Are the out of control mat prices affecting your crafting???

erliesc

In case you haven't noticed mat and other prices are being manipulated way out of a reasonable range.

Player 1 sells something at a real high price to player 2...while player 2 sells something at an equally high price to player 1. They come out even...price of a mat goes way up.

They likely do this in certain areas in order to take advantage of area price differences?

The economic functioning in this game is being TRASHED...absurd mat prices affect the cost of anything being crafted from the mats....

Tatanko

Example(s)? Server?

erliesc

Tatanko wrote: »

Example(s)? Server?

PC/NA. I've checked prices in several disparate locations in the game....pretty much the same thing going on.

Anotherone773

In capitalism, which is what the game economy runs on, something is only worth whatever someone else is willing to pay for it. So while things may be priced higher than you find acceptable, there may be others who will pay that price.

Unlike capitalism, you have the ability to acquire any of the items in the game you find on the guild trader with the same effort put in by the sellers. One can only assume you are talking about crafting mats such as Bast, Heartwood, and Regulus? On TTC

*Bast has 3 pages on PC/NA under 50 gold/unit and 12 pages under 75 gold/unit
*Heartwood has 2 pages under 100 gold/unit
* Regulus has 8 pages under 50 gold/unit.

Heartwood is always high because a majority of big furniture such as bookshelves and tables require it. ZOS does need to increase the drop rate of heartwood considering how much it is used in furniture making compared to other crafting mats.

Reverb

The mats needed for the New Life and Deep Winter writs are in very high demand right now, with a correlating increase in price. Things will settle back down in a few weeks.

tmbrinks

Another knee jerk reaction thread to a short term demand increase due to the event.

Nothing to worry about. Move on.

erliesc

I've contacted the SEC...they say they will be on it first thing Monday morning! So if you see "men in black" around in the game asking questions...that's who it is...do not panic!!!

VaranisArano

erliesc wrote: »

I've contacted the SEC...they say they will be on it first thing Monday morning! So if you see "men in black" around in the game asking questions...that's who it is...do not panic!!!

Thank you for the chance to test out the brand new sarcasm detector I got for Christmas. Somehow I don't think it'll last long 'round these parts.

Pinoh

erliesc wrote: »

The economic functioning in this game is being TRASHED...absurd mat prices affect the cost of anything being crafted from the mats....

Anotherone773 wrote: »

In capitalism, which is what the game economy runs on, something is only worth whatever someone else is willing to pay for it. So while things may be priced higher than you find acceptable, there may be others who will pay that price.

Unlike capitalism, you have the ability to acquire any of the items in the game you find on the guild trader with the same effort put in by the sellers. One can only assume you are talking about crafting mats such as Bast, Heartwood, and Regulus? On TTC

Heartwood is always high because a majority of big furniture such as bookshelves and tables require it. ZOS does need to increase the drop rate of heartwood considering how much it is used in furniture making compared to other crafting mats.

Your premise is sort of flawed Anotherone. It doesn't take into account players colluding to buy up existing stock and reselling it for much higher prices. Once the cheap stuff is gone, other players can no longer just buy stuff cheaply (the effort the sellers put into it). It is pretty disingenuous on your part to suggest players putting in hours of work, as somehow being a counter measure to market manipulation in a closed system.

A game shouldn't require literally hours and hours of real work, for simple things. If it does the designers have failed the players. It's a game Duh, I am not being paid to play it, in fact the opposite I am paying to be entertained.

It was a badly designed event, with apparently no thought put into how it would effect the economy. ZOS should be doing something to resolve the issue. Whether its increasing drop rates. Or adding furnishing materials to surveys. Was just absurd to require a dozen items instead of one or two of the items for these event writs.

As for it being a short term thing, that's merely speculation. The drop rates are low, and the materials used up will create a shortage for a while.

Anotherone773

Pinoh wrote: »

Your premise is sort of flawed Anotherone. It doesn't take into account players colluding to buy up existing stock and reselling it for much higher prices. Once the cheap stuff is gone, other players can no longer just buy stuff cheaply (the effort the sellers put into it). It is pretty disingenuous on your part to suggest players putting in hours of work, as somehow being a counter measure to market manipulation in a closed system.

1) You can buy up existing stock just as easily as the next person. So that isnt even a logical argument.
2) People have been consistently, on PC NA, posting new mats for reasonable prices, according to TTC.
3) Someone has to collect the stuff that sellers are selling, so someone DID put in the work to acquire those items one at a time. Another part of capitalism is that you either have to invest time or money. If you are not willing to invest either, then that is pretty much communism.
4) Nothing in this paragraph is a logical argument.

A game shouldn't require literally hours and hours of real work, for simple things. If it does the designers have failed the players. It's a game Duh, I am not being paid to play it, in fact the opposite I am paying to be entertained.

Work is relative to the person. You might consider collecting 50 heartwood from nodes to be work. My wife would disagree after a long day of meetings and writing training courses for corporate america, she likes the mindless wondering around collecting stuff. If you consider something work and dont want to work for it dont do it. If you want the end result then you need to either pay someone for their time or spend your own time doing it. This is not a hard concept and the basis of pretty much any form of economy ever to exist. Things dont magically appear because you want them. Time or money, your choice.

You are also not paying to be entertained. You are paying for access to interactive entertainment. This isnt Netflix. You have to participate in this form of entertainment. If you dont want to participate in your entertainment, might i suggest Netflix?

It was a badly designed event, with apparently no thought put into how it would effect the economy. ZOS should be doing something to resolve the issue. Whether its increasing drop rates. Or adding furnishing materials to surveys. Was just absurd to require a dozen items instead of one or two of the items for these event writs.

If you feel the event is bad and that to many materials are required for the writs, just dont participate in the event. As for material, bast and regulus are cheap. Heartwood has always been high priced because a lot of furniture is woodworking based. ZOS should permanently increase the drop rate by about 10% and give it about 6 months and see how the market looks for it and then adjust it again if needed.

As for it being a short term thing, that's merely speculation. The drop rates are low, and the materials used up will create a shortage for a while.

Your entire argument has been bad speculation...

* Bast with a max price of 50 gold
*Regulus with a max price of 50 gold
* Heartwood with a max price of 100 gold

You also forgot a few things:
1) people can use event tickets for skaal explorer which helps with demand.
2) The writs do not have to be completed during the event. People can wait a few weeks or even months to do the writs.
3) People can just buy the style pages they need off traders, so at a certain price point someone will spend the dough and but the exact item they need as opposed to do writs for random pages.
4) The higher the price gets for mats, the more people who will see some/all of their own stock or farm it.

Supply and demand, basic economics. It wont even take a couple of months before the prices are nearly back to normal on mats.

Taleof2Cities

“I’m either not yet self-sufficient on crafting mats, or I’m not interested in spending the time to be self-sufficient on crafting mats.”

“But, if I post in the forums about how prices are too high for me, surely other players will empathize and understand my predicament.”

SeaGtGruff

There is no decent defense for price gouging, nor for price manipulation through flipping.

Unfortunately, as long as nothing is done to prevent price gouging and price manipulation, your best recourse is to farm for your own mats.

VaranisArano

Should we warn the OP that ZOS doesn't give a rat's hind end about what events do the economy before we hit next year's Anniversary and motif prices plummet once more?

Alinhbo_Tyaka

I don't think you can blame it all or even a big chunk on manipulation. I think a lot has to do with the various addons where players look at sales/listing prices and price their items accordingly. At least I do. While I might think 50 gold is a fair price for an item I'm not going to list it for that if everybody else is around a 100 gold. It is this ability to look up market prices and the desire to maximize profit that drives prices the most. It doesn't take long to see a resource is constrained and that prices are moving upwards for sellers to adjust. If the prices really impact you my suggestion is to wait until materials are more plentiful or farm your own.

erliesc

Unlike some I mostly want to move stuff rather than try to get the best price...a higher price means a guild slot is wasted for a while. Got enough game gold and don't want another house. I'm OK with some of the higher prices...makes it easier to sell stuff...

Just irritating to see the price charts in MM go weird...makes pricing more difficult...

Pinoh

Holiday events should not be insanely expensive and grindy affairs. I regard opening a present is basically all the work required, in receiving a present. Seemingly the concept is difficult. Telling someone to go work for a few hours to earn stuff to buy the present with, kind of, sort of, makes it not a present. This is a holiday event not an end game achievement. A dozen items was unreasonable should have been 2 maybe 3 per writ; if they wanted to be grinches. Should've just been a box with the style though.

The only people getting presents this holiday are flippers, gold farmers and bots. Yay for them I guess.

Being an apologist for a game company doesn't really help the game company or the players. The game company doesn't need it, they are perfectly capable of continuing to do a bad job without help. Trying to argue against any reasonable criticism of a game, just prevents most possible improvements to the game by either drowning them out, or convincing the developers a mediocre job is good enough.

TTC is sort of irrelevant as a source of data. Player wants to sell high, no one will come to see the high priced items though. So he lists them for a cheap price and scans it with TTC; you know those prices you are anecdotally referencing as meaningful. Then he turns off TTC, cancels his listing and relists it for his super high price. Yay for him and you, he made some meaningless numbers for you to justify bad economics with, and he might get a customer who would rather buy his over priced stuff than keep looking.

So sad op is caving to troll peer pressure, lol.

vuedange

I do a great deal of crafting for housing and the event has driven up the price of some mats 10 fold, to the point that yes, I'm slowing down my house building and spending hours farming because I refuse to pay such gouged prices for the mats.

Anotherone773 wrote: »

On TTC

*Bast has 3 pages on PC/NA under 50 gold/unit and 12 pages under 75 gold/unit
*Heartwood has 2 pages under 100 gold/unit
* Regulus has 8 pages under 50 gold/unit.

Yes, you can find such listings on TTC. If they are more than 30 minutes old, they are already gone. Sometimes less than 10 minutes and they're gone. Bast is averaging 175, Heartwood at 409 and Regulus at 175. Two weeks ago, before the event, the average for Bast was around 8, Heartwood around 30 and Regulus around 12. The prices you have listed are not good prices, they're just better than most of the exorbitant prices currently showing up. There's a reason that most capitalist real life systems have rules and regulations against collusion to set higher prices for consumers.

I agree however, that what would most help is for ZOS to increase the drop rates for these materials. These are furnishing mats. The rest of the year, outside of events with writs, pretty much no one cares about them except those of us who love crafting furnishings and building houses. So when these events hit and the prices increase 10 fold, we are the ones who take the brunt of that effect.

Anotherone773

vuedange wrote: »

Yes, you can find such listings on TTC. If they are more than 30 minutes old, they are already gone. Sometimes less than 10 minutes and they're gone. Bast is averaging 175, Heartwood at 409 and Regulus at 175. Two weeks ago, before the event, the average for Bast was around 8, Heartwood around 30 and Regulus around 12.

Actually, Bast and Regulus were 20-25 on average and heartwood was about 40-60. Unless MM has been lying to me all this time.

So when these events hit and the prices increase 10 fold, we are the ones who take the brunt of that effect.

Pfft they will be back down in a couple of months. Try being someone who makes a living off trading and being hit with floods of items that devalue your main sources of income. Like the recent dragonguard event and the anniversary event. Your prices go up tenfold for a month. Do you know how long it takes for the market to unload 800 of the same motif page? about 6 months. And ZOS murdered the market for elsweyr prints because their version of balance is one extreme to the other. Prints in murkmire were hard to get, prints in elsweyr are more common than solvents.

Anyway did a couple of hours of casual non efficient farming today of all resources but runes and even killed stuff and opened any chests i came across. I did keep track of furnishing mats. 26 heartwood an hour sometimes getting 3 per node but 3/4 of nodes getting 0. 19 Bast per hour. I didnt come across near as many cloth nodes as i did ore and wood. 37 regulus an hour. A lot of ore nodes. Could probably double to triple that if i focused only on gathering cloth ore and wood nodes used ideal routes( I roamed randomly)

It will come back down in a few weeks, let the gatherers get their year end bonus. By early spring you will be paying in the 20s for mats again.

bmnoble

Were in the middle of the New life event, that requires mats for special crafting writs, those mats have gone up in price, after the event the prices will go back to what they were.

The furniture mats in particular are a pain to farm, you don't get any from surveys so the market is completely reliant on:

-people that have farming routes and spend hours farming mats to sell

-people who pick up mats as they are doing other stuff and occasionally sell

-re sellers who have bought up large amounts of said mats in preparation for the event

-and bots farmers


You don't want to pay for the convenience of not having to go out and farm the mats your self, then go out and farm the mats yourself.



Or be like me and just don't bother with the New life writs at all, spend your gold on other stuff no one is forcing you to buy these mats, you want to chase the achievements gotta be prepared to spend either the gold or time or both.

Asardes

Not really. My situation is as follows:
- jewelry upgrade prices are high, but I seldom craft jewelry, and in any case I have large enough stocks, not high enough to start selling yet, but close.
- the upgrade prices for other crafts are historically low, so I let them accumulate, waiting for the next spike to sell
- refined materials needed for writs are at very low prices, barely above vendor price in some cases, and I have most of those covered from surveys anyway - probably most people who do crafting writs are in the same situation, hence the decreased demand and price.
- housing materials have spiked recently because people are crafting those event writs to get the skin and motif pages, but I'm unaffected, got the skin last year, and I only have one of the Deep Winter writs a day on average, which consumes 24 materials; I have stocks in the low 4 digits for those so I don't care.
- style and trait material prices have been stable, and I don't craft jewelry master writs to really care about Dibelium, Gilding Wax or any of those - I have plenty of vouchers from the other craft to make those redundant.

tmbrinks

Pinoh wrote: »

Holiday events should not be insanely expensive and grindy affairs. I regard opening a present is basically all the work required, in receiving a present. Seemingly the concept is difficult. Telling someone to go work for a few hours to earn stuff to buy the present with, kind of, sort of, makes it not a present. This is a holiday event not an end game achievement. A dozen items was unreasonable should have been 2 maybe 3 per writ; if they wanted to be grinches. Should've just been a box with the style though.

The only people getting presents this holiday are flippers, gold farmers and bots. Yay for them I guess.

Being an apologist for a game company doesn't really help the game company or the players. The game company doesn't need it, they are perfectly capable of continuing to do a bad job without help. Trying to argue against any reasonable criticism of a game, just prevents most possible improvements to the game by either drowning them out, or convincing the developers a mediocre job is good enough.

TTC is sort of irrelevant as a source of data. Player wants to sell high, no one will come to see the high priced items though. So he lists them for a cheap price and scans it with TTC; you know those prices you are anecdotally referencing as meaningful. Then he turns off TTC, cancels his listing and relists it for his super high price. Yay for him and you, he made some meaningless numbers for you to justify bad economics with, and he might get a customer who would rather buy his over priced stuff than keep looking.

So sad op is caving to troll peer pressure, lol.

My normal activities over the course of the rest of the year allowed me to have enough heartwood, regulus, and bast, to do enough Deep Winter writs to complete the motif on 2 accounts (only crafted them on 1). I didn't "grind" for it. I just didn't sell it at the ridiculously low prices those items normal go for through the year.

And don't even get me started on the conspiracy theories... lmao. Your two statements contradict one another. You, the noble citizen, don't want to grind. But anybody selling the items is evil, and will do whatever they can to make a little extra profit... MWAH HAH HAH...

Jayne_Doe

I noticed on console, two days into the event, that heartwood prices (I only checked Mournhold) were 500-770g, regulus had climbed to 250-500g. I didn't check bast since I have lots of that and only one Deep Winter writ required it.

Fortunately, I had enough stock to complete enough Deep Winter writs (already had the skin from last year) to get 9 pages, plus some duplicates, which I gave to my spouse. The rest I'm buying with event tickets since I don't want to deplete my stock further as I have a good number of houses I still want to decorate. I'll be earning enough tickets to get those 8 pages, and this is after already buying the 4th snow berry, the pet, and 2 feathers to complete a 5th nascent.

If ZOS hadn't been so generous with event tickets, it would have been a different story, though I probably would have stopped at some point and just purchased the remaining pages with gold. After a certain point, it becomes a waste to expend mats just to get a duplicate page. Sure, you can sell it, but you may as well just spend the gold on the last few pages and get exactly what you need, than waste mats that will take you a while to replace. You can make gold faster than you can gather furnishing mats, and it'll be a bit before prices settle down again.

katanagirl1

^^^That’s the thing, you use that heartwood or bast and get a duplicate page sometimes. It would be nice if we could use the vouchers from the writs to buy the style pages we need instead.

I have enough furniture mats to do the Deep Winter writs (got enough New Life writs last year) since I spend a lot of time farming mats. I did notice that for the last month or two I have been finding more empty wood nodes though, I guess people started hitting those more often in anticipation of the event and hoarding supplies. I will have to see if it goes back to normal in a few days.

Asardes

Pages are not bound, you can sell them on guild stores and buy the one you need instead.

FlopsyPrince

Jayne_Doe wrote: »

I noticed on console, two days into the event, that heartwood prices (I only checked Mournhold) were 500-770g, regulus had climbed to 250-500g. I didn't check bast since I have lots of that and only one Deep Winter writ required it.

Fortunately, I had enough stock to complete enough Deep Winter writs (already had the skin from last year) to get 9 pages, plus some duplicates, which I gave to my spouse. The rest I'm buying with event tickets since I don't want to deplete my stock further as I have a good number of houses I still want to decorate. I'll be earning enough tickets to get those 8 pages, and this is after already buying the 4th snow berry, the pet, and 2 feathers to complete a 5th nascent.

If ZOS hadn't been so generous with event tickets, it would have been a different story, though I probably would have stopped at some point and just purchased the remaining pages with gold. After a certain point, it becomes a waste to expend mats just to get a duplicate page. Sure, you can sell it, but you may as well just spend the gold on the last few pages and get exactly what you need, than waste mats that will take you a while to replace. You can make gold faster than you can gather furnishing mats, and it'll be a bit before prices settle down again.

I have bought most of the Skaal patterns I have. I got a few drops, but I have not been motivated to run this event as much as I did last year.

I can run dailies (if I can stomach them) and earn the same gold in a few days (across several characters) if I need to, but I still have some stockpile and I am getting a bit burned out on them for now.

I have all but one of my 17 characters to 50 though (last one at 47 now, likely 50 by tomorrow) and the next grind is to get skill points for all the crafting stuff for everyone. That is another pain, especially since the skill points should have been free or in game gold, not crowns (when you got them on another character).

I use most of my own mats now and rarely sell, so I have plenty for my own needs, especially after running so many crafting dailies already across my characters.

wolfie1.0.

Dont get upset at the people listing items at high prices. Get mad at the people who buy them. Considering that all mats are essentially can be farmed for free anything above that is overpriced.
The fact that people are willing to buy at a higher price means that they value their time and convenience more. Also keep in mind that often what's in the guild stores is what didn't sell, and is likely the highest price in the place. As for me? Well if someone wants to buy the mats I farmed at 3x the normal price I will of course sell them. Then go farm more and keep selling until the price goes back down.

Zulera301

given that I have literal thousands of just about every mat in the game (okay, gold tempers only number in the hundreds for now...) it didn't faze me in the slightest.
mat prices rise any time there's an event that involves crafting *glances at Anniversary Jubilee*, and so when demand increases and supply can't keep up... prices rise. I take advantage of that every year, just as I do with the motifs that drop from said event. I buy a bunch of stuff while it's cheap, hold onto it for several months, and then unload after prices have had some time to recover.

it's just capitalism.

Inaya

Pinoh wrote: »

erliesc wrote: »

The economic functioning in this game is being TRASHED...absurd mat prices affect the cost of anything being crafted from the mats....

Anotherone773 wrote: »

In capitalism, which is what the game economy runs on, something is only worth whatever someone else is willing to pay for it. So while things may be priced higher than you find acceptable, there may be others who will pay that price.

Unlike capitalism, you have the ability to acquire any of the items in the game you find on the guild trader with the same effort put in by the sellers. One can only assume you are talking about crafting mats such as Bast, Heartwood, and Regulus? On TTC

Heartwood is always high because a majority of big furniture such as bookshelves and tables require it. ZOS does need to increase the drop rate of heartwood considering how much it is used in furniture making compared to other crafting mats.

Your premise is sort of flawed Anotherone. It doesn't take into account players colluding to buy up existing stock and reselling it for much higher prices. Once the cheap stuff is gone, other players can no longer just buy stuff cheaply (the effort the sellers put into it). It is pretty disingenuous on your part to suggest players putting in hours of work, as somehow being a counter measure to market manipulation in a closed system.

A game shouldn't require literally hours and hours of real work, for simple things. If it does the designers have failed the players. It's a game Duh, I am not being paid to play it, in fact the opposite I am paying to be entertained.

It was a badly designed event, with apparently no thought put into how it would effect the economy. ZOS should be doing something to resolve the issue. Whether its increasing drop rates. Or adding furnishing materials to surveys. Was just absurd to require a dozen items instead of one or two of the items for these event writs.

As for it being a short term thing, that's merely speculation. The drop rates are low, and the materials used up will create a shortage for a while.

Colluding? Really? It's the law of supply and demand. You can just as easily farm and sell at the same prices!

The event was designed fine and the crafting writs were no different than the witches achievement.

There is/was nothing for ZOS to resolve!

redlink1979

Supply n demand = the higher the demand, the higher the price will be. Nothing more.

PS - If you don't feel comfortable with the asked price in zone or traders, then just farm it yourself.

Nestor

Every Crafting Related event spikes prices on in demand materials. They always float down after the event is over.

This only affects the unprepared or newer player who has not built up a stock.

To insulate your self, just buy a couple of stacks of the mats you will use before the next event, which should be the Anniversery event. And, even then, you should only need cloth, other mats are self sustaining or a net gain.

xWarbrain

The cost of Bugloss is killing me on XboxNA server.

People go around to all the guild traders for weeks, buy up a certain reagent, horde it, then list a ton of it at a high price when its harder to come by. The people that do this play the economy side of the game. They log in, travel from guild trader to guild trader buying it all up while getting an idea of the market Tamriel-wide for specific items. They buy low and sell high.

Bugloss might be the rarest reagent in guild traders in the past 4-5 months. Its hard to find at any price, let alone a reasonable price. The tri-pot struggle is real.