Editor’s Note: This guide was written, in its entirety, by Ixtyr, a long-time trader who has served as a Guild Master or Senior Officer in three high-end trade guilds on the PC North American megaserver since the game’s launch in April 2014. He currently actively manages The Ska’vyn Exchange (Wayrest) . If you would like to learn more about his guild (and possibly join), you can visit their website here.
Foreword
Over the course of the past several years, I’ve been approached by an overwhelming number of players, both new and old, who ask me a wide variety of questions regarding the Trading System in ESO, how to make more gold, and different tips and tricks to make the entire process easier. Many of these are questions I’ve answered multiple times over the years, as a Guild Master and Officer in multiple high-end Trade Guilds on the North American PC megaserver – but as time passes, I’ve found that I’ve had fewer opportunities on a day-to-day basis to proactively help everyone with tailored advice or one-on-one trade lessons.
Because of this, I’ve decided to sit down and write this “ESO Gold Guide” to help everyone grow their wealth, improve their trading tactics and strategy, and find greater success in the ESO economy. If you have any questions, or would like to voice your opinion regarding anything in this guide, please feel free to leave a comment below!
I’ll be splitting this guide into a few parts, each linked below:
- Overview Of The Elder Scrolls Online Economy
- Useful Addons For Trade & The ESO Economy
- Earning Your First Five Million Gold
- Amassing Your Fortune And Wealth
Useful Addons For Trade & The ESO Economy
There are a variety of useful third-party addon programs available for your use to improve your trading experience. I’ve outlined a few of my favorites below, with brief descriptions and explanations as to how they can best be used for maximum benefit.
Looking for the new and best addons for ESO? Check out my Top 25 List of Addons For ESO!
Advanced Filters
Advanced Filters is a great inventory-management addon that adds a series of additional inventory filters to your User Interface (UI). On its own, this mod has its uses, but it really shines when used in conjunction with AwesomeGuildStore – you gain even more filtering options.
AwesomeGuildStore
Let’s be honest – ZOS’s default UI for the Guild Store is pretty much objectively horrid. The biggest issue? Lack of adequate search and filtering options. AwesomeGuildStore solves that problem by completely revamping the interface, adding dozens of new filtering options, text-search capabilities, and even some nifty “deals” filters that pull from your Master Merchant data. If you’re remotely serious about Trading in any capacity, you need to have this addon installed.
Master Merchant
I have over 100 addons installed for ESO (seriously, I’m not kidding). Master Merchant is by far my favorite. Philgo’s done a great job with this mod over the years. As I stated above with AwesomeGuildStore – if you’re involved in Trading at all, you need Master Merchant. Period.
Master Merchant acts as a massive data management system – it logs all of your sales and purchase data in each of your guilds over time, provides a variety of useful filters, and allows you to manipulate it into a variety of useful reports. But it doesn’t stop there – this addon also stores the data of all other players’ sales and purchases within any of your guilds.
I’ll go ahead and outline a few of my favorite features and reports below – but I really encourage you to jump online and mess with the settings yourself to find out what works best for you.
Guild Roster Filters
Jump into your addons settings for Master Merchant (go to “Settings > Addons > Master Merchant”), and enable the “Show In Guild Roster” option. I absolutely love this view – when enabled, Master Merchant will add a series of new columns to your Guild Roster for Purchases, Sales, Sales Tax Generated, and Listings Sold, as well as a small filter button at the bottom of the window where you can set your preferred date ranges.
This lets you see everyone’s sales and purchases right in the roster – and you can sort each column in ascending or descending order. Want to know who the top 10 sellers were last week? Select “Last Week” as your filter and sort by sales. Curious to see who made the most internal purchases yesterday? Choose “Yesterday” as the filter and sort by purchases. It’s a great feature to help you keep track of how you’re doing in your guilds.
Scatter Plot Graphs
Go into your Master Merchant settings and enable the “Show Scatter Plot/Graph” option. This will add a small scatter plot with all relevant sales of each item when you bring up its tooltip. This might seem a bit advanced or cluttered at first – but just trust me, and stick with it. There are some seriously useful insights to be gained from viewing your sales data in this way.
In addition to Master Merchant’s default “Price Check” capability, which adds a weighted average price figure to all items for which you have data, the scatter plot lets you view how that price has fluctuated or changed over time. Is the average price of Tempering Alloys 7,500g right now? Great – but how stable is that price? Is it trending up, or down, or is it mostly flat?
Viewing your scatter plot can save you from making a bad purchase, or help you make a more educated decision on how to price an item. If Tempering Alloys have been selling for 8,000g each for the past few days, you may not want to leave money on the table by just following the “average” price – and likewise, if those Alloys are selling for significantly less, you might not want to list them at an average price that isn’t reflective of where the market is going.
Guild Color Filters
This isn’t really a stand-alone feature, but it is worth mentioning if you don’t already change your Guild colors to be unique for each of your individual guilds. Master Merchant will look at the different color settings (see “Settings > Social”) of each of your guilds, and then change the color of its data points in your Scatter Plots to reflect each guild that a specific sale took place in.
This is a subtle, but very important feature to make use of – different cities have different markets, and some items sell faster or for different prices in one town versus another. If you have a guild in Rawl’kha and a guild in Belkarth, and you’re trying to sell Potent Nirncrux – they might sell faster in Belkarth, or for more gold, than they would in Rawl’kha. By quickly examining the different trends by color in your Scatter Plot, you can make a better decision on how/where to move your goods.
Average Price Range Hotkeys
Another little-known feature that doesn’t get a lot of love – by holding down your “Shift” or “Ctrl” keys, you can adjust the date-range window utilized by MM’s “Price Check” function. By default, the time range for MM’s Price Checks are “Last 30 Days”, but holding “Shift” while viewing a tooltip will change the data source to be “Average Price over Last 10 Days”, and “Ctrl” will adjust it to “Average Price over Last 3 Days”. These modifier keys, as well as their specific date ranges, can be customized in your Master Merchant settings to be whatever you prefer.
MM Data Tables
I don’t really know why, but it seems like arguably the best feature of Master Merchant is also its least utilized by most players. By typing “/mm” into your chat prompt, you’ll bring up your Master Merchant window – a really slick, clean interface that you can use to view and manipulate all of your Master Merchant data in a variety of ways.
One of my favorite views is the “Item Details” view, which allows you to view all items sold (or purchased) by yourself, all players, or specific players that you search for. Just toggle the Scroll icon in the top of the window to make sure you’re looking at “Item Details” rather than Player Details, and then toggle your small “person” icon in the top-left header to swap between Sales and Purchases to bring this view up. Want to know what that one guy in your guild has been doing to make those massive sales figures this week? Just pull this view up, search their name, and take a look!
Alternatively, if you want to know how much in sales your guild has done overall for the week, you can pull up a Player Details view – change your toggle on the Scroll icon, adjust your headers so you’re viewing “Sales” rather than Purchases or Items, then sort in ascending order by “Rank” – rank zero will show you your aggregated guild-wide sales figures. Keep in mind that you can always adjust your date ranges with the filter at the bottom of the window at any time!
MM Missing Data Recall
Sometimes, Master Merchant gets bogged down and bugs out. It doesn’t happen often – but when it does, it can be frustrating, particularly if you’re a power-user who needs accurate data. In the event that you suspect your Master Merchant may not have completely scanned your guilds’ sales histories, and when a “Refresh” doesn’t work, you can use the “/mm missing” command to force a full re-scan and audit. This is more taxing on your system than a typical refresh – but it should ensure your data is 100% complete. Personally, as a GM, I run this prompt every week for safety – but your chosen frequency is up to you.
Tamriel Trade Centre
I’ll be blunt – I hate this addon, just on principle. I’m a bit more of a Trade purist, I suppose – and the fundamental design philosophy behind TTC directly opposes the intended design of the in-game economy by attempting to collaboratively aggregate all server-wide data into one database, creating what I’d call a “poor man’s global auction house”. This differs from the functionality of Master Merchant, which only gives players easier access to their own data from their specific guilds – in short, MM shows you your data, while TTC shows you everyone’s data…but rather than sit on my soapbox, I’ll just go ahead and explain this mod and its uses – because despite my disdain for the addon, it’d be irresponsible for me to suggest it can’t be useful.
Tamriel Trade Centre is a collaborative project that attempts to pull Listing data from all of its users and store it in a public database that anyone can query. The result is effectively a loosely-accurate “global listing library”. Players can go to https://www.tamrieltradecentre.com/ at any time and search for a specific item, and then TTC will spit back a list of all Listings for that item it has in its database, including the Price, Guild Store & Location, as well as the time the item was last seen listed in that store – and that’s the key. TTC is not updated in real-time, it relies on players to send reports back to its server.
That being said, TTC has two basic features that most players will find useful. The first is that online database – if you’re looking for a specific item, particularly something rarer, searching TTC can save you some time by telling you where specifically you may want to begin searching. It can also be a good way to find good deals – assuming no one else has already snatched it up, you may find an item in TTC’s database that is listed extremely cheap, which presents an opportunity for you to flip.
The second feature is its own version of an “Price Check” function. Be careful with this – as a rule, I never suggest using TTC on its own to inform your pricing decisions. TTC does not pull actual sale data – it only averages the listing prices, and since listings don’t always sell, the range TTC will give you is often not particularly useful beyond just offering you a “ballpark estimate” of what might be an acceptable price. TTC also aggregates all listing data across all locations – and as stated previously, sometimes items sell for higher prices in one city versus another. If you try to sell an item in Rivenspire at Rawl’kha prices, you may not have much success. However, in the event that you’re just looking for a rough estimate, particularly for a non-commodity-type item that doesn’t have a ton of sales data in Master Merchant, it can be a useful tool to make sure you’re not grossly under-pricing (or over-pricing) your goods.
That concludes Part II of this guide. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading thus far! If you found this at all helpful, please consider sharing. Otherwise, check out the links below to read more:
