Why is everything so expensive? (PC NA)

notyuu

why everything is more expensive? simple
demand went up (new plans, new sets, new balance)
amout of avaiable coin went up somewhat (antiquties)
supply remained the same (furnshing and upgrade mat drop rate)
result: price inflation

Possible solution
Add a Luxary crafting vendor that shows up on the weekends, sells upgrade mats, furnshing mats and (on weekly rotation) certain furnsihing plans for gold
this would
1: increase supply
2: add a gold sink

Celephantsylvius_Bornasfinmo

20k+ Dreugh Waxes
10K+ Tempering Alloys
3K-4K+ Rosins
300K+ Chromium platings

Prices are stabilising around these above values on PC EU.

It is pretty darn expensive.
People are going to do a long haul (new end game) of golding out their stuff only to realise there are many other issues with gameplay/performance in ESO.

Just saying...there are going to be many disappointed new folk *nods*

Northwold

starkerealm wrote: »

warsteheineub17_ESO wrote: »

The overall "wealth" that comes from doing daily writs is not the actual gold from the mission reward. That's what ? 660 gold ?

The mission reward from, "doing your writs," is 70k. Cash. Every day. Slightly more if you have a bunch of Imperials. That's before you start picking through the rest and deciding what to sell.

It is not representative of most or even an appreciable minority of players to say that people do 18 sets of writs on 18 different characters a day. That is a hardcore and tiny minority who dedicate their lives to the game (just imagine how much time people would need to be playing the game daily to do that), and the game should not be designed around them.

Personally, I use one character. And I do writs twice a week if I'm even playing the game at all.

kojou

My tin hat theory is that there is a gold duplication bud that can be exploited on the PC client and the players that know are introducing a lot of gold into the economy.

Xebov

kojou wrote: »

My tin hat theory is that there is a gold duplication bud that can be exploited on the PC client and the players that know are introducing a lot of gold into the economy.

There is crown trading that caused many players with alot fo money to get things they want and as such release that gold into circulation. The crown sellers that would normally not have the gold to buy stuff can now buy stuff so the demand has risen.

Artanisul

starkerealm wrote: »

warsteheineub17_ESO wrote: »

The overall "wealth" that comes from doing daily writs is not the actual gold from the mission reward. That's what ? 660 gold ?

The mission reward from, "doing your writs," is 70k. Cash. Every day. Slightly more if you have a bunch of Imperials. That's before you start picking through the rest and deciding what to sell.

Can someone point me to the "doing your writs" quest that gives 70k gold? I get the 660 per craft on 12 characters each day and would love to know what I am missing.

FlopsyPrince

Artanisul wrote: »

starkerealm wrote: »

warsteheineub17_ESO wrote: »

The overall "wealth" that comes from doing daily writs is not the actual gold from the mission reward. That's what ? 660 gold ?

The mission reward from, "doing your writs," is 70k. Cash. Every day. Slightly more if you have a bunch of Imperials. That's before you start picking through the rest and deciding what to sell.

Can someone point me to the "doing your writs" quest that gives 70k gold? I get the 660 per craft on 12 characters each day and would love to know what I am missing.

660 x 7 (crafts) x 14 (characters - for me) => 64,680

You should be just a bit short of this.

Diminish

ShawnLaRock wrote: »

The problem is that people actually PAY the exorbitant prices, plus there is far too much gold.

S.

Definitely need more gold sinks in the game. It was brutal switching to PC, and having absolutely nothing. Having played many years on console I at least had an understanding on the game so I knew ways to make gold, but I couldn't imagine being a brand new player to the game now days. To put it in perspective, when I left console, I was buying bulk Dreugh wax (30+ at a time) for 4k - 4.5k per... They are around 18k+ per on PC currently, and as you said, people actually buy it.

peacenote

Woozywyvern wrote: »

katanagirl1 wrote: »

I really don’t know why so many people get bent out of shape about gain from daily writs. If someone wants to spend hours doing them on dozens of toons then they certainly deserve the rewards. It would be torture for me.

Agreed, and lets not forget the time it takes to get 18 characters to 50. That investment should have some return too.

Well, in a way this is EXACTLY the larger problem. Leveling is a one-time time sink, while it's potentially a daily recurring return on investment.

I agree with everyone saying the issue is the influx of gold causes this. Lots of people with better-written posts than I so I won't bother to re-state.

I will only say that, while writs aren't the only problem, I think the reason they keep coming up as a thing to nerf is because it would be a way to make a broad difference easily. I get why this seems unpopular as they aren't the root cause. Many people are pointing to Greymoor as the time when prices rose. Antiquities (and the bug) definitely hit PC specifically. But another thing that started happening, as a trickle, I think started in Elsweyr. The "anchor-replacements" (dragons in Elsweyr, harrowstorms in Greymoor) and holiday events began dropping items you just sell for gold. We used to only see treasures in stealing but I started wondering why my inventory seemed to be filling up so much faster during events. I realized that there were all these treasures I had to vendor, which I didn't always notice right away because of the way my inventory was sorted. There wasn't even a need to do this, and yet I think this concept is even being added to older events retroactively. I'm not 100% sure about this but I think I got treasures in the New Life event.

ZOS does everything it can to funnel people to these events and now they're slowly giving more and more gold to everyone who does them. As opposed to sticks and banners.

BlueRaven

I posted this in another thread but I think it bears repeating here.

I think everything got expensive when “gifting” crown store items started.

Suddenly people who don’t normally have a lot of gold, became flush with it. And the “real” in game price of things became a bit meaningless.

“Oh I need 30 dwax to gold my gear, I will sell some crowns to make it possible. I have no idea what dwax normally costs, but I want it now and relatively convenient so I will pay whatever.”

I think the selling of crowns is just easier on pc so the effect is bigger. It’s easier to type crown offers or requests in zone chat, compared to console where many players may not have a keyboard attachment to help them.

Rasande_Robin

There is also this aspect, once a "hardcore" trader reaches his "gold cap" (100 mil). He can't have any more gold on that character when you have this limit on all characters. You can "store gold" in a limitless crafting bag, basically buying all gold mats you can find. Since the market on them are pretty stable.

kringled_1

100 million is not the gold cap, but I couldn't tell you what is.

James-Wayne

Low drop rates on good needed vs high demand

Furnishing homes is expensive.

noblecron

kringled_1 wrote: »

100 million is not the gold cap, but I couldn't tell you what is.

one gold below a billion or trillion if I remember right is the cap


ZOS needs more gold sinks badly and maybe increasing the drop rate of everything to combat the inflation. Once the drop rate increases the demand will decrease which will decrease the prices. Instead of all these exclusive homes for instance. Keep them in game. Sell them at the unfurnished price like they do for all the other homes. Implement a barber system for characters. Yes it's pointless for those with the hair pack maybe but folk would still use it.

TX12001rwb17_ESO

People who "Accept" the inflated prices and ZOS themselves must realize that this inflated "Economy" is now effecting the gameplay features of ESO itself which is not healthy, features which I used to do all the time are now features I do not even touch and I am sure I am not the only one.

Thieving at one point in time was profitable but now it's is worthless, no point in even touching that feature of the game as the gold gained simply is not worth the time, if every item we sold was at least green quality you could only get 14000 gold from it per day, that is not even enough to buy a single dreugh wax now and you need 8 dreugh wax to safely upgrade something, even from a story point it is even laughable why any of my characters would even care about the thieves guild, I got more gold in the bank then the entire guild has amassed in it's entire history of existence.

Daily Quests, the gold gained used to add up but now it is not even worth touching this part of the game, 300 gold per quest is trash, I can get more gold by killing random mobs and even that is not profitable, if it were not for the gold mats then even Writs would become worthless.

There is a solution to this problem but the solution that would work would not be popular, the main problem is Gold is losing its market value because the game is flooded with too much of it, this inturn has driven up the price of everything that has value, from crafting mats to Crowns, the solution would be to increase the market value of gold but how do you do that? well you simply remove what is causing it and that is too much gold, this could be done by capping the gold limit to a MUCH lower number (Which would be very unpopular) to ease this a tax on those who had exceeded the gold cap could be put in place where they would lose a percentage of their gold everyday until it goes below the cap giving them a chance to spend it as opposed to just stripping them of all of it.

Gold Sinks do not work as the super-rich who are the culprits are barley effected and they would need to buy hundreds of the item anyway which they are probably not going to do which brings me to this, a gold material vendor, this would pose several benefits

1. It is something that would work as a Gold Sink as long as the number is "Fair" something like 5,000/10,000 gold each, a Chromium plating is now 300k+ with this method it would never go beyond 50k or 100k depending on the price of individual Chromium Grains.

2. It would cap the price of gold mats and in addition to having the max amount of gold you can have capped (Again which would massively reduce the Gold ingame) it would make it harder to make gold off of them so even if they went and spent all their excess gold on mats their value would be drastically reduced.

noblecron

Just to show how bad the inflation is. THIS IS A BLUE PATTERN FROM LEYAWIIN! A BLUE PATTERN!. It's literally cheaper to farm the materials and ask a friend to make it/ or buy the furnishing itself then pay for that

https://us.tamrieltradecentre.com/pc/Trade/SearchResult?SearchType=Sell&ItemID=24671&ItemNamePattern=Praxis:+Leyawiin+Wall,+Castle&SortBy=Price&Order=asc


Increase the drop rates a bit to lower the inflation please

FlopsyPrince

TX12001rwb17_ESO wrote: »

People who "Accept" the inflated prices and ZOS themselves must realize that this inflated "Economy" is now effecting the gameplay features of ESO itself which is not healthy, features which I used to do all the time are now features I do not even touch and I am sure I am not the only one.

Thieving at one point in time was profitable but now it's is worthless, no point in even touching that feature of the game as the gold gained simply is not worth the time, if every item we sold was at least green quality you could only get 14000 gold from it per day, that is not even enough to buy a single dreugh wax now and you need 8 dreugh wax to safely upgrade something, even from a story point it is even laughable why any of my characters would even care about the thieves guild, I got more gold in the bank then the entire guild has amassed in it's entire history of existence.

Daily Quests, the gold gained used to add up but now it is not even worth touching this part of the game, 300 gold per quest is trash, I can get more gold by killing random mobs and even that is not profitable, if it were not for the gold mats then even Writs would become worthless.

There is a solution to this problem but the solution that would work would not be popular, the main problem is Gold is losing its market value because the game is flooded with too much of it, this inturn has driven up the price of everything that has value, from crafting mats to Crowns, the solution would be to increase the market value of gold but how do you do that? well you simply remove what is causing it and that is too much gold, this could be done by capping the gold limit to a MUCH lower number (Which would be very unpopular) to ease this a tax on those who had exceeded the gold cap could be put in place where they would lose a percentage of their gold everyday until it goes below the cap giving them a chance to spend it as opposed to just stripping them of all of it.

Gold Sinks do not work as the super-rich who are the culprits are barley effected and they would need to buy hundreds of the item anyway which they are probably not going to do which brings me to this, a gold material vendor, this would pose several benefits

1. It is something that would work as a Gold Sink as long as the number is "Fair" something like 5,000/10,000 gold each, a Chromium plating is now 300k+ with this method it would never go beyond 50k or 100k depending on the price of individual Chromium Grains.

2. It would cap the price of gold mats and in addition to having the max amount of gold you can have capped (Again which would massively reduce the Gold ingame) it would make it harder to make gold off of them so even if they went and spent all their excess gold on mats their value would be drastically reduced.

A big problem with most current gold sinks is that they are all front loaded. Increasing bank and bag space are all at the start. I would not want an ongoing space cost of course, but this limits the gold cost.

Then buying other in game things can happen, but that just circulates more gold in the economy, not ever removing it.

Selling skyshards for gold would have helped, but would have faced the same challenge.

Awnia

silvereyes wrote: »

Case-in-point: Perfect Roe - why has it gone up in price so much? Could it be perhaps that ZOS revamping the XP curve for CP 2.0 increased the demand for XP pots?

Roe prices shot up drastically because of they fixed a bug that used to allow you to get 2 fish at the same time instead of 1 as intended.

FlopsyPrince

Awnia wrote: »

silvereyes wrote: »

Case-in-point: Perfect Roe - why has it gone up in price so much? Could it be perhaps that ZOS revamping the XP curve for CP 2.0 increased the demand for XP pots?

Roe prices shot up drastically because of they fixed a bug that used to allow you to get 2 fish at the same time instead of 1 as intended.

It clearly wasn't rare enough! /sarc

PrimusTiberius

I didn't read all the responding post but I've never had an issue with farming my own mats and getting what I needed, if I don't have the gold plates to gold out gear, then I wait till I do. Prices from traders is only what you make of it, if its too high, don't buy it. I've picked up complete sets for my sticker book (over time) for PvP gear, I just set limits as to how much I'll pay for something, for gear and weapons, I'll never spend more than a 1K for an item, with that budget in mind, I've save a ton of gold coinage. You can find some real gems with this merchant system.

The issue I see with most gamers and the economy is, most players have to have it now, all of it, right now....and with that mindset, you're going to pay for it.

Just sit back, enjoy the game for what it offers and you'll eventually get there.

I have a bit of dark humor side and I find it amusing that players will complain about the high cost of crown items or whatever Bethesda is charging for items but players will not hesitate to charge exorbitant amount of gold for items that other players can obtain with a little effort.

Cheers

katanagirl1

noblecron wrote: »

Just to show how bad the inflation is. THIS IS A BLUE PATTERN FROM LEYAWIIN! A BLUE PATTERN!. It's literally cheaper to farm the materials and ask a friend to make it/ or buy the furnishing itself then pay for that

https://us.tamrieltradecentre.com/pc/Trade/SearchResult?SearchType=Sell&ItemID=24671&ItemNamePattern=Praxis:+Leyawiin+Wall,+Castle&SortBy=Price&Order=asc


Increase the drop rates a bit to lower the inflation please

This is the one that wasn’t dropping for so long until a recent fix.

Hey at least you can buy the plan on PC. I have only ever seen one on PS traders.

wolfie1.0.

M0ntie wrote: »

Oreyn_Bearclaw wrote: »

Inflation. The game doesnt have enough gold sinks AND it pumps way to much gold into the game. Everyone loves to shout about gold sinks, or the lack there of, but nobody wants to admit that is only half the equation. Writs are the elephant in the room. Way to easy, especially on PC with addons, to simply print 100k+ in like 45 minutes.

Some of the best proof that this is one of the largest issues is that prices anent nearly as out of control on console. Gold is worth more on console because its harder to get. Therefore, prices are lower across the board.

The gold currency from writs needs nerfed (and the gold mat drops need buffed to compensate). This would force more mats into the market as writ farmers would need to liquidate some of their spoils. It would also lower the total gold coming into the game. Win win. It's not a popular opinion because a lot of people, myself included, have used writs as their primary gold source for a long time. That said, just because its unpopular, doesn't mean its untrue.

This is the only explanation in this thread that makes any sense. I play on PC and PS4. In the last couple of years the crown exchange rate on PC has gone from about 400:1 to 1200:1. Currently on Ps4 I'm quoted 100:1 and this hasn't changed.

On PC there are add ons that make it really really fast and easy to do writs. But I'd suggest rather making it easier to get gold on console. And ZoS STOP ALL THE CONTINUAL CHANGES AS TO WHAT IS META because this just drives the prices up for gold mats and widens the divide between players with heaps of time to play and those with less time.
Something needs to be done because the exchange rate, and hence prices on PC are just insane. (Written from someone who sells crowns.)

The only influence zos has on the crown market is the price of IRL funds used to buy them. They can't force players to buy crowns from them, they can't force players to sell them to other players. They probably could set up set conversion rates, but depending on conditions that may do more harm to them than anything else. Look in terms of gameplay the only things in the store that are not in game luxuries are the dlcs.

Oreyn_Bearclaw wrote: »

Amottica wrote: »

@Oreyn_Bearclaw below is information I put together and it shows inflation on PC/NA is not rampant. Yes, there are items that have increased in value such as Chromium. However, I did not cherry-pick the items below as I looked as some items that are often used. They do indicate that inflation is not out of control by any means.

Below is Tempering Alloy which is a much more widely used gold upgrade material than Chromium. It's cost seems to have decreased over the past year which is deflation.

Rosin for wood. It shows a slight increase in price from a year ago, but a decrease in price from about 340 days ago.

there does not seem to be an indication of the inflation some are claiming.

I looked at Rubedite ingot, which did not show any inflation, and Rubedite ore, which has decreased in price over the past year, to see if the base material showed notable inflation. I did not post them here as the post would become annoyingly long, if not already.

I will also note that USEP considers this system to be Early Beta. It also appears to gather data from players using a specific addon USEP developed. So while it uses "real" information it may have a limited number of users.

Interesting data. I am not sure Rosin and Temp alloy are the best benchmarks of the economy. It is of course impossible to completely separate the price impact between Inflation/Deflation and supply/demand. Both are always at work on every item, it is just a question of magnitude.

The two items you listed are very very low in the demand department. Most old timers have an ample supply of rosin, and typically need between 8 (stam) and 16 (magic) for a meta build. Your average PVE player that is not a tank requires 0 Temp alloy these days as magic, and 8-16 as a stamina player. Recent changes to armor passives have actually lowered demand here, because 5/1/1 is pretty much gone.

Your average build always needs 30 chromium grains to max, and upwards 56 of Wax. Chromium is more recent to the economy, but why not use Wax as a metric of inflation. Or more relevant, why not use Crown price as metric of inflation? Crown prices are arguably the best metric and are likely the least impacted by supply demand considerations. Most supply/demand is a result of balance decisions. Anyone with cash can buy crowns to sell, and there are always new shineys to be bought.

Wax has been on an upward trajectory for a while that I dont think Supply Demand can explain by itself. Crowns are through the roof on one platform, but not another. I don't know how you explain that without looking at the value/purchasing power of the underlying currency, i.e. inflation/deflation. There are also ways to measure the value of your entire craft bag. I don't do many writs these days, but yet, every time I check it, the overall value is up. I could log out for 6 months, and my craft bag would be worth more when logged back in, I am 100% sure of that. If there was no inflation, that would almost certainly not be true.

Now certainly, inflation may not be as rampant as the forums would have you believe. Most problems arent as severe as the internet says they are, but to act like inflation is doesn't even exist, not sure I can get behind that.

You can't and shouldn't use crown prices as an in game metric. Since crown supply is literally influenced by real world currency values and real world economic factors and inflation. If a sizable portion of eso players suddenly are unemployed then crown supply is going to falter while crown demand will increase as those who don't have disposable income anymore convert to buying crowns with gold vs buying with irl funds.

wolfie1.0.

Kiralyn2000 wrote: »

tmbrinks wrote: »

Agree that the gold reward from writs could just be removed and a (small) bump in drop rate (although one may not even be needed with current prices), would help keep gold out of the economy.

Well, that would certainly screw me over completely.

Since quest & writ rewards, and vendoring gear drops, is the only gold I get. If you took the gold off of writs, my 'income' would drop like a rock. And I wouldn't be able to buy furniture from the weekend vendor, or another house to put it in, etc.

Because I'm never going to sell materials on the market. Adding more gold tempers to the writ rewards would do absolutely zero for me - I don't switch my gear due to nerfs, so I rarely need to gold out anything new. It just goes into my bank & craft bag. I've got plenty of tempers in stock, I don't have a use for more.

You have the option of selling your excess mats to an npc to get your gold.

renne

noblecron wrote: »

kringled_1 wrote: »

100 million is not the gold cap, but I couldn't tell you what is.

one gold below a billion or trillion if I remember right is the cap


ZOS needs more gold sinks badly and maybe increasing the drop rate of everything to combat the inflation. Once the drop rate increases the demand will decrease which will decrease the prices. Instead of all these exclusive homes for instance. Keep them in game. Sell them at the unfurnished price like they do for all the other homes. Implement a barber system for characters. Yes it's pointless for those with the hair pack maybe but folk would still use it.

So let me get this straight: you want to screw over the economy of the other platforms just because PC can't control their economy due to mods making earning gold so pathetically easy?

Hm.

You get the economy you deserve. If you use mods to make getting gold easy then of course things are going to be expensive, but it's only "expensive" in context because you're earning more gold using those mods.

Run vet Crags for plunder, you've got mods that tell you when to press what skills so it's not even like you need to be competent.

wolfie1.0.

The real problem with gold in eso is that gold itself outside of a few use cases is nothing but a time saver, And every single one of the uses for it can be avoided pretty easily with a time commitment. Yet zos keeps throwing gold and gold avoidance items at us as either login rewards or crown items.

Unless your running a guild there really isn't anything to spend gold on that removes it from the game, all you do is put it back into the economy If you buy something from another player.

Arunei

TX12001rwb17_ESO wrote: »

People who "Accept" the inflated prices and ZOS themselves must realize that this inflated "Economy" is now effecting the gameplay features of ESO itself which is not healthy, features which I used to do all the time are now features I do not even touch and I am sure I am not the only one.

Thieving at one point in time was profitable but now it's is worthless, no point in even touching that feature of the game as the gold gained simply is not worth the time, if every item we sold was at least green quality you could only get 14000 gold from it per day, that is not even enough to buy a single dreugh wax now and you need 8 dreugh wax to safely upgrade something, even from a story point it is even laughable why any of my characters would even care about the thieves guild, I got more gold in the bank then the entire guild has amassed in it's entire history of existence.

Daily Quests, the gold gained used to add up but now it is not even worth touching this part of the game, 300 gold per quest is trash, I can get more gold by killing random mobs and even that is not profitable, if it were not for the gold mats then even Writs would become worthless.

There is a solution to this problem but the solution that would work would not be popular, the main problem is Gold is losing its market value because the game is flooded with too much of it, this inturn has driven up the price of everything that has value, from crafting mats to Crowns, the solution would be to increase the market value of gold but how do you do that? well you simply remove what is causing it and that is too much gold, this could be done by capping the gold limit to a MUCH lower number (Which would be very unpopular) to ease this a tax on those who had exceeded the gold cap could be put in place where they would lose a percentage of their gold everyday until it goes below the cap giving them a chance to spend it as opposed to just stripping them of all of it.

Gold Sinks do not work as the super-rich who are the culprits are barley effected and they would need to buy hundreds of the item anyway which they are probably not going to do which brings me to this, a gold material vendor, this would pose several benefits

1. It is something that would work as a Gold Sink as long as the number is "Fair" something like 5,000/10,000 gold each, a Chromium plating is now 300k+ with this method it would never go beyond 50k or 100k depending on the price of individual Chromium Grains.

2. It would cap the price of gold mats and in addition to having the max amount of gold you can have capped (Again which would massively reduce the Gold ingame) it would make it harder to make gold off of them so even if they went and spent all their excess gold on mats their value would be drastically reduced.

This reads as "people have earned more gold than me and I don't like that so let's punish them by making them lose the gold they worked for". In no way should an arbitrary "tax" be imposed on people for hitting an arbitrary cap that literally punishes them for their efforts. If someone puts in the time to get their gold then they're entitled to it.

Nerfing writs or "taxing" peoples' gold isn't going to do anything, it's only going to make it harder for people who have fewer ways of reliably getting gold. Suddenly it becomes harder for them to get gold and keep it if they manage to hit a "cap", leaving only the wealthier people as the ones being able to afford stuff. Which solves absolutely nothing. The game needs more gold sinks that are more reliable, such as different base mounts being available for gold, perhaps Titles or Dyes or Styles that can only be obtained via special Merchants. Things that would encourage people to spend their gold.

What would also help is making certain things a bit easier to farm, mainly furnishing mats like Heartwood. Making furnishing mats drop at least one piece per node harvested would make it easier to farm and help lower the price some (tho not by much since there will always be people who prefer buying things as opposed to farming it themselves).

noblecron

renne wrote: »

noblecron wrote: »

kringled_1 wrote: »

100 million is not the gold cap, but I couldn't tell you what is.

one gold below a billion or trillion if I remember right is the cap


ZOS needs more gold sinks badly and maybe increasing the drop rate of everything to combat the inflation. Once the drop rate increases the demand will decrease which will decrease the prices. Instead of all these exclusive homes for instance. Keep them in game. Sell them at the unfurnished price like they do for all the other homes. Implement a barber system for characters. Yes it's pointless for those with the hair pack maybe but folk would still use it.

So let me get this straight: you want to screw over the economy of the other platforms just because PC can't control their economy due to mods making earning gold so pathetically easy?

Hm.

You get the economy you deserve. If you use mods to make getting gold easy then of course things are going to be expensive, but it's only "expensive" in context because you're earning more gold using those mods.

Run vet Crags for plunder, you've got mods that tell you when to press what skills so it's not even like you need to be competent.

First off, I don't use mods to even increase my gold earn. I don't even like running trials. I am not talking about screwing over the economy at all. Even folk like TCE agrees with me that the game needs more gold sinks. Mods aren't the issue. If mods were the issue than ZOS would step in and do something about it as it would be considered an exploit.

Secondly, they can always implement different systems into different games if they wanted too. Make something pc exclusive. But let me ask you something. If you could buy a home in game for 5 mil, would you rather buy that than a crown exclusive home that costs more than the entire game and DLC combined?

LightningWitch

I don't play on PC, but I do XBox, and I've seen the same thing.

My belief is there are fewer people playing the game, which limits the number of resources sold in the game. Thus, "supply" and demand are forcing prices up.

This is true for motif pages as I try looking for them. As older content gets ignored by most players, finding pages becomes increasingly difficult, and those who do find them have no problem price gouging the community.

Greed also dictates these "sellers" provide lockpicks at rates far higher than the in-game merchants.

I suspect prices will continue to go up from here. It doesn't take a genius to see most people playing this game has no clue how economies actually work, so it's just a "I'll sell it for this price to see what happens."

Those who get lucky to sell at a high price (to people who generally have so much gold, 100K is literal chump change), and this price goes online for everyone else to follow.

I sell every motif I find for 5K. No more. No less. I couldn't care less about rarity. What typically happens is people buy them then try to flip them. Not my concern, but I can attest I make more gold than they do while their overpriced items sits in stores with 5 days left while my stuff flies out the door in 2 days or less.

People have this misconception selling higher is better than selling volume, yet everything around them proves them wrong.

There is no "work" to picking up some of these items, especially materials. Play the game, pick as you go. Easy.

Yet... instead of capitalizing on this to sell volume, they instead sell stacks at inflated prices then wonder why they're not moving anything when everyone else is selling at the same rate.

Whatever. At this point in my game having also returned, I'm just ignoring motif pages. I have no desire to pay 100K for a stupid page that's deliberately coded in the game to make them difficult to find.

This 14 page crap should never have been introduced, but in looking at the $50 price tags they carry in another greedy storefront, it's not an accident.

xXSilverDragonXx

ZOS can influence markets by increasing drop rates. The more drops, the more supply. More people wanting to sell. More people selling lowers prices. SUPPLY and DEMAND. This is basic economics. They make items too rare.

They can also influence economy by creating gold sinks.

Also, you have people with money doing lots of flipping. I personally hate flipping. It's disadvantageous to the normal player who doesn't run around shopping all day for proper prices while flippers do and then buy desirable items at a fair price only to then sell it much higher. This is why trade guilds fail. You don't see this in games with a huge trading system that everyone can access from one point. Not to this degree. Or at least I never have, not to this degree.

then there is the drive to the crown store, but people with lots of gold don't want to buy with crowns. Nor do they want to part with much of their gold from what I have seen. So they will hold prices high and buy up lower priced items. I saw this with roe years back. A few people bought all the reasonably priced roe then resold it at nearly double the price. This happened every weekend. And especially before events. The normal player doesn't have time or desire for this, but the gold junkies do. This happens on all things. People go around buying items low to resell higher. They play the gold market here like some kind of stock market. It's insane. That is one of the main issues as to why things cost so much. Then at some point, those prices become the new prices because all the stock is now higher priced after all the low stock has been bought and people are forced into buying. And the people making this money, plenty of them that I have seen go to buy crown crates for millions of gold.

All of this got much worse after gifting became a main way for people to buy stuff with gold. Before then, it was not so bad. I have seen over years when I have come and gone playing briefly. In a few years, major changes with prices for crowns triple now.

Now, I'm a normal player. I make gold on things but don't put much effort into it. Over time I have gotten to 20 million after selling lots of loot in my craft bag and selling some crowns I was never going to use. That's a pittance by some people's standards. And I hoard it because every time I come back to this game after time off, prices are more outrageous, and I never know what I might need upon return due to changes in gear, skills, cp.... nor do I know what will be selling well when I come back. Or will be dropping well enough to get without putting lots of effort into it. I have seen lots of changes in the seven years I have come and gone from this game. Now I hoard gold because who knows what it will be like the next time I take time off. It's insane.

FlopsyPrince

LightningWitch wrote: »

I sell every motif I find for 5K. No more. No less. I couldn't care less about rarity. What typically happens is people buy them then try to flip them. Not my concern, but I can attest I make more gold than they do while their overpriced items sits in stores with 5 days left while my stuff flies out the door in 2 days or less.

You are free to do that of course, but you are leaving a lot of gold out and benefiting those who flip them (most likely). Some Motifs are much rarer, some are not. That is why getting to know prices is worthwhile in any economy.

It is also a reason the consoles are really messed over in this area, since finding reasonable prices is so hard!