Any plans to fix inflation in the economy? (PC/NA)

Sakiri

dmnqwk wrote: »

Hoarding gold is never the issue, it's the hoarding of items.

If you want to prevent inflation, force people to sell items - make any drop kept for 3 months automatically bind to the player (and perma ban ANYONE who sends it between their accounts to circumvent this).

Gold flow is rarely the issue versus the rare drops being hoarded to improve scarcity and raise prices. There would also be fewer people who hoard gold because they can no longer purchase items to hoard forever.

This has to be the most absurd suggestion I've heard.

kiwi_tea

Sakiri wrote: »

kiwi_tea wrote: »

Sakiri wrote: »

Well, what do you think they should do? Right now, mats for example, are flooding the market, and prices for say, dreugh wax don't seem to be going down much.

There is always a delay in the reporting of price decreases for mats during/following events that drop them, I believe. But just increasingly supply doesn't address inflation itself. Also, commodity speculation means wealthy players will be buying up stuff like dreugh wax en masse, assuming that it will continue to rise in price, so although it is releasing to the market, and prices may fall temporarily, it'll be bought up quickly either for use, or for speculation. The flood will be a blip in the overall trend because it's temporary and seasonal.

Well, one of the suggestions I was given involved mats market flooding.

What if they shut off the writ gold and upped the colored mats return or survey chance? Something that'd make you gold selling to another player rather than more raw gold in the economy.

You might have noticed that earlier in the thread @doesurmindglow and I were talking about increasing supply of specific commodities. ZOS have clearly made attempts to to that.

Shutting off writ gold appeals to the already wealthy because it's an obvious source of gold in the early-to-mid game. We don't need to remove a source of gold at the bottom/mid (although we need to avoid adding too many new sources for gold). We need a sink for end-game players. That needs to include end-game players who don't do crown-gold purchases.

And it needs to be a system that end-game players see as WORTH sinking lots of gold into. My mind comes back to a guild system and UI revamp over and over again, not just because it is overdue, but because wealth (and commodity speculation) are concentrated in guilds. Give them a system that gives them value as a community for throwing gold into it.

Add a safer crown->gold system with a gold sink included, too, if that's possible.

Just give the wealthy things to spend gold on, to cool off the economy, so that instead of wanting to speculate constantly, and drive up prices constantly, they want to put their gold into something *other than* accumulating wealth for wealth's sake.

The money needs to come out of the system at the top, not at bottom. Take it out from the bottom, and you're just setting newer players back even further, while leaving the price-setters only mildly worse off.

SilverBride

I have plenty of things to spend gold on, and I do. I just don't spend all my gold because I want to always have enough for another house and all the crafting mats needed to furnish it.

Just giving more things to spend gold on doesn't mean we will.

TaSheen

Speaking of houses.... I really wish Willowpond Haven was available for gold, not just crowns. Annoying.

kiwi_tea

SilverBride wrote: »

I have plenty of things to spend gold on, and I do. I just don't spend all my gold because I want to always have enough for another house and all the crafting mats needed to furnish it.

Just giving more things to spend gold on doesn't mean we will.

It's not about you as an individual. And it's not about making you spend gold *recklessly*. It's about taking more gold out of the economy in some fashion naturally. Cutting gold out from the bottom appeals to the rich, but it doesn't solve the *gameplay* problems and imbalances that continuing inflation causes.

Sakiri

TaSheen wrote: »

Speaking of houses.... I really wish Willowpond Haven was available for gold, not just crowns. Annoying.

Friend of mine just sold a guildmate the crowns to buy it for like 19m or something.

Sakiri

kiwi_tea wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

I have plenty of things to spend gold on, and I do. I just don't spend all my gold because I want to always have enough for another house and all the crafting mats needed to furnish it.

Just giving more things to spend gold on doesn't mean we will.

It's not about you as an individual. And it's not about making you spend gold *recklessly*. It's about taking more gold out of the economy in some fashion naturally. Cutting gold out from the bottom appeals to the rich, but it doesn't solve the *gameplay* problems and imbalances that continuing inflation causes.

I'm not exactly rich. I'm sitting comfortably at 5-6 million.

I could sell crowns for more but I'm cheap.

doesurmindglow

Zodiarkslayer wrote: »

The only thing I'd like to add is that most players claim they are talking about inflation, while they are actually talking about "wages". Or rather that their labour does not let them purchase the commodities that they want.

🤣 So maybe we should form a union and demand a minimum wage of one million per day! 🤣

I can't speak for others on the thread but I've been talking about inflation -- the fact that the rate of gold production exceeds the rate of gold destruction, and the resulting devaluation of gold as a means of exchange with purchasing power.

There aren't really wages in a customary sense in the ESO economy. Sure, yes, the value of labor could be impacted -- I brought up an example earlier about how crafting writs is considerably less profitable now than simply hedging against inflation by trading out of gold -- but to me that's not really as important as what's going on with the value of currency itself.

doesurmindglow

dmnqwk wrote: »

Hoarding gold is never the issue, it's the hoarding of items.

If you want to prevent inflation, force people to sell items - make any drop kept for 3 months automatically bind to the player (and perma ban ANYONE who sends it between their accounts to circumvent this).

Gold flow is rarely the issue versus the rare drops being hoarded to improve scarcity and raise prices. There would also be fewer people who hoard gold because they can no longer purchase items to hoard forever.

This likely isn't practical. More realistic is probably just to buff the drop rates of items and reduce their demand. This isn't an an ideal solution either as it doesn't really confront the underlying devaluation of in-game currency, but it is one the developers have actually implemented already, and appear to be willing to try.

doesurmindglow

kiwi_tea wrote: »

It's not about you as an individual. And it's not about making you spend gold *recklessly*. It's about taking more gold out of the economy in some fashion naturally. Cutting gold out from the bottom appeals to the rich, but it doesn't solve the *gameplay* problems and imbalances that continuing inflation causes.

I think what makes this conversation challenging is I'm not sure people naturally think about issues affecting them in the aggregate. It's fairly easy to understand how higher prices for this or that might affect ME, but it's for some reason harder to understand how they might affect US.

Conversely, solutions can be painful for ME (I've mentioned before that any sort of deflationary action would probably be financially devastating for me personally) but good for US as a whole.

I remember someone IRL recently saying something like "I don't know how to explain to you why you should care about other people." This is that kind of problem, I guess.

doesurmindglow

kiwi_tea wrote: »

It's not about you as an individual. And it's not about making you spend gold *recklessly*. It's about taking more gold out of the economy in some fashion naturally. Cutting gold out from the bottom appeals to the rich, but it doesn't solve the *gameplay* problems and imbalances that continuing inflation causes.

I think additionally perhaps people see these things as binary and tribalistic: "the rich players" are on one team, and anything that benefits "the poor players" necessarily hurts them and must be avoided. Further, if you identify as a "rich player," you should be against things that benefit the other group, as well, in order to advance the interest of your tribe.

Inflation as economic problem doesn't really fit well in that mindset. It sucks for the poor, sure, as they probably the least means to pay the higher prices. But what's so odd about it is that it also, at the very same time, sucks for the rich as well,
and arguably more so, because they have something (a stockpile of gold with "value") that they are actively losing.

It's counterintuitive to imagine a problem that hurts all the "tribes" of players simultaneously, with seemingly no one who really benefits. But that is the kind of problem that this actually is.

doesurmindglow

JemadarofCaerSalis wrote: »

Personally I am all for new gold sinks.

One of the things I have noticed is that, even though I am not that fast of a gold earner, I still have started to accumulate gold, because I don't really find anything to buy.

However, instead of focusing on only luxury, high end traders, or only inexpensive sinks, give a range.

As an example using housing.

Add low level traders that sell basic things. I have wanted to make a garden in game, and looking through UESP, I didn't really find a lot of flowers. So, make a vendor that sells flowers/plants for a small amount. Single flowers for cheapest, with bundles/bushes for more and larger pieces (because of the housing limits) for even more.

Add a vendor, maybe mid level, that sells building blocks, such as walls and floors, and stairs etc.. Pretty much the basic building blocks you would see in the editors for the offline Elder Scrolls games. Another vendor could perhaps sell 'landscaping' such as small hills and rocks etc...

Add high level traders that sell specialty items. Items that cost a million gold each and so on. These would be large items or items that do specific things.

While on the topic of housing, add new housing, for gold. Add flat plains for users to be able to use the building blocks/landscaping.

Then add vendors that sell various types of mounts for gold, one that sells various types of motifs and so on.

If the issue is new assets, then just make a lot of these new items recolored versions of older items. New motifs could be old motifs with certain elements removed (I have seen a lot of hate for the hip flaps that many armors have).

Allow me to customize my mount's tack using the outfit system.

Just give a variety of ways for players to spend gold to the game itself. (I am also not saying no to an official crown to gold trading post type system). Try to hit every popular playstyle with new vendors, especially ones that need multiple instances bought. For the vendors like the motif one, have rotating stock to encourage people to buy the motifs they want before it rotates out for months or longer at a time.

Yeah I tend to like these sorts of ideas as well, mostly because I honestly just think they sound like cool Quality of Life upgrades that I could see myself spending on and benefiting from.

I'm less sold on it as an effective solution to inflation as it seems pretty compelling that the problem largely arose from the elimination of a high frequency, low cost gold sink with the movement away from respecs, or a series of small tweaks along similar lines, that mostly affected/nerfed gold sinks that don't cost very much to use at any one time, but that get used at very high volume and frequency. I don't know though that the solution necessary *has to* be something on a similar scale as the one we're effectively replacing. It's within reason that a lower volume, high cost gold sink could very well work.

There is a second, kind of parallel but I think arguably related problem that your solutions really do get at: The in-game rewards structure has always been a bit sparse. It's possible something like this might help address that and create more rewarding experiences for players, even if the aggregate economic effect in terms of inflation leaves something to be desired.

SilverBride

doesurmindglow wrote: »

I remember someone IRL recently saying something like "I don't know how to explain to you why you should care about other people." This is that kind of problem, I guess.

This is not that kind of problem. The fact that some players have a lot of gold does not mean they don't care about others. It means they wanted to have the things in game that they enjoy and they figured out how to get them.

Working hard for the things we want in a game does not make us uncaring. It's a game that I play to relax and I am not a bad person for doing what I enjoy when I'm playing it. And if that means accumulating a lot of gold, that's my choice.

sarahthes

SilverBride wrote: »

doesurmindglow wrote: »

I remember someone IRL recently saying something like "I don't know how to explain to you why you should care about other people." This is that kind of problem, I guess.

This is not that kind of problem. The fact that some players have a lot of gold does not mean they don't care about others. It means they wanted to have the things in game that they enjoy and they figured out how to get them.

Working hard for the things we want in a game does not make us uncaring. It's a game that I play to relax and I am not a bad person for doing what I enjoy when I'm playing it. And if that means accumulating a lot of gold, that's my choice.

If inflation runs rampant, the amount of gold you've hoarded won't mean anything because you won't be able to buy as much with it.

At the same time, new players will have even more trouble getting started in game because it'll cost them 3 million gold just on dreugh wax per item (if inflation is allowed to continue unchecked).

Now, if dreugh wax spikes to say 200K per (which is 100% possible at the current rate of inflation), and you've been sitting on your pile of 5 mill gold feeling rich and happy... suddenly you aren't rich anymore. It won't matter that you save gold and don't spend it, because that gold will in effect become worthless.

That is the real problem of runaway inflation. Your gold becomes worthless.

SilverBride

sarahthes wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

doesurmindglow wrote: »

I remember someone IRL recently saying something like "I don't know how to explain to you why you should care about other people." This is that kind of problem, I guess.

This is not that kind of problem. The fact that some players have a lot of gold does not mean they don't care about others. It means they wanted to have the things in game that they enjoy and they figured out how to get them.

Working hard for the things we want in a game does not make us uncaring. It's a game that I play to relax and I am not a bad person for doing what I enjoy when I'm playing it. And if that means accumulating a lot of gold, that's my choice.

If inflation runs rampant, the amount of gold you've hoarded won't mean anything because you won't be able to buy as much with it.

At the same time, new players will have even more trouble getting started in game because it'll cost them 3 million gold just on dreugh wax per item (if inflation is allowed to continue unchecked).

Now, if dreugh wax spikes to say 200K per (which is 100% possible at the current rate of inflation), and you've been sitting on your pile of 5 mill gold feeling rich and happy... suddenly you aren't rich anymore. It won't matter that you save gold and don't spend it, because that gold will in effect become worthless.

That is the real problem of runaway inflation. Your gold becomes worthless.

New players can't expect to come into a game and immediately be able to gold out all their gear. I have only done that with my main group content character because my others do quite fine with the content I use them for in purple gear with gold weapons. I could afford to do it but I don't feel a need to.

I also don't consider 5 million gold being rich.

spartaxoxo

5 million coin might not be much on PCNA, but it is a lot of coin on PSNA. That's an example of how much inflation hurts even the richer players.

Edit

Every time prices get inflated more and more, the effective buying power of coin is decreased. This, in practice (but obviously not literally), takes coin out of the pockets of the players as long as it goes on.

I think ZOS needs to do something about the add-ons personally. Lazy writ crafter, for example. Excessive gold sinks would just hurt console players.

SilverBride

spartaxoxo wrote: »

I think ZOS needs to do something about the add-ons personally. Lazy writ crafter, for example. Excessive gold sinks would just hurt console players.

I think that would be a huge mistake, especially after allowing add-ons for 10 years. If add-ons were no longer allowed I am pretty certain they would lose a huge amount of their playerbase.

Zodiarkslayer

kiwi_tea wrote: »

Can you describe for us what you believe inflation *is*? That might help me understand why/how you think ESO's economy is immune from it.

Look, I was like that, too. Believing in an economy and that there is inflation. But the truth is, I was emotional and not rational. I really debated with myself wether to share the following, because I expect to be ridiculed by players in denial.

I had the same problem once, I believed there is inflation and it is bad for us little players and is the rich players fault... bla bla bla ...
But I eventually came to my senses and reached out to my old economics professor. He is fairly young (45) and took an interest in my questions. He is a microeconomics expert. That was about three years ago, I think.
He contacted me back after a weak or so and we discussed what he had found. I offered him my account that week to get him some hands on experience and data with the game.

The jist of it all is that the eso players are experiencing a sandbox, that is designed to be felt as an economy, but doesn't meet most criteria to be a "real economy".

There is for example no way to determine how much gold is in circulation at any point in time. It appears from and disappears back into nothingness. Without explanation.
The amount of gold is highly volatile and rises and drops with any player that enters or leaves the sandbox. Just for practicality's sake alone we have to assume the amount of gold in circulation to be infinite.
The same thing can be said for goods. Numbers for available goods for purchase rise and fall with player counts. And, by the way, in the real world offers of goods and their accompanying prices are often determined by seasonality and rate of deterioration of the good, specifically the cost of keeping a good in its original state until the time of selling it.
In eso we basically have infinite gold for infinite goods in infinite storage.
He also specifically pointed out the in-game "Gold' to not strictly fall under the definition of real world money. It only serves as a transfer medium, but does not meet the other prerequisites to be real money, when you look closer.

Still not sold? Get a grasp on this: At the moment we have players hording super high amounts of gold and using it to buy a lot of goods, circulate them and thus accumulate even more gold.
Now in the real world, if gold would devalue and it we'd have widespread inflation, the above mentioned behaviour wouldn't be rational, because at some point the gold would buy less and less goods, and also the goods wouldn't create more gold from selling and eventually trade would collapse, because noone has the gold anymore to buy anything. And in the real world, the real economy, you'd see the rich buying real estate, high value art, jewelry, gem stones and rare metals to avoid having money that is going to devalue.

But it doesn't happen in ESO. It still works to hord gold, to buy stuff, to sell for more gold!
Because the gold does in fact not devalue!

And therfore we have no inflation!

I quote the professor here: "Anyone talking about inflation under these circumstances is [Weltfremd]". This is one of these almost untranslateable german words. We are both German, so we are allowed to say that. 😅
Feel free to google it.

However, as we talked on, my former prof pointed that most of the market behaviour in ESO can be explained by traditional microeconomics and game theory. Mostly because we actually are talking about markets and human behaviour, after all.

Edit: Typos and clarified some phrasing.

doesurmindglow

spartaxoxo wrote: »

I think ZOS needs to do something about the add-ons personally. Lazy writ crafter, for example. Excessive gold sinks would just hurt console players.

I think a really good solution that's come up on here a number of times is simply to replace the gold reward for writs with one of the rarer furnishing or style materials that tend to be hard to get, or at least to provide writ crafters with an alternate currency as an option that could be bought for things like that.

That alone would not impact the players who do writs, would not impact players using console, would not "tax" anyone really, and would probably solve the problem by itself.

It's a bit silly that there's so much effort to oppose something as obvious, effective, and clearly needed as that. The mental gymnastics are impressive: such a change doesn't even hurt "rich" players the way inflation does, not really, but still we're fighting the perception that doing something like that to combat inflation would come at a cost to them.

In truth, they would benefit immensely, and not just at the macro level where their gold is better at holding its value. They'd also probably just have more access to rare materials, both on the market, and if they do writs themselves.

doesurmindglow

Zodiarkslayer wrote: »

I had the same problem once, I believed there is inflation and it is bad for us little players and is the rich players fault... bla bla bla ...
But I eventually came to my senses and reached out to my old economics professor. He is fairly young (45) and took an interest in my questions. He is a microeconomics expert. That was about three years ago, I think.
He contacted me back after a weak or so and we discussed what he had found. I offered him my account that week to get him some hands on experience and data with the game.

The jist of it all is that the eso players are experiencing a sandbox, that is designed to be felt as an economy, but doesn't meet most criteria to be a "real economy".

There is for example no way to determine how much gold is in circulation at any point in time. It appears from and disappears back into nothingness. Without explanation.
The amount of gold is highly volatile and rises and drops with any player that enters or leaves the sandbox. Just for practicality's sake alone we have to assume the amount of gold in circulation to be infinite.
The same thing can be said for goods. Numbers for available goods for purchase rise and fall with player counts. And, by the way, in the real world offers of goods and their accompanying prices are often determined by seasonality and rate of deterioration of the good, specifically the cost of keeping a good in its original state until the time of selling it.
In eso we basically have infinite gold for infinite goods in infinite storage.
He also specifically pointed out the in-game "Gold' to not strictly fall under the definition of real world money. It only serves as a transfer medium, but does not meet the other prerequisites to be real money, when you look closer.

Still not sold? Get a grasp on this: At the moment we have players hording super high amounts of gold and using it to buy a lot of goods, circulate them and thus accumulate even more gold.
Now in the real world, if gold would devalue and it we'd have widespread inflation, the above mentioned behaviour wouldn't be rational, because at some point the gold would buy less and less goods, and also the goods wouldn't create more gold from selling and eventually trade would collapse, because noone has the gold anymore to buy anything. And in the real world, the real economy, you'd see the rich buying real estate, high value art, jewelry, gem stones and rare metals to avoid having money that is going to devalue.

But it doesn't happen in ESO. It still works to hord gold, to buy stuff, to sell for more gold!
Because the gold does in fact not devalue!

From a technical standpoint he's definitely right -- this isn't actually a IRL economy with the features typical of those markets. Gold is also not an IRL currency with the features typical of that, either.

I think we're really talking about the tight box in which this "economy" can be considered "market-ish" and within that box, a problem similar in behavior to inflation does, according to pricing data that's available, appear to exist. But this is kinda a technical, semantics argument. The semantics are a little important because they do actually play a pretty huge role in questions like "why is this not a problem on console?" and so on, but for the most part what's actually being experienced by your everyday player, and that we can see with the data that's available, is that more and more gold is in fact required to pay for items players are selling in the in-game markets.

doesurmindglow

sarahthes wrote: »

At the same time, new players will have even more trouble getting started in game because it'll cost them 3 million gold just on dreugh wax per item (if inflation is allowed to continue unchecked).

Now, if dreugh wax spikes to say 200K per (which is 100% possible at the current rate of inflation), and you've been sitting on your pile of 5 mill gold feeling rich and happy... suddenly you aren't rich anymore. It won't matter that you save gold and don't spend it, because that gold will in effect become worthless.

That is the real problem of runaway inflation. Your gold becomes worthless.

Yeah and I do think ZOS is paying attention to that aspect of it, given the recent jewelry adjustments. Most players, even "the rich," I think generally agreed that was a good change. Most players (especially "the rich") would also benefit from more effort to protect the market value of gold.

The problem with changes like the jewelry adjustment and other similar approaches targeting a commodity like Dreugh Wax that are particularly volatile cases of price instability is that they don't really address the underlying problem, which is price instability and inflation across the board. That's the kind of answer we need, and to be honest, it likely doesn't have to be dramatic or painful for anyone, if implemented correctly. Most likely we're either talking about a gold sink that sells items that players have the choice of using or not using, or minor changes to gold sources that are compensated by a different reward.

Absolute worst case we're talking about a slight adjustment to an existing gold sink, like raising the commissions end of guild trader transactions from 3.5% to 3.75 (?) %? A couple people might be talking about "taking gold from the rich" or whatnot, but I do think most of us do agree that's not a great solution and also not super likely to work.

spartaxoxo

doesurmindglow wrote: »

That alone would not impact the players who do writs, would not impact players using console, would not "tax" anyone really, and would probably solve the problem by itself.

It would have a massive impact on console and on players not in trading guilds on PC. Writs are one of the biggest sources of coin, not everyone is in a trading guild or even can be, and mats are not highly valued on console either.

This would be the absolute worst one for me. I couldn't be more opposed to it

kiwi_tea

doesurmindglow wrote: »

Zodiarkslayer wrote: »

I had the same problem once, I believed there is inflation and it is bad for us little players and is the rich players fault... bla bla bla ...

... The semantics are a little important because they do actually play a pretty huge role in questions like "why is this not a problem on console?" and so on, but for the most part what's actually being experienced by your everyday player, and that we can see with the data that's available, is that more and more gold is in fact required to pay for items players are selling in the in-game markets.

Yes, while the professor is correct on many counts, it's just semantics to argue that gold in ESO does not devalue when there is ample evidence that, in important senses that affect players, it does devalue. I'm just going to have to append an invisible mutatis mutandis to every post, I guess.

Also, in terms of end-game gold sinks hurting console players, obviously some of those gold sinks need to be competitive in some regard, so that rich players are setting prices relative to the gold they have to hand. Similar to guild trader bids. Otherwise it's punitive to the smaller economies (and I am going to continue referring to these simulated abstractions as "economies").

doesurmindglow

spartaxoxo wrote: »

It would have a massive impact on console and on players not in trading guilds on PC. Writs are one of the biggest sources of coin, not everyone is in a trading guild or even can be, and mats are not highly valued on console either.

This would be the absolute worst one for me. I couldn't be more opposed to it

I mean the way that we've been talking about it on here, the gold still would be an option. It just would no longer be the only option. If you wanted instant gold, you would still get it. But even like 10% of the PC players accepting an alternative reward would probably be enough to solve this problem there.

There's also another option which I don't think gets enough attention: the writs on console don't actually have to be the same as writs on PC. Like they totally could reward gold on console and reward something else on PC.

spartaxoxo

SilverBride wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

I think ZOS needs to do something about the add-ons personally. Lazy writ crafter, for example. Excessive gold sinks would just hurt console players.

I think that would be a huge mistake, especially after allowing add-ons for 10 years. If add-ons were no longer allowed I am pretty certain they would lose a huge amount of their playerbase.

It doesn't have to be every add-on, just very specific ones that are having a bad effect on the PC economy.

kiwi_tea

I think a really good solution that's come up on here a number of times is simply to replace the gold reward for writs with one of the rarer furnishing or style materials that tend to be hard to get, or at least to provide writ crafters with an alternate currency as an option that could be bought for things like that.

Because gold is worth so little right now, writs are probably the single most efficient way for lower income players to foothold into the inflated market. They're also the most obvious "play the game to earn gold" option.

The problem remains that (a) they print money for wealthy multi-account owners who do 40-odd writs a day. Whatever. Sure. Their time, they earned it, so-to-speak. The money that writs provide to lower income players entered the guild trader market and goes in one or two steps into the accounts of the already wealthy.

There's a huge upwards vacuum of wealth, with excess wealth just compounding the issue. Taking gold out at writs seems very risky. I'm naive here, but couldn't cutting one of the biggest sources of gold for many users potentially have huge negative flow-on? I'd be extremely cautious of implementing anything like it.

It also just seems to compound that issue, because it would confer *even more* power to the big account holders. Gold would print more slowly for everyone, but it would still flow straight up to that point where there's just nothing to spent it on.

SilverBride

spartaxoxo wrote: »

SilverBride wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

I think ZOS needs to do something about the add-ons personally. Lazy writ crafter, for example. Excessive gold sinks would just hurt console players.

I think that would be a huge mistake, especially after allowing add-ons for 10 years. If add-ons were no longer allowed I am pretty certain they would lose a huge amount of their playerbase.

It doesn't have to be every add-on, just very specific ones that are having a bad effect on the PC economy.

Lazy Writ Crafter doesn't do anything but make it faster to complete the daily writs. Saving time allows players more time for the things they enjoy. This does not hurt the economy.

spartaxoxo

Zodiarkslayer wrote: »

There is for example no way to determine how much gold is in circulation at any point in time. It appears from and disappears back into nothingness. Without explanation.

The developers absolutely know how much is in circulation, and very carefully tune their sinks and faucets to ensure a healthy economy. They hire literal economists to ensure that these mini-economies thrive. They aren't the same as the real world because there are definitely things the real world has that we don't, like real estate. But, to say it's not an economy and therefore can't have inflation is a bit too far.

I suspect that if the professor had access to everything that the developers do, they'd see how and why these sorts of terms are being used. And the ways in which developers have a lot more control over the economy than he seems to think.

doesurmindglow

kiwi_tea wrote: »

Yes, while the professor is correct on many counts, it's just semantics to argue that gold in ESO does not devalue when there is ample evidence that, in important senses that affect players, it does devalue. I'm just going to have to append an invisible mutatis mutandis to every post, I guess.

Yeah I think probably his most important point is that gold is effectively infinite and its value effectively arbitrary, and there's likely no way to really quantify (at least on our end) how much gold is "in circulation" and even if it could be quantified on ZOS's end, it'd be a number so ridiculous that this conversation would seem a bit silly.

I do see that and agree with it.

But there's also really good data at least on PC servers that show prices have followed certain patterns, and that those patterns are fairly universal across multiple in-game items, especially highly traded materials and ingredients. This is a place that the economy is definitely "market-ish" and gold is definitely "currency-ish" enough that we can proceed with considering solutions as if it were a problem like inflation IRL.

If the prices were a lot more random, or that is, some rose dramatically while an almost equal number fell dramatically, maybe this would be of greater relevance. And indeed there are a couple commodities that have lost value as expressed in gold, but from what I can tell from having looked at a lot of them is that they're either rare (ie. Lady's Smock and Clam Gall) or they're things specifically explained by a developer intervention (ie. Chromium Plating).

The other thing about the Chromium Plating example is it does show us a couple really huge things this conversation tends to gloss over: It's developer confirmation that this is, indeed, a problem; that it's a problem serious enough to warrant their intervention; and that intervention is entirely possible in a way that benefits most, if not all, players, regardless of "how successful they are." Those are each important lessons in their own right and we're really talking about "how can we learn from that and make it better" rather than a more theoretical conversation about whether or not this problem exists in the first place.

I think most people think the jewelry changes were a good and obviously needed start. The discussion is more rightly about whether or not that went far enough, and if not, what the other options could be.

doesurmindglow

kiwi_tea wrote: »

There's a huge upwards vacuum of wealth, with excess wealth just compounding the issue. Taking gold out at writs seems very risky. I'm naive here, but couldn't cutting one of the biggest sources of gold for many users potentially have huge negative flow-on? I'd be extremely cautious of implementing anything like it.

It also just seems to compound that issue, because it would confer *even more* power to the big account holders. Gold would print more slowly for everyone, but it would still flow straight up to that point where there's just nothing to spent it on.

Eh, my preferred version of this solution is one that sees it as optional; ie. what another poster suggested, which is having the gold be an option for the players who need it, but having something else be an option for the players who don't.

But even if that is impractical for some reason, players are actually quite good at converting other in-game rewards to gold. They're even quite good at doing that without even accessing the guild trader system, even if that is the most common and trusted method, by simply advertising in zone chat. Furnishing and style materials are also quite persuasively "too rare" in much the same way jewelry was.

I do hear you though: Simply removing the gold source here probably isn't ideal, and maybe adding or expanding existing gold sinks is a better approach if "optional non-gold rewards" isn't practical or realistic, I dunno.