in any way, shape or form, you're going to have these problems. Gold farmers and virtual currency vendors is what causes these problems. And if you don't take a stern approach and stay on it, you end up behind the 8-ball. If you stay on top of it and stop the buying/selling of virtual gold, you end up like LOTRO - a game that has almost zero gold spam and gold farming problems.

And wow face-roller combat? So I assume you've conquered all wow bosses on heroic huh? Wow to date has the best combat of any MMO whether you like Wow or not, used to like it and now jump on the hater bandwagon or whatever. I've played every MMO since Meridian 59 and spent years playing MUDs before that. I have yet to encounter combat that was fluid and immerssive as Wow.

This game w/o an AH will cause this to be a small niche game. It already has an uphill battle because most hardcoe PC gamers are turned off by games designed to work on a console controller as it is not to mention wildstar is launching around the same time... and I was in the beta this weekend and I must say I was very impressed. I had a low bar going in because it being NCSoft but I was very impressed. In fact I wouldn't have even bothered with the wildstar beta but finding out about no AH causes 3 years of anticipation of ESO to dissipate in 1 short weekend.

The poll might work better if it's one or the other. I suspect some people may be choosing both just to mess with the numbers.

I'm personally against an AH, mainly because it takes out a lot of personality from trading. On a related issue, it takes a lot of fun out of being a crafter.

I guess what I'm trying to say is AHs are very artificial and causes the player economy to be... inorganic. It doesn't feel like an economy. And personally? I like games to be immersive, rather than spreadsheet-like.

I've never played an MMO that has an auction house that the whole community thinks has no problems. As many people above have stated, they benefit some kinds of players, and penalize others. To me, they're just an un-fun headache, kinda like tax preparation Not my idea of a game.

I don't know how the guild store idea is going to work out, but I'm interested to see I put some stuff, mostly crafted consumables, in my guild store last beta, and some of it sold; kinda surprised me (since why spend money in beta), but seems to be working so far I certainly made a nice profit.

Edited the ability for multiple options to be selected. Now it's one or the other.

Also agree with you, I fear the AH system just devalues trade goods and marginalises crafters in several ways. There's no salesmanship, it's purely numbers, very artificial and unrealistic to me.

On the other hand if trading becomes too challenging then what's the point?

Sometimes we have to compromise . The game is immersive due to a lot of other features, there have been a lot of posts regarding clunky combat, lack of bag space etc, but those issues will get fixed with time and is not gamebreaking at launch. Not having an auction house which has been a staple of MMOs for many years will absolutely put people off. Where are people going to sell their wares during the first week or 2 after launch. Do they need to make a forced decision on joining a guild when they dont want to just to sell their wares? I repeat again , i can see the system working great once there are established trading guilds, but at launch a lot of people will quit because of it.

well then how are we spose to advertise?

we iether need a global "sales chat channel" so we arent spaming people in normal chat and zone chat (but that dont even work cause it would be spamming so fast you wouldnt be able to even read it from it scrolling at top speed and you wouldnt be able to find what u wanted or sell what u wanted)

OR we could .. nvm idk any other way .......

And you just proved my point. GW2's economy is pure garbage and was exploited by tradebots in a matter of weeks after release.

Fixed.

Let's stop being intentionally disingenuous, those people that want to "play" the auction house are talking about using margin tradebots to exploit it in order to sell gold for real money.

I for one, am happy that ZOS is not catering to the script kiddy tradebotter gold sellers.

Advertising could take many forms... if you sell a lot of blacksmithed items people may want to have your set of marked items, they'll look you up and contact you if you're reliable (marking items does make this easier), of course there will be hawking goods in a trade channel, using a guild merchant store, word of mouth, keep vendor (if you have a keep), posting on forums, mail out free promo daggers with your mark on them to entice real customers etc..

In a nutshell it's going to rely on the crafter building a relationship with his clientele, even being able to charge a premium just to have and maintain that crafter/customer relationship. That's completely missing with a cold AH, there's no relationship management or branding, it's just pure "who's got what I want at the cheapest price."

The AH does a disservice to craftsman by forcing them to charge the cheapest rate if they want a quick sale, there's no value-add that they can give and no margin that they can boost. The AH however does service brokers and farmers who only take away from an economy without producing anything to bring back to said community, buying low and selling high does nothing but inflate an economy and take margin away from the crafter that actually did the work, relisting items on an AH is not work.

It's fixed now and their problems were due to a weak, exploitable interface.

No, it's not. You don't understand what problems I'm talking about if you think it's fixed.

I'd like to see how it works as the devs want it but if after a few weeks or months, an AH be a possibility should the intended way fail.

That's like saying that the Internet and ebay doesn't "feel like an economy" because there isn't any "personality" or "personal interaction" and makes the global economy feel "inorganic".

The rationale of these stances is beyond reason at times.

I rest my case. Some of the most irrational dialogue.

It is actually! I much prefer going to traditional (Asian) markets than supermarkets, for example.

Except for one thing: real life has real needs. You don't really have real needs in a game, the first priority is fun.

If you want to run trade bots so you can sell gold for real money, there are plenty of Korean grindfests with global auction houses I'm sure you'd love.

I would like to see an Auction House because I'm all for convenience.

But I am willing to give merchant guilds a chance and see what happens.