Why is everything so expensive? (PC NA)

Vaoh

Economy on console is fine at least for my server. PC is what is affected most due to addons permitting effective gold farming via writ farming accounts and TTC. There is significantly more gold in the PC market which causes the value of gold itself to drop.

Even though the market is “player-driven”, like how we decide gold upgrade mats are always valuable, it’s ZOS who still decides the true value of everything. Where items comes from, what items do, what kind of gold value every item on the crown store has, item drop rates, etc.

Crown rate for my server is 1 crown = 100 gold. It’s way cheaper for me to purchase the DC/EP/AD notable homes by having a Crown seller gift them for me rather than buying them for the ingame gold price. Same for using 150% exp pots vs gifted crown scrolls.

If ZOS wanted to they could add Minor Heroism to Spider Eggs and it would cause the price to skyrocket. They could make Mourning Dew drop from every alchemy node and the value would plummet. They could give a 100,000,000 gold for a day 1 login reward next month and the value of gold would be completely ruined.

The economy will only get better if ZOS decides to take action. It’s gotten pretty bad on PC though lol. Only solution I can think of is selling new gold cost-only mounts/homes for insane prices which correlate to the current inflation.... so like 10-20 million gold each on PC, but 1-2 million on consoles or something like that. Stuff that serves as a huge gold sink since the current gold sinks are no longer effective on PC.

Inaya

sinnereso wrote: »

We also have the issue of guild trader being rediculously expensive due to inflation and guild masters slave driving theyre members to sell / pimp themselves out to meet quota's. Players are no longer treated with any respect within these guilds, theyre just sheep for them and theres no discussion anymore. Its theyre way or the highway and the player left with nowhere to sell anything.

[snip]

THATS how the guild traders are run now!

[edited for naming-and-shaming]

Yeah....don't know what guilds you've been in but if they were ALL like this I'd say it's NOT a guild problem. My trader guild is AWESOME, friendly, helpful, great leadership and members. Has tons of ways to meet your requirements..sales..purchases..several different raffles...writ donations..or just a flat fee which is super manageable for almost anyone.

deleted220614-000183

I think enough is enough.

What can be observed (especially in VIvec as both writ boards and the bank are very close to every crafting station, drop-off point nearby, all outdoors)
is mixed armies of multiaccounts/bots and normal players crafting writs in massive numbers (by thousands) exploiting:
Automated login / logoff
Automated moving from writ boards to crafting stations and drop-off point
(miss)using crafting addons such as Dolgubon's Lazy Writ Crafter
Automated Banking
Automated buying mats right from the guildstores
etc

The original idea was to give beginers decent amount of golds (215-664 per writ scaling from lvl 6-50 char to be precise) to cover needs of beginers and give them tutorial to the crafting system

It was never mentioned to serve as the biggest (if not the single lol) source of golds in the game.

What really happened is that most of multiaccount/chars are permanently parked in Vivec, making just daily writs and nothing else and destroying ingame economy by generating bilions golds daily.
These surplus golds were not dropped proper way by killing monsters and completing quests but by running automated scripts / boting with minimum effort andit is not tolerable anymore.

My suggestion - limit normal writs rewards to experience, a consumable box of supplies, and inspiration for that profession - no golds at all.
As for as consumable box, it should be limited - one box per account/day

This is necessary to curb insane amount of new generated golds which are destroying the game economy,
making life of trading guilds difficult and encourage people play the game as it should be played.

Holycannoli

Djennku wrote: »

There's lots of groups who will manipulate the market and raise prices for the same amount and availability of goods to make more gold out of it. Eventually people going around buying all of an available item and flipping them for higher prices made things that used to be lower in cost extremely expensive.

So there's no reason anymore to not have a global auction house.

deleted220614-000183

Holycannoli wrote: »

Djennku wrote: »

There's lots of groups who will manipulate the market and raise prices for the same amount and availability of goods to make more gold out of it. Eventually people going around buying all of an available item and flipping them for higher prices made things that used to be lower in cost extremely expensive.

So there's no reason anymore to not have a global auction house.

Flipping and reselling items has nothing to do with inflation.

Example (PC/EU real life scenario as it happened couple of minutes ago)

Some player dropped rare yellow Motif 72 Book which is rare, because it drops very little and it is higly valued collector item.

It costs around 8M market price as golds are very common and are generated by bots doing daily writs without any real effort in massive amount (as you can see, bots are not able to drop Motif 72 book so the ratio is 1Book =8M golds and it is absolutely fine

But the player who dropped the book was noob and didn't know exact market price so he sold it for 1,7M golds in his guildstore.

I (as I'm powerseller specialized on collector items and know the prices) found that book and bought it from the shop before anybody else/
So the player who dropped that book got his 1,7M golds and he will be poor forever as it was his life drop which happens once per life.

Then I put that book for proper price 8M to my guild shop and eventually it will be bought by collector for that price.
If not this week, it will be bought later because of the inflation lol.
As I'm running regularly through Tamriel and know the prices, I can buy 4-6 items like that per months.
It makes me nearly as effective as gold/writ abusers with the only difference I'm not generating anything and my actions are absolutely sterile.

The difference is, that the book will be always sold by the market price 8M as collectors have not enough time to run around the shops as powersellers are always faster so my action has not any impact on the server economy, it has just impact on distributing golds, but the ratio between book and golds will be always 1 book = 8M golds.

If you introduce auction house, the book/ gold ratio will be perfectly the same 1 book = 8M golds.

DMuehlhausen

It's because at this point so many people have more than enough gold they will pay over inflated prices cause they can.

I'm not good at making money but I have friends that make literally millions a day. So if they want that base game motif page and somebody wants 3 million for it they just pay it which then screws up pricing. The only fix would be for ZoS to put in required money dumps. The problem though is, just like in real life, taxes only really affect poor people anyway.

They could so something like EQ2 where you have to pay "rent" for each house you own. If you don't pay it you can't enter. Could charge daily for horse usage or something or charge for distanced used. Again though only really affects people who already don't have money.

This is a problem that comes up in every single game like this. Eventually the people that are good and playing the AH game or farming drive up prices.

FlopsyPrince

DMuehlhausen wrote: »

It's because at this point so many people have more than enough gold they will pay over inflated prices cause they can.

I'm not good at making money but I have friends that make literally millions a day. So if they want that base game motif page and somebody wants 3 million for it they just pay it which then screws up pricing. The only fix would be for ZoS to put in required money dumps. The problem though is, just like in real life, taxes only really affect poor people anyway.

They could so something like EQ2 where you have to pay "rent" for each house you own. If you don't pay it you can't enter. Could charge daily for horse usage or something or charge for distanced used. Again though only really affects people who already don't have money.

This is a problem that comes up in every single game like this. Eventually the people that are good and playing the AH game or farming drive up prices.

Except that a Central AH means you can find what is being sold. Much more challenging today, even with TTC on the PC and worse on the PS4, in my direct experience.

Arunei

trpajzla wrote: »

I think enough is enough.

What can be observed (especially in VIvec as both writ boards and the bank are very close to every crafting station, drop-off point nearby, all outdoors)
is mixed armies of multiaccounts/bots and normal players crafting writs in massive numbers (by thousands) exploiting:
Automated login / logoff
Automated moving from writ boards to crafting stations and drop-off point
(miss)using crafting addons such as Dolgubon's Lazy Writ Crafter
Automated Banking
Automated buying mats right from the guildstores
etc

The original idea was to give beginers decent amount of golds (215-664 per writ scaling from lvl 6-50 char to be precise) to cover needs of beginers and give them tutorial to the crafting system

It was never mentioned to serve as the biggest (if not the single lol) source of golds in the game.

What really happened is that most of multiaccount/chars are permanently parked in Vivec, making just daily writs and nothing else and destroying ingame economy by generating bilions golds daily.
These surplus golds were not dropped proper way by killing monsters and completing quests but by running automated scripts / boting with minimum effort andit is not tolerable anymore.

My suggestion - limit normal writs rewards to experience, a consumable box of supplies, and inspiration for that profession - no golds at all.
As for as consumable box, it should be limited - one box per account/day

This is necessary to curb insane amount of new generated golds which are destroying the game economy,
making life of trading guilds difficult and encourage people play the game as it should be played.

Please tell us where any of the devs have specifically said that daily writs were only intended for beginning players to earn the gold and mats for their own stuff. Please show us exact quotes or links of any of them specifically stating daily writs were never intended to be one of the main ways of earning gold.

You're making baseless assumptions because I can guarantee that none of the devs have ever said anything like that. Writs are there for anyone to do, whether new or vet. They HAVE specifically said before that many players don't have even a full roster of 8 characters, though. Which basically tells you that not nearly as many people spam 18+ writs a day every day as everyone seems to believe there are.

FlopsyPrince

Arunei wrote: »

trpajzla wrote: »

I think enough is enough.

What can be observed (especially in VIvec as both writ boards and the bank are very close to every crafting station, drop-off point nearby, all outdoors)
is mixed armies of multiaccounts/bots and normal players crafting writs in massive numbers (by thousands) exploiting:
Automated login / logoff
Automated moving from writ boards to crafting stations and drop-off point
(miss)using crafting addons such as Dolgubon's Lazy Writ Crafter
Automated Banking
Automated buying mats right from the guildstores
etc

The original idea was to give beginers decent amount of golds (215-664 per writ scaling from lvl 6-50 char to be precise) to cover needs of beginers and give them tutorial to the crafting system

It was never mentioned to serve as the biggest (if not the single lol) source of golds in the game.

What really happened is that most of multiaccount/chars are permanently parked in Vivec, making just daily writs and nothing else and destroying ingame economy by generating bilions golds daily.
These surplus golds were not dropped proper way by killing monsters and completing quests but by running automated scripts / boting with minimum effort andit is not tolerable anymore.

My suggestion - limit normal writs rewards to experience, a consumable box of supplies, and inspiration for that profession - no golds at all.
As for as consumable box, it should be limited - one box per account/day

This is necessary to curb insane amount of new generated golds which are destroying the game economy,
making life of trading guilds difficult and encourage people play the game as it should be played.

Please tell us where any of the devs have specifically said that daily writs were only intended for beginning players to earn the gold and mats for their own stuff. Please show us exact quotes or links of any of them specifically stating daily writs were never intended to be one of the main ways of earning gold.

You're making baseless assumptions because I can guarantee that none of the devs have ever said anything like that. Writs are there for anyone to do, whether new or vet. They HAVE specifically said before that many players don't have even a full roster of 8 characters, though. Which basically tells you that not nearly as many people spam 18+ writs a day every day as everyone seems to believe there are.

While I find it tedious over time, removing the value of daily crafting as the previous reply (not yours) said would probably push me away from playing.

DagenHawk

sinnereso wrote: »

We also have the issue of guild trader being rediculously expensive due to inflation and guild masters slave driving theyre members to sell / pimp themselves out to meet quota's. Players are no longer treated with any respect within these guilds, theyre just sheep for them and theres no discussion anymore. Its theyre way or the highway and the player left with nowhere to sell anything.

[snip]

THATS how the guild traders are run now!

[edited for naming-and-shaming]

You are right but take heart Auction houses are coming

Maybe not this year but soon.

And you can thank the abdominal way players are treated within guilds for making it happen

Rex-Umbra

My theory is because bots can easily farm resources and mobs ruining the economy

Lumsdenml

DagenHawk wrote: »

sinnereso wrote: »

We also have the issue of guild trader being rediculously expensive due to inflation and guild masters slave driving theyre members to sell / pimp themselves out to meet quota's. Players are no longer treated with any respect within these guilds, theyre just sheep for them and theres no discussion anymore. Its theyre way or the highway and the player left with nowhere to sell anything.

[snip]

THATS how the guild traders are run now!

[edited for naming-and-shaming]

You are right but take heart Auction houses are coming

Maybe not this year but soon.

And you can thank the abdominal way players are treated within guilds for making it happen

I find that very unlikely, and I hope the day never comes.

Lumsdenml

I used to get mad at the people who did their writs and always had gold. Used to be upset with the system and wanted to change it. Then I started doing my daily writs and I can pretty much afford what I want. Please don't change it.

DMuehlhausen

FlopsyPrince wrote: »

DMuehlhausen wrote: »

It's because at this point so many people have more than enough gold they will pay over inflated prices cause they can.

I'm not good at making money but I have friends that make literally millions a day. So if they want that base game motif page and somebody wants 3 million for it they just pay it which then screws up pricing. The only fix would be for ZoS to put in required money dumps. The problem though is, just like in real life, taxes only really affect poor people anyway.

They could so something like EQ2 where you have to pay "rent" for each house you own. If you don't pay it you can't enter. Could charge daily for horse usage or something or charge for distanced used. Again though only really affects people who already don't have money.

This is a problem that comes up in every single game like this. Eventually the people that are good and playing the AH game or farming drive up prices.

Except that a Central AH means you can find what is being sold. Much more challenging today, even with TTC on the PC and worse on the PS4, in my direct experience.

I just used AH as a generic term meaning work the selling system. Really though TTC makes it easier then a central AH. You know exactly what seller, in what city to go to. Honestly I don't think the add in should be allowed. It was always amazing to find the item you wanted on some random out in the wild trader at an amazing price. It would probably lower the cost as well this point since you couldn't so easily find stuff.

BretonMage

DMuehlhausen wrote: »

The only fix would be for ZoS to put in required money dumps. The problem though is, just like in real life, taxes only really affect poor people anyway.

And this applies to any solution that limits the gold and rewards that players get from playing the game as designed. My layperson’s opinion is that ZOS should re-examine the mechanisms by which the rich in this game are getting even richer. If it’s through flipping, they can probably easily introduce measures to discourage it, like, oh I don’t know, cool down periods on resales, and/or designing a system where sales/trading information is easier to find for newer players. Increasing the drop rate of materials, especially furnishing materials, for legitimate players would also be helpful.

Holycannoli

trpajzla wrote: »

Holycannoli wrote: »

Djennku wrote: »

There's lots of groups who will manipulate the market and raise prices for the same amount and availability of goods to make more gold out of it. Eventually people going around buying all of an available item and flipping them for higher prices made things that used to be lower in cost extremely expensive.

So there's no reason anymore to not have a global auction house.

Flipping and reselling items has nothing to do with inflation.

Example (PC/EU real life scenario as it happened couple of minutes ago)

Some player dropped rare yellow Motif 72 Book which is rare, because it drops very little and it is higly valued collector item.

It costs around 8M market price as golds are very common and are generated by bots doing daily writs without any real effort in massive amount (as you can see, bots are not able to drop Motif 72 book so the ratio is 1Book =8M golds and it is absolutely fine

But the player who dropped the book was noob and didn't know exact market price so he sold it for 1,7M golds in his guildstore.

I (as I'm powerseller specialized on collector items and know the prices) found that book and bought it from the shop before anybody else/
So the player who dropped that book got his 1,7M golds and he will be poor forever as it was his life drop which happens once per life.

Then I put that book for proper price 8M to my guild shop and eventually it will be bought by collector for that price.
If not this week, it will be bought later because of the inflation lol.
As I'm running regularly through Tamriel and know the prices, I can buy 4-6 items like that per months.
It makes me nearly as effective as gold/writ abusers with the only difference I'm not generating anything and my actions are absolutely sterile.

The difference is, that the book will be always sold by the market price 8M as collectors have not enough time to run around the shops as powersellers are always faster so my action has not any impact on the server economy, it has just impact on distributing golds, but the ratio between book and golds will be always 1 book = 8M golds.

If you introduce auction house, the book/ gold ratio will be perfectly the same 1 book = 8M golds.

That's not the same thing.

OP was talking about people buying up items and re-listing them at higher prices. Basically scalping, like what was done with GPUs from 2020 to now.

The biggest argument against a global auction house was always that it would prevent scalpers from manipulating the market. The only other plausible argument against it was that guild traders were a gold sink.

So if people are scalping now what's the point of guild traders anymore? Because they're a gold sink? That's it? Because with an AH a lot of guilds would no longer need to exist?

What is the reason now for guild traders to remain in place of a global auction house? Who can give a reasonable argument in favor of them now?

Lumsdenml

Holycannoli wrote: »

trpajzla wrote: »

Holycannoli wrote: »

Djennku wrote: »

There's lots of groups who will manipulate the market and raise prices for the same amount and availability of goods to make more gold out of it. Eventually people going around buying all of an available item and flipping them for higher prices made things that used to be lower in cost extremely expensive.

So there's no reason anymore to not have a global auction house.

Flipping and reselling items has nothing to do with inflation.

Example (PC/EU real life scenario as it happened couple of minutes ago)

Some player dropped rare yellow Motif 72 Book which is rare, because it drops very little and it is higly valued collector item.

It costs around 8M market price as golds are very common and are generated by bots doing daily writs without any real effort in massive amount (as you can see, bots are not able to drop Motif 72 book so the ratio is 1Book =8M golds and it is absolutely fine

But the player who dropped the book was noob and didn't know exact market price so he sold it for 1,7M golds in his guildstore.

I (as I'm powerseller specialized on collector items and know the prices) found that book and bought it from the shop before anybody else/
So the player who dropped that book got his 1,7M golds and he will be poor forever as it was his life drop which happens once per life.

Then I put that book for proper price 8M to my guild shop and eventually it will be bought by collector for that price.
If not this week, it will be bought later because of the inflation lol.
As I'm running regularly through Tamriel and know the prices, I can buy 4-6 items like that per months.
It makes me nearly as effective as gold/writ abusers with the only difference I'm not generating anything and my actions are absolutely sterile.

The difference is, that the book will be always sold by the market price 8M as collectors have not enough time to run around the shops as powersellers are always faster so my action has not any impact on the server economy, it has just impact on distributing golds, but the ratio between book and golds will be always 1 book = 8M golds.

If you introduce auction house, the book/ gold ratio will be perfectly the same 1 book = 8M golds.

That's not the same thing.

OP was talking about people buying up items and re-listing them at higher prices. Basically scalping, like what was done with GPUs from 2020 to now.

The biggest argument against a global auction house was always that it would prevent scalpers from manipulating the market. The only other plausible argument against it was that guild traders were a gold sink.

So if people are scalping now what's the point of guild traders anymore? Because they're a gold sink? That's it? Because with an AH a lot of guilds would no longer need to exist?

What is the reason now for guild traders to remain in place of a global auction house? Who can give a reasonable argument in favor of them now?

The reason against an auction house was not to stop people from buying things low and reselling them. In fact, the guild trading system enables people to do that because people selling don't have an easy way to see what other people are selling the same item for (not counting addons).
The reason for the GT system over an AH is to REDUCE the number of people who control, or try to control, the market in a given item. The GT system will not eliminate this from happening, but it will reduce it because it puts a barrier up by forcing people to move around the map to buy items. There are a % of people who would go to an AH, buy up all items of something and relist them at a higher price who are unwilling to do so if they have to spend an hour going to every single physical location to do the same thing.
For this reason alone people should not want an AH. This is a reasonable argument.

kargen27

"What can be observed (especially in VIvec as both writ boards and the bank are very close to every crafting station, drop-off point nearby, all outdoors)
is mixed armies of multiaccounts/bots and normal players crafting writs in massive numbers (by thousands) exploiting:
Automated login / logoff
Automated moving from writ boards to crafting stations and drop-off point
(miss)using crafting addons such as Dolgubon's Lazy Writ Crafter"

You have made this claim several times and I simply don't see any indications this is happening. You can see a cycle where players crafting picks up then ebbs back down. Vivec City has basically the same pattern as other popular crafting locations. The stations are busy right before and right after the daily reset. If automated accounts were being used we would expect to see similar activity throughout the day. We don't.
During the Jubilee Event there was a noticeable increase in players doing writs. Because of rewards players that might normally run writs on one or two characters were doing writs on every character they had. After the event the numbers went back down.
If the thousands you claim actually existed we wouldn't have noticed an increase as we would already be overwhelmed by large numbers. What I am seeing doesn't support your claims.

Lazuli

EU as well , sadly

Coatmagic

Changing writs and/or other dailies will have zero impact except on the new players trying to feed their mounts, buy bank and inventory space, and homes, etc.

If people are running scripts they should be dealt with, sure.

BUT you can't fix basic greed; there's no other reason the price of in game items to be ridiculously high...

EXCEPT crowns for the cash shop is the games long term gold sink at this point; doubt that is going to change.

kargen27

"EXCEPT crowns for the cash shop is the games long term gold sink at this point; doubt that is going to change."

Purchasing crowns with gold doesn't add or remove gold from the game. It redistributes the gold.

Coatmagic

kargen27 wrote: »

"EXCEPT crowns for the cash shop is the games long term gold sink at this point; doubt that is going to change."

Purchasing crowns with gold doesn't add or remove gold from the game. It redistributes the gold.

Yeah, that is what I aiming at. It's hard to say what you mean on this forum sometimes without getting into trouble.
Could do with a direct from the shop gold for crown exchange but that's never going to happen, I mean we can't even get a barber shop, smh. Anyway, you can read between the lines I imagine

merpins

Hooded_1 wrote: »

Returning player. Quit for a year and a half. Came back and the prices of consumes, upgrade mats, and other generally useful items has increased tenfold. What the heck happened? Was there a new system ZOS implemented that injected more money into the economy? Some glitch that people exploited? What am I missing?

With ya there.

It has to do with a few factors I believe. The main contributing factor is just the fact that it's easier to make gold now. A couple years ago, you could only make gold through PVP, crafting (writs included), or RNG (motifs). Now there are WAY more PVE ways to make money. Before, you could only make gold through PVP consistently, and crafting slowly. Now, you can just choose one of several gold producing methods to just do and you can make several million gold in a week. It's still slower than PVP methods, but it doubled the amount of people with access to making gold efficiently, and with double the income around, marketplaces usually see a sharp increase due to inflation.

There's other reasons as well. From there is far more gold in the game than there is gold sinks to reduce it, marketplace manipulation. But I can't imagine these reasons account for more than half of the inflation.

haelgaan

markets work well when there are a lot of items being bought and sold - look, for example, at the intricate items. good supply, good demand, selling point hasn't changed much in recent memory.

the other places i've seen price changes are where the quantity traded seems to be to have done down. motifs are an extreme case - where you see few or no in the trade history, that price isn't a market, it's a wild guess. good luck to that seller.

in other places, i always had the sense that the supply of the item being sold was not keeping in balance with the demand. increase rare mat drop rates to compensate for less people out harvesting, for example, and prices would go down. That always seemed the stronger driver to me, than the changes to gold generation rate or arbitrage activity.

it's insane how expensive it is to improve jewelry - way out of whack relative to other equipment slots - and that's entirely due to the stupid low drop rates and mechanism to make plating. i truly have no idea what ZOS was smoking when they came up with that one.

Xinihp

As I have posted elsewhere (thread locked), the brief and minor uptick of the Steam price change, housing added to gifting, and Antiquities do not account for the overall trend. The main driver of runaway price increase is MONOPOLY (same as in real life, surprise surprise).

Specifically, a couple sites have cornered the market on crown <-> gold exchange, and have TRIPLED the prices over the past couple years alone. Because ZOS REFUSES TO ADD A SAFE WAY TO TRADE CROWNS FOR GOLD they are free to exploit the demand for trading without the fear of being scammed to effectively set the price at whatever they want.

This allows a handful of monopolists to grow OBSCENELY rich, which lets them then create massive auction flip factories, buying HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of gold worth of materials and other high demand items all at once, and flooding the market with overpricing. They call this "setting trends." (Also, exactly as in real life.)

Year after year, even month by month, crown prices in gold have climbed with no proportional increase in game gold availability, and this is directly proportional to the rate of inflation on guild stores.

It is also consistent over the entire RMT scene. Carry guilds have begun organizing in Discord to raise prices for "consistency" because a handful of top sites (not posting names) decided to DOUBLE their rates from 4 million gold for titles/personality runs to 8 million, with trial carries running upwards of 30 MILLION GOLD.

All this stems in large part from the runaway crown to gold conversion rate.

It is not a conspiracy to observe that ZOS benefits from this increase, while new players (and players in general) suffer as their gold and thus TIME is worth less and less.

How does ZOS benefit?

With 1 or 2 massive crown exchange sites effectively corning the market and rigging prices higher and higher, the number with gold to buy crowns through gifting decreases, and the number who can't afford the gold or just give up and buy it with money increases.

This directly increases ZOS's earnings in the short term, while contributing to FOMO burnout in the long term.

MIRCOSOFT NEEDS TO STEP UP AND DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS FOR THEIR OWN GOOD.

The handful of super-monopolists only have so much they are interested in or can buy with that gold or crowns. But by allowing the exchange rate to skyrocket out of control, ZOS effectively creates a defacto scenario that walks back their crown gifting system by making it inaccessible to the average player, who just ends up spending real money.

It also creates a very bad image of the company in the eyes of the average customer being pushed out and effectively told their time is no longer worth even half what it was just 3 years ago.

The best thing ZOS could do at this point is ADD A SAFE SECURE WAY TO TRADE CROWNS <-> GOLD.

Also, they could implement something like what WoW did with tokens, and just set a sliding scale exchange rate and allow people to buy things directly from the crown store with gold just like houses, and cut out the increasingly corrupt and greedy middlemen who are driving customers away with their exclusive price fixing.

While the desire to avoid selling all crown items for gold is understandable from a business standpoint, the continued refusal to add a safe and secure method of exchange in a real money system THEY took the responsibility to implement so people can simply trade gold/crowns with each other without fear of being scammed is simply unacceptable, and is highly suspicious to say the least.

kargen27

"The handful of super-monopolists only have so much they are interested in or can buy with that gold or crowns. But by effectively allowing the exchange rate to skyrocket out of control, ZOS effectively creates a defacto scenario that walks back their crown gifting system by making it inaccessible to the average player, who just ends up spending real money."

I don't see that anything has been walked back. The crown gifting system was created to allow players to gift friends or guild mates items from the crown store. The ability to do that still exists. You can also find lower prices for crowns in zone chat but of course you are taking a risk going that route. To me the Discord sites can demand a higher price because they guarantee the transaction. You are paying for convenience and a safe transaction.

"Could do with a direct from the shop gold for crown exchange but that's never going to happen, I mean we can't even get a barber shop, smh."
A properly done barber shop could be a huge gold sink for the game.

Xinihp

kargen27 wrote: »

I don't see that anything has been walked back. The crown gifting system was created to allow players to gift friends or guild mates items from the crown store.

That is a pretty narrow interpretation and not consistent with how it has come to be used. [snip]

Saying "that's not what it is for" seems like an attempt to downplay or deflect from the obvious truth of how it has always and continues to be used by the vast majority of people who use it.

But I understand this is just your opinion, not ZOS's official policy. [snip]

All this being really neither here nor there. The fact remains there is simply no acceptable reason to continue to refuse the simply implementation of a safe and secure method of conducting these "gifting" exchanges without fear of being scammed by either party.

The absence of security in a real money transfer for ANY reason is HIGHLY SUSPICIOUS.

Edit for Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation.

kargen27

Xinihp wrote: »

kargen27 wrote: »

I don't see that anything has been walked back. The crown gifting system was created to allow players to gift friends or guild mates items from the crown store.

That is a pretty narrow interpretation and not consistent with how it has come to be used. [snip]

Saying "that's not what it is for" seems like an attempt to downplay or deflect from the obvious truth of how it has always and continues to be used by the vast majority of people who use it.

But I understand this is just your opinion, not ZOS's official policy. [snip]

All this being really neither here nor there. The fact remains there is simply no acceptable reason to continue to refuse the simply implementation of a safe and secure method of conducting these "gifting" exchanges without fear of being scammed by either party.

The absence of security in a real money transfer for ANY reason is HIGHLY SUSPICIOUS.

Edit for Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation.

You read a lot into my words that is not there. I know how it has come to be used. That doesn't change that you can still gift crown items if you so wish. That has not changed.
I did not comment on an official position for or against trading crowns for gold. Obviously ZoS allows this to take place and has even seemed to embrace the idea.

"Update 18 also introduces the all-new Crown Store Gifting system. With this new system, you're able to purchase and send most Crown Store items to your friends and guildmates."
That is the first line of the official announcement for crown item gifting. So not so much my opinion as something ZoS flat stated.

"Saying "that's not what it is for"" at no point did I say "that's not what it is for". I said it was a way to gift friends and guild mates items and you can still do that now if you wish. My point being the higher prices for people purchasing crowns isn't locking people out.
There is no monopoly. If there were a monopoly you would have said "Gina Bruno herself maintains an official presence on the ONLY Crown Exchange site." Of course for there to truly be a monopoly they would also need to ban selling in zone chat.

"ZOS could never claim "we don't support using gifting to exchange crowns for gold" "

you are correct and I never made that claim.

"The fact remains there is simply no acceptable reason to continue to refuse the simply implementation of a safe and secure method of conducting these "gifting" exchanges without fear of being scammed by either party."

I agree and until now never suggested my opinion on the subject one way or the other. Strictly speaking there is no transfer of real money taking place. If you read the agreement you will see Crowns are items you purchase and there will be no refund. Sure crowns are purchased with real world currency so there is some spirit to what you say but the absolute truth is neither the gold or the crowns are good outside of the game.
Would still be nice if there were an in game mechanic to make the transaction secure. Doing so isn't simple though as part of the transaction takes part outside of the game. The seller actually has to purchase the item being gifted.

Pevey

If you think upgrade mats are expensive now, wait until after the upcoming zenithar event when a lot of them will get deleted doing master writs. Prices are about to go higher. It's not a big conspiracy or player greed, just maybe unintended consequences of certain actions/events.

The sticker book had a huge impact on the amount of upgrade mats spent by many endgame players. I have so many more golded sets now than I did before, just because it is possible now to reconstruct in the right trait for all my toons.

kargen27

Prices for master writs have been going up for a while now. I'm guessing it is in anticipation of that event. So yeah time to hoard materials. If you don't use them you will be able to sell them at premium prices. Then after the event prices will trickle back down.
Prices always take longer to adjust downward after an event causes an increase but eventually they get there.