The ESO Great Depression

MrBeatDown

You are going to waste your time, because what i described is currently the way things work.

Lets say im a millionaire with nothing to loose and one of my investments is 10 houses in a neighborhood.

If i have 10 Houses each valued at 100k a piece (but i only payed 80k a piece buying them) and im trying to sell them, I will have to pay taxes on these houses until they sell. I will also have to pay for any upgrades out of pocket that i will need reimbursement for.

Even though the economy is still crappy for Most folks, and alot of people cannot get the loans, I cannot take that into consideration because it cost me money for upkeep and taxes as long as i own them.

Now, In order for me to swing a little bit of profit, I might have to jack the price up to recoup my losses while i sit on them. SO i will advertise a higher price for them then what they are worth. You know, like 165k or something.

When someone is interested, we will negotiate a price that we both agree too or the deal will not be done. The longer i have to sit on these houses before i sell them, the more expensive each individual house will get in order to recoup my money and make some.

I may even have to resort to renting them out to squeeze more money out of them.

If inventory is getting dumped a little faster than expected and im selling them fast, then the prices can be negotiated lower as im still making money, and i dont have to take in to account that im sitting on them and throwing money away.

This is inflation. I set the price since i own them, but i have to charge you more because it cost me money for upkeep and im trying to swing a profit.

Since im a millionaire and i bought these houses cheaply in decent area with several people in the housing market that have decent jobs im sitting good. I know i will dump these anyway, AT MY PRICE. If no one else wants to compete with me or sell the home they live in cheaper than what i had to pay for these houses, Im going to do really good.

This will also drive the prices of housing higher in the area that im selling in. This is also inflation.

anitajoneb17_ESO

MrBeatDown wrote: »

You are going to waste your time, because what i described is currently the way things work.

Lol. No, it's not.
And what you've described is not inflation.

altemriel

MrBeatDown wrote: »

Its real folks, ESO is in a full scale Economic depression and commerce with guild stores are suffering from the economic downfall because of BOP and BOE. Everything you do in ESO has a gold cost associated with it. They have successfully bleed the gold out of everyone that was already dependent on sales of items to continue to progress their characters. There is way to many gold sinks in this game. We need more gold to play the game. When i spend real money to purchase the game/DLC , i expect to be able to play it with my gear/skills points/etc. Currently I cannot play the PVE V M A because i cannot afford to pay the repair cost associated with it, im also unable to afford to pay the gold fees associated with changing skills, CP's, Crafting mats, ETC, to optimize my character in order to play the content that i payed my Real Money for. Im also unable to play the Daily's because i cannot afford to pay the repair cost associated with those. Im also unable to sell mats, since everyone else is flat broke and cannot afford to pay for them. It is also too expensive to just craft new gear instead of repairing the old gear to get around the gold fees.

I guess my character needs to get on ESO welfare gold payouts daily, because i cannot afford to play the content that i payed real money to play. It is also against the rules to take out my credit card and buy gold from a chinese gold selling store and i risk loosing my account over this.

Something needs to change, and it needs to change quickly.

maybe we should turn to a gold-free economy there in ESO. Barter, exchange, ware for ware, let the prices become themselves. lets try !

magnusthorek

And there is also players that already did the hard work to become optimized and are able to take a walk alone in the jungle that Imperial City is (according to my current strength, at least) and have access to these new jewelries and try to sell them at exorbitant amounts of gold, in a broken economy.

For the regular and casual player, this almost doubles the work needed to get small alms here and there to pay these absurd prices, even MM saying it's extremely overpriced.

Not to mention the rarity of materials in Orsinium wilderness, that when finally gathered in good amounts, may be accidentally lost while doing writs, because the game "automagically" decided to move the counter to VR16 instead of VR15 and we end wasting 150 Ancestor Silks when we needed only 15 for a helmet.

With the richness of details above it's pretty obvious that this happened to me... twice O_O

MrBeatDown

anitajoneb17_ESO wrote: »

MrBeatDown wrote: »

You are going to waste your time, because what i described is currently the way things work.

Lol. No, it's not.
And what you've described is not inflation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation

In economics, inflation is a sustained increase in the general price level of goods and services in an economy over a period of time.[1] When the price level rises, each unit of currency buys fewer goods and services. Consequently, inflation reflects a reduction in the purchasing power per unit of money – a loss of real value in the medium of exchange and unit of account within the economy.[2][3] A chief measure of price inflation is the inflation rate, the annualized percentage change in a general price index (normally the consumer price index) over time.[4] The opposite of inflation is deflation.

In both of my examples i have proven that the price of the "item" i describe as being inflated, either by me or a distributor,
has received a sustained increase in the general price level of goods and services in an economy over a period of time.

[Moderator Note: Edited per our rules on Trolling & Baiting]

Nifty2g

The fact is simple

Zos aren't being smart with gold sinks they don't care about the player when it comes to this they just want all gear in dlc to be bop so players buy their content which will inevitably leave everyone with no gold and nothing to do in the end.

No one should feel forced to farm, this game was never like this, you do the content you like to make gold there were always ways of doing so. Now you're forced to farm, forcing players to do such things is unhealthy and many will leave or play other games.

Another example if everyone switches to farming, where does that leave crafters making gold if everyone is making their own stuff?

A lot of people are missing the point or haven't played as long, players used to support each other with the system zos had, supplying the gear from hard pve content to pvpers. Supplying crafting to hardcore pvers and pvpers who probably wanted to raid with their guilds etc rather than signing on to farm

This is imo the biggest problem and doesn't look like zos care I'm glad people are speaking up though

anitajoneb17_ESO

MrBeatDown wrote: »

anitajoneb17_ESO wrote: »

MrBeatDown wrote: »

You are going to waste your time, because what i described is currently the way things work.

Lol. No, it's not.
And what you've described is not inflation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation

In economics, inflation is a sustained increase in the general price level of goods and services in an economy over a period of time.[1] When the price level rises, each unit of currency buys fewer goods and services. Consequently, inflation reflects a reduction in the purchasing power per unit of money – a loss of real value in the medium of exchange and unit of account within the economy.[2][3] A chief measure of price inflation is the inflation rate, the annualized percentage change in a general price index (normally the consumer price index) over time.[4] The opposite of inflation is deflation.

In both of my examples i have proven that the price of the "item" i describe as being inflated, either by me or a distributor,
has received a sustained increase in the general price level of goods and services in an economy over a period of time.

Yes, but what you've described has nothing to do with inflation. (In fact, what you've described doesn't even exist, because if you cannot sell a good at any given price at a given moment, what you'll be forced to do is to lower your price. Your assumption that you'll always find a buyer at the price you want is plain wrong. I hope you never do business, you'd go bankrupt sooner than you think).
Don't forget to remain polite.

[Moderator Note: Edited quote to match moderated version]

Junkogen

I don't understand why we can't repair our own armor. We can make weapons and armor strong enough to fight a daedric prince, but we still need even a wandering merchant to repair our armor. It's pretty stupid. Why not just make it cost materials to repair armor? That would make too much sense I guess.

anitajoneb17_ESO

Nifty2g wrote: »

The fact is simple

Zos aren't being smart with gold sinks they don't care about the player when it comes to this they just want all gear in dlc to be bop so players buy their content which will inevitably leave everyone with no gold and nothing to do in the end.

No one should feel forced to farm, this game was never like this, you do the content you like to make gold there were always ways of doing so. Now you're forced to farm, forcing players to do such things is unhealthy and many will leave or play other games.

Another example if everyone switches to farming, where does that leave crafters making gold if everyone is making their own stuff?

A lot of people are missing the point or haven't played as long, players used to support each other with the system zos had, supplying the gear from hard pve content to pvpers. Supplying crafting to hardcore pvers and pvpers who probably wanted to raid with their guilds etc rather than signing on to farm

This is imo the biggest problem and doesn't look like zos care I'm glad people are speaking up though

Nobody's forced to farm. It's the most effective way to make gold but never the only one. You can always make gold by killing mobs and selling loot to NPC, that has always brought more gold than repair costs and still does.
At the moment the game does not suffer from too many people farming but from NOT ENOUGH (hence the increased prices). If more people farm prices will drop a bit and you will also be better off with your VMA running costs.
Less gold sinks will not get you what you want, more people farming (wether it's you or other people) will.

MrBeatDown

Anyone else notice the several Tempering alloy, Drough wax, Rosin, and Kutas being sold in guild stores, While the price is still going up, but there doesnt even appear to be enough gold in the game to buy them all?

Those repair cost, hidden taxes on everything, listing fees for guild stores (and you then pay a percentage of the sale price store you sold them in), you cant even fart in ESO without spending gold.

Merlight

MrBeatDown wrote: »

Currently I cannot play the PVE V M A because i cannot afford to pay the repair cost associated with it, im also unable to afford to pay the gold fees associated with changing skills, CP's, Crafting mats, ETC, to optimize my character in order to play the content that i payed my Real Money for. Im also unable to play the Daily's because i cannot afford to pay the repair cost associated with those.

....

It is also against the rules to take out my credit card and buy gold from a chinese gold selling store and i risk loosing my account over this.

You can take out your credit card and buy gold from an american gold selling store repair kits and reset scrolls from the crown store.

@anitajoneb17_ESO Insightful, Agree and Awesome.

Nifty2g

anitajoneb17_ESO wrote: »

Nifty2g wrote: »

The fact is simple

Zos aren't being smart with gold sinks they don't care about the player when it comes to this they just want all gear in dlc to be bop so players buy their content which will inevitably leave everyone with no gold and nothing to do in the end.

No one should feel forced to farm, this game was never like this, you do the content you like to make gold there were always ways of doing so. Now you're forced to farm, forcing players to do such things is unhealthy and many will leave or play other games.

Another example if everyone switches to farming, where does that leave crafters making gold if everyone is making their own stuff?

A lot of people are missing the point or haven't played as long, players used to support each other with the system zos had, supplying the gear from hard pve content to pvpers. Supplying crafting to hardcore pvers and pvpers who probably wanted to raid with their guilds etc rather than signing on to farm

This is imo the biggest problem and doesn't look like zos care I'm glad people are speaking up though

Nobody's forced to farm. It's the most effective way to make gold but never the only one. You can always make gold by killing mobs and selling loot to NPC, that has always brought more gold than repair costs and still does.
At the moment the game does not suffer from too many people farming but from NOT ENOUGH (hence the increased prices). If more people farm prices will drop a bit and you will also be better off with your VMA running costs.
Less gold sinks will not get you what you want, more people farming (wether it's you or other people) will.

I'm going to give you a run down of what it's like going for world record times so to put it.

You're familiar with VDSA and the portals right, VMA follows the exact same designs and for whatever reason someone at ZOS thinks the leaderboards should be competitive with time. Remember this because it's crucial to the argument I'm going to use.

Now, the current cost for the best potions would be around 15,000 gold on the NA server, this is for Essence of Spell Power, why you would use these is fairly common sense, so this is needed for competition. Now, remember the portals, right so the most important thing in ESO is time, to save time players skip looting the chests and talking to NPC's if not needed. You need to repair every 4 rounds I'd say before you start almost dying because of lack of spell resistance or physical resistance from your armor decaying. The only time you get to loot is the last chest, so you're at a loss of almost 18,000 gold if you're a player who likes to have competition.

And remember stop enforcing farming, I've played the game since Beta farmed for a total of 30 minutes probably, I usually make gold doing the content most people couldn't do and sell my stuff to PvPers or PvErs. Many other raiding guilds or high ranking players used to do this too.

Potions have always stayed around the same amount of gold, they have never increased or decreased, so you point of more people needing to farm is not true. Back in Update 1.4 Spell Power potions used to cost the same as Essence Potions do now maybe a bit less.

So yes in the end, players are at a loss doing content. Not to mention paid content.

code65536

josh5813 wrote: »

If I really wanted to I can earn 1000 gold in a matter of 30mins by just playing the game.

And there's your problem right there.

First, 1000 gold is a pittance, and 1000 in 30 minutes is a joke. You see, for someone practicing vMA, you're losing gold much, much faster than 1K per half hour. Oh, and for someone who wants to play the game, they rather play the game 100% rather than spend half the time out there grinding for gold so that they could support the costs of playing the game the other half of the time.

If you could have fun and make gold, then great! Then you could play the game 100% of the time and still get rewarded. Someone in Cyrodiil had fun doing PvP, earned AP while having that fun, had almost zero costs associated with that fun, and could sell AP at the end of the day and get rewarded for having fun. Or, someone questing in the zones would (and still do) get much more in value than whatever costs they incur. So your "just play the game" works for these people.

But vMA is different. Even if you don't die, the repair costs of vMA already exceeds the gold rewards from it. Once you start dying in vMA (my last attempt at vMA cost me 40 deaths and a huge repair bill of many thousands), you're going to be deep in red. Compounding the problem is the BoP nonsense so that the valuable things that you do get from vMA is worthless gold-wise: you can't trade it and sell it.

These are people who are "just playing the game" as you suggest. The problem is that the cost structure around vMA with the fact that BoP makes all the valuables you get from it untradeable makes it impossible to get gold from "just playing the game". Unless you want to redefine "just playing the game" as "just playing the parts of the games that I play, not those other parts that are fun but aren't gold-rewarding".

In short: You should take some time to understand the subject before preaching nonsense.

Zavus

hmm today, i think ill craft my 8th set (just this patch) v16, gold with gold enchants to test some more, or maybe just change the style of it. while i keep an xp pot on, even though im way past the cp cap. and drinking tri pots every CD. I also like to switch between gold food and purple food and drinks to mess around with different stats every 5 min. reset cp about 10 times today. reset skills which costs 17.5k ish a few times today. maybe loan some gold out. buy potions for ppl.

Had you not said mean things to my Bees in cyro, I might have let u borrow 100k. O well, I'll just go buy 100k worth of repair kits.

-Meth

anitajoneb17_ESO

Weren't people complaining about the very same thing when VDSA came out ?

Didn't VDSA become afterwards the main source of gold income (via reselling weekly rewards) for the same "elite players" ?

Nifty2g

anitajoneb17_ESO wrote: »

Weren't people complaining about the very same thing when VDSA came out ?

No because VDSA had Best in Slot gear for every role that you could sell. If I recall Gloves of Healer and Gloves of Footman were selling for 500,000 gold. Same with the gold rings for the weekly.

Now it's filled with bs BoP gear from the weekly and subpar sets.

Amazing when you put it in this perspective of what it used to be like to make gold for end game raiders isn't it?

ZOS_Alex

Hi, everyone.

We understand that people are going to disagree from time to time, but please remember to keep your comments respectful at all times on our forums, even when you disagree with others. Insults or other disruptive behavior do not help further discussion and can move a thread off topic quickly. We encourage sharing opinions, but we ask that they are constructively stated when doing so, as this will help keep the discussion on track.

Thank you!

Nifty2g

anitajoneb17_ESO wrote: »

Didn't VDSA become afterwards the main source of gold income (via reselling weekly rewards) for the same "elite players" ?

You seem to have an issue with elite players, you love throwing that term around lol
No VDSA was always a means of income, it was a lot better at the start when no one had any gear from it. Then it died down but still incredibly good.

TERMINAT0R_XVII

Im going to derail all of this economic nonsense. BACK ON TOPIC, There are such things as CROWN REPAIR KITS you know. Using the crown store kit at vet 16 saves you A TON of gold and yes I know the regular game repair kits cost gold which makes the crown repair kits much more viable and two EACH CROWN REPAIR KIT REPAIRS ALL OF YOUR BROKEN ARMOR IN YOUR INVENTORY NOT JUST THE ONE PIECE.
Let's say you have 30 crown repair kits, you're using a kit each time all 7 pieces of your equipped armor are at 0 durability not including a shield, you'll save yourself appx 50K gold in repair bills at vet 16. You gotta be willing to spend a little real world cash to offset some of the gold sinks. Getting the crown store repair kit WHICH COMES WITH 10 BTW is WELL worth it.

MrBeatDown

TERMINAT0R_XVII wrote: »

Im going to derail all of this economic nonsense. BACK ON TOPIC, There are such things as CROWN REPAIR KITS you know. Using the crown store kit at vet 16 saves you A TON of gold and yes I know the regular game repair kits cost gold which makes the crown repair kits much more viable and two EACH CROWN REPAIR KIT REPAIRS ALL OF YOUR BROKEN ARMOR IN YOUR INVENTORY NOT JUST THE ONE PIECE.
Let's say you have 30 crown repair kits, you're using a kit each time all 7 pieces of your equipped armor are at 0 durability not including a shield, you'll save yourself appx 50K gold in repair bills at vet 16. You gotta be willing to spend a little real world cash to offset some of the gold sinks. Getting the crown store repair kit WHICH COMES WITH 10 BTW is WELL worth it.

LOL

Nifty2g

TERMINAT0R_XVII wrote: »

Im going to derail all of this economic nonsense. BACK ON TOPIC, There are such things as CROWN REPAIR KITS you know. Using the crown store kit at vet 16 saves you A TON of gold and yes I know the regular game repair kits cost gold which makes the crown repair kits much more viable and two EACH CROWN REPAIR KIT REPAIRS ALL OF YOUR BROKEN ARMOR IN YOUR INVENTORY NOT JUST THE ONE PIECE.
Let's say you have 30 crown repair kits, you're using a kit each time all 7 pieces of your equipped armor are at 0 durability not including a shield, you'll save yourself appx 50K gold in repair bills at vet 16. You gotta be willing to spend a little real world cash to offset some of the gold sinks. Getting the crown store repair kit WHICH COMES WITH 10 BTW is WELL worth it.

Which ZOS employee are you? The new intern?

code65536

Nifty2g wrote: »

anitajoneb17_ESO wrote: »

Didn't VDSA become afterwards the main source of gold income (via reselling weekly rewards) for the same "elite players" ?

You seem to have an issue with elite players, you love throwing that term around lol
No VDSA was always a means of income, it was a lot better at the start when no one had any gear from it. Then it died down but still incredibly good.

Yep. I just made 25K this week selling a purple VR14 Ring of the Healer that I got from vDSA. And the amount of gold I made from selling vMA gear is... hmm, let me count that... er... 0.

Sausage

Lets just give unlimited gold to every player, thats going to be fun.. not. Ive made like 2.5 mill from IC. Also if you ever want good economy, there must be gold sink, people wont sell anything when they have millions in their bank.

ADarklore

Nifty2g wrote: »

Which ZOS employee are you? The new intern?

So you're going to insult someone for making a valid point? You don't want to farm in-game for gold, there are other options out there, including Crown Store repair kits.

TERMINAT0R_XVII

Im not a zenimax employee.

They aren't going to just remove repair costs and do what you want. I'm not even going to go into why because I'll just paint a large red bullseye on my head. I'll say again you have to be willing to spend a little real world money to offset the repair costs. If you aren't then thats that. End of discussion. Dont take it any farther or Zenimax will lock the thread.

Merry

Im horrible at making money in games, all games. I dont sell anything as I am a hoarder. I refuse to grind for gold or anything else. On this account (and I dont share money/items between accounts) I have one char vlvl 14 and two lvl 50 none of whom have ever been in Craglorn, Cyrodiil or either of the two DLCs. Yet somehow I have managed to amass quite a bit of gold (3/4 of a mil or so between all of my chars [3]) just by playing through the content. If I put actual effort into making money I have no idea how rich Id be but Im pretty sure I wouldnt be complaining......

M

Nifty2g

ADarklore wrote: »

Nifty2g wrote: »

Which ZOS employee are you? The new intern?

So you're going to insult someone for making a valid point? You don't want to farm in-game for gold, there are other options out there, including Crown Store repair kits.

Didn't I mention that in one of my posts, that they are pointing people to Crown Store with all the BoP, Potions and Repair kits but when you think about it, 3rd party selling websites are cheaper and they made it so in game items are better than the Crown Store. So what exactly is being promoted here?

ADarklore

Nifty2g wrote: »

3rd party selling websites are cheaper

What third party websites? The kind that get you perma-banned?

Nifty2g

ADarklore wrote: »

Nifty2g wrote: »

3rd party selling websites are cheaper

What third party websites? The kind that get you perma-banned?

Those sites have been in games for years and if i recall ESO had a very bad time getting rid of them but with ZOS's trading system it seems kind've worrying

code65536

Sausage wrote: »

Lets just give unlimited gold to every player, thats going to be fun.. not. Ive made like 2.5 mill from IC. Also if you ever want good economy, there must be gold sink, people wont sell anything when they have millions in their bank.

And do you know why you've been able to make 2.5M from IC?

It's because none of the loot from the city or from the sewers was BoP. You can sell those trophies and those Willpower/Agility pieces and make millions. So, yes, thank you for pointing that out and for helping illustrate the problem.

Nobody is asking to be handed money (good job misconstruing the argument here), and a high repair cost gold sink isn't the problem--I incurred huge repair costs in IC, but it was offset by the amount of gold that I could make by selling unbound loot.

All we want is for this BoP bull***t to end so that people could do the same thing that you did with IC: play what they want and make gold from it (and it's gold from other players, so it's not the kind of gold that increases the money supply and inflation).