This is certainly NOT a thread about adding an auction house to the game.

While I was a fan of the auction house in WoW, I am looking forward to seeing how buying and selling play out in ESO the way the devs imagined it. Hopefully it will be a good system, but I fear I may miss the convenience of dumping a bunch of stuff on the AH at night and waking up to a full inbox the next day.

But anyway....

My real question is:

With no auction house, how will we know what is a good price to sell our items at (or buy them for that matter)?

I understand that an item is worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it, but you need to at least be in the ballpark of the "going price" for people to even give you the time of day. And you run the risk of selling your items for too little.

So how do you think we will know?

I'm sure some of it will be obvious....certain items will establish themselves at a certain price point and we'll see that in chat enough times to get the picture. But other items will be more problematic.

I've only played WoW and Rift for MMO's, and they both have AH's so I'm curious.

Thoughts?

I think it will largely be done in two distinct (but not necessarily mutually exclusive) sectors

It will work like any 'older' MMO - spam zone chat (or trade chat if they implement one) your item, someone PM's you asking how much, you both proceed to do the awkward "well...idunno you offer" x100, and then finally come to an appropriate price/trade.

AND

The guildstore is - to my knowledge - 'kindof' like an AH, except only with people in the guild (I think)
That being said, seeing as you can join up to 5 guilds, I'm sure there will be MANY (and one "super") trade guild, so prices will be ballparked accordingly.

Calculate based on mats add 20% to that total, ask for offer, if it is the same price or less then what the mats cost then nope.

I think you will only be able to gauge fair pricing once this title launches...
Anything before is inaccurate as its BETA and as such is in a state of flux.

The biggest guilds will form a cartel to keep to prices sky high across the server.

The guild store is NOT an AH. There's no bidding! Not an auction without bids.

The seller sets a price, and the buyer can buy it at that price, or not.

The game does offer a suggested price, and you can adjust it up or down.

I tried putting a few things in my guild store in the last beta, when my guild had claimed a resource in Cyrodiil. A couple of things sold, but I don't know if the buyer was a guildie or somebody buying in Cyrodiil. I just used the recommended price.

How else somebody would determine what an acceptable price is, I dunno Never been one of those MMO wheeler dealers. But I bet there will be websites devoted to it.

honestly i think it will svck

i think having a market is better than what we get here, not saying auction house but market

being able to sell to guildies only initially will svck, as i tend to give stuff to guildies not sell it

even after my guild/guilds get a keep and we can sell to others it will svck, there will only be 2000 players in each campaign so about 666 from my faction, which is not a very big market to sell to, also i hope most of those are there to fight not to shop, shoppers adding to possible que time in pvp will svck,

when i want to buy some thing, it will really svck major donkey balls, to have to port around between god knows how many cyrodill campaigns and port around between 6-12 keeps in each of those to find good offers

so yeah im quite sure, this system will be inferior in every way, to any system i have seen in the past 5 years

Interesting theories. I had forgotten about the guild store actually, but that's not going to be a real economy in the traditional MMO sense. I'm fine with that for now.

I'm mostly curious about 1 to 1 transactions. If you're not in a guild let's say...

I plan to be in a guild but I'm almost certain most things will be traded or given away to guild members.

I'll admit I didn't sell a single thing to another player during my limited time in the last beta...I'm not sure I even spoke to anyone.

I'm sure it will work itself out, and as http://www.gamesas.com/user/722618-srikandi/ said above, there will most likely be tracking sites. I remember going to a site like that sometimes when playing WoW to help decide on a good price.