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.
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....
If you want to let me know which guilds those are, I can keep an eye out. I do trader bids for my social guild and I also hop around a lot shopping for motifs, so I'm sure I'll find them.
Feline is in Daggerfall this week, I will assume that is one of the nice ones you are looking for. I recently left them as I really don't do enough trading anymore to justify having a second guild with a trader, but yes, they are a bunch of cool cats!
A kingdom for a new green tree passive:
"survey spots will immediately respawn upon harvesting all 6 nodes when carrying more surveys for that spot"
As for the mar prices. Zos is certainly aware. Seeing they just added 2 cp passives that increase temper/mats drop rates.
My guess is they are monitoring effect on economy over the next few months. And if needed tune them upwards. Especially met. disasembly is pretty weak at 12.5% increase.
Zodiarkslayer wrote: »<Disclaimer: This is not Baiting! This is an Elder Scrolls enthusiast worrying about his beloved community!>
Anyone talking about economy should understand something. Speculation bubbles do only burst, when creditors massively demand payment from debtors. Which then have to sell low for short term earnings.
Since neither are subject to (monetary) economic pressure in ESO, bubbles cannot pop! They might stretch, though.
The craft bag removing any cost of storage for mats is one of the major driving factors of the price increases for storable materials.
Infinite Storage without Cost! How can anyone claim that this is even remotely describable by economic theory?
There isn't a good argument for an AH. They are inferior to the current system in almost every way. All we really need is a few QoL improvements to the current system.FlopsyPrince wrote: »The modern guild trader system is lousy in many ways, but a few profit from it so they loudly support it.
You won't win the argument for a Central AH, not matter how good the argument.
Lots of drawbacks to guild traders (or worse, selling in chat). Though look for some older threads and you can see the arguments.
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.
I belong to 5 guilds. One is an actual trading guild. 4 are social guilds. One doesn't care about trading. Four consistently get traders. None have dues or sales requirements. I don't bother to sell tons of stuff. I don't bother to sell stuff every day. I don't bother to fill all 30 slots in my trading guild. I seldom sell anything in my social guilds even though we have traders, usually giving away stuff I don't need. How much more "low-volume" could I get?
It really isn't hard to "participate" in the current economy, even for "low-volume" only want to sell stuff once a year players.
luen79rwb17_ESO wrote: »This is definately worthy of an investigation. In my opinion, this is definately casued by higher amount of gold in the economy, how? Well, 1) people have figured out ways to make more gold, which I don't believe is the cause or you would have seem Youtube videos all over it, or 2) probably because the player base have expanded by a considerable amount and that is increasing the amount of gold and matt demand aswell. This last reason seems to relate to official statements recently.
There isn't a good argument for an AH. They are inferior to the current system in almost every way. All we really need is a few QoL improvements to the current system.
The current system could use the QoL improvement of a global search function or even a regional multi trader search function but you should have to travel to each location to buy. I am not for sure what you mean by "selling things efficiently" though. Selling things efficiently requires you to properly price( or under price them).FlopsyPrince wrote: »
- Finding things.
- Finding a reasonable "going price for things"
- Selling things efficiently.
Feel free to buy from the same out of the way traders us evil item flipping traders do. We aren't stopping you from shopping at the one trader in the middle of BFE. If you want the convenience of big city shopping and to have that big selection of many active sellers then your going to pay for it. But you have the freedom to get your items the same places we do. No one is stopping you.Some benefit from the lack of open information and make money flipping, so they favor keeping things as they are.
We have already beat every argument on why ESO should never and will never have an AH to death. The people who want an AH always do it for the same reason. They don't actually care about the player economy or the impact a global system would have on the value of items in the game. They don't care that many things that are currently worth my time, their time, and Fred's time to farm, would no longer be worth even picking up under an AH system. They don't care that it would ruin the game for a lot of people that consider trading a major end game activity.Your idea that "no good reason" exists would mean people would stop pushing for it.
[snip]
Farming mats is legitimately the easiest thing in the game to do. They are legitimately everywhere just lying on the ground in the entire overworld. The game throws gold and materials at you for doing the most simple craft writs to the point where you can make literally millions of gold a month by doing daily crafting writs on 10 characters. [snip] And I'm saying "poor" because there is no actual concept of being poor in an MMO. There is exactly zero cost of living in an MMO. Literally every single item in the entire game is an optional luxury lol. You can literally make over 150k/hr (PC-NA prices) running around picking mats off the ground in Craglorn. You get handed 350k in raw gold per week for doing crafting writs on 10 characters and that really only accounts for at best a third of the value you get from crafting writs.
[snip] Everyone has every right to decide what they want to charge for their time and effort. Dont like the price? Put your own effort in. Dont want to put the effort in? Pay for someone else's. [snip]
[snip] Before I was even level 50 I asked enough questions to figure out why raw materials were worth more than finished mats and ran around the bottom of a delve in Auridon killing bats to get raw leather to sell lol.
[snip] The last thing you would ever want to try to price fix is something with massive volume and is ridiculously easy to acquire. It makes absolutely no sense other than an argument of convenience for some atrocious central auction house which is a thousand times easier to price fix on anyway. Like I could see people trying to control the price of a rare motif or a costume or something, but mats? [snip] You cant go more than 50 feet in the overland without running into them by accident lol.
You want a more logical solution why the price of mats went up? Population grew 20% in a single year. Stickerbook surged demand. Massive ban waves to the bots who are still massively reduced in number to this day (again, at least on PC-NA). PvP changes banned everyone's gear now they need to make new gear. Massive CP changes switching up the meta requiring new sets. You know, logical stuff like that.
Very well put. Every argument i see as to why someone can't boils down to they want to put in low effort but want grand rewards. I make 4600ish gold of writs each day on each character and surveys and rewards basically sustain the ability to print money using daily writs. I sell my intricates and ornates as well and this pushes me over 5000 gold a day per character. It takes 5 minutes or less even with the current login lag, to do writs on a single character. That is 60k an hour. You get 9 free slots. That is 45k a day in writs and that is without selling any of the mat rewards you get for them.
When i was a newbie, i did writs and stealing on 3 characters everyday. I could make about 5k-10k a day stealing out of containers every day per character for about 15 or 20 minutes worth of work. That doesn't include some of the stuff i would launder and sell on a trader.
I then figured out what sells on traders and then started farming those items. If supply was really high because of an event or because it was new and every was farming it, i would farm other stuff that people weren't farming and sell that instead. I can spend an hour a day farming and get a hundred thousand gold or more worth of stuff to sell.
I watch broke people run by 100 containers but they don't have 5k gold to their name. I've made millions off looting places like banished cells. Everyone just blows through it a requeues for another one. I loot containers and get all kinds of goodies. Like with raw mats, money making items are laying all over the place.
I make millions because people are in to big of a hurry to pick up things they run by every day or to go to traders in out of the way places. I am literally filthy rich because other people are to lazy or in to big of a hurry to get their own stuff. Wealth requires effort. If you don't want to put in the effort, you are going to be poor.
There is a CP passive in the green tree that increases gold gained by 10% and it applies to writs. Now you make 5.1k gold per character . But yeah its absolutely absurd and the arguments make legitimately zero logical sense.
Mat prices being so high is fantastic for new players because they have a super easy activity that anyone can do and rake in huge sums of gold. Which is exactly what I did when I and many other did as a new player.
People think that the progression is step 1: new player. Step two: maxed out gold gear. Well lets be real they don't actually think that, they just present it that way because it's convenient for their argument. Really it's a bunch of end game players shelling out gold to people who put the time in to farm them including new to mid game players
I’ve rarely actually had to buy mats in this game because I took the time to level multiple crafters and all my mats were earned by me. Something to consider for those worried about this.
The game in general will ultimately be better off it it makes the game more enjoyable for the 99% not the 1%. That's simple math, no? New players need to buy everything, old players don't; if ZOS forces themselves into a closed loop the game will eventually die off. Zos is making a fundamental mistake when it caters to flippers and trolls rather than promoting a stable economy. This affects all aspects of the game not just trading. pvp trials w/e new or casual players are squeezed out if the game has too steep of a curve for buy in.
Also a lot of the items people flip are from the golden vendor. The cost of upgrade materials has directly affected that market. It's not really market economics at play here. If Zos is going to inject end game items into the economy. It just needs to equalize the economy by having all the crafting vendors sell upgrade components furnishing materials provisioning materials as well. Players can sell off their excess for cheaper still if they don't need them or want to farm for money.
Zos already has a determined price for gold gear. And it's set at the golden vendor. ZOS just needs to stabilize the economy and sell those materials for a similar price to all crafting vendors 24/7. And if 1% of the game population has a cow and leaves, ZOS is far better off retaining 99% of its player base. It's simple math.
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.
No an central AH is much better to play the marked on. One bot to rule them all.There isn't a good argument for an AH. They are inferior to the current system in almost every way. All we really need is a few QoL improvements to the current system.
VaranisArano wrote: »
Perhaps you can point me to your source. The one I'm familiar with is talking about their desire to keep high level, desirable gear from flooding the market at cheap prices.
.
No an central AH is much better to play the marked on. One bot to rule them all.