adding gasoline to fire

Northwold

ForzaRammer wrote: »

Northwold wrote: »

ForzaRammer wrote: »

Kiralyn2000 wrote: »

ForzaRammer wrote: »

Kiralyn2000 wrote: »

ForzaRammer wrote: »

Kiralyn2000 wrote: »

Wandering_Immigrant wrote: »

I agree OP. And to the people saying 100k is a drop in the ocean or whatever, it's actually not 100k it's literally billions being added to the economy.

For a bit of perspective let's look at the average larger guild, since people like to say that kiosk bids are the only meaningful gold sink. We'll say the average (larger guils) has 400 members, since not all are going to have 500. That's 40,000,000 gold being added to the game by one guild alone. There's 18 guilds located in the Capitol cities, that's 720,000,000 gold..

And yet, 40mil gold is just ~9500 characters doing a set of daily writs (4200 gold). Or just 1200 players doing writs on 8 characters. Which happens every day, not once a month.

Plus there's all the other delve/zone/dungeon dailies, grinding, selling excess junk to vendors, etc.

Yes, when you apply MATH!™, that 100k gold turns into Scary Big Numbers.

...which still are barely a drop in the bucket, because Even Scarier & Bigger Numbers are being generated every single day.

And that's why there's inflation. Not because of one little giveaway.

I agree, direct gold from repeatable quest is a main cause of inflation, thus should be removed

Which would kind of suck for those people who aren't traders, and for whom that gold is a large % of their entire income.

That's the hard thing about balancing MMOs - making sure that the things you do to slow down the top players, don't disproportionately screw over the low end ones.

(I remember one time that WoW nerfed the entire resource recovery system because high-end raiders had figured out how to have effectively-infinite sustain... and Joe Random Leveling Dude ended up having to rest & drink recovery consumables after every single overland trash fight.)

No, the mats from the daily writs would still be valuable, the quest is still worth the time even after removing the direct gold reward.

The direct gold is not a large part of the income now, your claim is completely false.

I'm talking about people who don't trade. They get 0 gold from mats, just the quest gold (and selling ornates to the vendor).

(that would be all of us who have nothing to do with this game's dumpster fire of a trading system. Been playing since 2016, I've never sold a single thing to another player. I've also never had more than ~1.7mil gold.)

So many “us” and “i”, it’s all about you i guess, have you thought that trading with other player is literally a feature in every MMO

And have you thought that only in one is it gated behind guilds...?

What you talking about? People can sell in zone chat in eso, just like other games

As has been discussed to death, spamming zone chat is not a sensible selling mechanism. Other games, inter alia, use auction houses open to everyone. And while people can argue till the cows come home about the merits and demerits of auction houses in ESO, the fact remains that ESO gates its only sensible selling mechanism behind guilds, and behind the random strangers running those guilds (even automated guilds administered by the servers themselves would be an improvement).

A lot of people simply will not join guilds. They do not want to. And they are de facto cut off from one side of the player economy while fully exposed to its rising prices if they try to buy something.

As I said above, these forums are self selecting and tend to attract players who are not entirely representative of ESO's player base. So these conversations generally degenerate into "you're lazy for not joining a guild", "i make a million a day what's your problem", "spamming zone chat is an absolutely flawless mechanism (that I don't actually use) because reasons", "but the servers will crash if the game isn't the way I want it to be", etc.

There's a limit to how far this discussion can productively get if people refuse to recognise the existence of a large slice of the playerbase who do not want to and will not engage with guilds, and if people are going blithely to claim that a totally useless (and ridiculous) mechanism -- WTS spam in chat -- is the bee's knees.

Holycannoli

Northwold wrote: »

As has been discussed to death, spamming zone chat is not a sensible selling mechanism. Other games, inter alia, use auction houses open to everyone. And while people can argue till the cows come home about the merits and demerits of auction houses in ESO, the fact remains that ESO gates its only sensible selling mechanism behind guilds, and behind the random strangers running those guilds (even automated guilds administered by the servers themselves would be an improvement).

A lot of people simply will not join guilds. They do not want to. And they are de facto cut off from one side of the player economy while fully exposed to its rising prices if they try to buy something.

As I said above, these forums are self selecting and tend to attract players who are not entirely representative of ESO's player base. So these conversations generally degenerate into "you're lazy for not joining a guild", "i make a million a day what's your problem", "spamming zone chat is an absolutely flawless mechanism because reasons", etc. There's a limit to how far this discussion can productively get if people refuse to recognise the existence of a large slice of the playerbase who do not want to and will not engage with guilds and if people blithely assert that a totally useless mechanism -- WTS spam in chat -- is the bee's knees.

In Project 1999 (classic Everquest server) you literally stand there in a zone the players designated for trading and spam chat if you want to buy and sell.

In virtually every MMORPG since then there has been a global auction house. Convenience and QoL can't be beat.

In ESO you have to join guilds in order to buy and sell, or you can pretend you're back in 1999 spamming "WTS" over and over with zero success.

It's a giant step backwards. Not sure why the devs insist on keeping it, other than the fact that it's this game's only real money sink and supposedly it was to help deter botting.

ForzaRammer

Northwold wrote: »

ForzaRammer wrote: »

Northwold wrote: »

ForzaRammer wrote: »

Kiralyn2000 wrote: »

ForzaRammer wrote: »

Kiralyn2000 wrote: »

ForzaRammer wrote: »

Kiralyn2000 wrote: »

Wandering_Immigrant wrote: »

I agree OP. And to the people saying 100k is a drop in the ocean or whatever, it's actually not 100k it's literally billions being added to the economy.

For a bit of perspective let's look at the average larger guild, since people like to say that kiosk bids are the only meaningful gold sink. We'll say the average (larger guils) has 400 members, since not all are going to have 500. That's 40,000,000 gold being added to the game by one guild alone. There's 18 guilds located in the Capitol cities, that's 720,000,000 gold..

And yet, 40mil gold is just ~9500 characters doing a set of daily writs (4200 gold). Or just 1200 players doing writs on 8 characters. Which happens every day, not once a month.

Plus there's all the other delve/zone/dungeon dailies, grinding, selling excess junk to vendors, etc.

Yes, when you apply MATH!™, that 100k gold turns into Scary Big Numbers.

...which still are barely a drop in the bucket, because Even Scarier & Bigger Numbers are being generated every single day.

And that's why there's inflation. Not because of one little giveaway.

I agree, direct gold from repeatable quest is a main cause of inflation, thus should be removed

Which would kind of suck for those people who aren't traders, and for whom that gold is a large % of their entire income.

That's the hard thing about balancing MMOs - making sure that the things you do to slow down the top players, don't disproportionately screw over the low end ones.

(I remember one time that WoW nerfed the entire resource recovery system because high-end raiders had figured out how to have effectively-infinite sustain... and Joe Random Leveling Dude ended up having to rest & drink recovery consumables after every single overland trash fight.)

No, the mats from the daily writs would still be valuable, the quest is still worth the time even after removing the direct gold reward.

The direct gold is not a large part of the income now, your claim is completely false.

I'm talking about people who don't trade. They get 0 gold from mats, just the quest gold (and selling ornates to the vendor).

(that would be all of us who have nothing to do with this game's dumpster fire of a trading system. Been playing since 2016, I've never sold a single thing to another player. I've also never had more than ~1.7mil gold.)

So many “us” and “i”, it’s all about you i guess, have you thought that trading with other player is literally a feature in every MMO

And have you thought that only in one is it gated behind guilds...?

What you talking about? People can sell in zone chat in eso, just like other games

As has been discussed to death, spamming zone chat is not a sensible selling mechanism. Other games, inter alia, use auction houses open to everyone. And while people can argue till the cows come home about the merits and demerits of auction houses in ESO, the fact remains that ESO gates its only sensible selling mechanism behind guilds, and behind the random strangers running those guilds (even automated guilds administrated by the servers themselves would be an improvement).

A lot of people simply will not join guilds. They do not want to. And they are de facto cut off from one side of the player economy while fully exposed to its rising prices if they try to buy something.

As I said above, these forums are self selecting and tend to attract players who are not entirely representative of ESO's player base. So these conversations generally degenerate into "you're lazy for not joining a guild", "i make a million a day what's your problem", etc. There's a limit to how far this discussion can productively get if people refuse to recognise the existence of a large slice of the playerbase who do not want to and will not engage with guilds.

Zone chat not viable? Not sensible? Why exactly?

Auction house is no representation of real life, Amazon and aliexpress 3rd party sellers offer same item for different price all the time. Guild trader is a much more realistic store system.

freespirit

meekmiko wrote: »

More goldsinks would help.
Release more houses and mounts with the option to be bought with gold.

This! 👍

I would gladly throw my millions at houses, mounts and pets that could be brought with gold and I'm sure many others would too(I have all the current houses available for gold).

Howevet those three things are probably all best seller's in the Crown Store, whether via crates or individually, so I fear it will never happen! 🙄

K9002

ForzaRammer wrote: »

Zone chat not viable? Not sensible? Why exactly?

Because you have to happen to be in the right zone and the right instance of this zone. Busy zones like alliance capitals, Craglorn or Vivec run multiple concurrent instances and we have very little control over which one we'll be assigned to. Zone chat trading works well only during events, when people are concentrated around event quest givers and looking to barter for various event prizes. Lots of sellers and willing buyers in the same place. It doesn't work at all when you're trying to sell niche items, rare and expensive stuff and similar things which have few potential buyers.

ForzaRammer

K9002 wrote: »

ForzaRammer wrote: »

Zone chat not viable? Not sensible? Why exactly?

Because you have to happen to be in the right zone and the right instance of this zone. Busy zones like alliance capitals, Craglorn or Vivec run multiple concurrent instances and we have very little control over which one we'll be assigned to. Zone chat trading works well only during events, when people are concentrated around event quest givers and looking to barter for various event prizes. Lots of sellers and willing buyers in the same place. It doesn't work at all when you're trying to sell niche items, rare and expensive stuff and similar things which have few potential buyers.

1. Zone chat is not instanced based, plenty times when i get group invite from zone WTS guy, game tell me to port to the other instance

2. Selling expensive stuff like rare furnishings patterns is a first world problem, not a problem for super casual with no access to trade guild

zaria

Holycannoli wrote: »

Northwold wrote: »

As has been discussed to death, spamming zone chat is not a sensible selling mechanism. Other games, inter alia, use auction houses open to everyone. And while people can argue till the cows come home about the merits and demerits of auction houses in ESO, the fact remains that ESO gates its only sensible selling mechanism behind guilds, and behind the random strangers running those guilds (even automated guilds administered by the servers themselves would be an improvement).

A lot of people simply will not join guilds. They do not want to. And they are de facto cut off from one side of the player economy while fully exposed to its rising prices if they try to buy something.

As I said above, these forums are self selecting and tend to attract players who are not entirely representative of ESO's player base. So these conversations generally degenerate into "you're lazy for not joining a guild", "i make a million a day what's your problem", "spamming zone chat is an absolutely flawless mechanism because reasons", etc. There's a limit to how far this discussion can productively get if people refuse to recognise the existence of a large slice of the playerbase who do not want to and will not engage with guilds and if people blithely assert that a totally useless mechanism -- WTS spam in chat -- is the bee's knees.

In Project 1999 (classic Everquest server) you literally stand there in a zone the players designated for trading and spam chat if you want to buy and sell.

In virtually every MMORPG since then there has been a global auction house. Convenience and QoL can't be beat.

In ESO you have to join guilds in order to buy and sell, or you can pretend you're back in 1999 spamming "WTS" over and over with zero success.

It's a giant step backwards. Not sure why the devs insist on keeping it, other than the fact that it's this game's only real money sink and supposedly it was to help deter botting.

Action houses don't really work well with megaservers. WOW has over hundred servers each with their own economy. ESO has 6. The real issue is not performance but how min maxed it would become with the larger base. For cheaper items everybody would underbid each other because you have limited number of sale slots, For expensive items price would go way up.
All the traders adds serious fuzziness who would not exist with an action house, this keep the prices of the mid range items relevant and the expensive stuff lower.
And guild stores make it much harder to corner an marked who would be trivial with an action house and enough gold.

Now having NPC run guild store everybody could use but they are more expensive and take an larger cut.
Have the thief guild run them

Casul

Writs are the problem, but gold on top doesn't help.

joerginger

If writs are the problem, so are all daily quests.

Sarannah

There is no problem at all! Everything balances itself out, as always in any economy. Low end items rise in value, and high end items rise in value accordingly. This is why ZOS doesn't do anything about it, because an economy is naturally fluid. This is how the economy is supposed to work.

I can't believe some players actually blame a specific part of the game(crafting dailies) for prices rising. This entire thread is just a big conspiracy theory from players who do not want to take the time to invest in a certain part of the game, and actually want that part to be diminished for the players that do take part in it. Harming the players that actually do spend their time in a specific part of the game, in this case the crafting dailies which are apparently the target.

But gold comes from many sources, singling one out as this thread does, is only a guess and seems like a personal vendetta against a certain part of the game. Gold sources: Scrying/excavation, overland quests, Mirri's perk, dailies, monster drops, loot selling, thieving, etc.

PS: If you think something costs too much on the guildtraders, you have the option to simply not buy it!
PPS: As someone who has done crafting dailies for almost two years straight, it isn't as easy as it seems. I burn through 10k of each material every 8-10 days, jewelry even faster. I am always out of oko runes and mudcrab chitin. It isn't as simple as activating and handing in the quests. It is a real investment, like any part of the game! Besides the resources it is a huge time investment as well. (at the moment I am running hundreds of surveys per day, just so I can play High Isle for a few weeks without having to gather resources)

Mr_Stach

Sounds like we need to just purge all Gold and start over. Then we can be right back where we are again in like 3 years

Vaoh

joerginger wrote: »

If writs are the problem, so are all daily quests.

Not sure about that. A daily typical zone quest requires actual players to be involved and takes time.

Daily writs provide quite a lot of gold if done consistently. More importantly they are automated on PC to require minimal player actions. You can complete an account’s worth of writs (up to 126 writ quests) compared to 1 or 2 world boss/delve quests. People then have multiple writ farm accounts.

Writs should certainly not provide gold as a reward.

Heartrage

They just need to add more gold sinks. If they removed the bank upgrade cap with increasingly higher prices, increased the max listing number per guild and added some cosmetics/mounts/pets for high prices, we would see the value of gold drop. I don’t think 100k for login in really cause the inflation.

Sarannah

Vaoh wrote: »

joerginger wrote: »

If writs are the problem, so are all daily quests.

Not sure about that. A daily typical zone quest requires actual players to be involved and takes time.

Daily writs provide quite a lot of gold if done consistently. More importantly they are automated on PC to require minimal player actions. You can complete an account’s worth of writs (up to 126 writ quests) compared to 1 or 2 world boss/delve quests. People then have multiple writ farm accounts.

Writs should certainly not provide gold as a reward.

There is a reason hardly anyone does that, because it is impossible. Do you know how much farming time, collecting surveys time, and doing the actual quests time this takes. Not to mention the devotion over a longer period of time.

Anyone that does a full account of crafting dailies(or more) for over a month, is investing a huge amount of time and effort to do so. As they would need to massively restock their resources. Try it for yourself, and you will see it is not as easy as just activating and handing in the crafting dailies.

PS: PC EU, not using any add-ons!

Kesstryl

I think the issue has to do more with market flippers than any way players earn gold in game. Some people collected a large amount of gold over the years and now have enough to corner the market and mop up anything that undervalues their top line. As a casual player who has no interest in playing the market and doesn't have all day to farm, I never made that much in a day, and I never held on to a million for long as I'd use it to buy houses and furnishing plans. Casuals simply have no way to bring in that much, especially those of us who have full time jobs and families. It would just anger the casual player base if income was also nerfed on top of the many nerfs this game as received over the years due to angry people wanting to wreck the game for others because they feel that's better than asking for solutions where everyone wins.

Vaoh

Sarannah wrote: »

Vaoh wrote: »

joerginger wrote: »

If writs are the problem, so are all daily quests.

Not sure about that. A daily typical zone quest requires actual players to be involved and takes time.

Daily writs provide quite a lot of gold if done consistently. More importantly they are automated on PC to require minimal player actions. You can complete an account’s worth of writs (up to 126 writ quests) compared to 1 or 2 world boss/delve quests. People then have multiple writ farm accounts.

Writs should certainly not provide gold as a reward.

There is a reason hardly anyone does that, because it is impossible. Do you know how much farming time, collecting surveys time, and doing the actual quests time this takes. Not to mention the devotion over a longer period of time.

Anyone that does a full account of crafting dailies(or more) for over a month, is investing a huge amount of time and effort to do so. As they would need to massively restock their resources. Try it for yourself, and you will see it is not as easy as just activating and handing in the crafting dailies.

PS: PC EU, not using any add-ons!

Once again, the writ farming process can be automated on PC. In other words, it performs actions without human input. Login, pick up quest, craft items, turn in quest, bank item, logout, repeat..... You set it up once and maybe do occasional “maintenance” but otherwise it’s just an account sending you enormous amounts of materials/gold. Craft writ item materials are dirt cheap too and most even free from hirelings.

I’m not sure what point you’re trying to push but there is catastrophic inflation on PC, yet only minor inflation on console. Buying gold is 2500% more expensive on PS NA vs PC NA because on PC there is trillions more gold in the economy.

joerginger

I have been doing writs for almost four years now and I can't fathom any way to automate any of this, "without human input", no less.

As others have already pointed out, very soon you would run out of resources to do anything anyway. This looks like rumours or it's even intentional spreading of misinformation. There have been several people putting forth such claims. Wonder why.

Heartrage

@joerginger
Writs could definitely be automated, we already have addons like dolbugon lazy writ crafter that automate the crafting part and the opening of boxes, with a program that input characters movements and by using the craft bag to stock the ressources in advance to complete the quests, it could be done easily. Even the inventory management could be simplified by automatically selling the weapons and by storing master writs, gold and deleting the undesired items. The only thing that would have to be done manually would be selling on the auction house and buying more materials every once in a while. On an 18 characters account, with max bank space and eso plus, logging in for two hours every week would probably be enough to do the manual part.

LashanW

Heartrage wrote: »

with a program that input characters movements

This I believe is against ToS and should be a bannable offence.

joerginger

If you say so. I'm out.

K9002

joerginger wrote: »

I have been doing writs for almost four years now and I can't fathom any way to automate any of this, "without human input", no less.

As others have already pointed out, very soon you would run out of resources to do anything anyway. This looks like rumours or it's even intentional spreading of misinformation. There have been several people putting forth such claims. Wonder why.

I don't know about automation through addons because I don't use the lazy writ crafter. Though the PC version of ESO has a much better UI that can be navigated faster even without addons, and this also contributes to the ease and speed of churning out writs on multiple characters.

Equipment writs are entirely self-sustainable up to tier 3 materials (orichalcum/cotton) if hirelings are used, I've been doing this for more than a year with characters that never leave Vivec and never buy materials. Lower level items take less materials per piece than ruby tier CP 150 items, some of them go as low as 4 units. At iron/jute tier the boxes yield either a survey or more likely 20 units (yes, it's 20 not 15) of tier 1 material + 50% chance for an intricate item. The only materials that need to be sourced externally are basic style materials because hirelings don't bring enough of them. Easily done with the character that's actually played.

This method yields the same amount of gold from the quest itself, a bit less gold from selling ornate items and less potential income from tempering materials. But materials on their own don't create brand new gold, unless they're sold to NPC vendors.

Sarannah

After reading the replies, I can see why we see things differently. I assume players play the game, farm the resources themselves, and are doing crafting dailies at their maximum skilllevel. While you guys assume players simply use add-ons and buy all the materials they need.
Personally I do not buy the basic materials, only the extremely rare materials like oko/mudcrab chitin. So I don't know the prices for the base materials, but to me it seems like that would practically mean all earnings would go to being able to even do the writs. Which seems counterproductive to me. And would explain why not many players actually do all the crafting dailies.

Maybe the problem is the gold reward from skilllevel 1 crafting dailies being the same as the maximum skilllevel gold reward from the crafting dailies. As doing the crafting dailies with maximum skilllevel is a major time/material investment, unlike a character level 50 person who is doing them at crafting skilllevel 1.

This makes me feel ZOS needs to link the character level and the crafting skilllevel to the crafting daily gold rewards(only for equipment writs). For instance: a level 10 gets the regular amount of gold a skilllevel 1 crafting daily would reward, but a level 50 would only get 1/10th of the gold a skilllevel 1 crafting daily would reward. While a level 50 with maximum crafting skilllevel would still get the regular full gold reward. Ofcourse this would have to be calculated for all character levels against all crafting skilllevels and all gold rewards, but you get the point. (Note: This should only be done for equipment writs!)

Heartrage

@LashanW I don’t disagree, but with sharding and by spreading characters between different cities, who would report them? I manually farmed writs for months on 18 characters. Often, I would do it late after work and would only do my writs before logging off. If someone saw me playing, I would’ve probably been indistinguishable from a bot for most players.

My point isn’t to encourage this practice but simply to show how exploitable these quests can be by cheating in the game.

I also want to precise that I do not engage with those practices. I make my gold through legitimate trading.

peacenote

Northwold wrote: »

A lot of people simply will not join guilds. They do not want to. And they are de facto cut off from one side of the player economy while fully exposed to its rising prices if they try to buy something.

As I said above, these forums are self selecting and tend to attract players who are not entirely representative of ESO's player base. So these conversations generally degenerate into "you're lazy for not joining a guild", "i make a million a day what's your problem", "spamming zone chat is an absolutely flawless mechanism (that I don't actually use) because reasons", "but the servers will crash if the game isn't the way I want it to be", etc.

There's a limit to how far this discussion can productively get if people refuse to recognise the existence of a large slice of the playerbase who do not want to and will not engage with guilds, and if people are going blithely to claim that a totally useless (and ridiculous) mechanism -- WTS spam in chat -- is the bee's knees.

I do not think people are lazy if they don't join a guild but I do think they are stubborn and cutting off their own nose to spite their face if they complain about inflation and not having gold and refuse to join a trading guild.

It's how the game works. Just like you have to run dungeons to get dungeon gear or fish to get certain leads or PvP to get certain motif styles. If you don't WANT to do the activity, fine. No problem. Play how you want. But saying "there should be a global auction house" and simultaneously complaining "I can't afford anything because I refuse to join trading guilds" is also ridiculous. There is an avenue in game if you want to get into trading. If you don't, you as a player are potentially limiting yourself to farming everything yourself or not having access to certain goods due to rising prices. Just like you won't get that lead if you refuse to fish and you won't get that motif if you don't PvP. If people choose not to take part in a section of the game they will have a different experience than those that do. But the style of ESO has always been "do what you want but we encourage you to take part in everything!" and to me that's clearly a core tenet of the game, so I'm not a fan of arguments that try to fix a problem when the issue is the player doesn't want to participate in the activity. (Especially ones that support themselves, like trading or trial gear to advance in trials. I do feel for the folks when something that is required to be better in one area expects you to spend hours in a different one, like bad RNG in a dungeon for a gear set good in PvP or a fishing lead for a mythic that's used in end game raiding. There's encouraging players to branch out and then there's trolling the players.. but I digress.) It's like saying people should get quest rewards without doing the quests - that gating all that gold, gear, and/or mat potential (by deconstructing) behind quests is unfair for people who don't like questing. Trading isn't gated; you don't have to buy an expansion to join a trading guild.

So I absolutely recognize that slice of the playerbase but I think that it is their choice to not engage in the content and therefore not a problem ZOS or the community needs to solve. And there may be other reasons for a global auction house but to me the fact that some people won't join guilds is not a good one.

Something else ironic about avoiding guilds: as a newer player and as an experienced player I've found that guildies with resources stockpiled are extremely quick to GIVE AWAY mats, crafting services, gold, and their time to help guild mates. No trading necessary. It's rare that someone would walk up to a stranger in the world and say "hey, you're new, here's some gold" but it is pretty common once you have the loose association of guild mate. So again, avoiding guilds is a perfectly acceptable play style choice but it means you will miss out on some things.

K9002 wrote: »

This is once per account. The occasional gold rewards from endeavors are also once per account. All it does is help single character players catch up with those who abuse up to 18 alts. The real problem is that daily crafting writ gold is not once per day per account, and that the amount of gold scales with character level instead of skillpoints invested in crafting skills. If you want to turn off the faucet, either remove gold rewards from daily writs altogether, or make it so that only the first writ of each type nets any gold and writs spammed with alts only yield the material boxes.

And honestly is it even once per account? There's a lot of comments around the forums in many different topics on how we have a lot of casuals and new players. Do casuals really log in every day? I would assume not. Do all new players to a game log in every day? Nobody has other responsibilities?!? I mean, I'm not sure I'll even get the gold - since AwA I log in twice a week for my scheduled group content and that's it, unless I need to farm something new to do something for my team. A gift of gold in the daily login rewards requires all the accounts to log in every day until they obtain it and I'd argue that if we have so many casuals kicking around, many (most?) of them will not get it. These people who don't want to join guilds and want to only play solo and like overland to be super easy and like it that when you run by the map content on alts it just turns white now. No judgment to anyone, but being a little obnoxious to make a point. We're really worried that a daily login reward is exacerbating inflation while simultaneously arguing that all of these casual folks need other avenues to do things because they are too casual to put the time in for the "harder" and/or "time consuming" stuff? Which is it? I'm betting most of these folks won't even GET the login reward gold. Because to get it you must log in for fourteen days in a month (half of it) and they are... CASUAL. If you play just on weekends, which is extremely typical for me because I work a lot, that's only eight days of logging in. It's part of why I feel that the daily login rewards are predatory. I could play 8 hours each of those Saturdays but still not get the daily login rewards which are intended to reward loyal players because I can't change my schedule to log in every day. And I'm not even a "casual" - I'm in a prog trial group!!

I do not agree with the wording that players "abuse" alts. I have tons of alts. I do writs on one or two characters sometimes. But if chose to spend my time logging in and out (which takes forever) on all my alts to do writs, which I've done during some of the anniversary events to get my boxes, I am not abusing them or an evil member of the community causing inflation. Alts are a key part of the game for many people.

Anecdotally I feel like the inflation problem started being a thing when ZOS added all of those little trinkets to reward boxes. I'm always selling drops put in just to give me a reward which are only useful for selling just to make space. It takes time and effort to do writs, albeit it's slightly easier with mods, but it's still effort. But all of those little trinkets that sell not for 1 gold but like 40 or 200 gold each or whatever it is... I'm getting them just for doing other activities I'd do anyway, and they are now incorporated into a lot of the events which have high participation. We used to get them only for stealing but now they are everywhere.

Obviously there are multiple contributing factors, but writs have been around forever. Guild traders have been around forever. TTC has been around forever. And this has only been a problem in recent years. So think about what's changed more recently - the crown/gold exchange. Tons of free gold being handed out in the form of trinkets. It's troubleshooting 101 - what did you last install? The issue is probably not the app you tried out the first week you got your phone. It might be... but it PROBABLY is the app you installed yesterday.

Heartrage

@sarannah
With the price you can sell gold and purple materials and master writs on guild traders plus the gold per quest plus selling weapons and armor piecesplus the fact that provisioning and alchemy writs give more materials than they consume plus hirelings, of course you would make a profit even by buying all the materials.

rbfrgsp

Vaoh wrote: »

Browiseth wrote: »

is it really a problem? it's inevitable, if anything. the longer the game is out, the more gold that is generated by players to be traded between each other

100k seems quite inconsequential and not worth being upset about enough to make a thread on the forums about it. i for one like getting more money in this game

Yes it’s a problem. Do you want our console server economies to turn into an inflated mess like on PC.

More gold is generated overtime but that is supposed to be counteracted via gold sinks. We don’t have many effective gold sinks though and 100K per active player is a massive injection of new gold into the economy. I’d rather they provided something else, like 50K tel var. At least that gets destroyed via purchases at the vendor.

It won’t ruin the economy on its own but it’s unnecessary to take an a step toward inflation like that imo.

The issue with the economy is the cartelism that the hired trader system promotes. There's a huge concentration of gold within a limited few hands who operate the trader guilds. Just looking at trader options on pc EU today, I saw that six of the top ten trade guilds were really just two guilds, each operating three guilds.

Back when there were lots of players and the traders were busy, these top guilds required their vast pools of gold to bulk buy regular players' goods, set prices, etc. Nowadays the game is much quieter and fewer people are trading, but these big guilds still have to move around their money somehow. I think these big ticket items are just a symptom of that. This is speculation but, if in anyway accurate, it means the 100k login rewards has absolutely no influence over that one way or the other.

Kiralyn2000

peacenote wrote: »

I do not think people are lazy if they don't join a guild but I do think they are stubborn and cutting off their own nose to spite their face if they complain about inflation and not having gold and refuse to join a trading guild.

Personally, I'm not complaining about inflation. Because I don't buy anything from traders, either. (once in a blue moon, maybe a motif to do a master writ. If it's a common/cheap one.)

But I do oppose the "so get rid of quest gold rewards" thing, because that's literally my income. And I spend it on in-game-vendor things, like the Luxury furnisher, or buying houses. So while I don't have any issues with inflation, I do still need some gold to spend. Which the blanket "get rid of quest rewards, you can just sell gold mats on traders!" idea just doesn't solve.


As for trading guilds... meh, even ignoring the "I'm antisocial, and have no interest in joining some crowd of 500 strangers just to sell something" thing... even in games with auction houses, I don't trade much or consistently. If I'm going to trade nothing for two weeks, then sell three things, then skip another week, then maybe sell one stack of something, etc... that doesn't really make sense to join a guild. I won't be an "active" member, I won't meet any weekly amount of sales, etc.
It's idiotic to join a guild for an hour to sell two stacks, then quit for three weeks, then join another one to sell again, and so on.

The guild trader system is great for people who actually want to do trading as a game activity. It's lousy for someone who just wants to sell one or two things.


(then there's the part where my idea of what a "guild" should be doesn't match what this game does. The whole "five guilds X 500 people thing" seems insane to me. A guild should be a couple dozen comrades who all know each other and have each other's backs. Not some interchangeable crowd of strangers. It's another part of why I don't join guilds in games - if I'm going to make the commitment to support this group, I should be willing to back that up. And I refuse to make that commitment - my playtime is mine, I don't want to sacrifice it to the wants & needs of the group.)


----
As for "but people can bot their crafting on PC!"... that's against the TOS, if someone's botting they should get banned. Plus, you can also bot mob farming, and harvesting. Does that mean that those activities should also have their rewards removed because someone might be automating it?

(and no, I don't use Lazy Writ Crafter. About half my 8 characters are only tier 1 crafters, though.)

joseayalac

There's a lot of constructive opinions on this thread, however, what I observe to be more prevalent is the lack of understanding about how economics work.

If there's more gold in circulation, of course the gold will be worth less, hence inflation (prices for everything rise, as gold becomes less valuable). It's like printing money IRL.

Some people are saying that it's not a big amount, but I disagree respectfuly. One player with 1M gold normally puts way less gold in circulation than ten players with 100K gold each, specially if talking about the inflation of not that costly items like crafting materials, most motifs, boe gear.

A question to serve as example: If suddenly every player gets 100k, how much would the demand for Dreugh Wax rise?

JKorr

Northwold wrote: »

ForzaRammer wrote: »

Northwold wrote: »

ForzaRammer wrote: »

Kiralyn2000 wrote: »

ForzaRammer wrote: »

Kiralyn2000 wrote: »

ForzaRammer wrote: »

Kiralyn2000 wrote: »

Wandering_Immigrant wrote: »

I agree OP. And to the people saying 100k is a drop in the ocean or whatever, it's actually not 100k it's literally billions being added to the economy.

For a bit of perspective let's look at the average larger guild, since people like to say that kiosk bids are the only meaningful gold sink. We'll say the average (larger guils) has 400 members, since not all are going to have 500. That's 40,000,000 gold being added to the game by one guild alone. There's 18 guilds located in the Capitol cities, that's 720,000,000 gold..

And yet, 40mil gold is just ~9500 characters doing a set of daily writs (4200 gold). Or just 1200 players doing writs on 8 characters. Which happens every day, not once a month.

Plus there's all the other delve/zone/dungeon dailies, grinding, selling excess junk to vendors, etc.

Yes, when you apply MATH!™, that 100k gold turns into Scary Big Numbers.

...which still are barely a drop in the bucket, because Even Scarier & Bigger Numbers are being generated every single day.

And that's why there's inflation. Not because of one little giveaway.

I agree, direct gold from repeatable quest is a main cause of inflation, thus should be removed

Which would kind of suck for those people who aren't traders, and for whom that gold is a large % of their entire income.

That's the hard thing about balancing MMOs - making sure that the things you do to slow down the top players, don't disproportionately screw over the low end ones.

(I remember one time that WoW nerfed the entire resource recovery system because high-end raiders had figured out how to have effectively-infinite sustain... and Joe Random Leveling Dude ended up having to rest & drink recovery consumables after every single overland trash fight.)

No, the mats from the daily writs would still be valuable, the quest is still worth the time even after removing the direct gold reward.

The direct gold is not a large part of the income now, your claim is completely false.

I'm talking about people who don't trade. They get 0 gold from mats, just the quest gold (and selling ornates to the vendor).

(that would be all of us who have nothing to do with this game's dumpster fire of a trading system. Been playing since 2016, I've never sold a single thing to another player. I've also never had more than ~1.7mil gold.)

So many “us” and “i”, it’s all about you i guess, have you thought that trading with other player is literally a feature in every MMO

And have you thought that only in one is it gated behind guilds...?

What you talking about? People can sell in zone chat in eso, just like other games

As has been discussed to death, spamming zone chat is not a sensible selling mechanism. Other games, inter alia, use auction houses open to everyone. And while people can argue till the cows come home about the merits and demerits of auction houses in ESO, the fact remains that ESO gates its only sensible selling mechanism behind guilds, and behind the random strangers running those guilds (even automated guilds administered by the servers themselves would be an improvement).

A lot of people simply will not join guilds. They do not want to. And they are de facto cut off from one side of the player economy while fully exposed to its rising prices if they try to buy something.

As I said above, these forums are self selecting and tend to attract players who are not entirely representative of ESO's player base. So these conversations generally degenerate into "you're lazy for not joining a guild", "i make a million a day what's your problem", "spamming zone chat is an absolutely flawless mechanism (that I don't actually use) because reasons", "but the servers will crash if the game isn't the way I want it to be", etc.

There's a limit to how far this discussion can productively get if people refuse to recognise the existence of a large slice of the playerbase who do not want to and will not engage with guilds, and if people are going blithely to claim that a totally useless (and ridiculous) mechanism -- WTS spam in chat -- is the bee's knees.

Out of curiosity, those players who will not join guilds because reasons....what do they really need gold for if they restrict themselves to solo play? Not really crucial to have hundreds of potions for trials or "end game" stuff if you don't have a group/guild to do the content. Honestly if they refuse to engage with anyone because OMG GUILDS there's no worries about battleground teams or trial groups that need consistent people to do hard content there isn't a lot of reason for selling stuff to other players to make gold. Selling to npc merchants might take a lot longer to build a gold reserve, but hey, no contact with other players.

I don't think selling in zone chat is that great, mostly. On the other hand sometimes it is. Someone offered a large amount of mats in zone chat yesterday.. I thought he asked a reasonable price, so I gave him his asking price. I got my mats, he got his 200k. He sold without any guild taxes, I bought mats to do writs and crafting for my guilds.

ForzaRammer

Kesstryl wrote: »

I think the issue has to do more with market flippers than any way players earn gold in game. Some people collected a large amount of gold over the years and now have enough to corner the market and mop up anything that undervalues their top line. As a casual player who has no interest in playing the market and doesn't have all day to farm, I never made that much in a day, and I never held on to a million for long as I'd use it to buy houses and furnishing plans. Casuals simply have no way to bring in that much, especially those of us who have full time jobs and families. It would just anger the casual player base if income was also nerfed on top of the many nerfs this game as received over the years due to angry people wanting to wreck the game for others because they feel that's better than asking for solutions where everyone wins.

I don’t know what kind of economics you learned, but blaming flippers is ridiculous, you can’t flip crowns, crowns been going up just as wax, alloy, roe, chromium, mundane rune and heartwood.

Inflation happens when the supply of currency is significantly higher than its demand (basically too much gold too little mats and crown).

There is no solution to make everyone happy. But insist on keeping hyperinflation will make more people unhappy.