Raw Ancestor Silk sales plummeting!

krachall

Anyone know why I am seeing a massive drop in sales of Raw Ancestor Silk?

Selling raw mats is my main source of income. I travel for work every week and about the only thing I can do on my laptop is farm raw mats, craft, and fish. So I farm mats. For at least the last 2 months, I've posted 5-10 stacks of raw wood, ore, and cloth on my two trade guild vendors. I post right at MM price. Nothing lasts longer than 12 hours before it sells. Most sell within 2 hours.

Ore and Wood are still that way. But a week ago, Raw Ancestor Silk just stopped selling. I have 8 stacks posted on the same two vendors in the same locations that have been there for 4 days. Four days!

The only thing I can figure is that bots are farming silk. I was n Bal Foyen farming raws and saw a character positioned over a silk node that would immediately loot it as soon as the node appeared. He was there for around 48 hours. Could people be botting silk and driving the price down?

Is it something else? Is there a game change that abruptly lowered the demand for silk?

Dasovaruilos

krachall wrote: »

Anyone know why I am seeing a massive drop in sales of Raw Ancestor Silk?

Selling raw mats is my main source of income. I travel for work every week and about the only thing I can do on my laptop is farm raw mats, craft, and fish. So I farm mats. For at least the last 2 months, I've posted 5-10 stacks of raw wood, ore, and cloth on my two trade guild vendors. I post right at MM price. Nothing lasts longer than 12 hours before it sells. Most sell within 2 hours.

Ore and Wood are still that way. But a week ago, Raw Ancestor Silk just stopped selling. I have 8 stacks posted on the same two vendors in the same locations that have been there for 4 days. Four days!

The only thing I can figure is that bots are farming silk. I was n Bal Foyen farming raws and saw a character positioned over a silk node that would immediately loot it as soon as the node appeared. He was there for around 48 hours. Could people be botting silk and driving the price down?

Is it something else? Is there a game change that abruptly lowered the demand for silk?

Undercutters, maybe?

I sell on console so no add ons, but every time something stops selling completely all of a sudden and get stuck for days, I know some new undercutter joined the guild.

Silk is still the most sought after mat because of Daily Writs and crafted light sets being very good this patch.

kylewwefan

Crafters like me that want your mats have tons of these darn surveys we loathe doing, since it’s easier to buy. Prices got too high, so now we work on surveys.

supaskrub

it may go back up when the CWC crafting stations arrive (not seen what light armour set is actually, so hoping its a good one

starlizard70ub17_ESO

Yes, there's botting for resources in ESO that ZOS doesn't seem to notice. But that's not the only reason silk prices have gone down. One reason is that silk is relatively easy to get. Secondly, the current meta in PvP is heavy armor builds with very few light armor builds. So rubedite ore and it's alloy mats are selling for a lot right now. This will hopefully change after the next update when medium and light armor builds become more viable. As far as PvE goes, not a lot has changed, people may try new armor sets here and there, but once you have your set up finished, you're good to go. So armor mats don't get used up by PvE'er like PvPers do.
Resource sales run in cycles. When a new dlc drops, sales will go up because people are trying out the new armor sets, playing the new dlc and less people are farming mats. A few weeks before the new dlc comes out, sales are low because no one wants to waste mats on "old" armor sets, and are waiting on the new sets. People also are looking for bargains right now, so they wait.
(note, I never sell mats a few weeks before the new dlc, I wait to sell 'em until the dlc drops so I can get higher prices.)

Carokube

I don't know if you are on PC/NA, but the current MM price of raws for silk is too high because the price of dreugh wax keeps going down. I buy raws because I want to refine them and sell the dreugh wax and other upgrade materials for a profit. If I just wanted ancestor silk to craft it, I would buy it straight out. No one's going to by the raw ancestor silk at ~60g a piece (which is my current MM), because you can't make a profit refining it. Rawhide scraps are currently priced much better for that.

*If* bots are responsible at all for your raw ancestor silk not selling, it's because they are providing rawhide scraps, not because they are farming raw ancestor silk. Not that I'm saying they are.

rynth

lol boters I just sold several stacks and you know what I didn't charge the highest amount. I check see how much a stack of 200 or 100 goes for and adjust my prices to sell under 1000 to 2000 gold so that mine will sell I still make a nice profit. Only thing I have left that hasn't sold is 200 mats of raw jute.

Stop blaming bots and blame yourself for being greedy!

Cpt_Teemo

Bots

krachall

rynth wrote: »

Stop blaming bots and blame yourself for being greedy!

Basic economic lesson: The "right price" is the price the market will bear. Period. Prior to last week, that price was 66g each. Call it greed if you want to be ignorant but that's how economics work; in real life or in video games. If the market suddenly only bears a much lower price, it's usually because something happened to dramatically shift the supply or demand curve. I was questioning what that something may be.

You're welcome

CardboardedBox

On ps4 I haven't looked to buy any in a while, because the last time I did, I pretty much went, "lol no.", because the prices were so high.

I don't know if they're still so high priced in all the platforms or not, but if they are, that could be the problem.

krachall

Looks like it was a market correction.

Did some checking on other vendors and dropped my price to 60g. All stacks sold in a couple hours.

Reivax

I can't say whether there are fewer ancestor silk nodes in the world, compared to wood or ore nodes, but I can see that I have ~5,000 pieces of raw rubedite ore, ~2,000 of wood and ~150 of raw silk in my craft bag.
I'm not making any attempt to go find one over the other, I harvest everything I see, none of my characters uses cloth and I don't make gear for anyone.

And being that I received exactly zero master clothing writs since I started tallying these things at end of August, I've just stopped doing clothing writs altogether.

I can roam around for an hour and not see any ancestor silk plants in that time.
deduction is, either fewer ancestor silk are spawning, or someone is farming the [snip] out of them.

[Edited to remove profanity]

Asardes

On EU PC rubedo leather, ruby ash wood and rubedite are 10-13 gold per unit while ancestor silk is 35-40 gold, 3-4x what the other cost. I'm talking about refined. I've done the maths using observed green/blue/purple/yellow temper drop rates and you barely break even if you buy unrefined and refine yourself, so I only rarely buy refined to make up for shortfalls when crafting daily writs since some months my surveys are a little skewed. But I am generally self reliant on base mats from those, hirelings and what I pick up along the road and have a healthy surplus when it comes to tempers. As far as I'm concerned. I haven't noticed any spectacular drop in prices lately. If I see something not selling at MM price within 10 days or so I check the trend and cut 10% of the price. I usually sell at -5-10% MM price at first listing because I need to keep my inventory clean. I mostly sell surplus items that are relatively cheap and only rarely sell materials such as tempers besides yellow and low-mid level base ones from daily writs if I have free slots.

davey1107

It’s one of the quietest times during the year for the game...sales always slow in sept/early October, but should pick up with the dlc and through the holidays. That’s the first reason...all of my sales are slow, not just mats, which drives prices down.

I’d also wonder if the master writ game is aging out. There are quite a few posts where people say they’ve got all they want from the master writ vendor and have stopped doing them. Before the master writs refined silk was about $8k/200 on my server, the writs blew this up to over $15k (I think...I bought 40,000 at the old price) then now it’s down to $13k (the 40k have been used, lol). Anyway, a lot of the price is the crafting writs, so people stopping these would push prices down.