The deflation is awful.

RenTheCat

I'm glad people now can afford necessary materials like Dreugh Wax and such, especially when it's not hard to get, and it going from 40k to 20k is not that big a difference.
But some materials are outright horrible to farm, extremely rare to get to the point you need to spend hours or get extreme lucky to get them.
Aetherial Dust went from 1 million to 300k gold.
Perfect Roe went from 90k gold to 20k gold.
Getting those items is extremely rare and painful. The amount of farming you have to do to get Aetherial Dust or Perfect Roe is now not worth the price at all. I don't see the people cheering now everything in guild trader is cheap being the ones who actively farm said materials. The complete drop of prices makes it so making gold now is imposible and when you do put in the effort to make it, your reward is worthless because the community feels entitled to perfect roe for 20k even though it's not them the ones who spend hours fishing and refining.

Renato90085

event give me too many Perfect Roe
i nerver fish but my bag have 2k+ roe...

Sleepsin

Renato90085 wrote: »

event give me too many Perfect Roe
i nerver fish but my bag have 2k+ roe...

Not that kind of roe.

Renato90085

Sleepsin wrote: »

Renato90085 wrote: »

event give me too many Perfect Roe
i nerver fish but my bag have 2k+ roe...

Not that kind of roe.

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Perfect_Roe
not this? i think 10th Anniversary Jubilee box give me so many

Stafford197

Ths speaks to a different issue in my opinion. Ingredients should be earned through their sources, not through spamming thousands of Anniversary event boxes.

I’ve received 1,000+ of Dragon Blood/Bile/Rheum, Perfect Roe, Pearls, Clam Gall, as well as an unbelievable amount of all sorts of other mats just through anniversary event boxes alone. On the flip side, I’ve farmed hundreds of Elsweyr dragons and received massively less Dragon mats for an overwhelming amount of more effort. Target farming mats is totally devalued.

Would much rather we earn far more materials from their actual sources and almost zero from other sources.

Auroan

Dang, I remember when Perfect Roe use to be 10k and Aetherial Dust averaged 70k (cheapest I got it for was 50k in Zone Chat). I sold Mythic Aetherial Ambrosia for like, 25k-30k a pop back then.

Having said that, that's Supply and Demand for ya. Just reloaded my TTC and there's thousands of Perfect Roe on the market and a couple hundred Aetherial Dust.

To be honest though, they're not too useful and I'm surprised their prices are that high (I'm going to assume and blame it on inflation being through the roof). Perfect Roe will get you Clockwork food which is just a slightly better Witch Mother's Brew with some Health Regen. That's not a food you casually use though. That's min/max food you'll use when you're pushing Trifecta's and are resetting on death. Even then (provided I haven't done end game raiding in a while), the meta changed to Bi-Stat food since regen was so high, as with enemy damage output. That and DPS is so high right now that unless you're doing Trifecta's for the most recent Trials, every other past trial bosses die so quick you'll never hit a point where you have sustain issues in an optimized group anyways. So basically, no one will even use that food anyways.

Perfect Roe also gets you XP pots, and XP pots are the only thing Aetherial Dust is used for, if I recall. But let's face it, XP boosts are hyper inflated with all the XP scrolls ZOS gives for free via Login Rewards and all the other sources of boosted XP. You really only use XP pots to stack with Holiday Event XP boosts. But what's that XP even really used on anyways? Leveling Companions for the achievement (cause let's face it, Companions are pretty useless)? Leveling alts because the meta changes? Certainly not CP anymore since you can only equip 4 at a time anyways.

So while they deserve to be expensive simply due to rarity, when it comes to actual practical use, they're really not that valuable anymore. Last I recall, Aetherial Dust and the Mythic Aetherial Ambrosia Recipe could only be obtained in base game zones. They should change that so it's obtainable in any zone so it's rarity will drop to match its practical use.

TX12001rwb17_ESO

The thing is despite the massive deflation people are still asking over 1000:1 for crowns, back when items were actually this value before the mass inflation, Crown prices were more along the lines of 300:1

Nihilr

ITT: Complaining that the bubble is deflating, instead of continuing rising prices to infinity (like no economic system can ever do in reality).

As others have pointed out, prices are still high compared to before, and the grinding has gotten easier for some things, a little harder for others.

Sources of mats should be slightly more abundant and event rewards should not include mats. That said, Chaurus Egg farming feels so fruitless. Can Devs please make then drop on more than just on Reapers? I shouldn't spend hours farming a material for enough pots that last less than 1 evening in Cyrodiil raids...

Zodiarkslayer

So grinding cheap mats isn't profitable anymore. Mhm. Maybe grind something that is?
Furnishing plans, maybe? Or motif pages?
One can easily find alternatives.

The real question that you should ask yourself is: "What will I do with the gold?" 🤔
Seriously, what will you buy with, say, a million gold? Or ten? Last thing that I bought was Merryvine Estate and a bit of furnishings for it. Ever since then gold is just piling up again.
So I ask myself why grind at all?

I guess you could be a real pro, buy mats like crazy and sell them when the prices are inevitably rising again. Invest now, make profits later.
But hey, who wants to be a pro trader anyways? Right?

< This is not business advice, btw. I will not be accountable for your losses.😉 >

licenturion

I like what they have done tbh.

Thanks to this deflation and the abundance of resource and motif events I have gone from a poor ESO guy to millions and millions. Just by underselling loads with the lower prices.

Thanks to the ESO+ trial I also have a crafting bag full of special item reserves that will last me a while.

I doubt prices will change much in the very near future. A lot of people now have a lot of stuff they were missing for cheap and huge reserves and cash for the times to come that they don't need much overpriced stuff.

manukartofanu

Nihilr wrote: »

ITT: Complaining that the bubble is deflating, instead of continuing rising prices to infinity (like no economic system can ever do in reality).

As others have pointed out, prices are still high compared to before, and the grinding has gotten easier for some things, a little harder for others.

Sources of mats should be slightly more abundant and event rewards should not include mats. That said, Chaurus Egg farming feels so fruitless. Can Devs please make then drop on more than just on Reapers? I shouldn't spend hours farming a material for enough pots that last less than 1 evening in Cyrodiil raids...

No, you shoudn't, in current economy you should buy chaurus eggs from the market

xylena_lazarow

Players who don't want to do capitalism RP shouldn't be locked out of resources, neither should players who prefer swords and sorcery over menial labor simulator. The whole system is obsolete 00s game design [snip] Leave the grind for grind players but it's time to get it out of anything remotely competitive like tri pots or tri glyphs.

[edited for baiting]

TaSheen

I don't care one way or the other. I farm everything myself, and have enough stockpiled to last until the end of eternity (or whenever the game goes dark).

Nope, I never sell anything. I *might* - if we didn't have this stupid "guild trader" system.

TaSheen

I don't care one way or the other. I farm everything myself, and have enough stockpiled to last until the end of eternity (or whenever the game goes dark).

Nope, I never sell anything. I *might* - if we didn't have this stupid "guild trader" system.

LPapirius

This year's economy has absolutely crushed trading guilds. It's at least 4x harder to generate gold now than it was, and vending items isn't worth the effort now with 14 day listing limitation. Trading in ESO is dead right now and it's a real problem.

I_killed_Vivec

licenturion wrote: »

I like what they have done tbh.

Thanks to this deflation and the abundance of resource and motif events I have gone from a poor ESO guy to millions and millions. Just by underselling loads with the lower prices.

Thanks to the ESO+ trial I also have a crafting bag full of special item reserves that will last me a while.

I doubt prices will change much in the very near future. A lot of people now have a lot of stuff they were missing for cheap and huge reserves and cash for the times to come that they don't need much overpriced stuff.

Calling bluff on this.

If the going price were twice as much you'd make twice as much "just by underselling loads with lower prices".

I_killed_Vivec

Renato90085 wrote: »

event give me too many Perfect Roe
i nerver fish but my bag have 2k+ roe...

I'm a master angler, I've caught all the fish, in all the zones (including DLC).

I haven't kept track, but I'd say I'd be lucky to have got 200 perfect roe from fishing, and picked up less than fifty from events.

2k solely from events is just too much of an RNG blessing.

There are occasions, and this is definitely one, when I really have to wonder if I'm playing a different game from other people!

Morgaledh

Renato90085 wrote: »

Sleepsin wrote: »

Renato90085 wrote: »

event give me too many Perfect Roe
i nerver fish but my bag have 2k+ roe...

Not that kind of roe.

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Perfect_Roe
not this? i think 10th Anniversary Jubilee box give me so many

You're saying because of the anniversary boxes, you're sitting on 2k+ Perfect Roe? I almost need to see a screenshot to believe this, but only almost. If this is the case, 1. you're sitting on easily over 40 million gold or so, at least, but 2. that would explain the price plummet, since supply is way, way out of whack.

Recent

Farming bots don't help this situation...so sad that our time has become worthless.

Amottica

It is temporary.

Nharimlur_Finor

RenTheCat wrote: »

I'm glad people now can afford necessary materials like Dreugh Wax and such

It's free if you refine your own mats.

spartaxoxo

I make plenty from events still. I like the event mats.

Heren

Oh, another 'I can't adapt' thread !

Danikat

If the things you're farming aren't worth the time required then stop farming them. Find something that is worth your time (bearing in mind that, unless you're buying crowns, the price of things you're getting with gold will have been affected too, so you probably don't need as much profit as before).

I've always found it a bit weird that so many people in this game expect to be able to pick a few items and farm those for a profit forever. I've never known a game where that worked, the market is always shifting, if only because if something is easy to farm and profitable everyone will do it and then the excess supply drives the price down, so it's not longer as profitable and they move on to the next thing.

Rkindaleft

Morgaledh wrote: »

Renato90085 wrote: »

Sleepsin wrote: »

Renato90085 wrote: »

event give me too many Perfect Roe
i nerver fish but my bag have 2k+ roe...

Not that kind of roe.

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Online:Perfect_Roe
not this? i think 10th Anniversary Jubilee box give me so many

You're saying because of the anniversary boxes, you're sitting on 2k+ Perfect Roe? I almost need to see a screenshot to believe this, but only almost. If this is the case, 1. you're sitting on easily over 40 million gold or so, at least, but 2. that would explain the price plummet, since supply is way, way out of whack.

I don't think it's that shocking to be honest. Due to people grinding events, tons of people have a huge supply of mats which is one of the reasons prices have gone down -> everyone has mats so there's no need for those players to buy them, I.E no demand.

Outside of events I only really do raids, and so I regularly bought tri and heroism potions from the guild stores. Because I grinded boxes across 10+ characters, I got enough Dragon Rheum/Blood/Other ingredients for a huge stock of potions which means I haven't needed to buy any more of them since, and this is true for others for literally any kind of mat.

kargen27

Danikat wrote: »

If the things you're farming aren't worth the time required then stop farming them. Find something that is worth your time (bearing in mind that, unless you're buying crowns, the price of things you're getting with gold will have been affected too, so you probably don't need as much profit as before).

I've always found it a bit weird that so many people in this game expect to be able to pick a few items and farm those for a profit forever. I've never known a game where that worked, the market is always shifting, if only because if something is easy to farm and profitable everyone will do it and then the excess supply drives the price down, so it's not longer as profitable and they move on to the next thing.

Or if you are ESO+ or have the inventory space keep farming but don't put them on market until the price goes back up. This year with all the celebrations supply has really outpaced demand. That should change going into next year when we get back to a more normal schedule.

Estin

kargen27 wrote: »

Danikat wrote: »

If the things you're farming aren't worth the time required then stop farming them. Find something that is worth your time (bearing in mind that, unless you're buying crowns, the price of things you're getting with gold will have been affected too, so you probably don't need as much profit as before).

I've always found it a bit weird that so many people in this game expect to be able to pick a few items and farm those for a profit forever. I've never known a game where that worked, the market is always shifting, if only because if something is easy to farm and profitable everyone will do it and then the excess supply drives the price down, so it's not longer as profitable and they move on to the next thing.

Or if you are ESO+ or have the inventory space keep farming but don't put them on market until the price goes back up. This year with all the celebrations supply has really outpaced demand. That should change going into next year when we get back to a more normal schedule.

Next year is going to be another 10th anniversary celebration because of the console launch, so expect the same as this year for next year, though I think ZOS realized their massive mistake with this year's anniversary event because every single event since then hasn't been dropping that many valuable items. Mostly only new motifs or collectables were worth anything.

freespirit

Stuff still sells!

I emptied my mails and restocked my stores earlier than usual today because this evening we had our Annual Halloween Guild's(two guilds) Celebration.

I had stuff to organise and then the actual Celebration so for roughly six hours I totally ignored my mailbox.....

When I finally had time to get back to looking at it I had 91 sales mails, by the time I sorted it there were exactly 100 mails waiting for me......I haven't even got around to checking my other accounts yet!

1:- don't overprice
2:- sell things people actually want...... this one changes often!

doesurmindglow

I'm not really surprised ZOS took the player economy seriously and appears to have acted comprehensively to defend the value of gold.

What is concerning to me is there doesn't seem to a lot of clarity and communication around the series of changes to the game's monetary policies and drop rates so that players better understand why items are losing value and what they can expect of that trend going forward. As it is, it isn't even entirely clear that adjustments were intentional and though it seems pretty obvious to me, it's still kinda speculative that it arose from a pressing monetary policy interest. It almost looks like an unintended consequence at best.

In one example of a knock-on effect of the disparate-seeming constellation of monetary balance adjustments, I can't tell if it was fully anticipated or not the degree to which players were hedging against inflation with large positions in materials, and other asset stockpiles, that would enter the circulation in a deflationary scenario, or if that aspect of the changes has been fully appreciated in the time since guild listings were shortened, drop rates of very expensive items were buffed, and material quantities were increased.

I don't oppose efforts to defend the value of gold and prevent inflation -- I had even cautioned that an inflationary gold generation equation had been contributing to a massive asset bubble in the PC-NA and PC-EU economies and that the larger that bubble became, the harder and more painful it would be to deflate. While we're seeing now the prescience and accuracy of those predictions, I think it really would be good to hear more from the devs on the way they approach balance in the in-game economy, what their goals are in terms of adjustments to that balance, and what players can expect as those adjustments are made.

As it is, it's pretty challenging to understand that the game's gold generation equations were even altered unless you are paying pretty close attention and connecting the dots, and this lack of transparency leads a lot of players to feel discouraged and sometimes even panicked as they see things losing value on the guild markets and don't really understand why or how in a particularly helpful way. I do think the devs did a decent job of communicating some of these intentions around the jewelry materials change, which appears to be part of a larger effort in retrospect, and it would be helpful I think to hear more about the other changes, such as the adjustments to the drop rates of the most wildly inflated in-game assets, and the increase to guild listing fees (in that, meaning: the gold deletion vs time). Some of these changes don't even make it into patch notes, for example, but are clearly visible in trading volumes, as randomly a lot more listings for a given commodity arrive on the guild markets with no plausible explanation other than an adjustment to drop rates (I'm looking at you, Khajiit Brazier).

I also think it would be good to get some idea that if the goal is in fact to defend the value of gold and prevent inflation, when we might be able to expect a restoration of price stability: prolonged inflation is bad, to be sure, and needed addressing; but so too is prolonged deflation.

SirGabenOfSteamia

The deflation is affecting wayyyyyy more than just mats. ZoS has been making many incredibly rare or otherwise expensive things flood the market in a way to make it more readily obtainable for the average player, which is fine, but I personally think it punishes those who have already done everything in the game and find their joy from it now through grinding and selling on the markets.

Some examples of how the trading situation has changed over the last year in my experience on PS/NA:


Filer Ool with the introduction of the IA immediately began selling deadlands treasure maps in the first week of release, at least on console. This led to the price of maps dropping from around 50k EA on PS/NA to 5-10k where they sit today. Ancient daedric motifs dropped from anywhere between 200-500k to 30-90k today. Same goes for other maps and motifs the filer has sold that one could obtain their respective drops from.

Jubilee halved the price of rare mats, whether it be gold or alchemy. The extreme abundance of motifs that dropped during it due to jubilee boxes being able to be farmed infinitely crashed many of the rare ones. Some examples being minotaur chests dropping from 250k to 100k, Fang lair chests from 80-100k to 20k, crimson oath chests dropping from 500k to 200-250k. Plenty of other already decently cheap motifs

The Lucent Sentinel motif began dropping and selling between 100-500k depending on the page, two weeks later the West Weald event happened and now it's easy to find every page of the chapter at 5k EA.

Extremely rare masks like Lord Warden, Molag Kena and Baron Zaudrus have all dropped this year. People seized the opportunity and farmed them to hell, now traders are flooded with them at 1/5 of the price they were before with no one buying.

Guilds are struggling financially with crashing prices and lack of sales. Because so many people got their bags flooded with gold and alchemy mats from jubilee they no longer buy as much from guilds. Many guilds that held the same traders for years can no longer afford them and have been forced to move out. You might think this is great for newer guilds, which it is, but it has also opened the door to trolls who are either outbidding or being the only bids on multiple traders across the game. The traders they own sit there without a single listed item for weeks on end. Orsinium has had 2 of these on PS/NA for over a month, as one example.

I personally enjoy grinding scaly cloth scraps from the Silent Halls in Blackwood to list in traders. In the last year their price has crashed from 1.2mil to 400k for the set of 50. This is seemingly because ZoS boosted the drop rate of them, with single enemies dropping sometimes 2. Yet even with lower prices sometimes they will expire in the traders 2-3 times before they sell. Likely indicative of the lack of demand that has come with the dwindling playerbase.

Another example is the random increase of the drop rate of the morrowind banner of the 6th house from vvardenfell, which wasn't touched for 7 years until now for some reason. What was once one of the most sought after furnishings in the game now doesn't even sell for 50k.

There's no reason to grind anything anymore. Gold is abundant, things are cheap. I barely hop on other than to do dailies anymore. I understand it's great for new players, and ZoS is obviously trying to hook in a new audience with recent changes. But I don't think it helps the veteran playerbase of the game who are finding less and less reasons to play the game.

LunaFlora

deflation is awesome