From what I can see and I am assuming this , but its the relatively older gamers and the roleplaying community which are dead set aganst the AH (i am 35 btw). What you guys have to understand is that we and roleplayers will be in the minority in this game . If this game needs to be successful it needs to cater and make concessions to the casual gamer out there who dont want to waste unnecessary time peddling their wares. Times have changed since the days of EQ1.I am not saying cater to their every whim and fancy , but i feel this is once of the concessions that has to be made soon to avoid a mass exodus of people leaving the game.And by the time the trading guilds actually establish themselves the game would have leaked a lot of potential subscribers.

Trade botting gold sellers are nothing but bad for the game. I for one, will be happy to see them leave for WoW or whatever grindfest auction house gold seller paradise pops up next, never to return. The game will do just fine on its merits without ruining its economy by catering to gold selling script kiddies and their margin trading bots.

I don't really see the lack of an AH losing the game too many subscribers. I don't think trading mechanics is a high priority in the minds of most gamers when they decide whether they want to buy/subscribe to a game, the issue seems more likely to come up after they've immersed themselves in the game for a bit: at which point they've already decided whether they like the game and the trading mechanics (or lack thereof) would at most be an annoyance, rather than a dealbreaker.

i agree ^

arent the AH bots the ones who come in after a mmo has allready goten to higher levels tho? do you see them in the 1st year of a new mmo?

i can certainly see myself selling and trading in large towns where i can send out sales messages every 5 minutes or so. kind of like a begger on the street corner, you only see him in common chat once in a while and not dominating the common chat. i would not use zone chat, i would simply copy paste a comment like

"come see my good armor and weapons for good discounts, whisper me for details and location"

but i have several concerns about this,

1 being i would not have the global AH to compare my prices, i could easilly be lied to and selling an item for 50 gold when some one tells me the same item never sells for more then 20 gold.

2 how can i do this regularily since i do not plan to use my main character as the craftsmen. it would be made by my alt who has a different name.

3 keeping current with what is considered "hot items" and what people are searching for

4 keeping current with pricing

i dont have any more thoughts yet on this but im sure there are alot of things im not mentioning that will become a problem later on as im not a specialist on sales. my speciality is on the crafting NOT on sales, my sales info allways came from viewing the AH and allways looking at the prices and what was selling often.

for example:

i see that red dust is selling for 100 gold, so i sell red dust for 96 gold EA:

i loose a small profit but i know for a fact i will get the sale FAST! cause everyone loves a sale and cheaper prices.

i cannot do the above mentioned because i dont have access to info on the markets due to the lack of an AH!

Im thinking you are right about this no matter what the polls show...

I prefer an auction house, maybe have 1 in each town with the listings separate from other towns AH's, so we don't just have 1 massive linked AH.

Or at the very least allow you to open a shop individually as in have your own NPC character you place your goods on and price how you want and people can buy from them. That way you don't have to stand there yourself trying to sell things and can go off adventuring.

And any money made is collected by going to your NPC.

Personally I think the lack of a faction/server wide auction house is a good thing.

First, it makes gold farmers lives more difficult. (You cannot set up a bot, and simply flood the market with crap)

Second, It makes *your* trading skills more valuable. Your not competing with every Tom dike and harry when selling your wares. Your competing with folks in the same guild. (Prices will not get driven down as quickly, like in most mmos.)

Third, it may very well create a bazaar type situation. You have some items to sell? You want the best price possible? Go to x area and hawk your wares. I find it fun to go to such places and see what kind of deals I can get.

imo each faction should have its own AH. the system currently in place is just a way to push people into PVP. it seems most of the things they are doing in this game is like that. they want us all the pvp more than pve. at launch the pve looks good though, i just hope it too receives updates through out the years and does not turn into daoc where they just forgot all about it

Blocking the ability to sell without clogging chat behind a "join a 50 person guild that has a keep" wall is kinda a kick to the jimmies, honestly.

I don't even join guilds with that many people in it in ANY MMO. Bunch of people I'll never know, nor will I ever care about. Oh, and they have to pvp to get a keep. No thanks.

I see a lot of people guild hopping around to join the ones that have the stores on a regular basis.

"oh you can join more than one guild"... I don't care. I don't want to join A guild much less up to 5 of them. 5 more chat channels to turn off.

I speak exclusively from the selling side.

I don't care about buying, I very rarely ever buy anything from another player in ANY game, ever. Self sufficiency the entire way.

Give me an NPC in a market stall to unload on and make them sell for me. I sure as hell don't want to be stuck doing it ECL tunnel style. In fact, I spoke with the friend of mine I'm starting with today, and the first thing he said when I told him about how the economy works is "oh god not the CL tunnel again".

SO there's that.

I'm sorry, when I have a few hours to play, I want to spend those hours actually playing, not sitting in town trying to undercut the next guy by 1 drake to try to get my stuff to sell.

EQ2's system there's no bidding. You list your junk for a price and it'll sit there forever until you take it down or someone buys it. Don't like the price, buy it from someone else.

man i hated the eq bazaar system

I′ve played MMOs both with AH and without, honestly I personally dont care both options have good and bad sides and are possible to use.

Tho in EVERY game both with and without AH crafters are valued a lot higher than a AH, if you find a good crafter who is nice and polite people will always use them no matter what "system" there is in place, as much as you would love to just go and sell your stuff or vendor it or whatever you feel like, you will get a better feeling of the TES world by in fact trading and talking to people as a MMO is all about, AH is faster and easier for sure specially with 250,000+ people on each faction due to the mega server tech BUT then a lot of the other stuff that people all wants like personal shops, guild shops and housing and much more wouldn′t really be a needed, wanted or usefull option anymore.

You cannot have everything and then expect to loose nothing, the system in place now will create some spam on certian channels sure no doubt but it allows for such a wide range of other options both player and game wise compared to an AH, lets face it, if you have an AH why would you ever look into personal shops or guild shops ?

Just my thoughts, as said personally I couldn′t care less, always been a crafter always will be and will always find my costumers and talk with people as that is what I personally enjoy

you mentioned "other chat channels" but truth be told i did not see a trading channel.

Didnt refer to a trading channel, more the channels where there is a lot of people such as the cities and so on, if there comes a global trading channel or a zone trading channel that kinda solves all problems dosnt it ? just leave the channel and be happy

I like the auction house system. I think ESO's current approach is going to cause a massive amount of confusion and chat spam. Lots of people will totally circumvent the guild system. Especially by brand new players who didnt play the beta or keep up with the forums. It will also force people to join large guilds just to buy what they need.

Perhaps ZMO could implement an auction house but have some restrictions like short auction timers, or a hefty listing fee to limit the flooding of undercutting auctions at or near the vendor value... or even implement something like a 20 auctions per day maximum. Idk, just thinking out loud here.

that would be really nice.

but i am concerened that it would be over run with confusion and not be able to locate certain items due to spam from all of us asking for specific items or trying to sell just 1 thing that no one seems to want.

i dont see this ending very well atm

i must agree with you that it perhaps will drive people into guilds a bit more .. but what will be the end result?. will they become loyal or will we see massive guild hoping just for the sake of searching for the cheapest items?

perhaps put a limit on how often you can guild hop

You don't have to be a member of a guild to buy from their store if they set one up in a keep.

As i see it, this new system

- will give people a large incentive to join a guild

- will funnel people into PvP areas, but without forcing them to actually PvP thanks to the keep teleports (some might discover they like PvP even if they didn't think they would, thats a good thing!)

- will hamper gold farmers (puts the control over who can sell their wares into the hand of players)

The only price you pay for all the above is convenience. I think it's well-worth it, but time will tell.

Many people are used to all kinds of conveniences, most of which are in expense of much more important things, which is sad.

Totally against it.