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

master_vanargand

It cost me 300k to hire a Skywatch vendor seven years ago.
Nowadays, it costs 20 to 30 times more money than it used to.
Inflation is already accelerating.
I think they should stop giving out gold as login bonuses or for effort.
Giving out 100,000 gold to every player would cause astronomical inflation.

PapaTankers

dk_dunkirk wrote: »

Sakiri wrote: »

I managed to max my bank and bag space and build up to about 5 million in the course of six months. People just need to get off their butts and do stuff to make money.

That might be just enough to buy a full set of Deadly Strikes gear and weapons in all the right traits. Maybe not. Does that seem a reasonable tradeoff to you? Six months of grinding for 1 set of meta gear? I'm honestly asking. Sure, you could spend all your time PVP'ing and grinding it out there, but it might take that long to do it that way as well. I'm specifically asking about your perception on the value of your time in relation to popular things to buy in the game.

No.
It's proportional. I could just sell 1 hour of brp powerleveling on pc EU and get the full set of deadly in desired trait.
Difference between irl inflantion and inflation in eso is that the buying power still remains the same as the price of common commodities is high also.
New players are not gatekeeped from that.
They can just go and farm flowers for a day and they can be rocking meta gear.

For what its worth tho. I do agree that price stability and inflation needs to be looked at for long term health of the game.
Not for the new players. I dont think it conserns them that much.
But if you do choose to take a break from the game and come back few months later to see that all your previous work has been devalued does suck.

I suspect the biggest contribution to this massive inflantion was disabling of crown gifting and gifting in general for long period of time.
And yes, I know that transactions between players do not directly contribute to inflation.
The problem is that people that do not engane in housing dont have a massive gold sink in endgame. A huge chunk of it goes towards crown trading.
When gifting was enabled again, a huge amount of gold that people had been clinging onto got back into circulation. It wasnt just rotting away in someones bank.

Sakiri

dk_dunkirk wrote: »

Sakiri wrote: »

I managed to max my bank and bag space and build up to about 5 million in the course of six months. People just need to get off their butts and do stuff to make money.

That might be just enough to buy a full set of Deadly Strikes gear and weapons in all the right traits. Maybe not. Does that seem a reasonable tradeoff to you? Six months of grinding for 1 set of meta gear? I'm honestly asking. Sure, you could spend all your time PVP'ing and grinding it out there, but it might take that long to do it that way as well. I'm specifically asking about your perception on the value of your time in relation to popular things to buy in the game.

I already have a full set of deadly strike. I bought stuff and transmuted it instead of buying it gold with the best traits. Cost me a few hundred thousand.

Trejgon

Inflation seems unavoidable in all mmos out there, because the most basic way of obtaining currency will always be the exact same thing that causes inflation irl - printing out more currency into the system. Providing data for this statement would exceed post capacity and would muddy the water of conversation too much.

There are MMOs that handle it more gracefully than others and some that handle it super badly. The difference is in what is going to be your best or most popular methods for a player to gain more wealth. For example, in Black Desert Online the primary and best way of acquiring wealth, is industrial scale of mass murder of mobs, which then drop "trash items" which is then sold to an NPC for primary currency (silver in this case). It is alot of steps for essentially printing out currency out of thin air. Therefore, the game is hyperinflating like no tomorrow. This went even worse, because response to playes complaining about not being able to keep up with expensive upgrade systems, was met with buffing these sources of wealth, followed up, by periodic changes to price brackets of tradeable items to compensate (price caps increased), and increase in cost of stuff from vendor, which then reignites the complaints about not being able to keep up with cost of things, which leads to another buff to gind income.... and so the loop goes. Currently sitting in situation, where fast travel costs millions, and everyone is like "it's pocket change lul".

For contrast, everyone's favourite economy simulator EvE Online, is a curious case study, of having both periods of handling it better and worse. When the top methods of acquiring wealth was coming from farming stuff, that would be sold to other players for their primary currency (ISK), the inflation seemed more tame, but in periods where the most common way of acquiring wealth was tied to being paid ISK from unlimited NPC sources, it was getting worse.

ESO has alot of very popular sources of base income that relies on getting gold from the game itself (writs, quests, treasure items from antiquities, pickpocketing NPC, just to name some), And the trading system is barred behind guilds, which despite community effort is going to discourage alot of players from participating in alternatives.The disparity of inflation between platforms and regions is interesting, and would warrant some study into causes, but in my opinion, attempt to shift the most popular sources of gold into materials, or other items that would be desirable (and thus sellable).

In my opinion, altering writs to award less raw gold, and instead more in materials, could be beneficial in slowing the rates of inflation in regions where alot of writs are being done. There is other side of the coin to such change tho, refined mats are already having issues with their respective worth, so adding more sources of those without more needs for them could make situation even worse for those.

To properly deflate PC NA back it would take more drastic measures than reducing of gold printers, and would indeed require some way of removal of alot of raw gold from circulation. Flat out deletion would be extremely unpopular and sinks would depend on exact implementation.

dk_dunkirk

Sakiri wrote: »

dk_dunkirk wrote: »

Sakiri wrote: »

I managed to max my bank and bag space and build up to about 5 million in the course of six months. People just need to get off their butts and do stuff to make money.

That might be just enough to buy a full set of Deadly Strikes gear and weapons in all the right traits. Maybe not. Does that seem a reasonable tradeoff to you? Six months of grinding for 1 set of meta gear? I'm honestly asking. Sure, you could spend all your time PVP'ing and grinding it out there, but it might take that long to do it that way as well. I'm specifically asking about your perception on the value of your time in relation to popular things to buy in the game.

I already have a full set of deadly strike. I bought stuff and transmuted it instead of buying it gold with the best traits. Cost me a few hundred thousand.

I did the same thing, but that's beside the point, and avoids the question entirely.

Sakiri

dk_dunkirk wrote: »

Sakiri wrote: »

dk_dunkirk wrote: »

Sakiri wrote: »

I managed to max my bank and bag space and build up to about 5 million in the course of six months. People just need to get off their butts and do stuff to make money.

That might be just enough to buy a full set of Deadly Strikes gear and weapons in all the right traits. Maybe not. Does that seem a reasonable tradeoff to you? Six months of grinding for 1 set of meta gear? I'm honestly asking. Sure, you could spend all your time PVP'ing and grinding it out there, but it might take that long to do it that way as well. I'm specifically asking about your perception on the value of your time in relation to popular things to buy in the game.

I already have a full set of deadly strike. I bought stuff and transmuted it instead of buying it gold with the best traits. Cost me a few hundred thousand.

I did the same thing, but that's beside the point, and avoids the question entirely.

If you're spending 5 million on a suit of deadly strike you're doing it wrong.

And I had the money for it quite early on, however, I did not buy it early on as I was using OW, not sure which class I'd main, and wasn't worried about "meta".

To answer your question. If you want something, work for it. Do you expect to be able to get millions in less than a week? And what makes you think that people aren't going to continue to sell the daggers for a million each if people are willing to pay that for it?

That's the part you all are missing. PEOPLE. ARE. WILLING. TO. PAY. THAT. THAT is why prices are high. Folks are willing to pay it. And the people with all the money aren't interacting with anything that takes it out of the system. Trading between players only distributes the gold already in existence.

I personally do not buy:

raw mats
tempers
patterns
gear I could get through chests/overland/whatever(only exception was the deadly strike because I detest PvP)

In fact, I buy very, very little. This is why I have money in the first place. I do stuff to earn it, then don't spend it. I farm my own materials. Why? Because I'm typically a tightwad and refuse to be broke in the game for when there *is* something I want to buy. I already have multiple large houses and smaller houses, and some of them are furnished. I hit up the lux vendor every week. I *do* spend gold occasionally, but not constantly on stuff like potions when I can farm mats and make them myself.

It's just like real life, honestly. The ultra rich don't spend their wealth frivolously, they don't hold it in cash, they hold it in assets(hence the term "net worth", not "how much money they actually have"... these people are worth more than their bank balance), and taxing them more just screams jealousy, especially when the vast, VAST majority of them ARE paying taxes. But we're deviating.

All I'm taking from this conversation is that people are mad that people have more money than they do, things cost too much, and they don't want to be bothered to put in some effort to obtain funding or materials for the things they want to do.

I'm done replying here. I'll continue to read, however, because it amuses me greatly.

doesurmindglow

Sakiri wrote: »

To answer your question. If you want something, work for it. Do you expect to be able to get millions in less than a week? And what makes you think that people aren't going to continue to sell the daggers for a million each if people are willing to pay that for it?

[Snip]. No one on this thread is really interested in giving away items for free, in not having an in-game economy where players have to work for rewards, or even really in making everything cheaper.

We're talking about a problem at the macro scale, something that's much bigger than an individual player's behavior or lack thereof.

Sakiri wrote: »

That's the part you all are missing. PEOPLE. ARE. WILLING. TO. PAY. THAT. THAT is why prices are high. Folks are willing to pay it. And the people with all the money aren't interacting with anything that takes it out of the system. Trading between players only distributes the gold already in existence.

Yes and no. Obviously the players in the market find prices for things based on supply and demand, and this is done by mutual consent of the parties to the transaction. No one in the thread is really disputing or denying that.

But the supply and demand of gold itself is also at issue, and when it's being created at a faster rate by the game's gold sources than it is by the gold sinks that take it out of the system, it loses its value compared to items, which is the issue we're primarily concerned with. There's been a pretty clear explanation of why that's bad, but to recap it briefly: it means those who have accumulated any gold at all are quickly having that wealth depleted just by the passage of time, and it means that those who have not yet accumulated any gold must work harder to simply enter the market.

This is not actually a rich vs. poor issue like you imagine. It's an issue that's actually just bad for both. It's an unusual problem in economics for that reason, which is why economists tend to study it pretty extensively.

Finally, players with "all the money" do often interact with the things that take it out of the system. You do this yourself when you buy from guild traders or give toward guild trader bids. Both of those systems are gold sinks: 3.5% of every guild trader transaction is simply deleted by the system, and the entirety of what a guild pays to get a trader is also deleted by the system. The latter nowadays stretches well into the hundreds of millions of gold every week. Once the game determines a guild has the highest bid on an NPC kiosk, it deletes the full amount of their bid from the system and awards them the kiosk.

Those of us who trade regularly interact with that system all the time.

Sakiri wrote: »

I personally do not buy:

raw mats
tempers
patterns
gear I could get through chests/overland/whatever(only exception was the deadly strike because I detest PvP)

In fact, I buy very, very little. This is why I have money in the first place. I do stuff to earn it, then don't spend it. I farm my own materials. Why? Because I'm typically a tightwad and refuse to be broke in the game for when there *is* something I want to buy. I already have multiple large houses and smaller houses, and some of them are furnished. I hit up the lux vendor every week. I *do* spend gold occasionally, but not constantly on stuff like potions when I can farm mats and make them myself.

First off, interactions with the luxury vendor also delete gold from existence, so a lot of players that accumulate wealth do also interact with that particular system. The luxury vendor NPC doesn't turn around and buy things from guild traders. He deletes whatever gold you pay him from existence instantly.

Second, good for you! But this does admit you're holding a lot of your wealth in gold and not converting it to things that hold their value better. You should buy and hold tempers, raw mats, and patterns, because all of those things have doubled in value over the last several years. If you decided to save your gold instead during that time period, you're now half as wealthy as you were, simply because of the passage of time.

That is an issue that concerns us even if we are not affected by it because of the way it hurts the player economy as a whole.

Sakiri wrote: »

It's just like real life, honestly. The ultra rich don't spend their wealth frivolously, they don't hold it in cash, they hold it in assets(hence the term "net worth", not "how much money they actually have"... these people are worth more than their bank balance), and taxing them more just screams jealousy, especially when the vast, VAST majority of them ARE paying taxes. But we're deviating.

I am well aware of all of this as I do all of it. I keep very little gold on hand, and have made that my policy ever since I noticed there was rampant inflation going on. I pay millions every week in sales taxes to seven different trading guilds, including one I run. I'm not really jealous of anybody, and I'm perfectly willing to work for more gold. This is not actually an issue of personal behavior.

But because of inflation, I don't have to. I don't have to work for anything. I simply buy tempers and other rapidly inflating commodities and then wait. I don't have to do any work, don't have to spend any time interacting with players, don't have to farm anything myself or run any content and still would make gold automatically because the things I leave sitting around in my craft bag constantly "gain" value in terms of gold. Most of the gold I've made over the last couple years has simply been buying commodities, holding them, and then when I do need to buy something, flipping them for double or whatever because they've gone up that much in the time I've been holding. Meanwhile, all the players who didn't do this are paying me twice as much because they decided to save their gold instead. They also have to contribute more and more to guilds just to compete with me for a guild trader, while I do nothing but sell things I bought for cheaper earlier, before gold lost its value.

To be clear: I don't think that's good for the game.

It's not really a question of individuals and whether or not they're willing to "earn" things. No one is against that as far as I can tell on the thread. It's about whether or not the things they earn continue to have value, or whether they lose it over time because the economy is inflating. We're concerned that players who work hard and earn wealth have to constantly spend more of it for the same amount of goods.

Sakiri wrote: »

All I'm taking from this conversation is that people are mad that people have more money than they do, things cost too much, and they don't want to be bothered to put in some effort to obtain funding or materials for the things they want to do.

Yeah I think that's why you're finding it frustrating rather than illuminating. You're thinking most of us are just unwilling to work for things, despite the fact that most of us are and have.

A lot of us just want the players who do work to gain gold to be able to know that gold will still be worth something once they do.

[Edited for Baiting and Bashing]

Rowjoh

xylena_lazarow wrote: »

I_killed_Vivec wrote: »

"I don't like doing [insert unfavoured task here]. ZoS, change the game so I don't have to do it."

It's a game not a job. If the game is making you do unfavoured tasks to progress, yes that's the game's problem.

There's no reason PvPers should need to spend hours picking flowers to be competitive in PvP.

There's no reason for PVPers to pick flowers.

In PVP you can use your AP to buy gold gear and jewellery from the weekend golden vendor, then sell for very good gold with which you can buy as many stacks of flowers as you want, and much more besides to the extent that any inflation is an irrelevance.

karthrag_inak

To Khajiit, the problem is that there is very little downward pressure on prices. No cost for inventory, no expense for logistics no perpetual price for shelf space, nothing that a real seller would have to deal with, other than the slight listing fee. This means that folks can afford to list items and let them sit at whatever price they wish.

Couple this with the fact that there are relatively few vendors (one can visit all of them in an hour) so a wealthy seller can make the rounds, purchase all the cheaply offered items and then flip them at a higher price, as opposed to the real world where controlling the market through buying out one's competitors (horizontal integration) is more difficult and carries risks that are absent in the game, and in the end you have a system that, without some kind of external regulation of -some- kind, is destined for instability in favor of the wealthiest players at the expense of everyone else.

Khajiit prefers that this regulation be, at least with regard to crafting goods, in the form of npc crafting merchants offering all crafting materials at some expensive but still reasonable price, which will produce a soft barrier above which runaway mat inflation will surely dissipate. Khajiit offers this option as the GM of a trading guild, with high 9 digits worth of gold in bank, 20 7-prof master crafters and ~11k surveys stockpiled. So this one could exist as an economy onto himself, but it would be dishonest to not admit there is a problem.

Let's be honest, at least with regard to materials such as jewelry and light clothing mats, the current prices for these, both raw and refined, are ridiculously high, with no signs of going down. This could be considered laziness tax, it is known (materials are literally everywhere) but khajiit thinks making this aspect more fun (the acquisition of sufficient materials for crafting dailies and just making things) would be a big help for new players wishing to get involved in the game, which ESO needs any way it can get.

chessalavakia_ESO

Amottica wrote: »

chessalavakia_ESO wrote: »

Amottica wrote: »

doesurmindglow wrote: »

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.

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. Otherwise, you would name one, which you haven't.

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.

Inflation has occurred in every major MMORPG in existence today. That is not conjecture. In ESO, the minimal changes that reduced some gold sinks pale in comparison to the inflation of certain items that have seen steep climbs over the years.

Heck, Zenimax even added a major gold sink to the game with the bidding on traders. Intersting how inflation still occurred back then. It occurs in ESO and other MMORPGs because the developers have no real monetary policy to manage such things.

The wealthiest players, even the ones with a couple of million gold, have that because they are active in the game and are not big spenders. Please quote one post in this thread with a suggestion that would pull money out of their pockets without harming the lower end of the economic scale. Without such a suggestion that is workable the wealthy will remain wealthy and the newer player and lower end of the economic scale would be harmed disproportionately.

Replace the gold rewarded for completing daily crafting writs with tokens that can be exchanged for materials once you get enough or gold.

The idea behind this is that in high gold environments the materials will hold more value and players will thus choose to exchange for materials instead of gold which will cut the amount of gold being added to the game and somewhat reduce the value of materials as it increases the supply.

If the player would rather have the gold they would get now they can just exchange the token for gold.

Reward players with Achievements and other rewards (that don't turn into gold) based on the amount of gold they have made selling items on the Guild Trader while also raising the amount that the Guild Trader eats for those players.

If you look at most of the richer players the gold they have generally comes from the Guild Traders. Increasing the fees will increase the amount removed from the game. Tying the fee increase to achievements will prevent the increase from impacting players that are newer immediately. Adding the achievements for the amount of gold made from sales will also reduce the screaming from the wealthy somewhat as they are getting both carrot and stick.

1. If materials rewarded by this new currency, tokens are currency, is significant enough to reduce the price of the same materials in the player-based economy then it will replace that player-based economy to a significant degree. The economics of supply and demand are still in play here. If the demand in the player-based economy is reduced there would be less interest in farming the materials to sell.

So yes, this would reduce inflation of the related items but in the same token, it would work like government-controlled pricing. After all, that is what it would be.

2. The Tax the rich idea would work better as a cash dump though the rich would still be rich and inflation would still be in play. It goes back to why those in the game are rich and why those who are lacking gold are lacking gold It does not change that issue.

The tokens will reduce the price of the materials in the player economy for high priced goods primarily because they will increase the supply.

You might have the occasional case where somebody doesn't use much of something that they might stop buying but, I would not assume that would be the norm.

Unless the price of materials plummets, the farming behaviors are unlikely to significantly move unless the majority of the people farming the materials are deeply tapped into the economy.

You can already buy coffers with materials in other areas of the game so, the government controlled pricing is already a thing.

The goal of suggesting changes is to get something that will improve things that people are also willing to accept.

The rich aren't going to accept something that blatantly threatens them with not being rich and the issues probably aren't bad enough for ZOS to risk annoying them too much.

Slightly increasing the cut on the Guild Trader for people that have made lots of $ will relatively quietly remove gold from the game which will impact inflation.

Interestingly enough, I was looking up some stuff on SWTOR's economy when I went to make this post since they had some of the worse inflation issues of the games I've played and apparently they actually put out some updates that appear to have actually dented it.

ESO's issues aren't anywhere near as bad as SWTOR's were and as such you wouldn't be able to justify going as far as they did but, it is interesting to see that an older game actually made a go at inflation and appears to have hit some success in dealing with it.

doesurmindglow

chessalavakia_ESO wrote: »

The tokens will reduce the price of the materials in the player economy for high priced goods primarily because they will increase the supply.

You might have the occasional case where somebody doesn't use much of something that they might stop buying but, I would not assume that would be the norm.

Unless the price of materials plummets, the farming behaviors are unlikely to significantly move unless the majority of the people farming the materials are deeply tapped into the economy.

Yeah your idea is actually a really good one.

Most of us I think do appreciate it: it's a way to reduce the inflationary impact of crafting writs without reducing their ability to be rewarding to the players who do them. One idea that's come up in a Discord conversation around this could be to have the tokens buy the rare furnishing materials that are especially inflated (Heartwood, Culanda Lacquer, Ivory Brigade Clasps etc), creating more efficient supply of some of those. This would make sense as something a prolific crafter would have access to, and again, it could be just an option rather than gold.

chessalavakia_ESO wrote: »

You can already buy coffers with materials in other areas of the game so, the government controlled pricing is already a thing.

The goal of suggesting changes is to get something that will improve things that people are also willing to accept.

The rich aren't going to accept something that blatantly threatens them with not being rich and the issues probably aren't bad enough for ZOS to risk annoying them too much.

Yeah I sorta wish this conversation could completely move on from "wealth taxes" and this idea anyone wants to "take money out of my bank." Yes, a couple people have talked about that, and weirdly, they seem to be posters that aren't particularly concerned about inflation, but I think most of us don't think simply removing players' gold is a workable idea.

I'm not convinced it would do anything for inflation, in the first part, because I do think the players' obvious response to it will be to divest themselves of gold. Second, I see the arguments it isn't particularly fair to those who have accumulated gold from their hard work and go-getter attitude, or whatever.

It's not a serious idea in either case, at least in terms of addressing price instability, and I don't really think many people support it. Makes a great forum strawman though! I do see that!

chessalavakia_ESO wrote: »

Slightly increasing the cut on the Guild Trader for people that have made lots of $ will relatively quietly remove gold from the game which will impact inflation.

Yeah I don't mind this idea either especially if it does scale like you've talked about. I actually think your other idea is better, but this one might be the easier for ZOS to implement.

chessalavakia_ESO wrote: »

Interestingly enough, I was looking up some stuff on SWTOR's economy when I went to make this post since they had some of the worse inflation issues of the games I've played and apparently they actually put out some updates that appear to have actually dented it.

ESO's issues aren't anywhere near as bad as SWTOR's were and as such you wouldn't be able to justify going as far as they did but, it is interesting to see that an older game actually made a go at inflation and appears to have hit some success in dealing with it.

Yeah and to be honest, this really also only has been a problem for ESO in the last couple years. Before that, at least according to the data I've seen, prices were relatively stable. Even just comparing the inflation since then to other games shows that ESO's gold sinks are still pretty effective.

And to be clear, I don't think developers should be trying to return prices to pre-inflationary levels. Deflation is also a really bad thing. I think the goal of any change should be to stabilize prices where they are now and prevent continued inflation, and that's it.

ZOS_Volpe

Hi there,

We have removed some non-constructive comments as well as some insulting back and forth that was disruptive in this thread. Please ensure you are treating others with respect on the forums even when they have views that differ from your own. If there may be any questions in regards to the rules, please feel free to review them here.

Thank you for your understanding

kiwi_tea

@ZOS_Volpe Noted, and understood.

master_vanargand wrote: »

It cost me 300k to hire a Skywatch vendor seven years ago.
Nowadays, it costs 20 to 30 times more money than it used to.
Inflation is already accelerating.
I think they should stop giving out gold as login bonuses or for effort.
Giving out 100,000 gold to every player would cause astronomical inflation.

Taking away relatively small amounts of gold (given how much the currency has devalued) will only compound the increasing grind for low income players, and hurt overall engagement. It has to hit the top end of the economy, without hitting the bottom hard too.

There's heaps of systems that are overdue a rework and that could provide a gold sink.

Sakiri wrote: »

It's just like real life, honestly. The ultra rich don't spend their wealth frivolously, they don't hold it in cash, they hold it in assets(hence the term "net worth", not "how much money they actually have"... these people are worth more than their bank balance), and taxing them more just screams jealousy, especially when the vast, VAST majority of them ARE paying taxes. But we're deviating..

Real life economies are almost universally in a dystopian crisis, though. To teach effectively I feel the need to read a child poverty technical report each year, which demonstrates pretty conclusively that in my country - an advanced Western country - just slightly over a quarter of the students I meet in many, many classrooms will be experiencing severe material hardship in terms like food insecurity, lack of books, shoes, clothing, medical visits, etc. Students who look "middle class" but have shaking hands every morning probably aren't eating, or sleeping, etc. Surely we don't want to emulate the failures of devalued labor and devalued currency in our videogames?

Real life, with its complete social crises, is not even a great model for real life - let alone for videogame economics. Again, there's a level of grind where people in an economy disengage, become reckless, that is not just down to their individual bad decision-making. Even if they make good decisions they may struggle for a variety of reasons.

A videogame differs from real life in that it *needs* mass engagement, and it needs to be *engaging* with a *reasonable* amount of grind to reward. A small community of highly financialised players can't sustain an MMO videogame the way that small groups of highly financialised people can (presently pretend to) sustain economies IRL. (I don't mean the brackets here to be baiting, the present situation where big financial trading of wealth is increasingly completely detached from the meat and bones of economic activity is incredibly worrying for long-term economic health IRL). ESO has a strong, broad player base, and it does need to pander to those players broadly. Sometimes that will be at the (apparent) expense of power users - it pretty much has to be, when it comes to tackling inflation.

But again, I think the best approach is to present those power users with a gold sink that is optional, but extremely rewarding in a non-monetary way. Revamp guilds. Or a dedicated end-game XP farm that effectively trades gold for XP, and that is more efficient even than BRP. Or an end-game gambling mechanic that gives cool cosmetics, perhaps with ultra-rare drops from the crown store.

The latter is my least favourite variety of gold sink, but I'd still take it. I think community-building gold sinks are the way to go. Encourage your power users to spend gold to strengthen the "MM" in MMO.

sarahthes

Spend 1 billion gold to permanently convert a house to a guild hall, with ownership by the guild itself. If the guild disbands, it goes to the highest ranking member who does not already own the house.

I want this LOL. This would be a fun gold sink.

TaSheen

kiwi_tea wrote: »

Taking away relatively small amounts of gold (given how much the currency has devalued) will only compound the increasing grind for low income players, and hurt overall engagement. It has to hit the top end of the economy, without hitting the bottom hard too.

I snipped out all of your post but this nugget - because this has been exactly what's been going on with the devs' trying to "level the playing field" in combat tiers. Remember the "raise the floor, lower the ceiling" situation that's still far from "fixed"?

The devs are already still deeply into tweak mode to raise floor/lower ceiling, and not having a lot of success. It seems fairly counterproductive to me to expect the devs to also figure out how to collar inflation without some truly unfortunate results. Then again, I suppose it's entirely possible the devs might be better at the economics than the combat....

Amottica

kiwi_tea wrote: »

Amottica wrote: »

doesurmindglow wrote: »

Amottica wrote: »

Inflation has occurred in every major MMORPG in existence today. That is not conjecture. In ESO, the minimal changes that reduced some gold sinks pale in comparison to the inflation of certain items that have seen steep climbs over the years.

Show me the data..

Further, anyone who has spend significant time in MMORPGs has seen heavy inflation. It is often attributed to being able to sell cash shop items in the game but even that is an opinion as no one has demonstrated a cause and effect.

Cause: More money comes into existence than disappears. Effect: Money worth less and less relative to goods and services.

[Snip]. As others have said, more money is entering the economy than is leaving it. That money tends to shift quickly into the hands of people who already have money, so the value of money decreases as rich players suck up newly generated money and then compete to set ever higher market prices for goods. Each gold piece does less and less for players. Taking some money out of the system slows the devaluation of the in-game currency, and means the market cannot set those excessively high prices into infinity.

[Snip]

[Snip]

[Edited for Baiting]

It is a little bit more complex than more money is coming into the economy than leaving. I have tons of gold because I rarely spend it. As such my gold has very little effect on the economy. The same can be said for a great many players who are very rich in-game.

What has a greater effect is the means to gain large sums of gold without playing the game. It permits gold cows like myself to be able to give lots of gold to another player who will spend that money in the game which does have an effect in the economy. So the ability to gain lots of gold via selling crowns instead of playing the game spreads that gold into hands of players who will actually spend it. This is observational but also based on the sound logic I have noted here.

I am not arguing that more money is going into players' hands than is leaving the game. That is an obvious fact. I am noting that a gold sink is an easy answer but not necessarily one that will have a great effect unless it is burdensome. If it is burdensome that is not likely to be good for the game as it could very well drive players. We know Zenimax is more likely to reduce gold sinks than to increase them based on history. That history is they have reduced the cost of respecing including giving us a means to respec for free and they have made it so we can repair our armor for free. I have not paid for armor repair in about two years and have tons of armor repair kits to last me a while.

A great gold sink that does not create a burden on actual gameplay would be to introduce a crown trading system similar to what GW2 has employed for trading their gems. It is not directly from player to player but via a market. The prices vary depending on activity such as how many are selling crowns and how many are buying. There is a hidden fee as the exchange rates are not equal. A current example, just logged into that game, it costs 919 gems to get 250 gold yet 800 gems cost 320 gold. 3.67 gems to 1 gold vs 2.5 gems per gold. Again, those rates change as activity in that market changes.

That is a serious gold sink that does not harm a newer player or anyone who does not hold onto their gold very well.

Amottica

dk_dunkirk wrote: »

Amottica wrote: »

Poor choice of words on my part. The buying power remains unchanged meaning the inflation is not a problem. That is what we see in the game. Items cost more but players have more. So buying power remains the same and the economy stays vibrant.

As @doesurmindglow has pointed out several times in this thread, inflation hurts the game, whether we see it or not. If you stop playing for a year, and come back, your buying power will have severely diminished because of inflation. You'd have to get to work grinding and farming stuff to sell to catch back up. So, yes, in the short term, inflation is a problem for everyone who doesn't play the game to farm and grind to keep up with the economy. It's working exactly like real life, right now. Your time is worth less, and you have to spend more and more of it to keep up.

Amottica wrote: »

My poor choice of words doesn't change that people in this thread are trying to fix a problem that does not exist. Comparing markets/economies that can never co-exist or crossover isn't how you check for the health of either economy.
New players within a couple of hours can afford everything they need. Doesn't take long before they can begin purchasing things not out of need but out of want. That is a sign of a strong and stable economy. The beauty is no matter the server players can earn the gold they need for just about anything in game and usually in a reasonable amount of time.

But you really CAN compare them. I took a long break from PC, and started playing on console. To get into the current Deadly Strikes meta, I bought a full set of gear on PS for about 20K gold. That's eminently reasonable, given playing the game as designed, and collecting gold from questing and selling junk.

Then I switched back to PC again, where the same set of gear cost me 500K gold, and I'm not even talking about the gods-forsaken daggers! Farming motifs or nirncrux or perfect roe, this kind of money represents a pretty significant investment in time. I mean, I'd expect to have to farm 50 low-value motifs or 10 perfect roe. That's 20-30 hours. Is that reasonable? I don't think so, but it's completely subjective. (Please, everyone, don't get pedantic about the numbers; I'm just putting some down to show where I'm coming from.)

The other alternative, of course, is actually playing enough PVP to farm the in-game loot boxes, and try to win the desired traits, and that's the same on either platform. You can say, see, it's not broken, because you can just "farm" the gear directly, but PVP is a whole other argument. No, strike that, it's a whole other catalog of arguments. Thanks, but no thanks. ;-)

My point is that playing the game as ZOS designed it yields a certain gold per hour. On console, the prices of things seem to be in line with that design. On PC, well, that's what we're all arguing about here. Sure, you can go farm expensive things to earn gold to buy stuff you want, and you're arguing that this effectively renders the problem moot, but it breaks the game design, and forces a bunch of people to focus on the things that are NOT "the game," per se.

I think this shows up in strange places, like in the threads on the way jerks run ahead in random dungeons. They're on a schedule to get their random and/or pledges done, and GET BACK TO FARMING to keep up and get ahead in the economy. I think there are many knock-on effects that demonstrate that the economy on PC bends the game out of shape. The flip side of the argument that "it's not broken is": Just because some people put in the work to navigate the new shape doesn't mean it's NOT.

@dk_dunkirk

I am somehow attributed to the comments quoted but do not recall saying any of that. Did I really say all that?

Cheers.

TaSheen

Amottica wrote: »

dk_dunkirk wrote: »

Amottica wrote: »

Poor choice of words on my part. The buying power remains unchanged meaning the inflation is not a problem. That is what we see in the game. Items cost more but players have more. So buying power remains the same and the economy stays vibrant.

As @doesurmindglow has pointed out several times in this thread, inflation hurts the game, whether we see it or not. If you stop playing for a year, and come back, your buying power will have severely diminished because of inflation. You'd have to get to work grinding and farming stuff to sell to catch back up. So, yes, in the short term, inflation is a problem for everyone who doesn't play the game to farm and grind to keep up with the economy. It's working exactly like real life, right now. Your time is worth less, and you have to spend more and more of it to keep up.

Amottica wrote: »

My poor choice of words doesn't change that people in this thread are trying to fix a problem that does not exist. Comparing markets/economies that can never co-exist or crossover isn't how you check for the health of either economy.
New players within a couple of hours can afford everything they need. Doesn't take long before they can begin purchasing things not out of need but out of want. That is a sign of a strong and stable economy. The beauty is no matter the server players can earn the gold they need for just about anything in game and usually in a reasonable amount of time.

But you really CAN compare them. I took a long break from PC, and started playing on console. To get into the current Deadly Strikes meta, I bought a full set of gear on PS for about 20K gold. That's eminently reasonable, given playing the game as designed, and collecting gold from questing and selling junk.

Then I switched back to PC again, where the same set of gear cost me 500K gold, and I'm not even talking about the gods-forsaken daggers! Farming motifs or nirncrux or perfect roe, this kind of money represents a pretty significant investment in time. I mean, I'd expect to have to farm 50 low-value motifs or 10 perfect roe. That's 20-30 hours. Is that reasonable? I don't think so, but it's completely subjective. (Please, everyone, don't get pedantic about the numbers; I'm just putting some down to show where I'm coming from.)

The other alternative, of course, is actually playing enough PVP to farm the in-game loot boxes, and try to win the desired traits, and that's the same on either platform. You can say, see, it's not broken, because you can just "farm" the gear directly, but PVP is a whole other argument. No, strike that, it's a whole other catalog of arguments. Thanks, but no thanks. ;-)

My point is that playing the game as ZOS designed it yields a certain gold per hour. On console, the prices of things seem to be in line with that design. On PC, well, that's what we're all arguing about here. Sure, you can go farm expensive things to earn gold to buy stuff you want, and you're arguing that this effectively renders the problem moot, but it breaks the game design, and forces a bunch of people to focus on the things that are NOT "the game," per se.

I think this shows up in strange places, like in the threads on the way jerks run ahead in random dungeons. They're on a schedule to get their random and/or pledges done, and GET BACK TO FARMING to keep up and get ahead in the economy. I think there are many knock-on effects that demonstrate that the economy on PC bends the game out of shape. The flip side of the argument that "it's not broken is": Just because some people put in the work to navigate the new shape doesn't mean it's NOT.

@dk_dunkirk

I am somehow attributed to the comments quoted but do not recall saying any of that. Did I really say all that?

Cheers.

No, it wasn't you. It was Kargen27, post #225.

Amottica

chessalavakia_ESO wrote: »

Amottica wrote: »

chessalavakia_ESO wrote: »

Amottica wrote: »

doesurmindglow wrote: »

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.

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. Otherwise, you would name one, which you haven't.

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.

Inflation has occurred in every major MMORPG in existence today. That is not conjecture. In ESO, the minimal changes that reduced some gold sinks pale in comparison to the inflation of certain items that have seen steep climbs over the years.

Heck, Zenimax even added a major gold sink to the game with the bidding on traders. Intersting how inflation still occurred back then. It occurs in ESO and other MMORPGs because the developers have no real monetary policy to manage such things.

The wealthiest players, even the ones with a couple of million gold, have that because they are active in the game and are not big spenders. Please quote one post in this thread with a suggestion that would pull money out of their pockets without harming the lower end of the economic scale. Without such a suggestion that is workable the wealthy will remain wealthy and the newer player and lower end of the economic scale would be harmed disproportionately.

Replace the gold rewarded for completing daily crafting writs with tokens that can be exchanged for materials once you get enough or gold.

The idea behind this is that in high gold environments the materials will hold more value and players will thus choose to exchange for materials instead of gold which will cut the amount of gold being added to the game and somewhat reduce the value of materials as it increases the supply.

If the player would rather have the gold they would get now they can just exchange the token for gold.

Reward players with Achievements and other rewards (that don't turn into gold) based on the amount of gold they have made selling items on the Guild Trader while also raising the amount that the Guild Trader eats for those players.

If you look at most of the richer players the gold they have generally comes from the Guild Traders. Increasing the fees will increase the amount removed from the game. Tying the fee increase to achievements will prevent the increase from impacting players that are newer immediately. Adding the achievements for the amount of gold made from sales will also reduce the screaming from the wealthy somewhat as they are getting both carrot and stick.

1. If materials rewarded by this new currency, tokens are currency, is significant enough to reduce the price of the same materials in the player-based economy then it will replace that player-based economy to a significant degree. The economics of supply and demand are still in play here. If the demand in the player-based economy is reduced there would be less interest in farming the materials to sell.

So yes, this would reduce inflation of the related items but in the same token, it would work like government-controlled pricing. After all, that is what it would be.

2. The Tax the rich idea would work better as a cash dump though the rich would still be rich and inflation would still be in play. It goes back to why those in the game are rich and why those who are lacking gold are lacking gold It does not change that issue.

The tokens will reduce the price of the materials in the player economy for high priced goods primarily because they will increase the supply.

You might have the occasional case where somebody doesn't use much of something that they might stop buying but, I would not assume that would be the norm.

Unless the price of materials plummets, the farming behaviors are unlikely to significantly move unless the majority of the people farming the materials are deeply tapped into the economy.

You can already buy coffers with materials in other areas of the game so, the government controlled pricing is already a thing.

The goal of suggesting changes is to get something that will improve things that people are also willing to accept.

The rich aren't going to accept something that blatantly threatens them with not being rich and the issues probably aren't bad enough for ZOS to risk annoying them too much.

Slightly increasing the cut on the Guild Trader for people that have made lots of $ will relatively quietly remove gold from the game which will impact inflation.

Interestingly enough, I was looking up some stuff on SWTOR's economy when I went to make this post since they had some of the worse inflation issues of the games I've played and apparently they actually put out some updates that appear to have actually dented it.

ESO's issues aren't anywhere near as bad as SWTOR's were and as such you wouldn't be able to justify going as far as they did but, it is interesting to see that an older game actually made a go at inflation and appears to have hit some success in dealing with it.

1. I had already stated that the supply and demand curve would change. However, it will likely reduce the supply from people who current farm it as they will find the lower price not worth their time.

That is what I stated.

2. Further. It forced the player to choose materials instead of getting that gold to get what they wanted. I rarely buy material with the gold I get from doing writs but this suggestion will force me to do just that. Of course, I could sell those materials but that is forcing me to be part of a guild to have access to a trader and forcing me to take additional action in order to sell them.

Then again no one is really forcing me to do anything as I can just bank the tokens because I do not want to deal with them or cease to do crafting writs because I find them less valuable which in turn takes some high-value items out of the market.

I think the suggestion I made earlier today is a better course of action as it solves a real problem and adds a gold sink.

However, the real question that is not being asked (until now) or being answered is why are some people not able to afford items when others are easily able to buy them. We all have the same opportunity to earn gold in-game, unlike the real works where salaries differ. That is the real question that needs to be answered because that will tell us if something actually needs to be fixed.

Amottica

TaSheen wrote: »

Amottica wrote: »

dk_dunkirk wrote: »

Amottica wrote: »

Poor choice of words on my part. The buying power remains unchanged meaning the inflation is not a problem. That is what we see in the game. Items cost more but players have more. So buying power remains the same and the economy stays vibrant.

As @doesurmindglow has pointed out several times in this thread, inflation hurts the game, whether we see it or not. If you stop playing for a year, and come back, your buying power will have severely diminished because of inflation. You'd have to get to work grinding and farming stuff to sell to catch back up. So, yes, in the short term, inflation is a problem for everyone who doesn't play the game to farm and grind to keep up with the economy. It's working exactly like real life, right now. Your time is worth less, and you have to spend more and more of it to keep up.

Amottica wrote: »

My poor choice of words doesn't change that people in this thread are trying to fix a problem that does not exist. Comparing markets/economies that can never co-exist or crossover isn't how you check for the health of either economy.
New players within a couple of hours can afford everything they need. Doesn't take long before they can begin purchasing things not out of need but out of want. That is a sign of a strong and stable economy. The beauty is no matter the server players can earn the gold they need for just about anything in game and usually in a reasonable amount of time.

But you really CAN compare them. I took a long break from PC, and started playing on console. To get into the current Deadly Strikes meta, I bought a full set of gear on PS for about 20K gold. That's eminently reasonable, given playing the game as designed, and collecting gold from questing and selling junk.

Then I switched back to PC again, where the same set of gear cost me 500K gold, and I'm not even talking about the gods-forsaken daggers! Farming motifs or nirncrux or perfect roe, this kind of money represents a pretty significant investment in time. I mean, I'd expect to have to farm 50 low-value motifs or 10 perfect roe. That's 20-30 hours. Is that reasonable? I don't think so, but it's completely subjective. (Please, everyone, don't get pedantic about the numbers; I'm just putting some down to show where I'm coming from.)

The other alternative, of course, is actually playing enough PVP to farm the in-game loot boxes, and try to win the desired traits, and that's the same on either platform. You can say, see, it's not broken, because you can just "farm" the gear directly, but PVP is a whole other argument. No, strike that, it's a whole other catalog of arguments. Thanks, but no thanks. ;-)

My point is that playing the game as ZOS designed it yields a certain gold per hour. On console, the prices of things seem to be in line with that design. On PC, well, that's what we're all arguing about here. Sure, you can go farm expensive things to earn gold to buy stuff you want, and you're arguing that this effectively renders the problem moot, but it breaks the game design, and forces a bunch of people to focus on the things that are NOT "the game," per se.

I think this shows up in strange places, like in the threads on the way jerks run ahead in random dungeons. They're on a schedule to get their random and/or pledges done, and GET BACK TO FARMING to keep up and get ahead in the economy. I think there are many knock-on effects that demonstrate that the economy on PC bends the game out of shape. The flip side of the argument that "it's not broken is": Just because some people put in the work to navigate the new shape doesn't mean it's NOT.

@dk_dunkirk

I am somehow attributed to the comments quoted but do not recall saying any of that. Did I really say all that?

Cheers.

No, it wasn't you. It was Kargen27, post #225.

Ok, thx. For some reason, the quotes attribute the statements to me.

TaSheen

Amottica wrote: »

TaSheen wrote: »

Amottica wrote: »

@dk_dunkirk

I am somehow attributed to the comments quoted but do not recall saying any of that. Did I really say all that?

Cheers.

No, it wasn't you. It was Kargen27, post #225.

Ok, thx. For some reason, the quotes attribute the statements to me.

Sometimes on lengthy quoted threads, they can get messed up like that.

[Edited to fix messing up quote structure - my bad!]

kiwi_tea

Amottica wrote: »

However, the real question that is not being asked (until now) or being answered is why are some people not able to afford items when others are easily able to buy them. We all have the same opportunity to earn gold in-game, unlike the real works where salaries differ. That is the real question that needs to be answered because that will tell us if something actually needs to be fixed.

At the most basic level it is because what you are saying isn't true. Players do not all have the same opportunity to earn gold in-game, because they have different amounts of time, information, and ability - and the fixed gold that the game gives newer players as starting capital (if they know where to find it in sufficient amounts while knowing how to save in this particular environment) is worth far less today than it was even two years ago.

It's easy to answer your question. Newer players are inherently poorer than we were starting out: Inflation has made their money go less far. That in itself is a *difference in the opportunity to earn gold*. Those little pops of money throughout the game, they don't necessarily stay with newer players, because newer players need to buy from traders. If they save, that money is worth less over time, if they buy assets, that money is now potentially in the hands of price-setters. That money quickly all goes into bigger and bigger bank accounts, where it potentially helps push up prices across the board. Hopefully prices stabilise, but *even if they stabilise where they are* it can be difficult to "onboard" new players into the market, because there is little to no in-game guidance. They have to learn all that external to the game.

On top of that, there is clearly widespread market concern about affordability, because lots of players bring up the prices of various commodities on PCNA specifically - dreugh wax, mundane runes, columbine, Deadly Strike, etc - pretty much constantly.

Not every player has the abilities, time, and knowledge that we have. Not every player knows they need to go to Youtube, Discord, etc to understand ESO. Heck, not every player is an adult. ZOS presumably want to retain those players, and continued inflationary pressures will make that less and less likely.

The big questions to my mind are: How long do new players stay on? How deeply do they engage in or demonstrate understanding of the market in ESO? Are there signs that inflation has reached a point where players are disengaging with core content that devs want players to do (eg, presumably devs want players to gold out gear as they progress)?

TaSheen wrote:

The devs are already still deeply into tweak mode to raise floor/lower ceiling, and not having a lot of success.

Personally, I don't think they need to raise the floor. In this case that compounds the issue. A mild contractionary system that takes enough out at the top should be able to restore or at least stabilise the value of the currency presently coming in a the floor.

kiwi_tea

doesurmindglow wrote: »

YandereGirlfriend wrote: »

Would love to see ZOS pull a "Chromium" on the current prices of Dreugh Wax.

One area I think is super obviously needed along those lines is stripping out most of the "pulverized" and "raw" trait and style materials, which are largely relics of a dated system that no longer really makes sense. (I'm looking at you, Grain of Pearl Sand.) Like with the jewelry changes this does have the problem of really just freeing up the gold to move into other commodities, but it's not a bad change just for its own reasons.

I was really surprised when they didn't do this during the jewelry update. I would have thought it would be a big drop to the number of items the game has to deal with, and that's why I just assumed it was part and parcel of the jewelry changes.


(Apologies for double post. I somehow ended up on any earlier page, and replied to an old comment I thought was new).

doesurmindglow

kiwi_tea wrote: »

I was really surprised when they didn't do this during the jewelry update. I would have thought it would be a big drop to the number of items the game has to deal with, and that's why I just assumed it was part and parcel of the jewelry changes.

Yeah I think it might be coming probably in Q3 or sometime next year. It's more nibbling around the edges than the kind of change that'd be required to stabilize the inflationary curve we've seen in the longer-term pricing data, but it would be a welcome change nonetheless. I don't know that they'll touch the weird "pulverized" style materials but I suspect the jewelry materials like Dibellium and Titanium might get their attention.

doesurmindglow

kiwi_tea wrote: »

The big questions to my mind are: How long do new players stay on? How deeply do they engage in or demonstrate understanding of the market in ESO? Are there signs that inflation has reached a point where players are disengaging with core content that devs want players to do (eg, presumably devs want players to gold out gear as they progress)?

One area Ive started to delve into is the issue of gold prices of crowns. I've not yet finished what has turned out to be an extensive audit -- I'm working through the prices in the bidding channels of the World Crown Exchange Discord from their launch in 2020. At that time, crowns on the NA server could be bought for 85-100 gold per, I kid you not.

On one hand I could see it being good for ZOS that each individual crown now fetches more in-game gold, such that the value proposition for each crown maybe looks better; but on the other, one of the hardest rules in economics is that things with higher prices sell lower quantities, and fewer buyers are available to buy them.

For now I haven't looked at trading volume so I'll probably have to do that on a second pass of the audit, but I'd be pretty surprised if as many crowns are being bought with gold now as there were four years ago. Maybe that means more people are now paying actual USD instead, I dunno. I strongly suspect it's simply that fewer crowns are being sold.

Sakiri

There's fewer sellers. Prices went up.

If suggest getting rid of the gold from writs and up the materials return. You can still sell them for money to other players, and I'd argue for rewarding with raw mats instead of refined.

kiwi_tea

doesurmindglow wrote: »

I don't know that they'll touch the weird "pulverized" style materials.

I don't know why they'd keep them. It's nice to combine them from a "processing goblin" perspective, I guess, but that's all they seem to offer in-game, and there must be lots and lots of them occupying bytes. I don't know how servers work. I just assume keeping them around would be pretty inefficient, and getting rid of them would cost players nothing.

doesurmindglow wrote: »

One area Ive started to delve into is the issue of gold prices of crowns. I've not yet finished what has turned out to be an extensive audit -- I'm working through the prices in the bidding channels of the World Crown Exchange Discord from their launch in 2020. At that time, crowns on the NA server could be bought for 85-100 gold per, I kid you not.

I can only speak for myself, but I've never bought crowns for gold. I've played years. I've bought some crowns. I don't know how atypical I am for a long-term player (started Dec 2017). I've always regarded the crown-gold market as a waste of gold, because I've always been squeezed for gold. I've had breaks for a year while working full time and come back to see my savings depreciated back to a point where I'm struggling, after I thought I'd be good. I feel that in this thread some very common types of ESO players get blamed for always being squeezed for gold. Heck. I once blew literally everything I had ever saved in my first few years on one PA Ice Staff that a guild told me I *had* to have. Bad information. Bad decision. Back to square one monetarily. I have dyscalculia. I have ADHD. Both I try not to use as excuses, but nevertheless they have an effect on my ability to save and track finances. IRL I can hire an accountant. I cannot, nor would I, hire an accountant to help me overcome challenges in a videogame. I do budget in ESO. I do use spreadsheets for ESO, which probably isn't typical ESO player behaviour. Evenso, I struggle to keep on top of even my weekly dues because I am inattentive (the ADHD). There is some moralising and blaming going on pretty freely on that score, in the sense that players like me in the past (I have enough gold at the moment) are being presented as... ... morally ... ...dysfunctional? At least that is how certain posts are making me feel. Those feelings have driven me to some inappropriate responses in this thread.

Edit: No, the exact term is "Jealous". I don't think it's fair to imply that all, or even most, players who struggle financially and want lower prices are merely jealous. I'm not jealous of others' wealth, I just want to be able to enjoy the game more fully as a game. Sometimes the sheer grind in terms of time or gold (or time to get enough gold for the things I need) saps that enjoyment pretty damn hard.

Presumably I'm not some bizarre outlier (maybe I am). I suspect lots of players have been in my shoes, struggling to find a purchase in the market, struggling to find information about the workings of the market, all with limited time.

doesurmindglow

kiwi_tea wrote: »

I can only speak for myself, but I've never bought crowns for gold. I've played years. I've bought some crowns. I don't know how atypical I am for a long-term player (started Dec 2017). I've always regarded the crown-gold market as a waste of gold, because I've always been squeezed for gold. I've had breaks for a year while working full time and come back to see my savings depreciated back to a point where I'm struggling, after I thought I'd be good. I feel that in this thread some very common types of ESO players get blamed for always being squeezed for gold. Heck. I once blew literally everything I had ever saved in my first few years on one PA Ice Staff that a guild told me I *had* to have. Bad information. Bad decision. Back to square one monetarily. I have dyscalculia. I have ADHD. Both I try not to use as excuses, but nevertheless they have an effect on my ability to save and track finances. IRL I can hire an accountant. I cannot, nor would I, hire an accountant to help me overcome challenges in a videogame. I do budget in ESO. I do use spreadsheets for ESO, which probably isn't typical ESO player behaviour. Evenso, I struggle to keep on top of even my weekly dues because I am inattentive (the ADHD). There is some moralising and blaming going on pretty freely on that score, in the sense that players like me in the past (I have enough gold at the moment) are being presented as... ... morally ... ...dysfunctional? At least that is how certain posts are making me feel. Those feelings have driven me to some inappropriate responses in this thread.

Yeah this stuff is actually fun for me: I work in market research, costing/budgeting for a multimedia company IRL, and exploring these kinds of interesting little economies when I don't have to worry about hitting quarterlies is actually weirdly decompressing.

This being said, I don't expect other players to enjoy what I enjoy. My concern with inflation is really that it drives players into spending more and more of their time trying to work the markets and grind for gold just to support the stuff they do enjoy, which is likely to be "other things." On one hand, sure, it's probably easier to amass large sums of gold than it's ever been. But it's also a higher hurdle than it's ever been for those who are starting with nothing, or those just have less time and headspace to commit to it.

I also just think there's kind of psychological "sticker shock" factor, like those of us who have been playing the markets a long time do inherently know that "1 mil gold" today probably means the same thing as "250k gold" four years ago, but a new or returning player I feel like is just gonna see the huge price tags and go "Elden Ring is coming with a DLC, so like, why bother?"

I also know that markets don't function particularly efficiently when currencies are unstable: It triggers all kinds of bizarre supply shocks and arbitrages, with unpredictable knock-on behaviors, rent-seeking, and speculation. The market can't produce effective price signals that players can react to by producing more of a needed good or service, or by reducing supplies of things no longer in demand. There's a tremendous amount of excellent work out there by many economists much smarter and more experienced than me about how inflation can destroy an economy, and precisely the kinds of problems it causes, but I don't think any of that is really necessary to understand why it's a pain for your average player just trying to unwind in an MMO.

To put it simply: It's not something you should have to worry about, really, at all. If you "work hard" and stockpile a bunch of gold, you should still be able to get some value out of it even after a six month break from the game, or even if you just want to save it for something you might want in the future.

Fortunately I actually do think the impacts of this kind of inflation and wealth inequality are legitimately not as bad as with other games I've either tried or even just heard about. And I don't think we should expect or want the developers to deflate prices back to a 2020 equilibrium, because that process would be pretty discouraging for a lot of players. I just mostly hope that the data I've been looking into might provide the kind of context and justification to explore adjustments that prevent inflation from continuing endlessly into the future. In short, I'm more worried about what happens if prices keep doubling every two years than I am about the fact they've doubled in the last two, as I don't see that as particularly healthy or sustainable.

doesurmindglow

kiwi_tea wrote: »

Edit: No, the exact term is "Jealous". I don't think it's fair to imply that all, or even most, players who struggle financially and want lower prices are merely jealous. I'm not jealous of others' wealth, I just want to be able to enjoy the game more fully as a game. Sometimes the sheer grind in terms of time or gold (or time to get enough gold for the things I need) saps that enjoyment pretty damn hard..

Sorry I guess I missed your edit before posting a reply. I guess my thoughts on this piece of it are that looking into the crown exchange data has been illuminating: Like say if you bought a Trial Atronach by exchanging gold for crowns in 2020, you could afford it simply by doing daily crafting writs on 9 characters for two weeks and not farming any of the surveys unless you want to.

If you bought that same Trial Atronach today, it'd take you nearly 11 months with this method.

Yes, you'd almost certainly now have to either do the writs on more characters or get to actively selling the survey mats for gold, which will require you to spend additional time participating in a guild or a zone chat that allows you to do that, and maybe, because of inflation, that side of the process is faster now. But at the very least it'll look like -- and honestly probably be -- a much heavier lift.

I'm struggling to see a compelling case for why it's fair that it only took me a couple weeks to afford mine while you, because you joined the game later, need to spend nearly a year of grinding to afford the exact. same. thing.

kargen27

doesurmindglow wrote: »

kiwi_tea wrote: »

The big questions to my mind are: How long do new players stay on? How deeply do they engage in or demonstrate understanding of the market in ESO? Are there signs that inflation has reached a point where players are disengaging with core content that devs want players to do (eg, presumably devs want players to gold out gear as they progress)?

One area Ive started to delve into is the issue of gold prices of crowns. I've not yet finished what has turned out to be an extensive audit -- I'm working through the prices in the bidding channels of the World Crown Exchange Discord from their launch in 2020. At that time, crowns on the NA server could be bought for 85-100 gold per, I kid you not.

On one hand I could see it being good for ZOS that each individual crown now fetches more in-game gold, such that the value proposition for each crown maybe looks better; but on the other, one of the hardest rules in economics is that things with higher prices sell lower quantities, and fewer buyers are available to buy them.

For now I haven't looked at trading volume so I'll probably have to do that on a second pass of the audit, but I'd be pretty surprised if as many crowns are being bought with gold now as there were four years ago. Maybe that means more people are now paying actual USD instead, I dunno. I strongly suspect it's simply that fewer crowns are being sold.

Prices of crowns went up when ZoS locked down people being able to buy crowns based on other countries exchange rates real world. Crowns cost more in real money so in game prices reflect that. The crown/gold exchange rate has little to do with the game economy and is instead a reflection of the real world economy.