Prices fluxuate, just look at everything XP potion related right now, the price on Aetherial Dust seemed to have capped at 650K last week, and looks to have plummeted into the 450K range now. The market is volatile and completely based on supply & demand, regardless of what all the conspiracy theorists feel.
As for the gentleman above wondering about overland gear sets you can wear... Mothers Sorrow/Juliannos & Briarheat/Hundings. Both options Overland/Crafted and available to everyone, both setup capable of completing *all* content in ESO. Heck, I have seen 90K parses on MS/Juli!
HumbleThaumaturge wrote: »I agree with the original poster. Fortunately, I have a large supply of materials from years ago, but I try to imagine how a new player might deal with the current situation. I mean, imagine needing to come up with nearly 1 million gold for your first set of Gold-gear!
Actually, inflation is worse then the original poster states. He remembers when Dreugh Wax was 6k. I bought 800 Dreugh Wax years ago for 2700 gold each (still have them), but now wax is selling for 16k or more! Up by a factor 6. Similar stories for items like Potent Nirncrux and Perfect Roe. And, of course, jewelry mats have always been high, but the blue mat used to be 4k and is now 16k to 20k!
The value of gold-mats is now so high, it makes no sense to do Master Writs most of the time. Some folks do them just to get the XP, but I rarely do them because the value of the resulting Voucher is less than the value of the materials. (Also, the drop-rate of Master Writs and the average Vouchers per Writ are now significantly lower than when the Master Writ system first started.) I don't do any jewelry Master Writs anymore. And I don't do gold-level non-jewelry writs unless the voucher-value makes it worth it.
Some folks have said inflation is all due to "supply and demand." I think not. I mean, that may be a part of it, but not the most important part.
As others have explained, I think much of the inflation is being caused by price manipulation by folks (individuals and guilds) with huge amounts of gold and an understanding of how to manipulate the market and how to manipulate the listings on Tamriel Trade Centre.
I suppose ZOS can (and has) made changes affecting the amount of materials and gold in the game. But what can ZOS do to control price manipulation? They could stop Crown-selling. But that's not going to happen. They could ban Tamriel Trade Center. But that's not going to happen. And how could they stop a rich player or guild from cornering the market on certain items by going to every guild trader and buying that item if it is below their target price? I can't think of a way.
DaveMoeDee wrote: »
Rare mats will always plummet during Jubilee. So many drops.
It's not just the rare mat drops, the diminished dusts you buy for vouchers are not selling as well either. Apparently the market for Mythic Ambrosia may have been saturated or demand for the product has waned, either way that has near instantly caused a market reversal. People can try to manipulate the market, even with some limited success occasionally, but in the end it is always supply vs demand. You can make the price as high as you want, until no one wants, needs or feels the price of the product is still worth it, at which point it just sits there, unsold.
The diminished dust prices have probably dropped due to the large amount of Master Writs being done which is flooding the market with diminished dust people are buying with the writ rewards.
Sambucca1973 wrote: »This is how economies work. Basic supply and demand.
This game's economy does not function like a free economy. Supply is intentionally kept out of the market to artificially raise prices. That is literally how this game's market structure was designed. Add that to the use of addons to hawk the market and buy up competing prices and what you have is something more akin to how a cartel would operate. So you can't really apply the rules of supply and demand to this game's economy. It was deliberately designed to keep the demand high in proportion to its supply.
The player economy is a free market. I can set whatever price i want for anything i want to sell. People can either buy it for that price from me, pay a different price from someone else, or farm it themselves. That is about as free as you can get. What addons make the trading in game cartel like? What items have demand that is high in proportion to their supply?
The player economy is a free market. I can set whatever price i want for anything i want to sell. People can either buy it for that price from me, pay a different price from someone else, or farm it themselves. That is about as free as you can get. What addons make the trading in game cartel like? What items have demand that is high in proportion to their supply?
Goregrinder wrote: »
That's about as clear cut as it gets right there. Don't like the price of something? Farm it or build it yourself.
No they can't. Unless you belong to a trading guild in possession of a guild trader, you can't set the prices for anything. A free economy would be one that everyone could participate in and put up their goods for sale on the market no matter what guild they belong to. This was intentional, and done deliberately by the developers to keep prices artificially high by limiting the amount of supply coming into the market.
The "cartel" element I alluded to comes into the picture when you consider that the more popular trading hubs are dominated by specific guilds who hawk the market and then buy out their competition so they can control prices. If this was actually a free economy the prices of materials would not be what they are now. That I can promise you.
1) You don't need to be a trading guild to sell items. People sell stuff in zone chat all the time. You can post stuff for sale on TTC without being in a guild. You could make your own buy and sell discord. A trade guild is like storefront. Its a lot better to sell out of a store in a strip mall than it is out of your garage on Suburbia St.
2) There is nothing stopping people from joining trade guilds but themselves. There is nothing stopping players from forming guilds and and securing their own trader if they don't like how any of the current trade guilds are run.
3) Actually it wasn't to keep the prices artificially high. It was to create a healthy player economy. It is not hard for experienced traders like me to control and manipulate a centralized system. Not saying i would do it myself, but i have both the experience and skillset to control the market on an AH with relative ease and i am not uncommon in that skill and experience among serious traders. The ONLY thing keeping this market in a healthy competitive state is that it uses a fractured trader system that doesn't allow one person to stand at one NPC and continuously hoover up deals and set the prices higher.
I have played dozens of games with an AH and not a single one of them had a player economy that was worth two ***. You end up with really high priced rare items controlled by traders/bots and noobs posting random junk and also penny wars. Only people who don't have a clue about player economies/markets think an central AH is a good thing. Eve Online has probably the best player economy in any game every to exist. You want this economy to follow that one and fractured traders do that.
4) Your cartel statement is a conspiracy theory. I am in those guilds in tops spots. I am also in second tier guilds and have been in guilds that got lucky to get in places like Firsthold and outlaw refuges and really random places. Ive sold stuff and made profits in.every.single.guild i have been in. Yes you can make more in those top spots than others but it typically cost more in activity or fees to be in those spots. Those aren't top spots because trade guilds have some secret mafia that dictates where the top spots are. Those are top spots because the cities appeal to players who want to shop where they hang out and they will pay stupid prices for items in those cities.
Guess where a lot of the people in those spots get their supply? Lower tier traders. The people in those trade guilds in top spots know how to price stuff and know how to sell. That is why they are there selling incorrectly stuff off backwater traders. The people who post on traders in remote places have no clue what they are doing. I buy motif pages for 100 gold, Alloys for 200, I once bought 200 butterfly wings for 250 gold. And there are like 10-15 pages of items. My traders all run 50 plus pages of items. You can't make any money to afford a good trader if you can only fill 10-20 pages a week and half the stuff is way underpriced so it makes no money and the other half is way overpriced so it never sells.
You want a trader in a good spot you have to earn it by being good at trading. You can't sell your flea market items in a mall next to Chanel, Armani, and Gucci stores. Top tier locations require players that sell hundreds of thousands to millions of gold worth of items weekly or buy a bucket load of raffle tickets. Just like in the real world you pay for location but you don't need a top location to sell. You just need to know how to properly price things and what to put on the market.
I'll admit I only skimmed some of this, so I'll respond briefly (my time on here is short).
Zone chat is not an effective way to sell items, and is no replacement for a guild trader. So I don't find that a convincing argument. But even if you believe otherwise, it still remains unequal access to the market as some players must rely on zone chat to sell while others do not. So it is still not a free market with equal access.
In relation to my so-called "conspiracy" - I can assure it it is very much accurate to say guilds flip items on the market and then resell them at a higher value to keep prices high. I've seen it done myself. It is no conspiracy, trust me. It is a routine practice and you can go observe it taking place yourself by watching activity on Tamriel Market.
And to once again reiterate the main thrust of my comment: the whole point of the guild trader system and why it was developed by the developers in the first place was to limit the supply flow into the market and thus keep prices artificially high. That was their stated goal (I read the post myself). So not only is this game's economy not based on supply and demand, but it was purposely designed to circumvent it.
No they can't. Unless you belong to a trading guild in possession of a guild trader, you can't set the prices for anything. A free economy would be one that everyone could participate in and put up their goods for sale on the market no matter what guild they belong to. This was intentional, and done deliberately by the developers to keep prices artificially high by limiting the amount of supply coming into the market.
The "cartel" element I alluded to comes into the picture when you consider that the more popular trading hubs are dominated by specific guilds who hawk the market and then buy out their competition so they can control prices. If this was actually a free economy the prices of materials would not be what they are now. That I can promise you.
I'll admit I only skimmed some of this, so I'll respond briefly (my time on here is short).
Zone chat is not an effective way to sell items, and is no replacement for a guild trader. So I don't find that a convincing argument. But even if you believe otherwise, it still remains unequal access to the market as some players must rely on zone chat to sell while others do not. So it is still not a free market with equal access.
In relation to my so-called "conspiracy" - I can assure it it is very much accurate to say guilds flip items on the market and then resell them at a higher value to keep prices high. I've seen it done myself. It is no conspiracy, trust me. It is a routine practice and you can go observe it taking place yourself by watching activity on Tamriel Market.
And to once again reiterate the main thrust of my comment: the whole point of the guild trader system and why it was developed by the developers in the first place was to limit the supply flow into the market and thus keep prices artificially high. That was their stated goal (I read the post myself). So not only is this game's economy not based on supply and demand, but it was purposely designed to circumvent it.
No they can't. Unless you belong to a trading guild in possession of a guild trader, you can't set the prices for anything. A free economy would be one that everyone could participate in and put up their goods for sale on the market no matter what guild they belong to. This was intentional, and done deliberately by the developers to keep prices artificially high by limiting the amount of supply coming into the market.
The "cartel" element I alluded to comes into the picture when you consider that the more popular trading hubs are dominated by specific guilds who hawk the market and then buy out their competition so they can control prices. If this was actually a free economy the prices of materials would not be what they are now. That I can promise you.
Only people who don't have a clue about player economies/markets think an central AH is a good thing.
Kiralyn2000 wrote: »
I don't care about "player economies/markets". I just want to sell stuff, with low effort, with low volume. (i.e, I'm not a "trader", I'm just a player who would periodically like to sell something).
In an AH system, I can do this - on some random day, I have one or two items that might be worth something, so I can throw them on the AH for a slight undercut (having looked at the AH to see the price; as opposed to having to have addons to poll sales across many vendors), and sell them quick. Total time/effort - a minute or two.
I don't sell enough volume to bother belonging to a trading guild, and I'm not going to stand in chat yelling "<_____> for sale!" for who knows how long, and dealing with some number of /whisper conversations. A few more gold isn't worth all that hassle.
So I just vendor or delete 95% of the drops I get from the game, that I don't personally use. Which, as Jeremy mentioned, helps keep prices high by keeping supply out of the market. Every copy of a motif/recipe/etc that I (and everyone like me) just throws away, keeps supply down to keep prices higher for the people who are willing to jump through the hoops of this game's system.
Now, if that's what you mean by "maintaining a healthy economy"... then, yeah. This system is set up to do that. But it does it by making it hard for most players to actually participate in said economy.
tl;dr - games with an AH, I actually interact with the 'economy'. This game, I don't bother, because they made it annoying & tedious for anyone who doesn't enjoy Trading as an activity.
This game's economy does not function like a free economy. Supply is intentionally kept out of the market to artificially raise prices. That is literally how this game's market structure was designed. Add that to the use of addons to hawk the market and buy up competing prices and what you have is something more akin to how a cartel would operate. So you can't really apply the rules of supply and demand to this game's economy. It was deliberately designed to keep the demand high in proportion to its supply.
I love how people keep saying "guilds" are setting the prices, buying up stuff, etc... You do realize that a guild is 500 individuals, who are basically all in competition with each other. never mind the fact that is neigh impossible to tell 500 random people with differing motivations what to do... Guilds can't buy, sell or set prices on anything, as has been said a ton of times... Only individual *players* can.
BTW, there is a reason you see the same 30 something guilds in all the top spots, it is because it is incredibly hard to run a guild capable of generating enough income to consistently do it. My guild has a decent enough trader for our needs in an outlaw refuge, and that alone is enough stress, competition and flat out work both in and out of game to make that happen for my tastes. I probably could, but have zero desire to build my guild to the point where we could afford to bid and keep one of those big city spots, I refuse to put that much "work" into a game and my members are quite happy with having the one we have. We are a social newbie based guild that runs trailing trials, has outfitted many a new player in their first real set of armor and our Discord is all about helping each other, and getting better and succeeding at the game, we are not a trade guild at all. I am aware of many other guilds like mine as well, so quite bluntly, you don't need to even be in a trade guild to have access to a public trader, which puts a huge hole in the whole "you have to join a trade guild" statements.
Also, I have been playing for a while and have noticed those "top" guilds in Mournhold, are not all the same ones as last year, or even last month or last week for that matter. So it really isn't the same guilds at all there consistently... Trade guilds come and go, succeed and fail... just like every other type of guild in the game.
I love how people keep saying "guilds" are setting the prices, buying up stuff, etc... You do realize that a guild is 500 individuals, who are basically all in competition with each other. never mind the fact that is neigh impossible to tell 500 random people with differing motivations what to do... Guilds can't buy, sell or set prices on anything, as has been said a ton of times... Only individual *players* can.
BTW, there is a reason you see the same 30 something guilds in all the top spots, it is because it is incredibly hard to run a guild capable of generating enough income to consistently do it. My guild has a decent enough trader for our needs in an outlaw refuge, and that alone is enough stress, competition and flat out work both in and out of game to make that happen for my tastes. I probably could, but have zero desire to build my guild to the point where we could afford to bid and keep one of those big city spots, I refuse to put that much "work" into a game and my members are quite happy with having the one we have. We are a social newbie based guild that runs trailing trials, has outfitted many a new player in their first real set of armor and our Discord is all about helping each other, and getting better and succeeding at the game, we are not a trade guild at all. I am aware of many other guilds like mine as well, so quite bluntly, you don't need to even be in a trade guild to have access to a public trader, which puts a huge hole in the whole "you have to join a trade guild" statements.
Also, I have been playing for a while and have noticed those "top" guilds in Mournhold, are not all the same ones as last year, or even last month or last week for that matter. So it really isn't the same guilds at all there consistently... Trade guilds come and go, succeed and fail... just like every other type of guild in the game.
Sylvermynx wrote: »The most annoying thing is that over three years I have developed a fondness for certain guilds (three in particular) who always used to be in Vivec - and now they're not reliably IN Vivec any more. I actually don't know how to find them without spending all my time running around multiple cities instead of y'know, just playing the game (I don't spend my game time in cities outside of doing writs on my mains in Vivec).
Most of the traders in Vivec now are.... not guilds I want to buy from. WAY too expensive for the most part, and they're mostly guilds I used to see in Mournhold (where I wouldn't buy from them there either). Fortunately, I don't need a whole lot from traders....
Sylvermynx wrote: »The most annoying thing is that over three years I have developed a fondness for certain guilds (three in particular) who always used to be in Vivec - and now they're not reliably IN Vivec any more. I actually don't know how to find them without spending all my time running around multiple cities instead of y'know, just playing the game (I don't spend my game time in cities outside of doing writs on my mains in Vivec).
Most of the traders in Vivec now are.... not guilds I want to buy from. WAY too expensive for the most part, and they're mostly guilds I used to see in Mournhold (where I wouldn't buy from them there either). Fortunately, I don't need a whole lot from traders....