sorry bad form

shmity72

I've run a social guild since launch. we've had a trader every week minus 3 in the last year from ONLY non obligatory donations. no kidding...

since the new expansion came out i can tell you first hand that trader stalls have become more expensive by the millions.

also note: see that trader stall with hardly anything in it? could it possibly be a large trader guild trying to squelch competition? say it isn't so....

sincerely, shmity

SirAndy

I am in two small social guilds that have been struggling for a long time now to keep a weekly trader for their members.
Both guilds had traders since PC launch but now the buy-in even for crappy locations in the boonies is getting to the point where it isn't feasible anymore for a small social guild that relies on donations to raise money.

It really, really sucks ...

shmity72

prime time kiosk go from 20 to 60 mil per week. i have guild masters in my guild that run them.

potential solutions to this problem? not entirely sure but the blind bidding system is beginning to bite back.

rauyran

Increase the supply by adding more traders to bid on.

Mythreindeer

I was in a small guild very briefly that had the kiosk on Bleakrock. I did pretty well there for a couple of weeks until they lost it so I dropped out. The bidding system is less than perfect and I don’t have the answer but an alternative or adjusting the procedure probably needs consideration.

WrathOfInnos

Inflation has been crazy lately, not too surprising that trader costs have increased. It’s probably a good thing, since it means more gold is removed from the game.

Zyva

we do need gold sinks badly in eso. the ability to buy more mega houses with gold instead of crown only would help too., things like 10-20-40 million or something. People might goggle at the prices, but when there are also people walking around dropping 1, 5, 10 million a DAY or week on buying carries for gear, then the people who get paid that money just turn around and just put that back in the economy etc on items.... its just recycled over and over. Inflation is huge atm and nothing in GAME (as in, an actual pay a vendor merchant npc) actually costs in the millions other than the houses and trader bids to get rid of this massive amount of accumulated gold that is growing by the second.

To be honest, the answer might be zos itself coming up with a gold to crown exchange in game.

virtus753

rauyran wrote: »

Increase the supply by adding more traders to bid on.

I’d be very happy to see this happen.

I do have to wonder how big an impact it would have on the stability of the servers, though. PC-EU had several failed changeovers before ZOS moved flip from the weekend to a less popular time, and NA was threatening to go that way too, with delays of 20 minutes or more some weeks. The number of traders and number of bids placed on those traders presumably contributes to the workload for the server at flip. Then there’s the potential for 15,000 items to be listed at any given time per trader, which the servers have to keep track of. Ideally the servers would be able to handle this, but the game has clearly struggled with scaling in many respects, as the devs themselves have acknowledged.

corrosivechains

the past several weeks the trading stall game has been pretty brutal honestly. Wouldn't say it's a trading guild intentionally pushing out little guys, but probably more to do with Big Guilds fighting over spots and dung rolls downhill. There's one major elephant in the room which doesn't help the situation at all.

Oreyn_Bearclaw

Zyva wrote: »

we do need gold sinks badly in eso. the ability to buy more mega houses with gold instead of crown only would help too., things like 10-20-40 million or something. People might goggle at the prices, but when there are also people walking around dropping 1, 5, 10 million a DAY or week on buying carries for gear, then the people who get paid that money just turn around and just put that back in the economy etc on items.... its just recycled over and over. Inflation is huge atm and nothing in GAME (as in, an actual pay a vendor merchant npc) actually costs in the millions other than the houses and trader bids to get rid of this massive amount of accumulated gold that is growing by the second.

To be honest, the answer might be zos itself coming up with a gold to crown exchange in game.

That would of course be the best solution, but it simply wont happen. It would hurt their crown sales because they would have to price it competitively to the current crown sale market, or nobody would use it. They really need to work on both ends. They need to introduce new gold sinks AND they need to nerf new gold coming into the game by a decent amount.

I would start by removing all gold drops from crafting writs, and perhaps simultaneously increase Gold Mat drops. This would curb inflation, and put serious downward prices on these commodities. Not only would there be more mats coming in game (increase supply lowers prices), but if writs didnt pump out gold, more people would actually feel compelled to sell their excess mats (also increases supply in the actual market).

I am a perfect example of the problem. Writs have given me enough gold that I can spend recklessly, and I havent ever sold a gold mat because I simply don't need to. I just sit on piles of them. Why would I sell when they are almost certainly going to be worth more tomorrow, and when I do need them, why would I want to buy them back at a higher price? If you turned off the gold from writs, at some point, I am forced to be a seller.

Of course, this is arguably against ZOSs short term interest as well. They want people to have easy access to gold so that those people can buy crowns from other players (with excess real life money). To them, a sale is a sale and they could care less about whether it goes through a middle man. In the long term, well, it is in there interest to do something because at some point, as suggested, run away inflation does kill the economy.

jle30303

One thing I would like to see, is the ability to buy "furnished" versions of the vanilla game houses, for gold instead of crowns. You can buy them "unfurnished" for gold, after all.

shmity72

Why would I sell when they are almost certainly going to be worth more tomorrow, and when I do need them, why would I want to buy them back at a higher price?

correct supply and demand. this is why I've gone from 32 mil to 1 back to 20 within a couple months personally.

takes some doing though.

earlier i was referencing the blind bidding system. i see it as faulty but i'm not entirely sure what to 'do' about it.

Kalik_Gold

Make personal traders assistants, we can buy and park in various spots for a fee in empty stalls already in game. Not everyone wants to be in a trade guild. Sell the spots at a reasonable cost, stick these spots all over the world map...

HumbleThaumaturge

I would add suggestion to . . . ZOS should aggressively police (monitor and ban) "gold laundering" in guild stores. This practice allows the transfer of in-game gold between buyers and sellers (sellers such as bot-farming outfits).

jedtb16_ESO

shmity72 wrote: »

I've run a social guild since launch. we've had a trader every week minus 3 in the last year from ONLY non obligatory donations. no kidding...

since the new expansion came out i can tell you first hand that trader stalls have become more expensive by the millions.

also note: see that trader stall with hardly anything in it? could it possibly be a large trader guild trying to squelch competition? say it isn't so....

sincerely, shmity

it is called competition. a feature of capitalist systems and working as intended.

shmity72

the current system of trading kiosks and their acquisition lends too much ability for their to be cabals in game. this conspirafact, could lead to dire consequences as mentioned in my original title.

Vhozek

The only way to fix a problem like this is by highlighting the problem to its extreme degree through practice so they're forced to fix it.

wolfie1.0.

Oreyn_Bearclaw wrote: »

Zyva wrote: »

we do need gold sinks badly in eso. the ability to buy more mega houses with gold instead of crown only would help too., things like 10-20-40 million or something. People might goggle at the prices, but when there are also people walking around dropping 1, 5, 10 million a DAY or week on buying carries for gear, then the people who get paid that money just turn around and just put that back in the economy etc on items.... its just recycled over and over. Inflation is huge atm and nothing in GAME (as in, an actual pay a vendor merchant npc) actually costs in the millions other than the houses and trader bids to get rid of this massive amount of accumulated gold that is growing by the second.

To be honest, the answer might be zos itself coming up with a gold to crown exchange in game.

That would of course be the best solution, but it simply wont happen. It would hurt their crown sales because they would have to price it competitively to the current crown sale market, or nobody would use it. They really need to work on both ends. They need to introduce new gold sinks AND they need to nerf new gold coming into the game by a decent amount.

I would start by removing all gold drops from crafting writs, and perhaps simultaneously increase Gold Mat drops. This would curb inflation, and put serious downward prices on these commodities. Not only would there be more mats coming in game (increase supply lowers prices), but if writs didnt pump out gold, more people would actually feel compelled to sell their excess mats (also increases supply in the actual market).

I am a perfect example of the problem. Writs have given me enough gold that I can spend recklessly, and I havent ever sold a gold mat because I simply don't need to. I just sit on piles of them. Why would I sell when they are almost certainly going to be worth more tomorrow, and when I do need them, why would I want to buy them back at a higher price? If you turned off the gold from writs, at some point, I am forced to be a seller.

Of course, this is arguably against ZOSs short term interest as well. They want people to have easy access to gold so that those people can buy crowns from other players (with excess real life money). To them, a sale is a sale and they could care less about whether it goes through a middle man. In the long term, well, it is in there interest to do something because at some point, as suggested, run away inflation does kill the economy.

Changing writ gold won't do enough to curb inflation. Also the craft bag is likely the number one reason that people don't sell excess mats and prices

• i would remove ALL passives that directly increase gold generation and replace them. As in any passives that increase gold from stealing, loot, etc.
• further scale repair costs and teleportation fees to account for inflation.
• Increase the amount of traders
• Add much sought after weapons to weekend golden vender (ie Mothers Sorrow Inferno, Medusa Inferno, etc)
• Allow players to BUY event tickets with gold: Since event tickets are earned by in game activities there should be no harm in doing this if priced adequately. I know many players that would pay gold just to by pass PVP events or PVE events.
• Allow players to convert gold to seals of endeavors, that DO NOT exceed the daily/weekly limits for that day.
• Allow horse training to be completed faster, but scale it to do so and increase it to 500 gold per tick, then apply an exponential factor to it to get it done quicker, with a 20hour cool down on each tick. this would make it so that you can max out the mount in one day, but to do so would be exponential more costly than doing so normally, thus speeding up the process without impacting people that want to take it slower.
• Add more bank/character storage slots, but scale the costs even higher.
• remove gold from daily rewards and Seals of endeavors rewards
• Sell more houses for GOLD
• Sell more MOUNTS for GOLD
• Sell more PETS for GOLD
• sell more OUTFIT Styles for gold
• Allow conversions of gold to transmute stones or undaunted keys something like 500k for 1 key or 20 transmute stones or something like that.
• Place a soft limit on what gets stored in the craft bag, Players can exceed said limit however, introduce a weekly maintenance fee paid in gold to keep the excessive items in the bag. failure to pay results in the deletion of said items. won't be popular but introduces incentive to use it or lose it.

really what needs to happen is that the gold sinks need to be spread out so much that you can avoid most of the gold sinks but not ALL of them. Also there needs to be a real incentive for players to willingly sink gold OUT of the game. Part of this is really on ZOS, because for one other than the "FREE" event houses they have offered they have not given us a large home to buy with gold for quite some time. They also have not really added anything NEW to the golden vendor or the luxury vendor in that time 1 new furnishing a week is NOT enough to make a meaningful impact. ZOS you need to adjust your gold sinks or create new ones or inflation is going to run out of control.

shmity72

jed your response is contrary to the point i'm making concerning competition in and of itself.

one day not long ago someone with a spare 200 mil bought all the trader kiosks in a busy town. and put nothing in them...

i know there are people in the game with half a billion.

given the state of the trading kiosk acquisition and that kind of money laying around, (that kind of money will always be laying around), how volatile does that make the 'capitalist' 'working as intended' process of the game?

jaws343

All of these proposals to remove gold sources from the system would destroy the console markets.

We do not have addons that do crafting writs for us. If we want to do writs on 18 characters, we have to spend time doing so mostly manually. The time sink to do the same things on console as on PC are much greater. So adjusting the game's sources of gold to combat a strictly PC problem would be terrible. A PC problem that is mostly a result of market and crafting writ addons. The simpler solution would be to disable those addons. There is a reason that console markets aren't wildly overinflated, and that starts and ends with addons.

VaranisArano

shmity72 wrote: »

jed your response is contrary to the point i'm making concerning competition in and of itself.

one day not long ago someone with a spare 200 mil bought all the trader kiosks in a busy town. and put nothing in them...

i know there are people in the game with half a billion.

given the state of the trading kiosk acquisition and that kind of money laying around, (that kind of money will always be laying around), how volatile does that make the 'capitalist' 'working as intended' process of the game?

Is that really a problem for ZOS? The PC market has a fair bit of inflation, so higher trader bids equals more gold taken out in gold sinks.

It might be rough on the individual guilds who can't keep up with the deep pockets of others, but higher bidding is not necessarily a problem for ZOS right now.

Oreyn_Bearclaw

wtlonewolf20 wrote: »

Oreyn_Bearclaw wrote: »

Zyva wrote: »

we do need gold sinks badly in eso. the ability to buy more mega houses with gold instead of crown only would help too., things like 10-20-40 million or something. People might goggle at the prices, but when there are also people walking around dropping 1, 5, 10 million a DAY or week on buying carries for gear, then the people who get paid that money just turn around and just put that back in the economy etc on items.... its just recycled over and over. Inflation is huge atm and nothing in GAME (as in, an actual pay a vendor merchant npc) actually costs in the millions other than the houses and trader bids to get rid of this massive amount of accumulated gold that is growing by the second.

To be honest, the answer might be zos itself coming up with a gold to crown exchange in game.

That would of course be the best solution, but it simply wont happen. It would hurt their crown sales because they would have to price it competitively to the current crown sale market, or nobody would use it. They really need to work on both ends. They need to introduce new gold sinks AND they need to nerf new gold coming into the game by a decent amount.

I would start by removing all gold drops from crafting writs, and perhaps simultaneously increase Gold Mat drops. This would curb inflation, and put serious downward prices on these commodities. Not only would there be more mats coming in game (increase supply lowers prices), but if writs didnt pump out gold, more people would actually feel compelled to sell their excess mats (also increases supply in the actual market).

I am a perfect example of the problem. Writs have given me enough gold that I can spend recklessly, and I havent ever sold a gold mat because I simply don't need to. I just sit on piles of them. Why would I sell when they are almost certainly going to be worth more tomorrow, and when I do need them, why would I want to buy them back at a higher price? If you turned off the gold from writs, at some point, I am forced to be a seller.

Of course, this is arguably against ZOSs short term interest as well. They want people to have easy access to gold so that those people can buy crowns from other players (with excess real life money). To them, a sale is a sale and they could care less about whether it goes through a middle man. In the long term, well, it is in there interest to do something because at some point, as suggested, run away inflation does kill the economy.

Changing writ gold won't do enough to curb inflation. Also the craft bag is likely the number one reason that people don't sell excess mats and prices

• i would remove ALL passives that directly increase gold generation and replace them. As in any passives that increase gold from stealing, loot, etc.
• further scale repair costs and teleportation fees to account for inflation.
• Increase the amount of traders
• Add much sought after weapons to weekend golden vender (ie Mothers Sorrow Inferno, Medusa Inferno, etc)
• Allow players to BUY event tickets with gold: Since event tickets are earned by in game activities there should be no harm in doing this if priced adequately. I know many players that would pay gold just to by pass PVP events or PVE events.
• Allow players to convert gold to seals of endeavors, that DO NOT exceed the daily/weekly limits for that day.
• Allow horse training to be completed faster, but scale it to do so and increase it to 500 gold per tick, then apply an exponential factor to it to get it done quicker, with a 20hour cool down on each tick. this would make it so that you can max out the mount in one day, but to do so would be exponential more costly than doing so normally, thus speeding up the process without impacting people that want to take it slower.
• Add more bank/character storage slots, but scale the costs even higher.
• remove gold from daily rewards and Seals of endeavors rewards
• Sell more houses for GOLD
• Sell more MOUNTS for GOLD
• Sell more PETS for GOLD
• sell more OUTFIT Styles for gold
• Allow conversions of gold to transmute stones or undaunted keys something like 500k for 1 key or 20 transmute stones or something like that.
• Place a soft limit on what gets stored in the craft bag, Players can exceed said limit however, introduce a weekly maintenance fee paid in gold to keep the excessive items in the bag. failure to pay results in the deletion of said items. won't be popular but introduces incentive to use it or lose it.

really what needs to happen is that the gold sinks need to be spread out so much that you can avoid most of the gold sinks but not ALL of them. Also there needs to be a real incentive for players to willingly sink gold OUT of the game. Part of this is really on ZOS, because for one other than the "FREE" event houses they have offered they have not given us a large home to buy with gold for quite some time. They also have not really added anything NEW to the golden vendor or the luxury vendor in that time 1 new furnishing a week is NOT enough to make a meaningful impact. ZOS you need to adjust your gold sinks or create new ones or inflation is going to run out of control.

To be clear, I said I would start with that. Would it fix the problem of inflation by itself, no probably not. It is certainly not a popular opinion, as selfishly, a lot of people rely on writs for gold (I am one of them). That said, it is a HUGE influx of gold into this game. I dont know any other way to generate 100k of gold out of thin air in under an hour. Maybe you could do it with undaunted plunder in trials, but that is about it. A lot of players do that once a day. I can generate approx 700k a week out of thin air while watching 2 episodes a day of whatever netflix show I am binging.

As gold sources go, writs are very high on the list. I also dont disagree with any of your suggestions, as they would all move the needle. The issue is, almost all of them will cut directly into ZOS's bottom line. It's easy to say, hey, sell all the CS shinys for gold, but ZOS will NEVER do that. The other issue is most of your suggestions address gold sinks, and not gold sources. They have to work from both ends. Certainly agree that the new CP passive for gold needs deleted like yesterday, but writs are the proverbial elephant in the room.

shmity72

varnis thank you for the thoughtful and fair response.

yes it is a problem for zos. without checks and balances 'by zos' and leaving the stability of the entire games economy to whom has the cash...yah that's a problem for zos. please don't take this the wrong way I'm not being accusatory. It's a simple given and conclusion.

shmity72

so zos. solution: globalize the economy.

AlnilamE

shmity72 wrote: »

jed your response is contrary to the point i'm making concerning competition in and of itself.

one day not long ago someone with a spare 200 mil bought all the trader kiosks in a busy town. and put nothing in them...

i know there are people in the game with half a billion.

given the state of the trading kiosk acquisition and that kind of money laying around, (that kind of money will always be laying around), how volatile does that make the 'capitalist' 'working as intended' process of the game?

You know that you need a guild with 50 people in it to bid on a trader, and that each guild can only win one trader, right?

So the above was a coordinated effort and not just one guy with spare gold (even if it did blow out a bunch of gold from the game, which is never a bad thing)

ixthUA

Just a side story from lineage 2 from over a decade ago. There was an official server, and it had lots of botters, farming gold and selling it for cash. After one update gold price in cash started reducing over time. There were rumors, but no ifficial reply. A half of year later information became public: one item, bought in npc shop could be resold back for more than it was bought for. So there was a group of people who discovered this and was farming money this way, inflating the market.
I do not say that there is neccessarily a bug, but since cp 2.0 gold did inflate a lot. There is a passive that increases gold earned by 10%, but at the same time crown prices became 250% higher. I think for whatever reason this is incorrect and the source should be addressed.
I do not know the source of inflation, but it affects prices for everyone, including those whose income didn't increase. Not just crown prices, but prices for equipment and crafting materials.

kojou

The best gold sink IMO besides traders would be consumables like potions and food. If we could buy spell power and weapon power potions with gold then that would take a lot of gold out of the economy.

A lot of other things would be a one time purchase (like houses) and would have a short term effect, but over the longer term would diminish. It wouldn't hurt to do this though especially for some of the older houses just to take a lot of gold out of the economy.

I would like to see the number of kiosks increase in all of the major areas too. I think even if you doubled them there would still be a lot more guilds that want them than there are available. The major towns would remain expensive while the ones on the fringe would go down a bit and allow more guilds to have traders, so instead of the gold getting returned to the mid to low tier trade guilds they would at least get a trader and some gold would come out of the economy.

Tandor

shmity72 wrote: »

varnis thank you for the thoughtful and fair response.

yes it is a problem for zos. without checks and balances 'by zos' and leaving the stability of the entire games economy to whom has the cash...yah that's a problem for zos. please don't take this the wrong way I'm not being accusatory. It's a simple given and conclusion.

Unfortunately, ZOS has created a situation in which the entire game's economy relates solely to guild trading. The minority of players who commit seriously to trading run the economy effectively for themselves, they are the only ones with the impactful amount of gold and they either sink it into their trader bids, use it to buy each others' overpriced items, trade in crowns or leave it in the bank. Everyone else trades with NPCs (and in a few cases at lower prices with other players through zone chat) and that has zero impact on the game's economy.

I've played plenty of MMOs where forum discussion on the game's economy runs to many pages because every player is impacted by it, but here the odd topic comes up from time to time (usually when a small guild is priced out of the bidding market) and attracts a page or two of comments because most players aren't affected. ESO doesn't really have a fully functioning economy in the normal sense, it just has a niche guild trading market and that's that.

corrosivechains

shmity72 wrote: »

jed your response is contrary to the point i'm making concerning competition in and of itself.

one day not long ago someone with a spare 200 mil bought all the trader kiosks in a busy town. and put nothing in them...

i know there are people in the game with half a billion.

given the state of the trading kiosk acquisition and that kind of money laying around, (that kind of money will always be laying around), how volatile does that make the 'capitalist' 'working as intended' process of the game?

This actually sounds like a reportable offense. I'd say if it's something you see happen again, get screenshots and report them for griefing.

spartaxoxo

jedtb16_ESO wrote: »

shmity72 wrote: »

I've run a social guild since launch. we've had a trader every week minus 3 in the last year from ONLY non obligatory donations. no kidding...

since the new expansion came out i can tell you first hand that trader stalls have become more expensive by the millions.

also note: see that trader stall with hardly anything in it? could it possibly be a large trader guild trying to squelch competition? say it isn't so....

sincerely, shmity

it is called competition. a feature of capitalist systems and working as intended.

Healthy capitalist governments limit this kind of thing exactly because it is anticompetitive, otherwise you end up with monopolies

Hallothiel

Like how the discussion utterly ignores the fact that this is a PC problem ONLY.

As @jaws343 said, this would detrimentally affect console economies.

Just get rid of the add on that does the writs for you - that might be a good start.