Has the bottom fallen out of the market for guild sales?

moderatelyfatman · July 6

Hello All,

I thought it was just my imagination, but then my trade guild head publicly said that sales for pretty much everything had dropped off.

I was wondering who else had noticed that it was getting more difficult to sell?

SilverBride · July 6

For me it's not difficult to sell, but things are selling at much lower prices.

spartaxoxo · July 6

I haven't had an issue with volume so much as lower price. I find I have to list things cheaper than I used to. But it will go back up again. That's to be expected after anniversary and zeal.

agelonestar · July 6

Prices on both EU and NA have dropped off considerably. Items are all selling but for a much lower cost. This is especially true of high end materials.

Prices will probably rise again, but unlikely to recover completely. Prices were high for a little while - too high.

LikiLoki · July 6

The total sales of guilds fell by about 2 times. However, the kiosk-points have not fallen in price. Hard times for Trade Clan Owners

ValueDrift · July 6

I was away for a few years so can't compare to the immediate past, but certainly this summer slump seems harder than the ones I saw in the past. This would have typically been a good time for market speculation, buy for cheap now and sell for more months later when prices go back up. But that seems risky to me now, if the player-base is in a downwards spiral that starts feeding itself (like I suspect), then the prices might not go back up.

Thysbe · July 6

one main reason for the massive drop in material prices is the sharp increase of supply due to ink farmers

just ride anywhere in the overworld and you´ll see that most of the nodes are harvested

BlueRaven · July 6

Also people are over harvesting, looking for those elusive inks. So material prices are plummeting.

LunaFlora · July 6

if things don't sell simply list it for a lower and more reasonable price.

also prepare for set items from PvP containers like Powerful Assault ice staff to not sell for hundred thousands anymore as those containers will be curated with update 43.

Vulsahdaal · July 6

LunaFlora wrote: »

if things don't sell simply list it for a lower and more reasonable price.

Nope, if it doesnt sell I vendor or destroy it. Im not paying the listing fee again. Same as I did when it was 30 day.

I have noticed that sales have dropped. The mats are understandable, everyone is harvesting looking for ink.

But unlike previous new chapters, the Colovian furnishing plans arent selling, which is unusual. Ive already had to trash blue and purple ones already and its only been a month. Never had to do that on any previous chapter.

Could be because of the shorter selling period, or a smaller player base. TBH Im not really sure.

h9dlb · July 6

They broke the economy and fewer people are playing since they brought in the changes

Steamstats (a broadly representative sample)

Month Avg. Players Gain % Gain Peak Players
Last 30 Days 13,766.5 -651.7 -4.52% 24,532
June 2024 14,418.1 +622.3 +4.51% 27,405
May 2024 13,795.8 -3,082.8 -18.26% 23,327
April 2024 16,878.7 +3,246.2 +23.81% 29,898

Vulkunne · July 6

Well for a long time now many posters on here warned about economic problems and other things like players selling garbage and misleading sales and trying to deflect ZOS changes that were hostile towards the economy (while still making it) and NOW there is no real difference between the trash being sold by scammers (including the people who don't care) and the price of your pearls and the things you worked so hard to find or got lucky. Which means it's all garbage now. And we all told you this was a problem back in the day. You guys mocked us harshly saying that anyone can sell anything, ok so now anything sold is worth the same so don't complain.

And this is what you get, no one listened, we all wasted our time apparently trying to talk about things so it is what it is now and there's nothing that can be done. Whereas before, we could make good income by dropping the price on things and it would sell, now everyone is forced to drop their prices but in a losing strategy not a winning strategy.

So basically, you're on your own now. What was once a diverse, competitive, thriving economy is now essentially dead to itself, which make no mistake, this is not just a reflection on ZOS but the player base as well which I've noticed how over time the maturity level has dropped by alot.

It seems there's no way out of it this time. We're now ALL forced to lose and I don't know about you, but I don't like that, and I don't like changes being made in the game for the wrong reason. Makes me wonder what they do care about which is concerning. Given the lack of better options, I'm off to New World now and have noticed how things are actually alot better over here. What a weird situation, who would have thought, given how many problems that game used to have, hah. 'Tis well.

Aurielle · July 6

BlueRaven wrote: »

Also people are over harvesting, looking for those elusive inks. So material prices are plummeting.

Yup. I know I certainly am harvesting way more than I used to in the past. I used to just do surveys when I needed crafting mats. Now I pick every node I see in the off chance that I’ll be able to add to my comically low supply of ink, and I sell all my stacks of refined mats (and I build up a lot of them) for way below market prices to just get them out of my inventory and free up slots for stuff I actually want to sell. It’s almost like making ink a super rare RNG-based drop instead of something easily attainable through daily quests or merchants wasn’t a great idea for the economy…

Fiktius · July 6

During so many years I've been active on trading, this ongoing summer is worst I have ever seen.
It's natural that summers are mostly slow selling seasons due people prefer being outside and going vacations at summer instead of melting front of their computers. Nothing unusual with that.

However this new 14 days change has been the turd that did hit the fan and faces of players.
If you are not selling highest demand items like materials with cheapest possible price, undercutting everyone left and right, your listings are most likely going to return back to you. So people that still would like to get some gold back from the item, they have two options:

1) List even cheaper
2) Go to sell to zone chat

So many people have picked the second option, which made times of trade guilds even harder.
Guilds gets nothing if players are selling items in zone chat, unless these players are generous and donates to guild.
(Be realistic: how many actually do this?)

As result we have slow sale season, falling prices, a lot zone chat sellers, less taxes for guilds and guess which did not change or went even higher due competition?

Guild trader bids.

Thanks a lot to the person who ever thought this 14 days change was a good idea.

belial5221_ESO · July 6

Problem is not limiting anniversary boxes,or not limiting amounts of items in them.20 dragon rheum in a box is a bit much,when ppl getting hundreds of boxes a day.They need to limit daily craft boxes to one each type per account(like zenithar),and like 5 of each mats instead of 20 to start,would help reduce oversupply,and no demand.

joergino · July 6

belial5221_ESO wrote: »

Problem is not limiting anniversary boxes,or not limiting amounts of items in them.20 dragon rheum in a box is a bit much,when ppl getting hundreds of boxes a day.They need to limit daily craft boxes to one each type per account(like zenithar),and like 5 of each mats instead of 20 to start,would help reduce oversupply,and no demand.

Absolutely not. Then the anniversary would be as dead and superfluous as the Zenithar event.

Luke_Flamesword · July 6

Prices are going down since april/may so it's not 14 days change. I heard rumors that ZOS take care of some fraudulent gold making, but I don't know if this is true. I hope so, because it would mean pernament change and it would be good for everyone and saying it as merchant player who have 90% of gold from trading.

It's just not fun when your main source of gold is grinding daily writs on multiple characters and surveys - it's boring as hell and unhealthy for game. Gold should come naturally with playing game and doing different activities. I earn millions every week just from doing writs every day on 5-7 characters and it was so easy gold, that it was hard to even bother with other sources of income. I bought ALL houses, all missing recipes (furniture and food), all missing buyable gear for sticker book (half year ago I spent so many millions for PvP gear, great timing for me

) and all of this mainly from mats selling.

You can tell me: "so why you even doing this if you don't like it?" - Well, answer is simple. With this economy that we had for last years it was only viable option to earn all these things I wanted to have, because when some rare furniture plan costs 13 million you just don't have much choice.

So, if all these prices will go down and will be closer to normal levels of gold you have from game, that will be great and I hope it will stay that way.

sarahthes · July 6

I'm just waiting for guild trader prices to drop... but it's blind bidding so it's hard to know when it will.

SilverBride · July 6

I'm holding on to most of my mats and only selling enough to bring in about half what I was before. Maybe sellers should just stop selling mats rather than give them away half price to decrease the saturation in the market.

SaffronCitrusflower · July 6

Yes, sales have steadily slowed since U35. Now days I sell about 25% of what I list the first listing, and the other 75% of the items are returned after 14 days. This 14 day listing limitation is turning out to be a severe pain in the ass; to the point that I will no longer farm for items even during the special anniversary events. It's just not worth it. It's work to farm the items to sell, and now it's more work to sell them.

This 14 day listing limitation is doing nothing but causing an unnecessary inconvenience for anyone wanting to use a guild store to earn in game gold. And we should see the trade guilds start to fold this week, with the pace of trade guild closures picking up pace for a couple more months.

It's going to be interesting to see just how many of the casual trade guilds are going to be shuttered over this. It's just too much work now to pay the fee for the vendor locations.

manukartofanu · July 6

The 14-day term isn't a problem. Sales dropped even before the release of the chapter, and prices did too. With the old 30-day term, you would have just noticed 15 days later that your materials didn't sell and their value halved.

JHartEllis · July 6

The guild trader system has run its course and is less and less usable as more trader locations and more items are added with each update. The saving grace was the liquidity from a robust gifting system, and that's been mostly removed to combat the fraudsters. It's very much time to add a parallel trading system that is "pull" oriented instead of "push" oriented.

CrashTest · July 6

manukartofanu wrote: »

The 14-day term isn't a problem. Sales dropped even before the release of the chapter, and prices did too. With the old 30-day term, you would have just noticed 15 days later that your materials didn't sell and their value halved.

Exactly. Any big trader (dozens to hundreds of millions a week) knows this, so I'm guessing it's just the smaller traders who are just noticing and blaming it on the new mail limit when it's not that.

If you're not selling, understand that your stuff isn't worth what you think it's worth and lower your prices. You will sell if you do that.

Also, one of the major contributors to the rapid deflation that no one ever mentions is ZOS has done a wonderful job at cracking down on and banning the worst gold buyers and sellers.

notyuu · July 6

The tldr is the laws of supply and demand in effect
Supply has gone up
Demand has remained (roughly) the same

Heck, I cut my prices by about 30% and everything I list sells within the hour regardless of what it is

belial5221_ESO · July 6

joergino wrote: »

Absolutely not. Then the anniversary would be as dead and superfluous as the Zenithar event.

I'm not saying limit to like 10 boxes,but don't allow to get 140+ boxes on an account jsut for easyily doing daily crafting on all chars.and limit the amount of items you get from inside them,that way more people will be out in the world doing things,making it more lively.

acastanza_ESO · July 6

belial5221_ESO wrote: »

Problem is not limiting anniversary boxes,or not limiting amounts of items in them.20 dragon rheum in a box is a bit much,when ppl getting hundreds of boxes a day.They need to limit daily craft boxes to one each type per account(like zenithar),and like 5 of each mats instead of 20 to start,would help reduce oversupply,and no demand.

Absolutely not. This was an essential market correction that ZOS did 100% intentionally and they were 100% correct to do so.

Wereswan · July 6

acastanza_ESO wrote: »

belial5221_ESO wrote: »

Problem is not limiting anniversary boxes,or not limiting amounts of items in them.20 dragon rheum in a box is a bit much,when ppl getting hundreds of boxes a day.They need to limit daily craft boxes to one each type per account(like zenithar),and like 5 of each mats instead of 20 to start,would help reduce oversupply,and no demand.

Absolutely not. This was an essential market correction that ZOS did 100% intentionally and they were 100% correct to do so.

Also, it's like this every anniversary; here's last year's announcement in case anyone is dubious. Nothing changed. As noted upthread, the oversupply is just more prolonged this year because everyone's out farming ink.

SickleCider · July 6

belial5221_ESO wrote: »

Problem is not limiting anniversary boxes,or not limiting amounts of items in them.20 dragon rheum in a box is a bit much,when ppl getting hundreds of boxes a day.They need to limit daily craft boxes to one each type per account(like zenithar),and like 5 of each mats instead of 20 to start,would help reduce oversupply,and no demand.

I gotta say, the dragon rheum is hurting me in particular. It's evident that ZOS wanted it to be a rare resource, locking it behind a time gated quest chain (it won't drop from dragons before doing this). If you continue that quest chain you gain access to a box you can open once a day on your account, and it might give you 1-2 rheum.

From there, you have to spend a day hunting dragons to build up a decent supply. I don't know how it is on PC, but on PS5 you're usually trying to do this alone. There's a lot of downtime waiting for at least another player or two to show up. I've tried to solo dragons, but the most I can do is get them down to about half health. It's just a losing battle of attrition. The point is, this takes a lot of time to do.

But yeah dragon rheum was definitely overpriced. /s

Estin · July 6

I remember selling dreugh wax for around 49k a piece a month or so before the event, and now they're down to about 24k a piece last I checked. The anniversary event flooded the market with so many highly valued items to point where everything is crashing. Players don't need to buy these highly priced materials since they already have way more than enough from the event, but the players who rely on these items to stay afloat in their guilds are undercutting each other left and right just to make their sales quota, and that's a large reason why prices for everything are tanking. I am suspecting hakeijos are next to go, followed by rallying cry, powerful assault, and deadly strikes when U43 drops. The big ticket guaranteed gold makers due to their rarirty seem to be given out like candy these days, and while that's not necessarily a bad thing, it is going to make it much harder for the average player to make gold while also furthering the already giant wealth gap between the rich and the poor. I'm not sure if the end goal is to make gold and player trading worthless, but that's certainly what it feels like it could be in the next year or two if prices keep following this downward trend.

TaSheen · July 6

belial5221_ESO wrote: »

Problem is not limiting anniversary boxes,or not limiting amounts of items in them.20 dragon rheum in a box is a bit much,when ppl getting hundreds of boxes a day.They need to limit daily craft boxes to one each type per account(like zenithar),and like 5 of each mats instead of 20 to start,would help reduce oversupply,and no demand.

No thank you. I harvest everything I run across while questing, yes. But the things that don't have a "farm node" (dragon blood, rheum; perfect roe - yes yes you can fish for it, but it works a LOT better for me to get a few here and there during these events), etc.

I NEVER SELL ANYTHING. I'm not running around undercutting anyone. I keep mats for my own use, I refuse to be bothered with traders as I find it a crap system overall. So your idea to cut my mats is NOT appreciated AT ALL.

tsaescishoeshiner · July 6

I've lost a lot of interest in trading for having to list many of items twice as often. Yes, I can list them lower, but sometimes we'll just overprice something unintentionally and having to relist them much more often is something I'd rather avoid.

If what they said was true about the vast majority of items selling quickly rather than after 20-30 days, I guess it's just an adjustment to make.

I wonder if it's also just lowered TTC average/suggested prices based on overpriced items not lingering as long. But, people seemed to notice a dip in sales when Gold Road launched. It could definitely be a combination of the events, the Chapter launch, and the trader changes, or more.