Zenimax is limited by the megaserver. It has to deal with potentially millions of players on the AHs.

Whether or not we have a global AH a faction AH or a GAH, we all probably think the AH, as a system, could use a little help to make it a better tool.

Please don't post on which AH you want, that is not what this thread is about.

I would like to hear ideas on how to stop price undercuts, prices being sold for thousands of times what it is worth and see if we can fix the way AH get flooded with so many items that nothing sells for much.

Here is a regulation that I believe is needed on AHs--

When you place an item on the AH you can not sell it for more than 10x it's base worth. This will stop players from selling items thousands of times more than an items worth.

When you place an item on the AH, you can not sell it for less than 110% of it's worth. This will stop people from undercutting prices so low that you can not even make a profit.

So, if an item was worth 100 gold, you could sell that item for a minimum of 110 gold all the way up to 1,000 gold.

This makes sure everyone can make a profit, but it will stop crazy undercuts and stop crazy price gouging.

What do you guys think?

Please feel free to add any ideas of your own or change my ideas to make it work better.

Sounds reasonable, in this way the minimum and maximum price is set by the game. I trust impartial game devs over players any day.

Guessing you used white for the important stuff. I'm on my phone at work and can't see half the [censored] you wrote.

Larger staff? Individual limitations? Item checkpoints?

You and this AH need to get married

Not my job to figure out a solution, I'll leave that to the professionals who are being paid

We have a dutch saying, comming from the worlds best soccer player Johan Cruijf..

Every advantage has its own disadvantage....


So while on a mega server you can allways play with your friends from every where around the globe, there will also be some disadvantages.. you just cant have everything in a single package. They just need to find a solution for the AH, and all is fine again.

I have no clue what that means.

That is what I am trying to help with .

Hmmm, now we are talking about economic regulation . . . Should it be Laissez-faire, or Keynesian? Like any economic system we will need to see who becomes the losers and the winners . . .

C'mon your a smart guy.

Item checkpoints to halt overpriced items; a pricing windoe based on supply & demand.

Larger staff to manually monitor the AH's activity.

What are you trying to avoid a monopoly?

Nobody should be able to dictate pricing outside of the owning party. If someone can build and sell something cheaper then the next party then that's nobody's problem but their competitor's.

Let me know if that isn't your agenda.

Don't need any of that pesky manual stuff, if the server has percentage-based min/max prices set when posting.

Within that range, a GAH could indeed decide which end of the pricing spectrum they wish to be known for.

Just throwing ideas, I think it's uncalled for to try and cap an item that's being auctioned.

This is the one that threw me. Why would they need a larger staff?

My agenda is to make the AH a better tool.

I think it's necessary, you can't expect a player to hunt for an item when there's upwards of 500 GAHs to sift through. So that means the bigger and more well-known ones could end up being the worst offenders for ripping a player off. This cap (at both ends) would be simply be about looking after player interests.

Actually i think they are not on the right track, by splitting up the mega market, i just dont think that splitting it up in guildmarkets is the right answer or the only part of a solution. Guilmarkets are a nice thing to have for guildconvenience, but thats about it. An economy is a global, or a local thing, depending on how hard traveling is, you can make it a local thing, but with teleports over the whole place, its by definition a global thing.

I however dont think that price regulations and interference with the market are the right answer..

They just need to make the items that flood the markets more interesting, being able to destruct items to gain components from them for crafting might also be part of the solution in keeping prices healthy.

Anyway, they should revise the market in such a way, that buyers and sellers are ballanced, if you have 10.000 items and only 10 buyers like in GW2 then you have a problem. With smaller markets the problem is lessevident but it is still there. Just make standard green items a bit rarer, have more diversity in them and make them have a use other then wearing them


And yes, Bop is a solution, but not somthing favoured by the players, BOE is a must, and item degradation, with repairs costing actuall resources.

Manual monitoring.

Make it a better tool? Well what's the starting base for your impeovements?

In what ways are you trying to make it better?

OP suggested a very generous cap on the maximum price - 10x its base worth. The onus is on ZeniMax in getting the base worth right.

I'm not following the math here. How does making items more interesting help the AH? Can you give an example of how this works?

Lol since I can't read your talking points here. I gathered you want the devs to control some aspects of the AH. ( whatever version of it we have) I say no. Items are worth what ppl will pay for them. If I want to over/under price my items I should be able to without interference from a third party.

You know how sometimes you're on a forum and there seems to be all these crazy querky threads and you're thinking where are all these people coming from then you look and realise its just one person making all these threads so yeah anyway I think with enough liquidity it won't matter what restirictions are on the AH because they'll be set by the market..

That way the market can decide what they want to pay for items - they are only worth what someone is willing to pay anyway?

Why would it need to be manual?

Read the OP.

My point exactly.

Didn't know Tamriel practiced communism.

The market is going to be confused and scattered all over the place, and probably sick of trudging through tons of GAH windows *trying* to find a decent AH that's selling what they want and at a price worth considering.

This is going to frustrate players.

Didn't say it need to be anything. You were just asking everyone to brainstorm, was you not?

And I answered your original post by asking were you trying to avoid a monopoly and controlled prices shouldn't be decided by anyone else but the parties involved.

Haven't experienced it personally so my knowledge is ignorance at the moment.

Maybe ZOS is trying to avoid the mass market clutter by separating the auctions using guilds; which in turn might help regulate prices by using competitive pricing.

In such a fragmented market, this isn't reasonable. People can't be everywhere looking at all GAHs, so the actual worth of an item isn't going to be readily apparent. People will be joining and quitting GAHs all the time that attempt to screw with the prices once some form of known pricing structure starts to occur. Guilds will be entirely disposable thanks to this.