How well do crafted items sell?

Sendarya · April 2014

I would like to state 2 things right off.
First, I love the crafting system in this game. I can make myself and my husband level appropriate greens (and an occasional blue), as I go, and the items are almost always better than dropped or quest rewards.

Second, I have been and still am against a server wide AH.

Those things being said, I can't sell anything. I am in 3 guilds, 2 of them at the 500 mark, one smaller, and NOTHING I put up for sale sells. If I sit around and try and sell in chat (which I am totally willing to do), I still can't sell anything. Neither drops nor crafted items.

The only things that seem sell are: Motif books and crafting mats (especially upgrading mats). That's it. I sold one dropped set piece once. So maybe those on a very limited basis.
Now I know at higher level people may come looking for someone to make them a set of purple gear of the "insert special crafting area name here", but until that time, I'm not making money, I'm just eating it all to level crafts (and buy more bag and bank slots to level crafts).

Provisioning is an example of something really useful that no one wants to buy. I made some blue food and blue drink, and linked it for sale in Zone chat for my entire 3 hours play session, and didn't get a single taker. Food and drink buffs are extremely useful! I rarely play without. But no one seems to want to buy any.

I played EQ pre-PoP, and I know how to sell stuff in zone chat, and I'm not opposed to taking time to do it. But no one needs much in ESO. The drops and quest rewards are sufficiently good, you rarely need to go looking for stuff. And many, many people craft so they can do it themselves. This leaves me to wonder if there even IS a player made economy outside of selling crafting MATS and BOOKS back and forth to each other.

I know it has only been one week since official launch, and only 2 since early release, but I'm really disappointed in the lack of sellable item/ability to sell. If we had a gathering place where people came looking for people selling it might help. Currently zone chat is it, so everything goes there, from gold spam to stupid trolling. And a lot of people play with zone chat turned off. With only 500 people per guild allowed, there just isn't much of a player base to sell to, not that it seems anyone needs much of anything they can't find or make themselves anyway.

My proposal is to create a PLAYER made AH area, like EQ's Bazaar. Somewhere other people outside your guild can come look for things to buy, either in chat or off of you as some sort of turn-yourself-into-a-vendor-ablility.

Other opinions appreciated. I'm not trying to be negative, I love this game and am really enjoying my play time so far. I'm not saying the game is doomed. This is just a HUGE area of gameplay for me (crafting, buying, selling, and trading), and currently only one of those 4 things is really working at all.

Malediktus · April 2014

Its too easy to level crafting professions in this game to make everything yourself. My main is lvl 33 and has all crafting professions at a lvl higher than needed for his lvl (can craft 40+ stuff and max provisioning)
Zenimax needs to think of more special boss loot and more special crafting recipes and motives to make it work. Even the daedric motif is not rare enough to make it special within 1-2 months time.

DrearyYew · April 2014

Malediktus, the reason for this is veteran ranks. 1-25 crafting is for 1-50 levels, and 25-50 crafting is for vr 1-10, and it becomes incredibly important.

SexyVette07 · April 2014

Crafting is a joke because gear drops off about every other mob. Drops need to be significantly reduced because the market is so incredibly washed out that epics are selling for less than 1k, and good luck trying to sell blues and greens unless youre basically giving it away.

knightblaster · April 2014

SexyVette07 wrote: »

Crafting is a joke because gear drops off about every other mob. Drops need to be significantly reduced because the market is so incredibly washed out that epics are selling for less than 1k, and good luck trying to sell blues and greens unless youre basically giving it away.

I agree that scarcity is not a concept in the game design.

They may need to make things more scarce as it is, even with the system we have. If they were to introduce a global AH, they would need to make things drastically more scarce, I think, to avoid total supply gluts being presented in a hyper-efficient way.

Dekkameron · April 2014

As someone with (nearly all motifs, i dont have daedric or primal) i often ask in zone chat if anyone wants something made with any talent in any style and get a decent response often

LastLaugh · April 2014

I think the difficulty buyers experience when trying to search for items effectively is a contributing factor. You can't search the guild stores by keyword and the categories are so broad it is often really hard to find something specific. I would definitely buy certain types of crafted items if it wasn't so difficult to find what I'm looking for.

I've started a thread on this asking the developers to make guild stores searchable by keyword. Please check it out if you agree this is an issue.

R0M2K · April 2014

Guild stores are a pain to navigate trough.

Nazon_Katts · April 2014

Inflationary gear loot from drops and chests, easy access to self sufficient crafting and fast leveling, which makes you swap gear almost each play session paired with horrible trade options just don't make a good market. Here's hoping VR levels with lower leveling speeds will prove to be more lucrative.

theoak1ey · April 2014

I thought the exact same thing, and as other people have said drops are far too frequent, and you level way to quickly to make purchasing weapons/armour worthwhile. I think the reason food/drink items don't sell is provisioning is the easiest skill to level and you could easily level from 1-50 in one day so I'd imagine a lot of people have a good enough provisioning level to make food/drinks themselves.

The other problem is until players reach veteran ranks they wont have a need to purchase armour from crafter's and even then I think there are going to be enough people with level 50 crafting that will keep prices far lower than they should.

To the OP I'd keep hold of all your upgrade mats as with the high rate of levelling makes more sense to keep hold of them to you start to notice that your not levelling as fast to make upgrading plausible, otherwise your just wasting upgrade mats.

SadisticSavior · April 2014

My crafted items sell extremely well. I have never had a single NPC vendor turn me down. They buy them up like candy.

Vendrath · April 2014

low level crafted items with traits sell very well to other crafters. Unfortunately, it's a pain when going looking for something with a specific trait since you can't really search the guild store.

UnknownXV · April 2014

Armor sets will rarely sell until max level. There's no point. You outlevel them so extremely fast. Thus is the nature of a level based game like ESO, instead of a skill based game like Runescape. Everything is outleveled.

Crafting will be quite useful at end game, no doubt about that. It's difficult enough where a lot of people won't bother leveling it.

Chalybos · April 2014

I did like the Bazaar from EQ. If that's not a feasible option (doubtful, but one can hope), then at least a searchable broker would be nice. To clarify, I mean a useful search, not the one that there is now. That's probably my only real gripe with the system as it is (I know, I like it confusing & cumbersome - go figure).

davidhorstub17_ESO · April 2014

craft vr1 sets and sell them together in 3 or 5 pieces, sub 50 the game is too easy and you level so fast it isnt worth trying to sell, but people will buy up set bonus at vr1 since the difficulty spike is significant and they will be wearing them for a good amount of time. people with bad builds step into vr content and get dunked, first thing they look at is gear and not spec. those are the ones you want to sell to.

Fahrice · April 2014

Sorry for responding with a link, but I just commented fairly in depth on how to do this in another thread on these forums, so here is a link to that:

http://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/discussion/comment/628221/#Comment_628221