Morning Friends! If you have been reading this blog you will know that I am on somewhat of an Elder Scrolls Online kick right now. This tends to be a thing I go through where I latch onto a game and obsess over it for a few weeks/months and then get it out of my system and move on to other things. I would love for Elder Scrolls Online to be more of a permanent addition to the roster but I also know my personal faults which sorta stacks the deck against that happening. This morning I am going to talk about one of the weirder quirks with the game, the lack of a centralized Auction House. I am by no means an expert in this topic and as a result take pretty much all of my advice with a grain of salt. Traditionally speaking I am not the sort of person that plays the auction house in these sorts of games.
One of the things that I am getting used to slowly is logging in and seeing messages like this sitting in my mail box telling me that I sold something. This morning I am going to do my best to explain how selling items with other players works in Elder Scrolls Online given that I just stated that there is no auction house. I am still very much figuring all of this out myself and I am certain that somewhere in this post I am going to make factual errors just due to lack of experience with the system. What I do know however is that yesterday alone I made around 150,000 gold in sales and I am starting to get a little better at figuring out what to price things.
So when I say there is no such thing as an Auction House, what I mean by that is there is no vendor in the world that serves as a universal gateway to buying or selling merchandise. What exists instead is a series of Guild Stores. If you go to the banker one of the many options will be to access the Guild Store, which by default allows you to buy and sell items from members of your guild. This in itself is not super useful unless you are in a giant guild exclusively populated with traders. What most folks actually want is the ability to buy and sell items from effectively all of the other players playing the game. Here is where we start to get more complicated with the system, but ultimately it is one that I dig.
Scattered throughout the world are a number of vendors physically located in specific cities that are flagged as “Guild Traders”. Since I spent so much of my time in Shornhelm, these are a couple of the guild traders available there and you can see the guild that owns the vendor beside the trader title. Each week guilds throughout the game bid on specific traders in specific locations, and if they win that trader exposes their guild store to anyone who physically walks up to that location and attempt to buy an item. These traders are all clumped together somewhere in the city, and there are absolutely better locations than others. Mournhold for example tends to be a pretty hot location given that its trader stalls are all clumped around the Wayshrine for the city. Shornhelm where I am taking a photo tends to be one of the lower rent areas given that you have to exit town quite a distance away from the Wayshrine before you encounter the traders.
Given that players can be a member of up to five guilds at once, this has lead to the creation of trade guilds that act as cartels and make sure that they have a guild trader vendor each and every week. The above is a screenshot from the guild recruitment tool in game and just a handful of guilds listed under trading guilds that actively have a guild trader. Many of these guilds have trade requirements in that you need to make a certain dollar amount of sales every single week in order to guarantee your slot. However as a result they also tend to be the guilds that are furiously bidding on the highest traffic areas of the game. Many have a way of buying your way into the guild as well through buying weekly raffle tickets, which is a system that I have yet to really sort out.
I personally was looking for something a little bit more chill and ended up going with the Pilfering Peddlers which currently has a guild trader in Solitude. The challenge with being a more low key guild is that last week they failed to secure a bid on a trader meaning that we were effectively locked out of public sales during that time period. Right now I am mostly using it as a way of selling anything that I happen to get out in the world that has any value. Generally speaking I don’t sell anything that is less than 2000 gold on the trader, with the exception being patterns which are all pretty cheap but also sell super fast. The benefit of this system is that it is extremely cheap to list an item on the guild trader and since the default time period is 30 days you can mostly just set it and forget it.
The question obviously then is… how do I know if something is worth money on the guild trader? I lean heavily on an addon called Tamriel Trade Centre, that I spoke about the other day. Essentially it is a combination of a search website, an in game addon and a TSR that runs in your system tray and is constantly updating a list of prices in the background as well as announcing anything that you are selling. I combined a series of items that I have up for sale currently and you can see towards the bottom you will see a series of values in Avg/Min/Max format. Right now that is mostly what I am working off of because it tells me what items have been listed for on traders. Over time I am getting better at guessing what a reasonable amount because the first items I posted sold almost instantly telling me I had put them up for far too little.
My items are hosted on a Guild Trader located at Solitude in Western Skyrim, and anyone who happens to be wandering along can go up to that vendor and buy things directly from them. When this happens the item is delivered to the person via in game mail and then I get a chunk of gold delivered to me in my inbox minus the guild trader cut. What is more likely however is that someone will have gone out to the Tamriel Trade Centre website and done a search on one of the items I was listing and then purposefully ported to that city and bought the specific item they were looking for. The above is an example of a search that includes one of the items I am selling.
Right now I am the most expensive vendor because I sorta took a chance on this item specifically and am testing the waters. Were I a smart trader I would pop around to the cities where folks are selling something similar cheaper and relist those as well. In each listing shown above it indicates the player selling the item, where the trader is physically located at, the guild in question, the price and how long ago the item was last seen. Right now the TTC website is only showing you things that someone has physically witnessed, but given how prevalent the addon is and how active trading is in Elder Scrolls Online it ends up being a pretty reasonable resource.
Tamriel Trade Centre relies not only upon you installing the addon but also running the thin client that hangs out in your system tray. I opened mine and it has all of the things that I currently have listed and my internal database of items last synchronized at 6:23 am which is around when I started writing this blog post. This TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident process) hangs out and is essentially the glue that makes the whole process work. This is ultimately how WoWhead also worked back in the day in that you would install the WoWHead addon and then have a piece of software that was ferrying any information you collected during your WoW Play Session back to the website. There is a mutual benefit here in that I get the pricing information I need to be able to confidently place things on the Guild Trader and they get the benefit of effectively being the centralized auction house search engine that the game is missing.
At this point you are probably saying… “But Bel isn’t this just needlessly arcane?” and on some level yes. On another level however I really appreciate this particular brand of nonsense. Using World of Warcraft is the equivalent of electronic trading in the stock market. The person with the best tools and is capable of executing the fastest trades wins. Elder Scrolls Online is more like a Flea Market where there is absolutely money to be made in flipping items, but it requires effort to root around through the dross, physically go to a location in the world, make the purchase and then post the item for an updated price on your own guild trader. Earlier I said I should go snap up the cheaper version of an item, but in doing so that requires time and effort on my part to physically drop down into a city, find that particular trader and make a purchase.
The end result for me personally is the right amount of friction both on selling of items but also on buying of items. Do I go out into the world and farm an item or do I purchase it off a guild trader knowing there is a bit of friction in that interaction as well? Right now I am turning my proclivity for being a murder hobo and collecting loot into profit, given that items retain value in this game far more than any other game that I have played in the past. Some of the items that I have been selling have been in the game since launch and are still viable gearing options. There is so much content in the game and so many different item sets that no one can really corner the market on a specific type of item. The end result just works and the player based economy in Elder Scrolls Online seems to be thriving as a result, with the only barrier of entry being joining one of the hundreds of trade guilds.