PC|NA Hyperinflation is out of control

Ascarl

IMHO it s a combination of stickerbook, bot-ban (which I am very happy with) and maybe even some attempts of price manipulation (to a lesser degree).
I know many long-time players who had plenty of gold and nothing to spend on. Now with stickerbook they can equip a second or third char with trial sets that the reconstructed from the stickerbook. And now they need plenty of golden mats fast and have the money.

And this combines with some apparently successful attempts of ZOS to hunt down farming bots.

Kwoung

Flipping is a real problem. When a group of players band to take over markets and buy up every deal that pops up near instantly, just to list it again for a 50-1000% markup, it creates issues. There are numerous entire guilds on PCNA that do this now and do it so well they have managed to secure many of the top trader spots. They have also driven up the bid prices on traders considerably. Hopefully, this is not able to sustain long term, because all the gold going to a select few (who do god knows what with it), will outprice what the average player can afford, thus causing a downward market adjustment... hopefully.

It is not helpful that TTC is giving bad info either due to manipulation, allowing flippers to easily score great deals from people who list items based on that. It is few motifs at the moment that don't readily sell for 50-100% or more over what TTC "suggests" you sell them for.

Dracane

It's because the player population has decreased by a lot. People had enough of the neglect, performance issues and balance decisions.

Once this gets better, they will return and prices will too. Everyone wants to play ESO, but there is a point for everyone when it becomes morally unbareable to continue staying loyal.
ZOS just have to finally prove this year, that they care and that they make the changes and improvements requested a hundret times by us. People will return in an instant.

JavaRen

Wouldn't decreased population lower supply and demand? Why is that the explanation for price increases?

tmbrinks

JavaRen wrote: »

Wouldn't decreased population lower supply and demand? Why is that the explanation for price increases?

I would guess it's because many of the long-time players (who have left) are the ones who supplied a majority of the materials. So the supply has dropped more than the demand.

Eedat

ssewallb14_ESO wrote: »

No one is reconing 50 golded out gear sets

Not 50 but I've been pumping them out like mad personally. Probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 15-20 and I'm not alone

midgetfromtheshire

tmbrinks wrote: »

JavaRen wrote: »

Wouldn't decreased population lower supply and demand? Why is that the explanation for price increases?

I would guess it's because many of the long-time players (who have left) are the ones who supplied a majority of the materials. So the supply has dropped more than the demand.

This, and then add on top the new sticker book collection and the mass ban of bot farmers. The latter meant that for years while they were running, gold gear was easily accessible for everyone because we enjoyed a surplus on the supply side.

As for OP, what's occuring isn't hyperinflation (as pointed out), it's a shortage. You only have to look at something like motifs from DLC zones that aren't populated outside of any events.

NoSoup

Jierdanit wrote: »

Mythreindeer wrote: »

Jierdanit wrote: »

Mythreindeer wrote: »

So, being relatively new still, what are people buying that requires so much gold? You can't buy dungeon gear and most everything else can be farmed pretty easily.

Crafting materials, mostly gold upgrade mats.

Kind of what I was thinking. Farming is obviously slower but I'm accumulating them pretty nicely without buying them. How many sets of gold gear do you need? lol

1 gold weapon costs 8 upgrade mats, that is right now on PC/EU about 40k gold (for a blacksmithing weapons, staffs/bows are cheaper).
I like trying out new builds quite a lot, so i will often make like 3 or more new builds per week, which often require a new gold weapon.
On top of that i need mats to craft Potions, Glyphs (Tristat glyphs cost 20k gold each as well) and Armor.
And it is way faster to buy your crafting mats than to farm for hours for a random chane at gold materials.

On PC/NA that gold weapon would now cost over 100k.

This has nothing to do with supply shortages but a group of players uses TTC to find below average mats buy them, and repost them for 2-3k above the average price to surge prices. I would post screen shots of said players showing how all the items in a guild disappeared only to return 10 minutes later at a hugely higher price but it would get shut down in a second by the mods for naming and shaming....
This is hyperinflation, for people saying it's not you don't know economics, anything doubling in price in a month is hyperinflation.

tmbrinks

NoSoup wrote: »

Tempering alloy has nearly doubled in 2 months from a fairly consistent 7-8kea to 14-15k
Dreugh Wax is the same
Chromium plating has tripled over 12 months
and its not just the high end stuff

NoSoup wrote: »

Jierdanit wrote: »

Mythreindeer wrote: »

Jierdanit wrote: »

Mythreindeer wrote: »

So, being relatively new still, what are people buying that requires so much gold? You can't buy dungeon gear and most everything else can be farmed pretty easily.

Crafting materials, mostly gold upgrade mats.

Kind of what I was thinking. Farming is obviously slower but I'm accumulating them pretty nicely without buying them. How many sets of gold gear do you need? lol

1 gold weapon costs 8 upgrade mats, that is right now on PC/EU about 40k gold (for a blacksmithing weapons, staffs/bows are cheaper).
I like trying out new builds quite a lot, so i will often make like 3 or more new builds per week, which often require a new gold weapon.
On top of that i need mats to craft Potions, Glyphs (Tristat glyphs cost 20k gold each as well) and Armor.
And it is way faster to buy your crafting mats than to farm for hours for a random chane at gold materials.

On PC/NA that gold weapon would now cost over 100k.

This has nothing to do with supply shortages but a group of players uses TTC to find below average mats buy them, and repost them for 2-3k above the average price to surge prices. I would post screen shots of said players showing how all the items in a guild disappeared only to return 10 minutes later at a hugely higher price but it would get shut down in a second by the mods for naming and shaming....
This is hyperinflation, for people saying it's not you don't know economics, anything doubling in price in a month is hyperinflation.

changing your story from the first post already? To fit the narrative? (Also, was has gone from 8k to like 13k (or 7k to 12k for alloy) in 2 months, since the stickerbook came out) ~50% in 2 months, well below "doubling in a month" or was it two months?

Strangely, "hyperinflation" would affect everything (as it assumes the currency is losing value). Kuta is fairly consistent (maybe from 2.6k to 3.1k over the same time). Rosin (from like 3.4k to 4.1k about) to compare to similar "rare" items... most alchemy mats are only up 5-10% over the last few months.

More likely... it's just that people are utilizing the stickerbook to help them outfit some alt characters instead of swapping gear all the time, and we're just seeing higher demand...

along with many end-game players who've stopped playing because of poor performance (those that had all that gear) and are no longer producing the excess gold improvement materials putting a crunch on supply.

Add in these two effects... and you get what we've seen the last 2 months.

Eedat

NoSoup wrote: »

Jierdanit wrote: »

Mythreindeer wrote: »

Jierdanit wrote: »

Mythreindeer wrote: »

So, being relatively new still, what are people buying that requires so much gold? You can't buy dungeon gear and most everything else can be farmed pretty easily.

Crafting materials, mostly gold upgrade mats.

Kind of what I was thinking. Farming is obviously slower but I'm accumulating them pretty nicely without buying them. How many sets of gold gear do you need? lol

1 gold weapon costs 8 upgrade mats, that is right now on PC/EU about 40k gold (for a blacksmithing weapons, staffs/bows are cheaper).
I like trying out new builds quite a lot, so i will often make like 3 or more new builds per week, which often require a new gold weapon.
On top of that i need mats to craft Potions, Glyphs (Tristat glyphs cost 20k gold each as well) and Armor.
And it is way faster to buy your crafting mats than to farm for hours for a random chane at gold materials.

On PC/NA that gold weapon would now cost over 100k.

This has nothing to do with supply shortages but a group of players uses TTC to find below average mats buy them, and repost them for 2-3k above the average price to surge prices. I would post screen shots of said players showing how all the items in a guild disappeared only to return 10 minutes later at a hugely higher price but it would get shut down in a second by the mods for naming and shaming....
This is hyperinflation, for people saying it's not you don't know economics, anything doubling in price in a month is hyperinflation.

What? People have been flipping pretty much everything since ever. Wouldn't it obviously be the added feature which drastically raised demand that was added at the same exact time prices started going up? Isn't that obvious?

ssewallb14_ESO

Most of the price increase happened after Greymoor in a very short period of time. If you consider elasticity it would take a single very impactful event to do this.

bmnoble

I tend to sell my stuff close to the min average on TTC, if I go any lower than that, a re seller will just buy my items flip them and make profit that I could have made instead.

I am sure there are people out their selling lower but a real buyer who needs it will rarely make it in time to buy those items 90% of the time.

There is a lot more demand due to the sticker book collection, especially when you get people that want to make a gear set up for each of their characters instead of just swapping the sets through their bank they feel the need for the characters that use that set or this set in their build should all have it on them or in their inventory, wasting a lot of gold and gold mats.

I personally don't think prices are going to drop much until at least the middle of this year, when people have what they need to clear their backlog of sets upgraded and the demand drops off, of course prices will go up a bit depending on how good the new gear sets will be this year but that is nothing new.

VaranisArano

ssewallb14_ESO wrote: »

Most of the price increase happened after Greymoor in a very short period of time. If you consider elasticity it would take a single very impactful event to do this.

Which item(s) is that graph showing data points for?

ssewallb14_ESO

VaranisArano wrote: »

ssewallb14_ESO wrote: »

Most of the price increase happened after Greymoor in a very short period of time. If you consider elasticity it would take a single very impactful event to do this.

Which item(s) is that graph showing data points for?

Tempering Alloy. The other "bot farmable" items have a similar curve.

silvereyes

Kwoung wrote: »

Flipping is a real problem. When a group of players band to take over markets and buy up every deal that pops up near instantly, just to list it again for a 50-1000% markup, it creates issues.

I won't try to debate economics with you - others on here do a much better job. My own experience is very far from what you imply, however.

I, like many others, make my gold from selling mats acquired from doing crafting writs. I've rarely flipped anything, since I don't see shopping as a good use of my time. When I go to sell my gold mats, I usually list at 6-8% above market price.

For the last several months, everything I have listed has sold within a day or two, even at inflated prices. I can't do writs fast enough to satisfy the demand for how fast stuff sells, and I have 35 crafting toons that I've invested heavily in over the years to maximize their drop chances of gold mats.

I ask you, as a seller, what would you have me do? List things cheaper? All that will happen then is that the items sell faster - which I don't need, since I can't keep up with demand as it is - and I don't make as much gold as I could have. I have zero incentive to stop listing at the prices I have been listing at.

If the demand ever wanes, and my listings sit unbought, I will lower my prices, simple as that. Until then, I will keep listing at higher and higher prices as I see them continue to sell.

If some insidious cabal wants to keep buying up my items that I paid nothing for at higher and higher prices, I am more than happy for them to keep doing so. I don't know how they will make money in the long-run that way, but such questions are above my pay grade.

TheDarkRuler

PeterUnlustig wrote: »

There are a few spots in the game where you can afk farm up to 75k gold / hour per account as long as you tab in every 19 minutes and loot.
In the last years there were only around 1-4 people on that spots but lately people started to farm in groups up to 24 people per zone instance all day long. Thats around 30 mio gold per day made out of thin air. Also the antiquity farm creates some money. When i started new players had below 100k gold. Now with antiquities new players can farm that in a day without any advanced knowledge.

I am curious what place might generate such vast amounts of money. Care to elaborate? I have not run across such a moneymaker during my time in ESO and would be curious about it...although i probably dont need it.

silvereyes

PeterUnlustig wrote: »

Trader fees are the only remaining money sink in the game.

They are certainly a huge sink, but I'd hardly call them the only one. The golden vendor and luxury furniture dealer continue to be fairly good sinks. The golden vendor in particular got a big boost as a gold sink with the addition of the sticker book. It's a lot easier to spend an hour or less to make 100k gold to buy that exact monster shoulder weight you need for your sticker book than it is to farm keys and be subjected to RNG that hates you. There are also plenty of people who find making gold much easier and/or less stressful than running vet dungeons, so 300k to buy all three helmet weights and then be able to reconstruct their own on-trait gear is a no-brainer for them.

Also, don't underestimate the value of housing as a gold sink. Greymoor brought in a deluge of new and returning players, and many of them did not have houses or furniture yet. Get a big enough stream of people buying 600k houses and a bunch of 10k items from achievement furnishers, and it adds up.

FrancisCrawford

Kwoung wrote: »

Flipping is a real problem. When a group of players band to take over markets and buy up every deal that pops up near instantly, just to list it again for a 50-1000% markup, it creates issues. There are numerous entire guilds on PCNA that do this now and do it so well they have managed to secure many of the top trader spots. They have also driven up the bid prices on traders considerably. Hopefully, this is not able to sustain long term, because all the gold going to a select few (who do god knows what with it), will outprice what the average player can afford, thus causing a downward market adjustment... hopefully.

It is not helpful that TTC is giving bad info either due to manipulation, allowing flippers to easily score great deals from people who list items based on that. It is few motifs at the moment that don't readily sell for 50-100% or more over what TTC "suggests" you sell them for.

Nobody should simply follow MM or TTC "suggestions", unless the amounts of gold involved are too small to care about. Looking at actual data instead let's you do a lot better. If you're not willing to put in that effort -- and it may be a very valid choice not to do so! -- then don't complain (much) if you pick the wrong price.

jekyto

I want to point that geting gold jewellery platings is ridiculously long process. I dont want to maintain writs on 10 toons for months to get few pieces, so ill spend any gold i earn on those. And dont tell me to stick to purple, because i dont want to!

FatherDelve

TheDarkRuler wrote: »

PeterUnlustig wrote: »

There are a few spots in the game where you can afk farm up to 75k gold / hour per account as long as you tab in every 19 minutes and loot.
In the last years there were only around 1-4 people on that spots but lately people started to farm in groups up to 24 people per zone instance all day long. Thats around 30 mio gold per day made out of thin air. Also the antiquity farm creates some money. When i started new players had below 100k gold. Now with antiquities new players can farm that in a day without any advanced knowledge.

I am curious what place might generate such vast amounts of money. Care to elaborate? I have not run across such a moneymaker during my time in ESO and would be curious about it...although i probably dont need it.

I am guess we are talking about the Gambler Spot in Reapers March ? Thats not a secret, and thats also not the reason for the massive Inflation we have atm. This place is known since such a long time, and people farming there their Fence cap on multiple characters and accounts every day.

Shadow_CH

Viewsfrom6ix wrote: »

The weird thing is that some popular on-trait gears like divine mother's sorrow have doubled in price.

You would think the price would drop since people can just reconstruct them in their preferred trait.

Same goes for Briarheart, prices skyrocket since implementaiton of the stickerbook.

Another reason why i don't thin its a hyperinflation: some other prices didn't rise. Actually i sell a lot of solitude furniture plans (my bank is full of it because i farm vampiric plans^^). They sell very well and the price is stable at ~1k per green plan.

Raevyness

NoSoup wrote: »

Tempering alloy has nearly doubled in 2 months from a fairly consistent 7-8kea to 14-15k
Dreugh Wax is the same
Chromium plating has tripled over 12 months
and its not just the high end stuff

Corn Flower is trading for 1k EACH!!!!

I really do believe alot of this is artifical, you look at certain well known high traffic guilds and there will be one or two sellers listing certain items way above market cost, its as if these players are going around buying the cheaper items up and listing them for 2-3k higher than the average forcing all the price tracking addon's to inflate their recommended prices.

At what point will it all come undone, surely the only people this kind of inflation and market manipulation is helping are the chinese gold sellers???

Totally agree!!! Something needs to be done about it for sure..

Sinolai

Mythreindeer wrote: »

Jierdanit wrote: »

Mythreindeer wrote: »

So, being relatively new still, what are people buying that requires so much gold? You can't buy dungeon gear and most everything else can be farmed pretty easily.

Crafting materials, mostly gold upgrade mats.

Kind of what I was thinking. Farming is obviously slower but I'm accumulating them pretty nicely without buying them. How many sets of gold gear do you need? lol

Several if you play the end game. In just one raid, you may need completely different gear for each boss and 1 more for trash fights. In a raid with 3 bosses, that makes 7x4 gold body pieces, 3x4 gold jewellery and 2(3 for stamina)*4 golden weapons. That is 28*8 =224 alloy/wax, 48 chromium plating and 64(96) alloy/rosin.

Luckily, golden jewellery usually drops from raids, the Golden sells some golden jewellery every week and weekly rewards give golden armor/weapon drops so you dont have to upgrade everything yourself and you can deal with purple gear if you lack the money.

Bucky_13

jekyto wrote: »

I want to point that geting gold jewellery platings is ridiculously long process. I dont want to maintain writs on 10 toons for months to get few pieces, so ill spend any gold i earn on those. And dont tell me to stick to purple, because i dont want to!

I do daily writs on 13 chars and do the surveys and refine the raw mats. I average 3 gold platings per week, so 6 weeks roughly in your case should be enough for a full set in gold, assuming all your chars are crafting the highest tier of the dailies. Iirc the level affects the drops of golden grains.

magnusthorek

On top of my mind, I think it would be a simple matter of devs to add an internal, completely hidden flag (i.e. out of addons API), to mark items as bought on Guild Stores (and the value paid for them) and then define a maximum value, in percentages, of how much more this item could be sold.

It *would* because, unless devs ALSO restrict an item, identified by its internal ID (which I believe all items have), people would still fraud it by buying and selling between friends over and over again, gradually increasing this hidden flag.

zaria

Shadow_CH wrote: »

Viewsfrom6ix wrote: »

The weird thing is that some popular on-trait gears like divine mother's sorrow have doubled in price.

You would think the price would drop since people can just reconstruct them in their preferred trait.

Same goes for Briarheart, prices skyrocket since implementaiton of the stickerbook.

Another reason why i don't thin its a hyperinflation: some other prices didn't rise. Actually i sell a lot of solitude furniture plans (my bank is full of it because i farm vampiric plans^^). They sell very well and the price is stable at ~1k per green plan.

Agree I would expect prices here to drop, not only can you recreate the set, you can also recreate setts who is hard to farm like berserking warrior.
Yes, I would also except an price jump for junk items like Briarheart resoration staffs as they make reconstructing cheaper.

Now I think the reason price has gone up is that much more players who spend more time in game.
And most of them are pretty causal and might not understand the reconstruction system.

All who just exit dungeons then done and not interested in sharing gear is the prime example.
Yes you want an prayer shawl maul because its cost nothing to add it to the sticker book and it might be useful one day.

As an example on situation I wanted deadly strike but found the price to be very high. Went to Bruma spent around 400 K AP
Got that I wanted and sold the rest for around 250 K gold who is an insane AP to gold ratio.
Took me half an hour to figure out that this was an good idea.

Now the sold values for various sets tend to be way lower than the general listed value.
I guess many listed very expensive items hoping people with more gold than sense would buy an mother's sorrow maul for 30K to make recreation cheaper. So guild stores are filled with overpriced items and prices will go down here.

goatlyonesub17_ESO

It pays to shop around. I've noticed prices on some items differing by a factor of 10 or more between sellers. Most recently, as I was shopping for attunable crafting stations so I could add the Red Eagle set to my house, I saw prices as low as 149000 gold and as high as 350000 gold. I bought the cheaper ones of course. Shortly before that, I was buying lockpicks, and I noticed that some sellers charge 400 gold for 200 lockpicks, while other sellers charge 10000 gold for 200 lockpicks.

Shadow_CH

zaria wrote: »

Agree I would expect prices here to drop, not only can you recreate the set, you can also recreate setts who is hard to farm like berserking warrior.
Yes, I would also except an price jump for junk items like Briarheart resoration staffs as they make reconstructing cheaper.

Now I think the reason price has gone up is that much more players who spend more time in game.
And most of them are pretty causal and might not understand the reconstruction system.

All who just exit dungeons then done and not interested in sharing gear is the prime example.
Yes you want an prayer shawl maul because its cost nothing to add it to the sticker book and it might be useful one day.

As an example on situation I wanted deadly strike but found the price to be very high. Went to Bruma spent around 400 K AP
Got that I wanted and sold the rest for around 250 K gold who is an insane AP to gold ratio.
Took me half an hour to figure out that this was an good idea.

Now the sold values for various sets tend to be way lower than the general listed value.
I guess many listed very expensive items hoping people with more gold than sense would buy an mother's sorrow maul for 30K to make recreation cheaper. So guild stores are filled with overpriced items and prices will go down here.

A green Briarheart resto staff already is more valuable than each of my green solitude furniture plans at least on PC EU

Totaly agree with you about people insta-leaving a dungeon. Even if somebody says that he / she needs item X from set Y they leave without any comment (not even a good bye).

And I agree with you that the prices pushed by the stickerbook will drop some day, but I think it's still a long way to go. There are a lot of completionists among us

Parasaurolophus

I wrote! I wrote about it! Created a thread! But in 4 pages the thread was closed because I was told a lot of insults.

Kidgangster101

Jierdanit wrote: »

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

There is definitely some price manipulation-- excuse me, "flipping"-- going on, but I don't know to what extent it occurs. The manipulation of prices could possibly be curtailed by adding a "not for resale" flag on items posted for sale, to prevent them from being bought up en masse at lower prices and then sold at higher prices. But I doubt we'll ever see anything like that.

Under the existing system, the best you can do is (1) do not buy items which are priced higher than you think they should be; and (2) if the lower-priced listings disappear before you can get to them, hang onto your gold and wait for more lower-priced listings to be posted that you can get to in time.

The problem just is that you do not find any low priced stuff anymore lol.

Why should anyone sell their alloys for 4k when the price went up to an average of 7k - 8k now?

The real cause is not having a global auction house. A lot of casual players don't meet a demand for trader guild therefore their items never make it to the trader bored. Hence the richer players get to manipulate the market by getting the most traveled places in the game.

But hey I've said this numerous times and somehow I was told this type of inflation could never happen in this exact trader system...... And here we are today and it's happening while I'm on a long break from this game and enjoying my global auction house on ff14.......