Current problems with Merchant's Guild and how to fix them

[TriiipY]

Hello fellow merchants! After getting to level 7 in Merchants Guild I am going to post my complaints and thoughts to fix them and hopefully get some discussion from the community on ideas that we can collectively agree on to improve our faction.

1. The time it takes to achieve higher ranks takes too long:
This can be alleviated by simply reducing the XP for ranks 6+ required OR a more creative solution could be “Trade Missions”. Similar to prophecies in UI design except the quest would be to trade the faction merchant a desired item for a reward of gold and favor. You can accept a variety of items to exchange from a random pool but can only accept up to 3 a day, some are more basic items with specific affixes for example “Trade a Coral Wand with Lightning Penetration, Increased lightning damage and chance to shock” for example. A more difficult mission could be, “trade a full set of Halvers gear” or trade an Urzils Pride with 3+LP. These harder missions often take some grinding to get but give you vastly greater gold and favor reward and you could even make it so that you can trade items purchased from other players. This in turn would boost the overall market and give players a reason to purchase/sell gear that would otherwise be deemed worthless.

2. Ranking up milestones are not rewarding enough and do not align with the content hours:
By the time you unlock exalted weapons you would have already played through monoliths and then through an entire set of empowered monoliths. (Assuming its your first char). By this time you would most likely already have almost a full set of crafted exalted gear and even possibly a few legendries. This in turn makes Merchants Guild feel slightly pointless during most of the important gearing stages becoming only usable to min max your gear later during the cycle and initial gearing at the start of monoliths. I believe that 1-2LP items should be placed into earlier ranks. (1 LP on rank 5, 2LP buying added on rank 6.) Another way to make ranking up feel rewarding would be to add Increased Gold drops % added to each rank. Starting at rank 2 with a +5% bonus and incrementally going up to +150% increased gold drops at rank 10. (We are merchant gold hoarders after all )

3. Merchants Guild is MUCH more profitable for meta build classes:
Currently if you play a Rogue for example, you will drop mostly rogue gear. This is bad for merchants guild because if you want to play a less popular class your limited options of selling items that are in demand cuts your profit dramatically. A solution could be to add an OPTIONAL bonus perk to ranks to have x% of item drops be for a specific class of your choosing. This way you can play your Shaman and still make profit by selling to the meta.

4. Price checking non unique gear is not worthwhile.
Finding a similar item on the market is nearly impossible because of how sorting through affixes works: By the time you find a similar rare item you could have completed 2 monolith areas and made triple from gold drops of what that 25k rare helmet might eventually sell for. This problem can be fixed in one of two ways. EHG makes their API public so that 3rd parties can create trading sites/in game price checking tools OR they don’t release the API and create their own price checker. This price checker could show up in the UI automatically when you place an item into your stall to sell showing you similar items and what they have sold for and what they are currently selling for. Currently the market is a bit of a mess with people throwing wildy random numbers into their prices (I see 1000’s of poorly rolled idols currently in the market for 100k+ that will NEVER sell).

These are not all of the problems (search function not even letting you select certain affixes, etc.) but I believe these are the biggest to tackle. I do want to add that I am really grateful that we have a market at all! It has been a lot of fun trying to figure out how to price items so thank you EHG for giving us the option in the first place. Hopefully we can make it better and better. Thanks for reading

[TriiipY]

Someone else in Discord mentioned a few issues that should also be pointed out. Favor costs are way too high for LP items and all exalted items should also be unlocked with Rank 6.

[Dagde]

Hello There,

I agree with you about the time needed to gain interesting lvl. Moreover, it’s not really interesting from a mechanic point of view (favors used, mainly with the gambler if i understood correctly the system, which is not well explained). I think it’s not incentive for using the bazar (so creating a dynamic economy). If you want to reach reputation, is it useful to sell items ? (it’s kind of strange for a merchant’s guild imho).

Other issues from my point of view (if i didn’t miss something):

Gold earned Between 2 sessions of games, you don’t know exactly what you sold and what you earned. An option (like affixes) to transfer it from the bazar to your chest would allow us to check what we earned and allow to check easily if bugs occur

Filters & Terrible Interface The research is really awful (don’t keep memory and hard to check). If i didn’t miss something, two points seem relevant to me. First, the object we want to sell should always be visible (have a propre space) to compare easily with the market. Second, if it’s visible, it will be perfect to fill the research by clicking on the affixes of our stuff (and choose the min. Tier needed). Maybe it could help to make the market more interesting.

[TriiipY]

I’m not sure if I really understand what you are trying to say about your first point. I agree about the gold collection from sold items. However I don’t think a tracker is necessary but an easier way to collect all your gold at once at any time would be a welcome addition. It is really annoying to scroll through your list looking to press the button on sold items.