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

SilverBride

I never said that inflation was good. I just don't like being punished because I'm a successful trader. Taking my gold wouldn't fix anything any way.

The real solution would be for ZoS to increase the drop rate for mats and decrease the amount of mats needed to craft. When supply goes up prices go down. This solution also doesn't target players for being successful.

doesurmindglow

SilverBride wrote: »

I never said that inflation was good. I just don't like being punished because I'm a successful trader. Taking my gold wouldn't fix anything any way.

The real solution would be for ZoS to increase the drop rate for mats and decrease the amount of mats needed to craft. When supply goes up prices go down. This solution also doesn't target players for being successful.

You're just kinda obsessing over a solution one person proposed that most of us aren't really all that interested in, at the detriment of advancing a larger conversation about something else.

I at least am moving on from that.

I don't oppose the idea of buffing drop rates, though I'm suspicious it tends to move the inflation from one commodity to another: reductions have been achieved for example, in the prices of jewelry materials, but others, including things like crowns, still appear pretty inelastic to the effects of that change if not negatively impacted.

I actually expected to see most of the other tempers and materials increase in response to the jewelry adjustment, but so far I don't think we have data to support that, albeit that's in part because changes to guild histories have made the last month or so difficult to see.

sarahthes

I think a new, real gold sink could definitely help. One that could be balanced across platforms could be premium, normally cash shop locked items, available on a very limited basis as an auction. Like... 3 radiant apex mounts from the current crate season. Or two of the newest house. It could even be something entirely unique. Top bids win. Bids would need to be transparent.

I could see this taking a significant amount of gold out of the market, depending on how often it was done and the volume of items offered.

Amottica

doesurmindglow wrote: »

Amottica wrote: »

In the end, the market, which is players, decides what the price is. Find something costing more than one wants to pay then they can easily go farm it or they can farm something else and then sell it to gain the gold for what they really want.

This isn't precisely true either. While players certainly do dictate the day to day fluctuations in prices through market forces, a change in the game's monetary policy has a much stronger effect, which is why all players are paying more now for items on the NA server than they did two years ago. Only a change to less inflationary monetary policy can solve this, as players do not control the total amount of gold in circulation.

To improve price stability, a less accommodative gold supply equation should be implemented through one thing or another. I would prefer a gold sink that either has high per-transaction amounts, such as another luxury vendor NPC, personally, though I don't know if that alone would be enough to negate the impact of a much higher frequency gold sink (respecs) from being effectively removed from the game. Which is why I've taken pains to point the developers to the data that shows when this trend began, so they can more effectively explore potential solutions to offset it.

My comment is very much accurate in explaining the exactly how the price of items is set in ESO.

ESO does not have the monetary policy we have in the real world. Ofc, the lack of a monetary policy in itself is still a policy but that leaves things to the pure market force of S&D. Zenimax cannot introduce policies that we have in the real world because there is no structure for them to exist.

The suggestion of a gold sink has already been proven to not work in ESO and many other MMORPGs. Zenimax has added gold sinks and if the idea was to decrease inflaciton then they certainly failed.

More importantly, those that are already flush with gold are in that position because of two things. They are active in the game which is why they have the gold to start with and they do not waste it. Unless an increase in gold sinks hits a necessary activity in a notable manner it will do nothing to take gold out of my pocket. If it is a necessary and has a meaningful impact then it will harm the newer players who have do not have the gold revenue.

That is why it is not good for the game and why developers across the MMORPG genre know better than to introduce such repressive changes.

doesurmindglow

Amottica wrote: »

My comment is very much accurate in explaining the exactly how the price of items is set in ESO.

ESO does not have the monetary policy we have in the real world. Ofc, the lack of a monetary policy in itself is still a policy but that leaves things to the pure market force of S&D. Zenimax cannot introduce policies that we have in the real world because there is no structure for them to exist.

[Snip]

No, frankly, it's not. The game does have a monetary policy: it's the gold balance equation, or the net difference between in-game gold sources and gold sinks. The game has gold sinks precisely for the purpose of preventing inflation and many of them do still work quite well. In-game monetary policy is set by the developers and is much less complicated and more predictable than its equivalents in the real world, which should, in theory, make it much easier to understand.

Amottica wrote: »

The suggestion of a gold sink has already been proven to not work in ESO and many other MMORPGs. Zenimax has added gold sinks and if the idea was to decrease inflaciton then they certainly failed.

The data show that a gold sink was removed and subsequently that inflation resulted. No gold sinks have been added since that happened with the introduction of the Armory System. [Snip]

Amottica wrote: »

More importantly, those that are already flush with gold are in that position because of two things. They are active in the game which is why they have the gold to start with and they do not waste it. Unless an increase in gold sinks hits a necessary activity in a notable manner it will do nothing to take gold out of my pocket. If it is a necessary and has a meaningful impact then it will harm the newer players who have do not have the gold revenue.

[Snip]. As long as gold inflation is not addressed, you lose by simply holding gold. You need to constantly and actively increase your reserve of gold to maintain the same financial position relative to items, because you are losing purchasing power all of the time.

In short, if your concern is exclusively preserving the wealth of rich players, you need to actively support the introduction of gold sinks to reduce inflation. That isn't my main concern, but for those who think it's "fair" for some players to have a lot more gold than others, inflation is still a very bad thing and one worth addressing.

[Edited for Baiting]

chessalavakia_ESO

sarahthes wrote: »

I think a new, real gold sink could definitely help. One that could be balanced across platforms could be premium, normally cash shop locked items, available on a very limited basis as an auction. Like... 3 radiant apex mounts from the current crate season. Or two of the newest house. It could even be something entirely unique. Top bids win. Bids would need to be transparent.

I could see this taking a significant amount of gold out of the market, depending on how often it was done and the volume of items offered.

Keep in mind that the gold listed on just one of the illegal gold selling sites is over a hundred of billion for just PC NA.

You'd be needing to eat up an absolutely massive amount to actually make much of a dent with auctions and you'd also have the issue of it potentially leading to more illegal gold sales which might make the illegal gold sellers do more of whatever it is they do to make the gold on PC NA.

doesurmindglow

chessalavakia_ESO wrote: »

Keep in mind that the gold listed on just one of the illegal gold selling sites is over a hundred of billion for just PC NA.

You'd be needing to eat up an absolutely massive amount to actually make much of a dent with auctions and you'd also have the issue of it potentially leading to more illegal gold sales which might make the illegal gold sellers do more of whatever it is they do to make the gold on PC NA.

Yeah unfortunately this does suggest that the better solution might be one that is a small gold sink at very high frequency: something like extending the wayshrine cost to more instances of fast travel, or something to that effect. I also think nerfing high volume NPC gold sources could be in the same realm.

I personally prefer the option of a gold sink with a high individual transaction cost as it is less likely to adversely impact newer players, but it has to be something that will actually work, and the fact that this inflation seems to have arisen most likely from the removal of a relatively high frequency, low cost sinking transaction (respec shrines) something similarly pervasive might have to be the answer.

Ilumia

hiyde wrote: »

sarahthes wrote: »

hiyde wrote: »

sarahthes wrote: »

The solution, then, is to have things buyable with AP that translate into gold. There are some, but a lot of them are really RNG-based and the average PvPer isn't likely to convert enough AP to gold to fund their potions on a weekly or monthly basis.

Curious to know, with current pricing, how much gold the average PvP player needs each week to buy all the pots they'd like to have.

Depends how much they are pvping. A stack of tripots or heroism pots will last about 3-4 hours, give or take, so that's either 300K or 2m a night, depending on what you're using (on PC NA).

So, 75k per hour on tripots expense using 1 pot every ~2 mins. One hour of mediocre node farming can easily earn 500k. For every 6 hours of PvP, assuming absolutely no other income sources, it's one hour of farming. 86% of their time PvPing, 14% farming.

If I mathed right.

How does node farming net so much? Do you perhaps have a guide you can share?

SilverBride

doesurmindglow wrote: »

Yeah unfortunately this does suggest that the better solution might be one that is a small gold sink at very high frequency: something like extending the wayshrine cost to more instances of fast travel, or something to that effect.

And that would cancel out one of the Champion Points.

Necrotech_Master

adding cost to wayshrines would not do anything, because theres a lot of ways to mitigate that even without the CP reducing the wayshrine cost

porting to houses is free, and if you have enough houses you are bound to have at least a few near wayshrines (i have almost 1 house in nearly every zone)

then you have alternative methods like traveling to other players, which on PC is made even easier by use of addons such as beam me up (according to my beam me up ive saved between 500k and 1 mil in transit fees over the years ive used this)

a way to sink gold for people would be either: something worth buying with gold (imagine if you could just buy tripots with gold directly from an NPC vendor for example), or a currency conversion to turn the gold into another currency

right now you can indirectly convert almost every other currency to gold (tel var -> gold, AP -> gold, even crowns -> gold) by transacting with other players, but this process does not remove gold from the environment since its player-to-player transactions

the problem with a gold sink, is that if its too large most players wont end up using it. it has to be a small enough cost that has a big enough draw to make players want to buy the item

like yeah sure you could buy tons of empty soul gems, but they drop so often, its not worth doing so

one area i think they could probably improve is style mat vendors, which right now only sell the basic race style mats, if there was a vendor that sold exotic style mats and materials for housing, that would actually really act as a gold sink instead of pushing around 100s of thousands of gold (or more) in just rare style mats and furnishing mats

doesurmindglow

SilverBride wrote: »

And that would cancel out one of the Champion Points.

No, this idea is to apply to fast travel instances not currently covered by the wayshrine cost, such as travel to guild members, or something of the sort. If you had the CP, that cost would still be adjusted accordingly. Reversing the CP is not a bad idea either, though, I just don't know how effective it would be, as I think a lot of the players capable of slotting the CP are usually fast traveling for free using add-ons anyway.

But I wouldn't be surprised if changes to CP to buff gold sources (ie. higher value fenced items, larger gold drops) and nerf gold sinks (ie. reduced repair cost frequency, lowered wayshrine cost, and others) isn't also to blame for the inflationary curve the data have shown. But that change happened probably a year or so before the inflation I was seeing in these data, so I didn't go back that far.

doesurmindglow

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

adding cost to wayshrines would not do anything, because theres a lot of ways to mitigate that even without the CP reducing the wayshrine cost.

I'm not sure: you're definitely right that wayshrines are avoided by most experienced players, but the advantage wayshrines have as a potent gold sink is that they are very high frequency -- even experienced players with addons, a full guild list, and numerous houses probably still do end up paying the wayshrine charge a couple times a day.

It's probably not as frequent as guild trader commissions or even NPC repairs, but even so it has to be among the most repeated gold sinking transactions.

That all being said, i do like your other ideas too: a style mat vendor is especially interesting.

doesurmindglow

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

the problem with a gold sink, is that if its too large most players wont end up using it. it has to be a small enough cost that has a big enough draw to make players want to buy the item

I also am inclined to agree that a high cost vendor that's infrequently used is probably not that effective: though I personally think there'd be a good argument for adding more luxury vendors and things of that nature, you probably need a greater frequency to really achieve a deflationary effect commensurate with the elimination of the respec sink (provided, of course, that actually is the cause; I have data correlating that event but there are other plausible changes around the timeframe).

I also think you could simply expand the coverage of existing gold sinks, like if wayshrines aren't sufficient on their own because of the problems you raise, perhaps make it possible for the merchant assistant NPCs (the ones you sell junk to in a dungeon) also can do repairs, and for some of the other sinks to charge slightly more, such as raising the commission on guild trader transactions half a basis point to 4%.

Necrotech_Master

doesurmindglow wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

adding cost to wayshrines would not do anything, because theres a lot of ways to mitigate that even without the CP reducing the wayshrine cost.

I'm not sure: you're definitely right that wayshrines are avoided by most experienced players, but the advantage wayshrines have as a potent gold sink is that they are very high frequency -- even experienced players with addons, a full guild list, and numerous houses probably still do end up paying the wayshrine charge a couple times a day.

It's probably not as frequent as guild trader commissions or even NPC repairs, but even so it has to be among the most repeated gold sinking transactions.

That all being said, i do like your other ideas too: a style mat vendor is especially interesting.

the cost for wayshrines and repairs is so low its usually covered just by selling junk

for example i do 1 run of a vet trial, and i make 15-20k gold in junk sellables, and i pay less than 1k gold in repairs most of the time

i know i for sure still pay for wayshrine travel occasionally, but its so infrequently that i dont really care lol, i usually on avg make several hundred thousand to 2 mil in a week selling stuff on guild stores (because the market is where it is), but i mostly hoard the gold i dont spend it a whole lot (i have slightly over 100 mil gold in my bank right now)

thats why i think it would be better to introduce a sink in the form of an NPC vendor that actually sells items that people want, that also get consumed frequently (tripots, exotic style mats, furnishing mats) as all of those are unnecessarily difficult to obtain in most cases, especially when crafting for houses can require like up to 10-20 of a single one of these rare mats for 1 single item craft

it kind of goes the same for tripots, where ive seen some people say on this forum that they go through hundreds of tripots a week if they are in progs

sure you could still craft the pots, and maybe have the crafted pots be slightly better than the ones you can buy, but at least it would help sustain them instead of driving up prices on mats (low supply high demand)

SilverBride

Punishing players by adding costs to things that are currently free, such is traveling to friends and guildies, etc., won't have any positive effect on inflation. Rather it will make traders increase their prices to make up for the new cost.

doesurmindglow

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

the cost for wayshrines and repairs is so low its usually covered just by selling junk

for example i do 1 run of a vet trial, and i make 15-20k gold in junk sellables, and i pay less than 1k gold in repairs most of the time

i know i for sure still pay for wayshrine travel occasionally, but its so infrequently that i dont really care lol, i usually on avg make several hundred thousand to 2 mil in a week selling stuff on guild stores (because the market is where it is), but i mostly hoard the gold i dont spend it a whole lot (i have slightly over 100 mil gold in my bank right now)

thats why i think it would be better to introduce a sink in the form of an NPC vendor that actually sells items that people want, that also get consumed frequently (tripots, exotic style mats, furnishing mats) as all of those are unnecessarily difficult to obtain in most cases, especially when crafting for houses can require like up to 10-20 of a single one of these rare mats for 1 single item craft

it kind of goes the same for tripots, where ive seen some people say on this forum that they go through hundreds of tripots a week if they are in progs

sure you could still craft the pots, and maybe have the crafted pots be slightly better than the ones you can buy, but at least it would help sustain them instead of driving up prices on mats (low supply high demand)

Yeah I actually also think the value of the sellables to the NPC vendors (like Undaunted Plunder in vet trials) could be reduced slightly. None of these changes I'm talking about would be big ones: Like if a treasure sells currently for 1000 at base before scaling, it'd sell for 950. This sort of thing. I think it should be small, implemented incrementally, and scale to player level, but at sufficient frequency to meaningfully impact the supply of gold in circulation.

I definitely do agree with expanding the options to buy potions, style and furnishing mats, and others, or buffing their overworld drop rates to at least mitigate the problem with greater commodity supply on the guild traders. Some of those markets are notoriously inefficient and subject to arbitrage so I think increased volumes could create better efficiencies for some of them.

doesurmindglow

SilverBride wrote: »

Punishing players by adding costs to things that are currently free, such is traveling to friends and guildies, etc., won't have any positive effect on inflation. Rather it will make traders increase their prices to make up for the new cost.

No, that's not how inflation works. Transactions between players do not cause inflation, nor do they drive it. Inflation is exclusively a result of gold sources supplying more gold than gold sinks remove, and there is data that points to particular changes that did exactly that. Players charging more simply moves around the gold already in circulation. We need to remove gold from circulation in order to address it, and that has been the actual focus of this conversation.

SilverBride

doesurmindglow wrote: »

We need to remove gold from circulation in order to address it, and that has been the actual focus of this conversation.

I don't agree with that and I certainly don't agree with punishing players that have been successful at making gold so they can no longer play the way they wish.

I want houses and furnishings and I will not have my gold taken away from me so I can no longer enjoy the things I have worked to be able to afford.

RichestGuyinEso

AnduinTryggva wrote: »

ShadowPaladin wrote: »

I do like your analysis doesurmindglow. But as Sakiri mentioned, your solutions - especially the one with increasing the gold sinks already ingame - are not that good. As Sakiri mentioned, there is a chasm between *rich* and *poor* players. I would say that it is comparable to RL, where you have 10% who own 90% and are super rich and 90% who do only own the remaining 10% and are more or less poor.

Now, if you only want to hit the *rich* players with billions of gold, then the only way I can think of to do so would be to introduce a *wealth tax*. For example, all with more than 250mio gold on any char and in their personal bank will get 5% automatically removed - lets say - each month. This will continue until they fall under a certain threshold, for example 100mio.

This could perhaps stop players from hoarding gold, because it would be meaningless to do so, since they would loose gold if they move passt 100mio. Instead they would start to spent it or they perhaps would stop acquiring gold alltogether.

I have found again the video where you can see that this player has nearly a billion gold! This is such an insane amount of money and I am quite certain there are more like this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbuB6ERGvfo

Check for minute 4:33

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvQrqkymfl8
Inflation is an issue. Id be happy with a nice gold sink besides trader bids. Issue is with Consoles tho, need to think of something smartly to make all platforms fine.

doesurmindglow

"SilverBride wrote: »

I don't agree with that and I certainly don't agree with punishing players that have been successful at making gold so they can no longer play the way they wish.

I want houses and furnishings and I will not have my gold taken away from me so I can no longer enjoy the things I have worked to be able to afford.

Exactly, that's what inflation does, and why it is of concern to most of the people on this thread: It punishes players who have been successful at making gold so they can no longer play the way they wish. If you want houses and furnishings, you now pay roughly double what you did to acquire those things at market than you did two years ago, depending on the particular commodity in question.

So yes, I agree with you: reducing inflation is necessary so gold is not being taken away from you and you can no longer enjoy the things you worked to be able to afford.

doesurmindglow

RichestGuyinEso wrote: »

Inflation is an issue. Id be happy with a nice gold sink besides trader bids. Issue is with Consoles tho, need to think of something smartly to make all platforms fine.

Yeah what is interesting, and maybe you can speak to this, is that the pattern of inflation is not consistent across platforms and servers: while it's clear that EU began to experience inflation at roughly the same time, it doesn't appear to have been as sharp or accelerated as the data seem to indicate for NA.

I'm not entirely sure why that would be, given that the same inflationary change was made to both servers at the same time. But it is an interesting aspect of the conversation that potentially would complicate a deflationary intervention.

Czeri

I know on what I would spend all my gold in a blink of an eye, and what wouldn't affect ZoS' crown sales at all - being able to purchase rare recipes from an NPC merchant. And it wouldn't affect new players at all!

sarahthes

I think whatever gold sink is implemented or adjusted, it should either be completely unique, or common but small, so that it removes gold without impacting the average player.

I remember when inflation first started taking off a while ago, there was a suspicion that the amount of gold being produced by the game itself was increasing. In addition to the removal of a gold sink with the armory station in the Deadlands patch, Greymoor also added antiquities - which print small but steady amounts of gold during scrying.

karthrag_inak

khajiit thinks crafting prices could be effectively capped by having all materials and similar items available from craft-oriented npc merchants at some reasonable price, affordable by even beginner crafters. Then, the days of 300 gold per unit jewelry stacks would be over.

doesurmindglow

sarahthes wrote: »

I think whatever gold sink is implemented or adjusted, it should either be completely unique, or common but small, so that it removes gold without impacting the average player.

I remember when inflation first started taking off a while ago, there was a suspicion that the amount of gold being produced by the game itself was increasing. In addition to the removal of a gold sink with the armory station in the Deadlands patch, Greymoor also added antiquities - which print small but steady amounts of gold during scrying.

I generally agree. I'd really like to see incremental changes to high frequency transactions -- reducing the value of sellables, increasing the coverage of wayshrines and repairs, increasing guild trader commissions, and the like -- but I do also think that adding a couple gold sinks that other players have suggested that expand the availability of commodities, furnishings, or recipes purchased with gold might just be a nice QoL addition even if it doesn't get as much bang for our buck from a standpoint of achieving more sustainable price stability.

I also think the addition of CP 2.0 might have played a role in that it did buff gold sources in a number of ways while also reducing the impact of gold sinks including wayshrines and repairs. Scrying, you rightly point out, is another gold source that did not come with a corresponding sink: there is no repair bill or anything like that for participating in scrying. Curiously as I've been looking more at the data that's available for EU, many of their inflationary curves seem to have started earlier, like 1500 days ago (4 years) but backed off considerably and then rebounded. This is pretty consistent across commodities and a bit of a contrast from what I've found delving into the price histories on NA:









I haven't delved as deeply here and don't have the same level of personal experience with the trends as I do from being a trader on NA. For the most part there is still a fairly steep price increase across multiple commodities starting about two years ago, suggesting a monetary shift to more inflationary conditions.

Data is also not as robust at least at the resource I'm working with, which is TTC and UESP. It'd be interesting if EU players might contribute their own datasets to the conversation to better understand which changes could be most responsible for the trends we've seen.

doesurmindglow

Also interesting is that EU data seems to go back further: I'm able to find price points for as many as 2400 days ago, but the volume is much smaller overall. This has an effect of making recent trends a bit harder to see. It also shows there was considerable deflation in the very early days of this dataset, and even with some commodities, prices are only now recovering to early game levels, which is also a bit interesting.

I think possibly this is a result of the data source I'm working with, as UESP perhaps had a longer footprint on EU than it does on NA. In either case, the EU situation still appears to be one of less accelerated inflation but does correspond in terms of timeframe and, therefore, potential causes.

dk_dunkirk

SilverBride wrote: »

doesurmindglow wrote: »

We need to remove gold from circulation in order to address it, and that has been the actual focus of this conversation.

I don't agree with that and I certainly don't agree with punishing players that have been successful at making gold so they can no longer play the way they wish.

You're both right. It's not a algebra problem (subtract X, add Y), it's a differential equation problem (decrease d$/dt). They shouldn't just *remove* gold, but they need to change the RATES of how it builds up in the economy. "All they need to do" is slow the rate of the incoming gold, and increase the outgoing rates, and things will settle into a new normal.

Of course, the devil's in the details, and the various tweaks to affect the balance between these two are sure to make a bunch of people angry, and spark 100-page discussions here. Good luck, ZOS.

spartaxoxo

I don't see how they would fix NA problems without harming the economies of console and to a lesser extent EU.

doesurmindglow

dk_dunkirk wrote: »

You're both right. It's not a algebra problem (subtract X, add Y), it's a differential equation problem (decrease d$/dt). They shouldn't just *remove* gold, but they need to change the RATES of how it builds up in the economy. "All they need to do" is slow the rate of the incoming gold, and increase the outgoing rates, and things will settle into a new normal.

Yeah from a technical standpoint you're right: it's actually a rate of change problem. I also think they should avoid a large dramatic tweak in part for that reason, but yes, there probably isn't a tweak they can do that will be both effective and universally liked.

Because of the nature of the math behind the problem too, there is also the problem of the effects being pretty far downstream from the tweak being made, much the same way that offering free respecs from the Armory really didn't seem like that big a deal at the time but probably were in retrospect, now that we have a couple years of trends to look at. Similarly the long-term impact of a deflationary adjustment, especially if done right, would probably also take years.

hiyde

Ilumia wrote: »

How does node farming net so much? Do you perhaps have a guide you can share?

The numbers I quoted are PC-NA.

Pick a starter island, any starter island where ore/plat nodes respawn very quickly.

Run the Farming Party addon, which will calculate everything you farm.

Create a loop or two on an island you like. Farm for one hour with the aim being to hit those quick spawning ore nodes while you grab anything else you see.

Or try Craglorn if RNGeezus loves you (Nirncrux).

I also run some speed gear / ring of the wild hunt. And activate the CP passives in the green tree.

I'm not a pro at this - I usually only do it during guild farm events. I always pull at least 500k in mats and this is during primetime when my starter island loop has competition.

Happy Farming!