You can be a member of up to 5 guilds. So, what is to stop someone creating a guild specifically as an AH guild? Imagine you are a member of your normal pve or pvp guilds, but then you also join the "AH Guild". Word gets around that the "AH Guild" has thousands of members and so it becomes the best place to buy and sell your goods.

If the "AH Guild" becomes so huge and that makes it the best place to do business, no-one will bother to buy/sell in any other guild. So the game effectively now has an unofficial AH.

There must be something I'm missing that will stop this from happening. Guild member cap maybe? Maybe more members doesn't equal more profit?

Perhaps there would need to be 3 guilds like this; one for each faction but do you see my concern?

Pretty sure that's the purpose of the guild system.

Why is it a concern, it sounds like a good idea to me.

That's my plan or the plan of my guild - in fact everyone will do it like this . We will do joint ventures with huge trade guilds which have the appropriate capacity to have meaningful guild store trading.

We are a guild of 20-30 guys, we don't fit in the guild store system - we are a guild, we don't trade, we share. We trade to unkown guys to higher prices, yes, but that's why we need a huge trading guild (or guilds).

I didnt read much about AH, but if thats the case, i dont see the problem. It is a great way to control RMT from inside imo. Guild Master and officers can probably see who sells what and stuff like that, eso didnt want to hire someone to monitor the AH i guess player will do eso's job

Thats probably how it will go. And because of that they might actually open real AH at some point.
But it can also be diffrent. There might be special guilds for one selling special weapons while other is focused on potions. If they set up economy for it , guild ah will be fun. If not they will just open offical ah after some time

Plausible, Navhkrin.

I have heard on this forum that there is a member cap of 500 with guilds but im not sure if thats true. I for one think this guilds merchant thing is awesome. sure not get your stuff in one location but then it forces you to deal with other players. I see the possibility for huge merchant guilds who are loosely associated to join forces to capture the keep that is the most convenient for their consumers or near some valuable mat drops etc.

I just seen the tread topic and another bit of my soul disappeared in Couldharbor...

There's is a guild member cap. last i heard i was 300 members.

Which is pretty much nothing (GW2 guilds can be larger than that without really having any purpose). So there should be plenty of competition among the "AH guilds". Having very large recognizable and trusted trading guilds can only be a good thing there.

I think it might be fun to let the players compete in the economy of the world, making their own stores. Not just list stuff to highest bidder.