Price fixing, flipping and monopoly

Ratzkifal

A guide to the market of ESO and monopolies:
You can only corner the market with items that aren't easy to come by (rare motifs, time-limited things, consumables that require rare items, furnishings that nobody else knows the furnishing plan for). Try it with anything that is easy enough to reproduce and you will fail at creating your monopoly.
If you are looking to buy and find yourself in a situation where the market of a certain item has been cornered, get grinding or move on. Whoever has cornered the market is paying more money to maintain their monopoly than they get out of it, as long as nobody is willing to buy at their outrageous prices. If you still need whatever item desperately, then either swallow the bitter pill and pay the price, grind for the item yourself, or put in just as much effort as the person trying to maintain the monopoly by looking at TTC all the time and checking unpopular guild traders that don't get updated on TTC as frequently.
If you choose the grind option you can make bank off of the monopolists by continuously underselling them, driving the price down and making other buyers more willing to wait for your next cheaper deal than to swallow the bitter pill, thus ruining their monopoly.

RunForTheHills

I belong to a trading guild with a trader in Wayrest on NA/PC. There are 500 people in the guild selling stuff on the trader. I have not gotten any instructions from guild officers on how to price the items I sell through the guild. How can the guilds be manipulating prices? I use TTC and Master Merchant to determine a fair price and usually price it a little low to ensure it sells.

Ratzkifal

RunForTheHills wrote: »

I belong to a trading guild with a trader in Wayrest on NA/PC. There are 500 people in the guild selling stuff on the trader. I have not gotten any instructions from guild officers on how to price the items I sell through the guild. How can the guilds be manipulating prices? I use TTC and Master Merchant to determine a fair price and usually price it a little low to ensure it sells.

Same here in Mournhold. In fact the guild leaders have said they will kick people if they find out they are selling to themselves to manipulate MM data. If you can't meet the quota, you can always donate instead, so that's no excuse. Everything else just hurts the competition with other guilds.

Blacknight841

Madhojo wrote: »

Guilds have been ridiculously greedy forever on console thanks to ZOS refusing to allow even basic price finder mods. Honestly though the economy has always been a joke in ESO (probably all mmos) I still remember the reson for having to pay for fast traveling was to "have a money sink to help balance the economy" and that was 7 years ago. (Travel and respecing should be free always)

Best part about console. Zos doesn’t provide tools to see the market fluctuate, so we can go out and buy up all the Atherial dust at 100k and sell potions for 100k. It is fantastic, and the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. Working as intended. I can sell the same item in mournhold for 4x the amount because there is no add on to show that the trader in greymoor has the same item for 1/4 of the cost.

No add on support, or Zos taking the time to implement basic features (like searching traders which took 5 years to get on console) = best console experience for new players they are trying to retain!!!

Blacknight841

Moonsprite wrote: »

The event didn’t really have anything I wanted to use tickets on. I did the first quest for the pie then went and tried to get CP instead. I’m low CP, like 230ish now. I still had tickets from the last event too. I think it’s great people can get a skin from morphing their fire ball, but it doesn’t interest me. I already have the pet so I’m just waiting for the next thing 🙂

If you have the pet and want to keep the pet, it’s best to get the pet fragments again and then build up tickets after that. This way when you have to use the pet to morph it into something else, you can remake the pet.

Varana

Also, 65 or 175 pages listed on TTC is not "a lot". These are rewards for an event that has been running for days, with multiple reward boxes possible per day and character. If that situation leads to only a two-digit number of listings across the whole game, then you know that ZOS has severely curtailed the drop rates of that item. Consequently, prices will go up.
In comparison, judging by today's result: I'd bet that when the Anniversary event ends, the number of Jephrine pages listed on TTC will be in the thousands or tens of thousands - and that's only so "low" because a lot of players won't be bothered to list them on the trader. That is a drop rate that makes prices go down.
65? That's a rare item.

NoTimeToWait

Ratzkifal wrote: »

RunForTheHills wrote: »

I belong to a trading guild with a trader in Wayrest on NA/PC. There are 500 people in the guild selling stuff on the trader. I have not gotten any instructions from guild officers on how to price the items I sell through the guild. How can the guilds be manipulating prices? I use TTC and Master Merchant to determine a fair price and usually price it a little low to ensure it sells.

Same here in Mournhold. In fact the guild leaders have said they will kick people if they find out they are selling to themselves to manipulate MM data. If you can't meet the quota, you can always donate instead, so that's no excuse. Everything else just hurts the competition with other guilds.

Disclaimer: I don't use any of the dishonest methods to manipulate data. But, I think they are a part of the market pricing techniques. If one chooses to use data-gathering tools to get advantage over the players who don't use such tools, I guess it is only fair that there are people who use these tools to get advantage over addon users by messing with their data. If you got deceived by incorrect data, well, you failed in this case, because market research is an important part of any kind of trading.

We have 5 guilds to gather trading data from to make the data more robust to any maniputlation, so if one received incorrect data from most of these guilds, there is some flaw in the way this person chose their guilds.

Anyway, the price inflation is mostly caused by in-game gold volume inflation. Obviously, either we have too many players or bots farming gold (there are a few more possibilities of where additional gold came from, but those are what is called conspiracy theories). And it is coupled with the fact that existing gold sinks are obsolete and they are not enough to keep economy balanced anymore.

You don't need to corner the market, if the idea is simple enough for multiple people to start buying certain item (thus inflating demand and depleting supply).
Trading is lucrative and has one of the best gold per hour income ratios, so it is no wonder that more and more people do this and the market gets more and more influenced by these swings

marshill88

i went around to the all the traders 2 days ago, dozens of traders, and bought every pie (most were pretty cheap) I could buy save for the few times traders were selling pies for 1000 each.
I now have thousands of pies to last all year But the downside is, unless the traders were loaded with pies yesterday, you wont find too many, because I own them all

Ratzkifal

NoTimeToWait wrote: »

Ratzkifal wrote: »

RunForTheHills wrote: »

I belong to a trading guild with a trader in Wayrest on NA/PC. There are 500 people in the guild selling stuff on the trader. I have not gotten any instructions from guild officers on how to price the items I sell through the guild. How can the guilds be manipulating prices? I use TTC and Master Merchant to determine a fair price and usually price it a little low to ensure it sells.

Same here in Mournhold. In fact the guild leaders have said they will kick people if they find out they are selling to themselves to manipulate MM data. If you can't meet the quota, you can always donate instead, so that's no excuse. Everything else just hurts the competition with other guilds.

Disclaimer: I don't use any of the dishonest methods to manipulate data. But, I think they are a part of the market pricing techniques. If one chooses to use data-gathering tools to get advantage over the players who don't use such tools, I guess it is only fair that there are people who use these tools to get advantage over addon users by messing with their data. If you got deceived by incorrect data, well, you failed in this case, because market research is an important part of any kind of trading.

We have 5 guilds to gather trading data from to make the data more robust to any maniputlation, so if one received incorrect data from most of these guilds, there is some flaw in the way this person chose their guilds.

Anyway, the price inflation is mostly caused by in-game gold volume inflation. Obviously, either we have too many players or bots farming gold (there are a few more possibilities of where additional gold came from, but those are what is called conspiracy theories). And it is coupled with the fact that existing gold sinks are obsolete and they are not enough to keep economy balanced anymore.

You don't need to corner the market, if the idea is simple enough for multiple people to start buying certain item (thus inflating demand and depleting supply).
Trading is lucrative and has one of the best gold per hour income ratios, so it is no wonder that more and more people do this and the market gets more and more influenced by these swings

Not everyone is part of 5 trading guilds and I wouldn't call that a flaw in guild choice either. They are definitely not a part of "market pricing techniques", because you are selling to yourself. If the community rejects this kind of behavior, then it cannot be called a legitimate technique. It is fraud and as if with any kind of fraud, you can't exactly justify it just by claiming that the victim is at fault for believing the lie. The liar is the one at fault. Not to mention that it damages the guild by feeding tainted data to everyone in it, making other guilds more competitive. So it's not just the buyer who has the damage.

Thankfully MM isn't the only tool we have and TTC serves as a good sanity check to see what the market actually looks like, so there isn't even a point to manipulating MM data unless it is to sabotage guilds or to cheat the sales requirement (which you can get around by donating).

Fennwitty

Yes, people jack up prices of in-demand items during an event. All events.

Keep in perspective that this event ended literally this morning for PC.

It was a very short event of only 8 days. This means lots of players won't have had time to farm all the style pages etc. on their own. If they don't want to spend tickets, they have to buy -- and the drop rate didn't seem especially high on the style pages. Just about 1 a day from the gold box.

The style pages weren't even being listed for days -- people were using them themselves.

The Joke Popper Parts definitely is evidence of inflation due to events, but doesn't prove conspiracy. If TTC shows the average listing price of a popper part is say, 20k then that's the starting point for everyone else who uses TTC. It's collusion purely through "Well, that's what they're listed for, so that's how much I should be able to get" thinking.

The popper parts were extremely rare in this event vs. last year. I got maybe 2 total, and I was doing multiple boxes every day. For people who missed out on getting the popper achievement, or just wanted the momento, their only option is to buy -- and a captive buyer is subject to people inflating prices.

Once more time passes, they'll fall back down and people can get their momentos then. But so many players want everything ASAP that they do pay inflated prices even recognizing they're overpaying.

Runefang

I mean you need 5 Festive Noise Maker Parts and 5 Joke Popper Parts to get both achievements. That's a minimum of 10 stupendous jester boxes required to finish and you could only get 1 a day.

The event didn't even run for 10 days. Pretty easy to see how demand massively outstripped supply this year.

YandereGirlfriend

So the Halloween Festival really opened the eyes of a lot of trade guilds and traders.

If you recall, the Hollowjack Motifs were all selling for astronomically high prices this year whereas, for literally years, you could not even give away your excess Hollowjack pieces because they were so cheap and so abundant on the traders. Then ZOS cut off the tap for those motifs and those that were out in the world skyrocketed in value.

Flash forward to today, that sort of appreciation is still fresh in the minds of a lot of traders and they are absolutely speculating on any and all event items, much to the detriment of the casual player.

Auth3nticGlitch

Yea I was pretty upset to find out that the only event that allows me complete the achievements for popper parts was unable to give me 1 single popper part. Pathetic if you ask me, I shouldn’t have to pay a guild trader 80k to complete an achievement for an event that happens one time a year. I thought that was the whole point t of the event lol what a joke, which is fitting considering the name of the event lol.

AgentZenish

NoTimeToWait wrote: »

Anyway, the price inflation is mostly caused by in-game gold volume inflation. Obviously, either we have too many players or bots farming gold (there are a few more possibilities of where additional gold came from, but those are what is called conspiracy theories). And it is coupled with the fact that existing gold sinks are obsolete and they are not enough to keep economy balanced anymore.

This is what every post on this subject boils down to and should be reposted in every thread like it. Crown gifting just helped intensify this issue. Zos needs to find a way to get some gold out of the game before prices in the market will stabilize.

goatlyonesub17_ESO

Grandchamp1989 wrote: »

zvavi wrote: »

I don't think it is monopoly, u think it is because the parts were so rare...

I used to feel exactly like you do, but I don't anymore.
I used to think it was an ESO conspiracy.
But something is definitely pushing the prices up artificially, and not the free market.

I do believe there is an organized effort to keep prices up.

Yeah, a lot of people think that the law of supply and demand determines prices. It isn't, though. It's more like "follow the leader." Some guy with a lot to sell asks for the moon as his price. The next thousand people hoping to sell the same things do a price check, see what the first guy is charging, and then they charge that too.

Eedat

goatlyonesub17_ESO wrote: »

Grandchamp1989 wrote: »

zvavi wrote: »

I don't think it is monopoly, u think it is because the parts were so rare...

I used to feel exactly like you do, but I don't anymore.
I used to think it was an ESO conspiracy.
But something is definitely pushing the prices up artificially, and not the free market.

I do believe there is an organized effort to keep prices up.

Yeah, a lot of people think that the law of supply and demand determines prices. It isn't, though. It's more like "follow the leader." Some guy with a lot to sell asks for the moon as his price. The next thousand people hoping to sell the same things do a price check, see what the first guy is charging, and then they charge that too.

Thats not how it works. This is how it works if you 100% ignore demand and think supply is the only factor to determining prices. This assumes that there is an infinite amount of people willing to pay the amount of gold for the price the first person listed it. In reality you need an equal stream of people buying the item at that price which is where supply meets demand. If the price is too high, less people buy it and supply stacks up. Surplus begins the undercutting as people want to sell their items which slowly drops the price down to where it lines back up with demand.

Sergykid

Grandchamp1989 wrote: »

Joke Poppers are.. Hold on.. 175 pages on TTC! Yet rise and rise in price.It's not exactly rare..

joke popper parts on this second have 224 pages, with a price of 15k at page number 50. However, you will not find one for 15k anywhere because it's gone already. You will be lucky for 20k.
noise maker parts on this second have 229 pages, with a price of 19k at page number 50. However, you will not find one for 19k anywhere.

BrutalDeluxe

Sergykid wrote: »

Grandchamp1989 wrote: »

Joke Poppers are.. Hold on.. 175 pages on TTC! Yet rise and rise in price.It's not exactly rare..

joke popper parts on this second have 224 pages, with a price of 15k at page number 50. However, you will not find one for 15k anywhere because it's gone already. You will be lucky for 20k.
noise maker parts on this second have 229 pages, with a price of 19k at page number 50. However, you will not find one for 19k anywhere.

Sounds like Joke Popper parts are worth 20k and Noise Maker parts are worth even more.

Starlight_Whisper

Massacre_Wurm wrote: »

Guild monopoly and items being bought up as you said are kind of different things.

Yes , regalia style pages in 5-6k price range are being bought really quickly but its ok i guess.
You can stiil buy it for 8-10k a piece.

Try 25 to 30k pc na

Starlight_Whisper

Fennwitty wrote: »

Yes, people jack up prices of in-demand items during an event. All events.

Keep in perspective that this event ended literally this morning for PC.

It was a very short event of only 8 days. This means lots of players won't have had time to farm all the style pages etc. on their own. If they don't want to spend tickets, they have to buy -- and the drop rate didn't seem especially high on the style pages. Just about 1 a day from the gold box.

The style pages weren't even being listed for days -- people were using them themselves.

The Joke Popper Parts definitely is evidence of inflation due to events, but doesn't prove conspiracy. If TTC shows the average listing price of a popper part is say, 20k then that's the starting point for everyone else who uses TTC. It's collusion purely through "Well, that's what they're listed for, so that's how much I should be able to get" thinking.

The popper parts were extremely rare in this event vs. last year. I got maybe 2 total, and I was doing multiple boxes every day. For people who missed out on getting the popper achievement, or just wanted the momento, their only option is to buy -- and a captive buyer is subject to people inflating prices.

Once more time passes, they'll fall back down and people can get their momentos then. But so many players want everything ASAP that they do pay inflated prices even recognizing they're overpaying.

I saw a lot listed at 20k in my trader earlier today so 80k is just rip console prices

etchedpixels

Fennwitty wrote: »

The popper parts were extremely rare in this event vs. last year. I got maybe 2 total, and I was doing multiple boxes every day. For people who missed out on getting the popper achievement, or just wanted the momento, their only option is to buy -- and a captive buyer is subject to people inflating prices.

Older drops have to be rarer because many people have it so the only use for the ones they get in boxes is to sell them. If they were common then everyone new would have enough *and* the market would be flooded with spares. Zenimax know exactly how many current regular and irregular players have a given memento and I imagine a pretty godo idea what percentage of people bother to collect it and what percentage habitually destroy spares.

Like a lot of event items the price will crash 30-40 days after the event as everyone gets their overpriced junk back in their mail and realises none of it is selling.

preevious

Saucy_Jack wrote: »

Also, it should be noted that there's a non-zero subset of players who have more than one account, list items for a stupid amount, then buy it with their alt account. Some do this to manipulate MM data (which makes me want to punch them in the throat), and some do this to "reach" sales quotas in their guilds (which also makes me want to punch them in the throat).

PROTIP 1: If you need to game MM data to increase your sales, YOU"RE A BAD TRADER. Gold is easy enough to come by in this game without actively skewing data other traders rely on. Stop being the way you are.

PROTIP 2: If you need sell to yourself to make a guild quota, YOU DON'T BELONG IN THAT GUILD. FIND A DIFFERENT ONE WITH A LOWER QUOTA, GOOD GRIEF.

No, I'm not bitter. Why do you ask?

Non zero? Yes, you are certainly right.

Enough to be significant? Of course not, there's far too many players for that kind of artisanal manipulations of the market.
It would only create a few outliers (an handfull of 100k sale in a sea of 10k sales).
On PC, with add-ons, it's even more impossible, since add-ons can be set to simply ignore outliers when making calculations.

The only thing it achieves is you point n°2. It allows them to make the quota during a slow week. (it happens).

jaws343

I definitely saw a Joke Popper piece in a trader last night for 5K and bought it and sold it pretty much within an hour for 20K. No shame.

Mythreindeer

Round and round this market goes shuffling gold to no significant end.

I guess I don’t get all the concern.

Iarao

RedMuse wrote: »

Personal anecdata so take it for what it's worth but:

1) I didn't play the even nearly as much as last year for a number of reasons and I mainly did either just the Jorunn one for tickets or the double King Boar quest and called it a day.

2) Obviously this lead to a very low number of boxes so the following is not reliable at all but I only got the style pages from the daily golden box and both joke popper and noise maker parts didn't drop for me at all.

same here. i only did the min req for the tickets. in terms of time played, i think eso is aging and so everyone has the stuff and will just look to get the new stuff and so will produce less of the other stuff for selling.

Iarao

Larcomar wrote: »

The question I always ask when I see these prices is, are people actually buying them? I mean, it's not a perfect market by any standard. So it's quite possible some optimistic person stuck the first one on at 100k and everyone else has just followed suit. Of course, subsequent listers will put it on at 99,999, the next at 99900, the next at 98,999 etc etc But it takes a long time for the price to drop. I'd guess the real test will be when, in 30 days time or whenever, a bunch of these items get returned unsold, what happens then.

i do that all the time. have no clue of value. and sometimes it sells and if it dunt, by the time it returns prices have usually dropped.

Iarao

Grandchamp1989 wrote: »

Larcomar wrote: »

The question I always ask when I see these prices is, are people actually buying them? I mean, it's not a perfect market by any standard. So it's quite possible some optimistic person stuck the first one on at 100k and everyone else has just followed suit. Of course, subsequent listers will put it on at 99,999, the next at 99900, the next at 98,999 etc etc But it takes a long time for the price to drop. I'd guess the real test will be when, in 30 days time or whenever, a bunch of these items get returned unsold, what happens then.

I'm of the firm believe they're being held high artificially during the event. There's 175 pages of Joke Poppers on TTC!
They don't drop in price.
In a month you'll see these things being thrown at you for 2 gold and a free sandwich when their real market price is revealed

yes. people are just holding off buying at those prices. it will take a month for them to get returned and the relist will be lower. how low? unknown.

AngryLorekeeper

All I can say is that the excess Style Pages from the event that I sold went quickly and for top dollar. Whether someone is flipping them is hard to say but the markup would have to be very high considering what I sold them at.

Iarao

Grandchamp1989 wrote: »

Viewsfrom6ix wrote: »

All supply and demand.

An item is only worth what someone is willing to pay. For example, I've bought like over 20+ joke poppers for 10-20k
and re-listed for 90k and they all sold within a day.

If people are willing to pay 90k for joke poppers then that is what it is worth and all the 10-20k ones are listed at below market value.

If there wasn't a demand for them because of the event, I wouldn't be able to sell them all for 90k within a day.

Yep it's people like this jacking up the price.

Some dude gets a Joke Popper and sells it for 4k then the next guild sees it and buys all the Joke Poppers at 3-10k and sell them for 20k. Then people like you see them sold for 20k, buy them and sell them for 90k
Things are being bought up and resold at a higher price before people who actually needs them can buy them at a reasonable price. I feel so bad for the guy who bougt them for 90k each in a month they'll be worth 2gold and a sandwich when those 175 pages of grossly overpriced Joke Poppers aren't being sold.

wait a month for your part. patience is key here.

Goregrinder

Some people just figured out how to play the game. Not all of us can be winners.