We need to talk about Columbine

erdYrrson

spartaxoxo wrote: »

[...]
Current system doesn't have equal opportunities for everyone, if we're defining that as picking mats. Which we shouldn't. But we'll go with it anyway.[...]

Or using other ways to get them, as already posted in this - and the past - threads about this topic:

freespirit wrote: »

Some other sources besides farming....

Waxed Apothicary Sacks, 500 Tel Var(pretty good drop rate)
Alchemy Surveys(reset until at least one Columbine is showing)
Daily Chest in Dragonguard Sanctuary(frequently drops 3 columbine, drops rheum and dragon blood too, sell and buy columbine)
ToT reward coffers(I see a fair amount in the green NPC daily rewards)
Alchemy Daily rewards(make sure you use less expensive mats to make the potions for these dailies)

🙂

VisitHammerfell wrote: »

freespirit wrote: »

Some other sources besides farming....

Waxed Apothicary Sacks, 500 Tel Var(pretty good drop rate)
Alchemy Surveys(reset until at least one Columbine is showing)
Daily Chest in Dragonguard Sanctuary(frequently drops 3 columbine, drops rheum and dragon blood too, sell and buy columbine)
ToT reward coffers(I see a fair amount in the green NPC daily rewards)
Alchemy Daily rewards(make sure you use less expensive mats to make the potions for these dailies)

🙂

Also the alchemy satchets from the Archive![...]

spartaxoxo

erdYrrson wrote: »

Or using other ways to get them, as already posted in this - and the past - threads about this topic:

So not the point of that post, regardless none of those good sources are PK PvP. Until PK PvPers can get the mats in equal quantity or the potions by doing PK activities, there is no equal opportunity. The best source, by far, is to farm it.

EF321

spartaxoxo wrote: »

EF321 wrote: »

acastanza_ESO wrote: »

All of those potions see less individual use than tripots which are massively used by every player in PVP and by a significant number of PVE players as well (including all tanks), none of the other potions would even make a fraction of the impact that tripots would.

This does not answer the question. Why certain groups of players should be discriminated when everyone has equal opportunities in current system?
Name one clear reason why you, as an individual, deserve special treatment and user of armor potion does not.

Current system doesn't have equal opportunities for everyone, if we're defining that as picking mats. Which we shouldn't. But we'll go with it anyway.

There are already NPC pots in the game. It's not discrimination either. It makes sense for activities to reward things that makes those activities better. PvP rewards potions that make PvP easier. So it makes sense to ask for the most popular PvP potion to be added in with the rewards that already exist.

Just as PvE gets things like stealth pots as a reward for assassination missions.

I don't deserve to have the same rights and benefits because I am minority??

spartaxoxo

EF321 wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

EF321 wrote: »

acastanza_ESO wrote: »

All of those potions see less individual use than tripots which are massively used by every player in PVP and by a significant number of PVE players as well (including all tanks), none of the other potions would even make a fraction of the impact that tripots would.

This does not answer the question. Why certain groups of players should be discriminated when everyone has equal opportunities in current system?
Name one clear reason why you, as an individual, deserve special treatment and user of armor potion does not.

Current system doesn't have equal opportunities for everyone, if we're defining that as picking mats. Which we shouldn't. But we'll go with it anyway.

There are already NPC pots in the game. It's not discrimination either. It makes sense for activities to reward things that makes those activities better. PvP rewards potions that make PvP easier. So it makes sense to ask for the most popular PvP potion to be added in with the rewards that already exist.

Just as PvE gets things like stealth pots as a reward for assassination missions.

I don't deserve to have the same rights and benefits because I am minority??

In what universe does "PvErs shouldn't have an effective monopoly wherein they can charge exorbitant prices to a captive pvp audience" mean that "PvErs shouldn't have the same rights?"

Let's be very clear here. The people who are privileged in the obtaining of Columbine are casual PvE players. They can obtain a lot more of them than they need, allowing them to sell for high prices.

acastanza_ESO

EF321 wrote: »

acastanza_ESO wrote: »

All of those potions see less individual use than tripots which are massively used by every player in PVP and by a significant number of PVE players as well (including all tanks), none of the other potions would even make a fraction of the impact that tripots would.

This does not answer the question. Why certain groups of players should be discriminated when everyone has equal opportunities in current system?
Name one clear reason why you, as an individual, deserve special treatment and user of armor potion does not.

I did answer your question, you not liking the answer is irrelevant. Does the armor potion require columbine? No. It is a niche potion that is already cheap to create. It doesn't need anything to help reign in it's creation cost. Tripots are universal and are something everyone who uses any potions at all would benefit from having an additional source of.

Everyone doesn't have equal opportunities in the current system, the existance of the Alliance Stamina and Alliance Magicka DPS potions prove your assertion there to be false. Currently DPS are getting special treatment but the universal tripot is not. Making Tripots available for AP would be more fair not less. At this point I can only assume that you're a columbine seller.

EF321

spartaxoxo wrote: »

They can obtain a lot more of them than they need, allowing them to sell for high prices.

I don't understand. Original question you were replying to has nothing to do with columbine or pve. But to this your statement I already answered in this same thread before anyway:
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/8055730/#Comment_8055730
Players are not obliged to offer you items in their possession at all. Just be thankful they do even offer you that shortcut. Offers of internet strangers are not primary means of acquiring consumable items in this game. In the same fashion you could complain about prices of achievement runs. And answer would be the same: just get achievement yourself, if you think price is too high.


Back to original question, to avoid further confusion, please just fill in this form:

"Individual, independent PvP player who chose to use tri-stat potion for their build deserves to bypass alchemy system and have direct access to their potion of choice because...
.
.
.
Individual, independent PvP player who chose to use armor potion for their build does not deserve to bypass alchemy system and have direct access to their potion potion of choice because...
.
.
.
"

EF321

acastanza_ESO wrote: »

I did answer your question, you not liking the answer is irrelevant. Does the armor potion require columbine? No. It is a niche potion that is already cheap to create. It doesn't need anything to help reign in it's creation cost. Tripots are universal and are something everyone who uses any potions at all would benefit from having an additional source of.

Everyone doesn't have equal opportunities in the current system, the existance of the Alliance Stamina and Alliance Magicka DPS potions prove your assertion there to be false. Currently DPS are getting special treatment but the universal tripot is not. Making Tripots available for AP would be more fair not less. At this point I can only assume that you're a columbine seller.

Cheap to create... creation cost... both of these take same number of reagents to create and the cost of all reagents is your time spent to acquire them. Everyone can farm specific reagent they need and create potions they want.

Pelanora

If prices are super high, it's BY DEFINITION, a supply problem. Flood the market until the price drops, and then you will have the 'right amount' of the supply.

Thor

It nicely differentiates players who are willing to do some extra and those who don't, doesn't it?

Pelanora

I just can't understand how people can be living with food prices high all the world over, and oil prices, and house prices, all high because of very difficult supply problems, and see the same thing in the game, and in here, make it a moral failure on the part of players.

Just so strange.

Eyr0n

You can get plenty of columbine through tel vars if you buy apothecary satchels

NoTimeToWait

manukartofanu wrote: »

NoTimeToWait wrote: »

Being a trader is my primary activity in this game, I can say that this unfortunately won't work as well as you think. The only way to drop down prices is to increase supply, lowering demand won't be as effective mainly because traders don't feel pressured when demand is waning. Traders have stocks of many things, so when sales for one or two of these items begin to lag, we just switch to selling something else until demand recovers. And since we can store an infinite amount of stuff in Crafts bag, traders also are not pressured for storage space.

If it worked like that, the price of chrome wouldn't have dropped by half. When big traders know that irreversible changes have occurred, they are the first to rush to offload their stocks at lower prices.

My answer was towards a suggestion that players' actions concerning supply would make traders react. It is unlikely. Obviously, changes by devs that directly involve supply (and Chrome supply was basically multiplied by 10) would make a difference.
Its the difference between a long-term and short-term change and whether the traders can weather through the changes.

If you haven't noticed the very same problem (as with Columbine) existed for a very long time for multiple other items (corn flower, style mats, furnishing mats). Devs mostly adressed these issues on a small scale, sometimes not very effectively (like adding furnishing mats to ToT or adding style mats to Scrying didn't really make a significant impact). Which is not a bad thing, because impactful changes definitely have repercussions (like the price drop for jewelry made Golden Vendor jewelry much less lucrative which in turn resulted in less income for PVP players and so on).

Problems like this need regular incremental changes. Like small incentives added with each patch (for example adding more endeavors for harvesting mats), adding more events that promote resource harvesting in a better way. Devs are actually doing this stuff already (for quite some time) but it does look that they need to add more incentives more frequently

AnduinTryggva

My impression right now is that there are some professional trader-farm groups out there that manipulate the market by emptying ressources as much as they can. As soon as the prices are up due to removing the availability of free ressources they can demand anything that players are ready to pay. Combine this with farming guild stores for ressources sold at lower prices you have this kind of huge inflation.

ZOS should imho increase sources for obtaining highly sought after ressources by quite some amount. The trifle amount you get from passives and other sources are not sufficient to break these market manipulation effects.

Ph1p

AnduinTryggva wrote: »

My impression right now is that there are some professional trader-farm groups out there that manipulate the market by emptying ressources as much as they can. As soon as the prices are up due to removing the availability of free ressources they can demand anything that players are ready to pay. Combine this with farming guild stores for ressources sold at lower prices you have this kind of huge inflation.

ZOS should imho increase sources for obtaining highly sought after ressources by quite some amount. The trifle amount you get from passives and other sources are not sufficient to break these market manipulation effects.

Yes, how dare traders charge a price that people are ready to pay instead of underpricing on purpose? I mean, you'd totally volunteer to take a pay cut at work for no reason, right?

Columbine has the highest number of listings on guild traders out of every alchemy reagent out there. Despite its high price, the market is about as liquid as can be in this game. A trading guild would have to consist of complete idiots to try and corner its supply, especially given the large stashes that so many people still have in their craft bags.

People love having a scapegoat, so they blame traders based on their unfounded "impression" of "market manipulation". It's just how the market works for a highly abundant item, whose utility and demand are even higher. By all means, propose and implement solutions like AP tripots. Most traders will simply adjust their prices, move on, and not care - just like they did when the value of jewelry materials tanked recently.

redlink1979

Farm more and depend less on others.

Dax_Draconis wrote: »

I understand rare items being expensive, but as you said, it is plentiful, so why are they so expensive?

@Dax_Draconis It's just the supply/demand economy working: a high demand tends to inflates the price of the item.

spartaxoxo

EF321 wrote: »

I don't understand. Original question you were replying to has nothing to do with columbine or pve.

It has everything thing to do with it. The whole "it's discrimination" and "nobody is obligated to sell to you," are arguments that just make it sound entitled and unethical to want PvP to award stuff that makes PvP better. Those arguments refuse to acknowledge the conditions that PvPers find themselves in and instead frames the request as an attempt to discriminate some 3rd party group not even asking for help because they did not receive aid that they did not ask for.

The people in the privileged position in this scenario are the sellers of Columbine. They have a captive audience and such a large gathering advantage as to almost have an monopoly on the resource. They are able to leverage this to charge exorbitant prices.

If ZOS were to distribute the ability to get the mat or the pot more evenly, prices would naturally fall. This is a practice that zos already engages in. They already sell various pots for AP and for that precise reason. It's perfectly reasonable to ask that zos continue to make improvements to the PvP experience based off criteria they already use.

manukartofanu

NoTimeToWait wrote: »

manukartofanu wrote: »

NoTimeToWait wrote: »

Being a trader is my primary activity in this game, I can say that this unfortunately won't work as well as you think. The only way to drop down prices is to increase supply, lowering demand won't be as effective mainly because traders don't feel pressured when demand is waning. Traders have stocks of many things, so when sales for one or two of these items begin to lag, we just switch to selling something else until demand recovers. And since we can store an infinite amount of stuff in Crafts bag, traders also are not pressured for storage space.

If it worked like that, the price of chrome wouldn't have dropped by half. When big traders know that irreversible changes have occurred, they are the first to rush to offload their stocks at lower prices.

My answer was towards a suggestion that players' actions concerning supply would make traders react. It is unlikely. Obviously, changes by devs that directly involve supply (and Chrome supply was basically multiplied by 10) would make a difference.
Its the difference between a long-term and short-term change and whether the traders can weather through the changes.

If you haven't noticed the very same problem (as with Columbine) existed for a very long time for multiple other items (corn flower, style mats, furnishing mats). Devs mostly adressed these issues on a small scale, sometimes not very effectively (like adding furnishing mats to ToT or adding style mats to Scrying didn't really make a significant impact). Which is not a bad thing, because impactful changes definitely have repercussions (like the price drop for jewelry made Golden Vendor jewelry much less lucrative which in turn resulted in less income for PVP players and so on).

Problems like this need regular incremental changes. Like small incentives added with each patch (for example adding more endeavors for harvesting mats), adding more events that promote resource harvesting in a better way. Devs are actually doing this stuff already (for quite some time) but it does look that they need to add more incentives more frequently

Alright, I'll explain this once. The current chromium platings are the former chromium grains. Their drop rate or supply hasn't changed. The only thing that changed is that previously a player needed 40 chromium grains to upgrade jewelry, but now only 8 chromium grains are needed. So, this is indeed a direct reduction in consumption without an increase in supply.

This example completely refutes your assertion that supposedly a reduction in demand will not lower prices. Without any theorizing about nothing, we have a real example from the actual economy we are discussing.

Unfortunately, your statement that "Chrome supply was basically multiplied by 10" indicates that you have a poor understanding of what is really happening in the game's economy. It's hard to take any of your suggestions seriously after such claims.

There's another, even more illustrative example: the Mara's Balm Ice Staff. It drops as before, but due to a change in the meta, few people need it. What happened to the prices?
https://us.tamrieltradecentre.com/pc/Trade/Detail/659145475
https://eu.tamrieltradecentre.com/pc/Trade/Detail/865917706

manukartofanu

AnduinTryggva wrote: »

My impression right now is that there are some professional trader-farm groups out there that manipulate the market by emptying ressources as much as they can. As soon as the prices are up due to removing the availability of free ressources they can demand anything that players are ready to pay. Combine this with farming guild stores for ressources sold at lower prices you have this kind of huge inflation.

ZOS should imho increase sources for obtaining highly sought after ressources by quite some amount. The trifle amount you get from passives and other sources are not sufficient to break these market manipulation effects.

Professional traders in the game will never be able to manipulate the prices of a resource that is abundant and very easy to obtain. Such an attempt even took place on PC EU about a year ago. A group of people tried to raise the price of Perfect Roe. What was the outcome? The argument that "with the release of the arcanist everyone will need roe, and we will earn five times more" was shattered by more practical traders who dumped all their stock and waited until the high prices for roe would encourage all players to fish. The price at the start of this unprecedented operation was around 70k, during the operation it reached 120k, but the wave of roe flooding the market cooled the manipulators' enthusiasm, resulting in the price only slightly increasing for a couple of days to around 90k at the arcanist's release. On TTC, this local rise was hardly noticeable due to the large volumes.
https://eu.tamrieltradecentre.com/pc/Trade/Detail/866159832
I can't even begin to imagine how many tens and hundreds of millions traders lost by believing in the tale about roe.

Grizzbeorn

spartaxoxo wrote: »

The best source, by far, is to farm it.

Which EVERYONE who plays the game can do.
Making a personal choice not to do it isn't being discriminated against.

spartaxoxo

Grizzbeorn wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

The best source, by far, is to farm it.

Which EVERYONE who plays the game can do.
Making a personal choice not to do it isn't being discriminated against.

I didn't state that it was. I stated that it is not equally available resulting in the current market conditions. And that's true. It's not equally available to all play styles. Nobody has a problem acknowledging that when someone says that MYM is a PvP event and that tickets aren't equally available to PvE players. Because it is one and it's not. But somehow saying picking mats is casual PvE is alleging discrimination.

AnduinTryggva

Ph1p wrote: »

AnduinTryggva wrote: »

My impression right now is that there are some professional trader-farm groups out there that manipulate the market by emptying ressources as much as they can. As soon as the prices are up due to removing the availability of free ressources they can demand anything that players are ready to pay. Combine this with farming guild stores for ressources sold at lower prices you have this kind of huge inflation.

ZOS should imho increase sources for obtaining highly sought after ressources by quite some amount. The trifle amount you get from passives and other sources are not sufficient to break these market manipulation effects.

Yes, how dare traders charge a price that people are ready to pay instead of underpricing on purpose? I mean, you'd totally volunteer to take a pay cut at work for no reason, right?

Columbine has the highest number of listings on guild traders out of every alchemy reagent out there. Despite its high price, the market is about as liquid as can be in this game. A trading guild would have to consist of complete idiots to try and corner its supply, especially given the large stashes that so many people still have in their craft bags.

People love having a scapegoat, so they blame traders based on their unfounded "impression" of "market manipulation". It's just how the market works for a highly abundant item, whose utility and demand are even higher. By all means, propose and implement solutions like AP tripots. Most traders will simply adjust their prices, move on, and not care - just like they did when the value of jewelry materials tanked recently.

My complaint is not about selling for market prices but about manipulating market prices by reducing free access to these items by some farmers or farmer groups.
So your rant goes into the wrong direction.

AnduinTryggva

Grizzbeorn wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

The best source, by far, is to farm it.

Which EVERYONE who plays the game can do.
Making a personal choice not to do it isn't being discriminated against.

Well not EVERYONE can farm for instance cloth nodes if entire regions are farmed empty. I've seen this in recent months and weeks.

Got a bit better recently and I guess ZOS has removed some of the farming bots that were roaming around. But even if these nodes respawn the harvest is so low if you find only occasionally here and there a cloth node. It used to be wood nodes that you hardly could find but now it is cloth nodes due to the prices of adjacent ressources like heartwood then an dreughwax now.
And there the market manipulation comes in, some may do it unintentionally by farming to profit from the currently high prices, some do it to drive prices high. Or why are the prices of dreughwax soaring like that if the harvest possibilities were as before?

joergino

Anyone can farm these plant, almost anywhere. I wonder how somebody could remove all the millions of permanently respawning nodes from the game just to sell their stuff at higher prices. Must be a very special skill.

AnduinTryggva

joergino wrote: »

Anyone can farm these plant, almost anywhere. I wonder how somebody could remove all the millions of permanently respawning nodes from the game just to sell their stuff at higher prices. Must be a very special skill.

It is not a special skill. It is that harvesting a node takes much much less time than the node to respawn.

As I said this farming maschines reduce significantly the availability of the free ressource (you understand the word "reduce", don't you?) and in combination of the "drop rate" of dreughwax for instance it makes access to dreughwax difficult considering the amount of dreughwax one needs for an all golden equipment. Depending on your armour setup you need 5-7 times 8 dreughwax provided you have maxxed out your crafting passive. Which equates to 40 to 56 Dreughwax and with the low drop rate of dreughwax you need so much cloth node ressources that it takes a long time to farm that with the current scarcity of active cloth nodes.

Anyhow I personally think that ZOS could survey market prices and depending on the demand for some of the ressources highly sought after they could implement a dynamic increase of injection of these ressources. This should of course only be related to basic consumables, not for set pieces or motifs that are just style things and don't impact combat performance.

erdYrrson

spartaxoxo wrote: »

Grizzbeorn wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

The best source, by far, is to farm it.

Which EVERYONE who plays the game can do.
Making a personal choice not to do it isn't being discriminated against.

I didn't state that it was. I stated that it is not equally available resulting in the current market conditions. And that's true. It's not equally available to all play styles. Nobody has a problem acknowledging that when someone says that MYM is a PvP event and that tickets aren't equally available to PvE players. Because it is one and it's not. But somehow saying picking mats is casual PvE is alleging discrimination.

But that applies to all kind of things. I.e. my decisions how I want to play and what I don't want to do gives me access to certain stuff but also requires me to buy certain stuff - and that includes consumables. And I chose to be an independent player, no guilds, no vendor access (and really not into offering wares via zone chat). If there is a request or I see a need, I give stuff away for free, like occasionally Columbine and Bugloss to the only PVP-regular player I know in game.

I certainly don't open quarterly a topic, requesting special treatment for consumables I have to pay for - for sometimes quite high prices. I adjust my play style so either can get the stuff myself - or I collect, well, grind for gold or AP or Tel Var or FC till I can afford buying the stuff. And it's okay, sometimes I learn new or different things, get some inspiration to change the character I am playing and so on. It's a nice game, that's why I am playing it.

Edit: added the currency range

NoTimeToWait

manukartofanu wrote: »

Alright, I'll explain this once. The current chromium platings are the former chromium grains. Their drop rate or supply hasn't changed. The only thing that changed is that previously a player needed 40 chromium grains to upgrade jewelry, but now only 8 chromium grains are needed. So, this is indeed a direct reduction in consumption without an increase in supply.

TTC historical data says otherwise. It's not hard to see that number of Chromium plating listings on TTC went from 11k before the change to 85k after the change. So as far as consumers are concerned, the supply did increase.

But that wasn't even a point of discussion. What I was talking about is a short-term supply and demand. What you are talking about is a long-term supply and demand. The context is different.

RetPing

Let me buy tri stat pots with AP.
It' s the only pot I use in PvP.
There is zero reason to not allow that, [snip]

[edited for baiting]

SpacemanSpiff1

just pick up more columbine. and do your surveys

EF321

spartaxoxo wrote: »

EF321 wrote: »

I don't understand. Original question you were replying to has nothing to do with columbine or pve.

It has everything thing to do with it. The whole "it's discrimination" and "nobody is obligated to sell to you," are arguments that just make it sound entitled and unethical to want PvP to award stuff that makes PvP better. Those arguments refuse to acknowledge the conditions that PvPers find themselves in and instead frames the request as an attempt to discriminate some 3rd party group not even asking for help because they did not receive aid that they did not ask for.

The people in the privileged position in this scenario are the sellers of Columbine. They have a captive audience and such a large gathering advantage as to almost have an monopoly on the resource. They are able to leverage this to charge exorbitant prices.

If ZOS were to distribute the ability to get the mat or the pot more evenly, prices would naturally fall. This is a practice that zos already engages in. They already sell various pots for AP and for that precise reason. It's perfectly reasonable to ask that zos continue to make improvements to the PvP experience based off criteria they already use.

Entitlement is exactly what it is. For some still undisclosed reason tripot supermacists think that they (only) deserve special treatment and unique access to that one consumable that suits them, and any player who uses any different combination of effects for their build can go farm themselves. But why can't tripotters farm their tripots right now? What makes them special on individual level? I asked three times and got no other answer than "We are self proclaimed majority", but no explanation why individual A should have easier sourcing than individual B, in addition to having the same source as B. We are playing the same game with rules that apply to everyone, where everyone can participate in any game mode.


You have same means of gathering columbine as any other player, you can be privileged columbine seller today. You chose to not be one. You participating in certain game modes and opting out of other modes is entirely your choice. You don't play all the game modes, you don't get all the rewards.

RetPing

SpacemanSpiff1 wrote: »

just pick up more columbine. and do your surveys

I dont want to do dumb and boring things like running around to pick flowers.
I use tristat in PvP and have millions of AP, let me buy it with those.