PC|NA Hyperinflation is out of control

silvereyes

Inaya wrote: »

Don't want to farm, pay market price to those who did the work.

Don't want to compensate players who farm by paying market price - go farm.

Don't want to do either? Complain on the forums.

Lumsdenml

Waseem wrote: »

If you think that Zenimax will step in to police the economy you are wrong.
this is players behavior who choose to manipulate the economy and applying monopoly

Sad? Yes
Solution? Farm your stuff, there is absolutely nothing else you can do


You certainly can't riot in the streets of Tamriel burning guild stores or loot guild houses

But what if you could?

RageKing

Im liking this inflation. I spent about 5m gold buying up tempers for like 4k each when housing first came out and just held onto them. now with their current prices i have quadrupled my initial investment. will continue to hold them because i sense a gear cap increase coming when they update CP system. so alot of people going to need new gold gear, so prices just gonna go up more.

YandereGirlfriend

RageKing wrote: »

Im liking this inflation. I spent about 5m gold buying up tempers for like 4k each when housing first came out and just held onto them. now with their current prices i have quadrupled my initial investment. will continue to hold them because i sense a gear cap increase coming when they update CP system. so alot of people going to need new gold gear, so prices just gonna go up more.

This is the type of thing that Grapes of Wrath was written about.

silvereyes

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

RageKing wrote: »

Im liking this inflation. I spent about 5m gold buying up tempers for like 4k each when housing first came out and just held onto them. now with their current prices i have quadrupled my initial investment. will continue to hold them because i sense a gear cap increase coming when they update CP system. so alot of people going to need new gold gear, so prices just gonna go up more.

This is the type of thing that Grapes of Wrath was written about.

Well, that escalated quickly.

Tranquilizer

RageKing wrote: »

Im liking this inflation. I spent about 5m gold buying up tempers for like 4k each when housing first came out and just held onto them. now with their current prices i have quadrupled my initial investment. will continue to hold them because i sense a gear cap increase coming when they update CP system. so alot of people going to need new gold gear, so prices just gonna go up more.

When ZOS increase gear cap this game will have other problems than raising prices for gold mats.

Minyassa

As long as people who have the gold are willing to part with ridiculous amounts of it so they don't have to go gather mats themselves, these ridiculous prices will keep up. The only thing that would possibly have an effect would be if people just put their foot down and stopped buying them. It's not like you can't get them yourself, even with competition. But too many people are able and willing to let prices keep rising.

Lysette

Well, no one is forcing you to buy corn flower for 1k - you can just go for a stroll and pick some up along the way here and there?- Not worth your time, then you basically say, that 1k for a corn flower is actually not that bad, don't you?

Btw I'm on PC EU and I'm selling corn flower for 425-450 still -dreugh wax, well around 11.5k is reasonable. So it isn't too bad actually - and just like I said, if you think it is too high, just go out and try to get them yourself - you might find those prices not too high after having done this.

tmbrinks

Tranquilizer wrote: »

RageKing wrote: »

Im liking this inflation. I spent about 5m gold buying up tempers for like 4k each when housing first came out and just held onto them. now with their current prices i have quadrupled my initial investment. will continue to hold them because i sense a gear cap increase coming when they update CP system. so alot of people going to need new gold gear, so prices just gonna go up more.

When ZOS increase gear cap this game will have other problems than raising prices for gold mats.

It is at least plausible for them to do so now... with the stickerbook, at least you won't have to re-collect all the gear, just re-make it.

That said, in a stickerbook world, raising the gear caps doesn't make a ton of sense... since you can just re-make new gear... and everything is already scaled to CP160, so changing that to a new, arbitrary threshold doesn't make much difference.

zaria

tmbrinks wrote: »

Tranquilizer wrote: »

RageKing wrote: »

Im liking this inflation. I spent about 5m gold buying up tempers for like 4k each when housing first came out and just held onto them. now with their current prices i have quadrupled my initial investment. will continue to hold them because i sense a gear cap increase coming when they update CP system. so alot of people going to need new gold gear, so prices just gonna go up more.

When ZOS increase gear cap this game will have other problems than raising prices for gold mats.

It is at least plausible for them to do so now... with the stickerbook, at least you won't have to re-collect all the gear, just re-make it.

That said, in a stickerbook world, raising the gear caps doesn't make a ton of sense... since you can just re-make new gear... and everything is already scaled to CP160, so changing that to a new, arbitrary threshold doesn't make much difference.

And its why it will not happen as it would be pointless.

I predict perfected gear from more trials, this will not be that much an problem with the stickerbook that before than you needed to hold more gear in bank. Vet Craglorn is also pugged all the time from zone.

SidraWillowsky

Could it have anything to do with the significant uptick of people advertising in zone chats that they're looking to buy stuff at prices that are significantly lower than average (someone was trying to buy torchbug thorax for 300 gold per last night when the min suggested price is 544)? How many people actually take them up on that? I've seen the same player just rotating through zones doing that, then becoming apoplectic when I tell people not to sell to them and list the actual going rate.

IDK if they get enough business to have an impact, but these people are definitely flipping mats.

wolfbone

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???

well on ps4 eu, things like rubedohide have gone down drastically in price due to bots

silvereyes

SidraWillowsky wrote: »

Could it have anything to do with the significant uptick of people advertising in zone chats that they're looking to buy stuff at prices that are significantly lower than average (someone was trying to buy torchbug thorax for 300 gold per last night when the min suggested price is 544)? How many people actually take them up on that? I've seen the same player just rotating through zones doing that, then becoming apoplectic when I tell people not to sell to them and list the actual going rate.

IDK if they get enough business to have an impact, but these people are definitely flipping mats.

They have always been around hustling, and they are very loud. All it takes is a couple extra players doing it regularly to seem like a "significant uptick" in spam.

They are not the reason for inflation, though. Since they buy low and sidestep guild store and COD taxes, they can afford to undercut others and still make a large margin. I personally find such tactics distasteful, since they often catch ignorant new players in their nets, but their effect on the economy is rather small.

silvereyes

Minyassa wrote: »

As long as people who have the gold are willing to part with ridiculous amounts of it so they don't have to go gather mats themselves, these ridiculous prices will keep up. The only thing that would possibly have an effect would be if people just put their foot down and stopped buying them. It's not like you can't get them yourself, even with competition. But too many people are able and willing to let prices keep rising.

What one considers "ridiculous" is relative. I would think that it's actually a good sign that enough players are have the income to support higher prices as demand increases. It means there's a healthy-sized middle class in the game.

Players can still gold out all non-jewelry armor and weapons for a build for 600-700k. That's not anywhere near game-breaking expensive, or even unreasonable imo. Anyone can make 100k an hour with some prep, and those optimized for it can make much more.

These amounts aren't some lofty thing out of reach for the 99%. It just takes some effort. But so does farming that many mats. Seems like a fair trade to me.

silvereyes

The one exception to this, IMO, is gold jewelry platings. Those are undoubtedly luxury items, but that has always been the case, even without inflation. ZOS nonsensically created this 10x dust per plating system with no new dedicated JC nodes or hireling mails. They've steadily made more and more changes to decrease the cost of upgrading, but it still costs over twice as much to upgrade to gold jewelry as it does to just buy gold jewelry from the golden vendor.

It all makes no sense to me. Jewelry-crafting is supposed to be a selling point for the Summerset chapter, so you'd think ZOS would want to make it more popular.

Varana

Slight digression:
The bonus from purple to gold for jewelry is also not that big. Golding jewelry is, in most cases, a first-world problem anyway.

And having access to jewelry crafting has a lot of other advantages: being able to upgrade your blue or green rings to purple, having access to trait research so you can transmute or reconstruct in other traits. Gold jewelry is just icing on the cake, I think.

Zulera301

Kwoung wrote: »

Zulera301 wrote: »

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.

Flipping has happened since forever though, and thanks to the fact that sellers are divided through 197+ traders instead of one central auction house, it'd be a lot harder for the "trading cartel" to monopolize something as numerous as crafting mats.

Now, rarer items like old motifs from zones no one visits anymore... Those are easy to flip due to the small "population" of items.

I find flipping to be too tedious and risky personally, but I'll list things well above MM/ATT and sometimes even TTC price, and still score sales within a day or two.

And I've got over 91 million to my name, and haven't even needed to tap into my craft bag yet.

I am not quite there yet, only 20 mil to my name, but like you... none of it was made from flipping, I also find it tedious.

My point though, that I obviously didn't make clear after re-reading my post, is that it isn't the actual flipping of items that is the issue, it is the manipulation of TTC to drive prices up or down to suit your needs. On mats it gets driven up, on motifs they drive it down so they can buy them well below market value. Manipulating TTC is incredibly easy and the main reason I never trust what it says anymore. Even reading the addon description on the website he says:

"Q:Whats the difference between MM's price and TTC's price?
TTC uses the listing price and the MM uses sold price. By statistic and Economic, those two numbers should align given enough sample set"

Which is no longer true by a long shot, which is a good indicator that one of the two data sets is actually wrong. In this case it is TTC, because people can edit the data in the file before it gets uploaded and ingested to the TTC website/database. Yes, he does calculations and tosses out outlier prices, but making sure your "fake" listing are not outliers, but just enough to drive a price up or down... you can easily manipulate the market.

While yes, some people unaware of market prices do put things up for the cheap and those get snapped up fast, others simply check the in-game TTC tooltip for pricing data. Unfortunately for them, none of the items that the TTC price was derived from exist, in some cases never did, so they list their motif worth 100k... for the TTC suggested of 23K. Which the person who manipulated that items price is camping TTC watching for those items to pop up so they can buy and flip them.

Ironically I actually find the opposite to be true for motifs, at least for me. A lot of the ones I've been listing lately have such small populations that I'm able to inflate the price rather significantly and still make a sale.

That's also part of why I use a collaboration of TTC and MM/ATT do I can see if the listings on the TTC website are high, low, or right on par compared to actual sales.

ganzaeso

With the injection of 100K gold coming soon, I expect major increase in prices.

gatekeeper13

PC EU here.

Tried to transmute a perfect MA inferno staff, only to find out that Rosin average price skyrocketed from 1.8-2k to 4-5k.

Varana

Which is, as others pointed out, a result of the set collection system (apparently paired with a crackdown on bots).

f047ys3v3n

The increase in prices has not been limited to just some commodities such as materials, which might mean a bot crackdown or people wanting to craft new stuff after sticker book and widespread set changes. It also started well before sticker book announcement. As graphed here in this very excellent tracking of the issue from a dude with a worse @ name than me.

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.

I might add I first noticed the issue in august with motif prices I think these might have been the first commodities to move. Essentially all commodities have rapidly increased in price. Similarly, the value of gold measured in crown exchange rate also rapidly decreased despite there being only indirect and weak links between the relation of gold to commodity and gold to crown store prices. Other unmentionable gold exchange rates also massively reversed a long standing trend of appreciation in the value of gold which probably reflected increasing rather then decreasing popularity of the game.

The bottom line is that gold itself just plain lost massive amounts of value and fast relative to everything in game and out of it. I think the magnitude and rapidity of the change we experienced could really only have indicated either a gold dupe bug or a very efficient afk gold farm. Hopefully the graph shown by the user above which indicated a leveling off of prices reflects ZOS fixing the problem that caused the massive change. For what it is worth, my experience has also been that prices on most commodities appear to have leveled off or declined with the gold to crown exchange rate being the simplest example. Chromium seems to be the exception here but with ZOS broken jewelry system and the sticker book contributing to demand, that is no surprise. $1M+ for making jewelry gold seem to totally exclude 98% of the player base but if ZOS intended to fix the jewelry crafting issues they would have by now.

In the end, I had a lot of gold and a lot of mats and other assets so I both lost and gained a lot of value due to whatever mess ZOS clearly refused to tell us about. New players on the other hand just got totally hosed when it comes to advancing their gear, doing housing stuff, or anything else. They are like American workers every time the fed prints another few trillion and the price of assets such as housing or stocks shoots skyward to reflect this while their wages don't.

It would be nice for ZOS to let us know what went down and what they did about it but their policy has never been one of glasnost. I don't know how you easily help those newer players as assets will continue to be at high prices relative to earnings for years. Screw them though, there poor.

Xebov

The current situation is a simply supply vs demand. With less bots around there is less supply. At the same moment we have more demand due to sticker boook. As a result prices rise. Its simple economy.

The reason ppl complain about this is that a good chunk of the community got comfortable earning some gold and simply buying the upgrade materials (and alchemy ingredients) they need instead of doing crafting daylies or gathering themselves. Now with prices rising this group simply has to pay more to get along.

The winenrs of the current situation are the players that gather and do crafting daylies as more gold flows into their pockets.

zaria

Xebov wrote: »

The current situation is a simply supply vs demand. With less bots around there is less supply. At the same moment we have more demand due to sticker boook. As a result prices rise. Its simple economy.

The reason ppl complain about this is that a good chunk of the community got comfortable earning some gold and simply buying the upgrade materials (and alchemy ingredients) they need instead of doing crafting daylies or gathering themselves. Now with prices rising this group simply has to pay more to get along.

The winenrs of the current situation are the players that gather and do crafting daylies as more gold flows into their pockets.

This.

Fat cats thinking outside the box.

VaranisArano

f047ys3v3n wrote: »

The increase in prices has not been limited to just some commodities such as materials, which might mean a bot crackdown or people wanting to craft new stuff after sticker book and widespread set changes. It also started well before sticker book announcement. As graphed here in this very excellent tracking of the issue from a dude with a worse @ name than me.

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.

I might add I first noticed the issue in august with motif prices I think these might have been the first commodities to move. Essentially all commodities have rapidly increased in price. Similarly, the value of gold measured in crown exchange rate also rapidly decreased despite there being only indirect and weak links between the relation of gold to commodity and gold to crown store prices. Other unmentionable gold exchange rates also massively reversed a long standing trend of appreciation in the value of gold which probably reflected increasing rather then decreasing popularity of the game.

The bottom line is that gold itself just plain lost massive amounts of value and fast relative to everything in game and out of it. I think the magnitude and rapidity of the change we experienced could really only have indicated either a gold dupe bug or a very efficient afk gold farm. Hopefully the graph shown by the user above which indicated a leveling off of prices reflects ZOS fixing the problem that caused the massive change. For what it is worth, my experience has also been that prices on most commodities appear to have leveled off or declined with the gold to crown exchange rate being the simplest example. Chromium seems to be the exception here but with ZOS broken jewelry system and the sticker book contributing to demand, that is no surprise. $1M+ for making jewelry gold seem to totally exclude 98% of the player base but if ZOS intended to fix the jewelry crafting issues they would have by now.

In the end, I had a lot of gold and a lot of mats and other assets so I both lost and gained a lot of value due to whatever mess ZOS clearly refused to tell us about. New players on the other hand just got totally hosed when it comes to advancing their gear, doing housing stuff, or anything else. They are like American workers every time the fed prints another few trillion and the price of assets such as housing or stocks shoots skyward to reflect this while their wages don't.

It would be nice for ZOS to let us know what went down and what they did about it but their policy has never been one of glasnost. I don't know how you easily help those newer players as assets will continue to be at high prices relative to earnings for years. Screw them though, there poor.

That graph is showing the price increase of Tempering Alloy, so, if anything, it points to a bot crackdown or a meta shift (or both) as the starting causes of the increase in material prices, which is kept high by the stickerbook demand.

As for motifs, no one has shown any data to shown this is more than the usual fluctuation after the glut of motifs from the Anniversary Event. We've certainly had less older zone events in Q2-Q4 than usual. So if you have data, I'd love to see it.

Similarly, no one has shown any data for the claim that "Essentially all commodities have rapidly increased in price." Again, since this is a crucial part of the claim that we're experiencing "too much gold" hyperinflation as opposed to "demand-driven" inflation, I'd love to see the data!

Absent such data, we're left to look at the gold/crown trade and wonder where the increased gold came from. Do we think its a "too much gold generation" problem which should leave evidence everywhere in the game?
Or is it related to the nature of the gold/crown trades, where high gold prices have always excluded gold-poor players? Rich players, particularly rich item flippers, are the likely beneficiaries of the profits from the boom in materials. That wealth transfer from poorer players buying mats to richer players selling and reselling them is a likely contributor to the increase in gold used for crown trades.


Finally, I'd like to address your interpretation of the "leveling off" on that graph.

In the absence of any ZOS patch notes (and from the data of tmbrinks, no noticeable change in tempering alloys drop rates) we can safely assume that no, ZOS didn't do anything to adjust the supply or impact the price or cut off a supply of gold generation. Instead, the far more likely answer is that we've simply reached market equilibrium and found the new price at which consumers are willing to buy tempering alloys.

This argues against "too much gold" hyperinflation, since if the supply of gold were still increasing (and recall that there are no patch notes that say ZOS changed anything), then gold should still be devaluing and the price of tempering alloys should still be rising.

Instead, the "leveling off" shows precisely what we'd expect when demand and supply have reached equilibrium at a new price point. That's the end result of temporary "demand-pull" inflation, and shows that supply has indeed risen to meet demand because more players decided it was worth their while. Additionally, this means that ZOS probably doesn't need to correct any supply-side issues, simply because the market has already done so, albeit at a higher price point than many players would like.

CrashTest

I was just wondering why Hakeijos are at 26k now when they're usually 10-13k.

jaws343

CrashTest wrote: »

I was just wondering why Hakeijos are at 26k now when they're usually 10-13k.

Probably a result of the PVP meta shifting to higher health builds.

THEDKEXPERIENCE

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.

I played yesterday for the first time in months. In the past when I didn’t feel like playing PVP or a quest I would simply farm for hours upon hours. When I was done I would log into my guild stores and sell some of my excess stuff I didn’t need. I would even sell things at prices that were clear undercuts. At my peak I would get 50-100K sales a day easily. EASILY.

For the last 3 years I’ve barely played except for here and there. I’m no longer in any trade guilds. I don’t even have ESO plus anymore. Meanwhile if I liquidated everything I still have between armor and materials I’d likely make 20 to 50 million in gold. I have a lot of stuff simply collecting virtual dust. (No, you can’t have it.)

Anyway, all it takes for the market supply to dwindle is for a handful of people like me to simply move on to other games.

I cannot speak for PC but I’ve made millions of gold on XBox, and unless a player like me was replaced by another hardcore plant picker that’s one less good deal you’ll find. If hundreds of players like me left and weren’t replaced then prices will skyrocket. Also it’s not as if a CP810 farmer with a bazillion skill points will be replaced by someone who just bought the game. They aren’t even farming the same mats.

THEDKEXPERIENCE

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?

LOL ... “skyrocketing” to 8K. That was the basement console price like 3 years ago.

NoSoup

VaranisArano wrote: »

f047ys3v3n wrote: »

The increase in prices has not been limited to just some commodities such as materials, which might mean a bot crackdown or people wanting to craft new stuff after sticker book and widespread set changes. It also started well before sticker book announcement. As graphed here in this very excellent tracking of the issue from a dude with a worse @ name than me.

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.

I might add I first noticed the issue in august with motif prices I think these might have been the first commodities to move. Essentially all commodities have rapidly increased in price. Similarly, the value of gold measured in crown exchange rate also rapidly decreased despite there being only indirect and weak links between the relation of gold to commodity and gold to crown store prices. Other unmentionable gold exchange rates also massively reversed a long standing trend of appreciation in the value of gold which probably reflected increasing rather then decreasing popularity of the game.

The bottom line is that gold itself just plain lost massive amounts of value and fast relative to everything in game and out of it. I think the magnitude and rapidity of the change we experienced could really only have indicated either a gold dupe bug or a very efficient afk gold farm. Hopefully the graph shown by the user above which indicated a leveling off of prices reflects ZOS fixing the problem that caused the massive change. For what it is worth, my experience has also been that prices on most commodities appear to have leveled off or declined with the gold to crown exchange rate being the simplest example. Chromium seems to be the exception here but with ZOS broken jewelry system and the sticker book contributing to demand, that is no surprise. $1M+ for making jewelry gold seem to totally exclude 98% of the player base but if ZOS intended to fix the jewelry crafting issues they would have by now.

In the end, I had a lot of gold and a lot of mats and other assets so I both lost and gained a lot of value due to whatever mess ZOS clearly refused to tell us about. New players on the other hand just got totally hosed when it comes to advancing their gear, doing housing stuff, or anything else. They are like American workers every time the fed prints another few trillion and the price of assets such as housing or stocks shoots skyward to reflect this while their wages don't.

It would be nice for ZOS to let us know what went down and what they did about it but their policy has never been one of glasnost. I don't know how you easily help those newer players as assets will continue to be at high prices relative to earnings for years. Screw them though, there poor.

That graph is showing the price increase of Tempering Alloy, so, if anything, it points to a bot crackdown or a meta shift (or both) as the starting causes of the increase in material prices, which is kept high by the stickerbook demand.

As for motifs, no one has shown any data to shown this is more than the usual fluctuation after the glut of motifs from the Anniversary Event. We've certainly had less older zone events in Q2-Q4 than usual. So if you have data, I'd love to see it.

Similarly, no one has shown any data for the claim that "Essentially all commodities have rapidly increased in price." Again, since this is a crucial part of the claim that we're experiencing "too much gold" hyperinflation as opposed to "demand-driven" inflation, I'd love to see the data!

Absent such data, we're left to look at the gold/crown trade and wonder where the increased gold came from. Do we think its a "too much gold generation" problem which should leave evidence everywhere in the game?
Or is it related to the nature of the gold/crown trades, where high gold prices have always excluded gold-poor players? Rich players, particularly rich item flippers, are the likely beneficiaries of the profits from the boom in materials. That wealth transfer from poorer players buying mats to richer players selling and reselling them is a likely contributor to the increase in gold used for crown trades.


Finally, I'd like to address your interpretation of the "leveling off" on that graph.

In the absence of any ZOS patch notes (and from the data of tmbrinks, no noticeable change in tempering alloys drop rates) we can safely assume that no, ZOS didn't do anything to adjust the supply or impact the price or cut off a supply of gold generation. Instead, the far more likely answer is that we've simply reached market equilibrium and found the new price at which consumers are willing to buy tempering alloys.

This argues against "too much gold" hyperinflation, since if the supply of gold were still increasing (and recall that there are no patch notes that say ZOS changed anything), then gold should still be devaluing and the price of tempering alloys should still be rising.

Instead, the "leveling off" shows precisely what we'd expect when demand and supply have reached equilibrium at a new price point. That's the end result of temporary "demand-pull" inflation, and shows that supply has indeed risen to meet demand because more players decided it was worth their while. Additionally, this means that ZOS probably doesn't need to correct any supply-side issues, simply because the market has already done so, albeit at a higher price point than many players would like.

The problem is you're assuming a "fair" playing ground. In the real world we have agencies to protect against unfair competition and corruption, there are no such mechanisms in the game. The illegal gold trade highlights how much of an over supply of gold there is in the game. 2 years ago if you transferred another player 1million gold your account was almost immediately flagged and now there are 20 odd pages on google selling gold advertising prices on any amount from 1million - 20million......

Runefang

It'll self-correct over time. If the materials are so expensive now, more people will start to farm as it becomes the best value way to earn gold in the game (as a factor of time). And it becomes more worthwhile for botters to find a way around controls and farm again.

Doubt that prices drop all the way down again, but they will fall slightly in the long run.