ZOS please work on the in game economy

Lucinator

I'm sure I sound like everyone's broken record but the games economy is in a really bad way. Sale have flat-lined, commodity prices are about 1/4 of what they were a year ago and still in free-fall. there just isnt much of a incentive to buy or sell. This has now been a problem for months and the games economy feels like it is at the breaking point. At this point ZOS needs to add some new mechanisms to stimulate it, such as a massive new resource sink. the fact is that previously much of the economy was due to a increasing player base and that is just not sustainable. This is something that really needs to be fixed by year end or many trading guilds are gonna suffer as will people trying to sell stuff. To be honest any other suggestions that would work would be good.

sarahthes

This is the result of them working on the economy.

Be careful what you wish for...

Orbital78

Get to consuming, if everyone is harvesting their on mats and consumables there isn't as much demand. Sort it out and adjust. There is another explorers event in September, so have fun.

JinKC98

Not sure a new massive resource sink is a good idea...

Guild sales have rebound to normal after a few weeks of struggling and we're back to our old spot. Prices are definitely dropping across the board and nowhere enough to ruin the guild, at least on my end.

TaSheen

sarahthes wrote: »

This is the result of them working on the economy.

Be careful what you wish for...

No kidding....

katanagirl1

Yeah I’m not sure I want them tinkering with the game economy now. Console didn’t have PC inflation and I’ve had to drop listing prices considerably to get any sales. It’s still hard to find good bargains, though. We need time to recover.

Game fixes would go a long way to get players back and stimulate the economy I would think.

kargen27

Nothing is wrong with the economy. Players (mostly high end traders) are not adjusting to the market dynamics. High market prices led to players deciding to farm some items on their own. Couple that with recent events and celebrations and there has been a major shift in demand compared to supply. Supply right now is high and even on rare items where supply hasn't changed demand has gone down.
The market corrected and the players have not. Eventually the trading community will catch up with the market. The time to worry will be when the market no longer fluctuates based on supply and demand.

dk_dunkirk

I don't know what people are complaining about. You know the economy is a joke when they give us a daily reward of 5,000g and all you could do was laugh at how little that was. Gee, I guess I'll buy ONE COLUMBINE. The situation is finally becoming sane again. Back when I came back to the game after a hiatus, and re-geared for the current meta, a deadly dagger -- even in a crap trait like training -- cost 1.5M. Now, you could either farm AP in PVP for many weeks and fight the RNG boss (and the enemies on the way to Bruma) to open coffers, or do writs on 10 fully-leveled crafting toons every day for an entire month to buy on at a guild trader. Given those 2 choices, I sold crowns. You can make a bit of gold just by adventuring and selling your crap. In the economy of 6-12 months ago, that money meant NOTHING. Now, it is actually starting to mean something again. I could not possibly be happier with the recent changes.

DreamyLu

Orbital78 wrote: »

Get to consuming, if everyone is harvesting their on mats and consumables there isn't as much demand. Sort it out and adjust. There is another explorers event in September, so have fun.

Wow! Really? The market keeps sinking and they will feed it again with more supplies soon? LOL!

A while ago, the market was too high, with many sky high prices. Even if I was - egoistically - happy to benefit from this situation, I was certain it couldn't last. For now, the market falls down, turning everything cheap. I thought that after a while, it would stabilize to a "normal" balance, where items giving more work to farm are more expensive and normal items are cheap, to a fair level for both. But if a resource event is coming again...

Orbital78

DreamyLu wrote: »

A while ago, the market was too high, with many sky high prices. Even if I was - egoistically - happy to benefit from this situation, I was certain it couldn't last. For now, the market falls down, turning everything cheap. I thought that after a while, it would stabilize to a "normal" balance, where items giving more work to farm are more expensive and normal items are cheap, to a fair level for both. But if a resource event is coming again...

People had a 30 page thread on here awhile ago about prices being too high on things like Rheum, Columbine, etc. Now they are common. I like the double events, but eventually mats will bottom out. At least you can always sell them to the merchant for the bottom.

notyuu

Not even four months ago the threads about the economy were "inflation is out of control" and "prices too high, zos do something"so zos did something and now it's "the sky is falling, sales are dying" and "help zos the economy is imploding"

Where as in both cases it's literally just the laws of supply and demand in action being accelerated by about 50% due to the reduced listing time zos implemented, or in other words if zos didn't reduce the listing time we still would have had these issues/improvements (depending on perspective) start to manifest around now rather than 4 months ago.

TL:DR welcome to the free market, all zos did was make it change faster, now adapt or go broke

Zodiarkslayer

Yeah, I disagree, too. ZOS shouldn't do anything at this point. The economy seems healthy for now. After all, we are witnessing the aftermath of a burst speculation bubble.

If you want to look for reasons, why that speculation bubble finally burst, there are several factors that coincided.
1) 10th Anniversary and all its "festivities". The double drop events and the loot boxes, that were litterally thrown in your faces, is the biggest one.
2) The grindy experience of ESO (and the seemingly worsening RNG) is driving players away from a competitive and intense playstyle to a more laid back way of engaging with the game. Sometimes even getting players to quit or take a pause.
3) A really weak chapter release, that brakes the usual seasonality of players returning and that doesn't inspire confidence in the producers of the game.

There are more contributers. Like the shortened listing times, but they do not influence the "demand" side of things. So, I do not count them as main reasons.

Northwold

Lucinator wrote: »

I'm sure I sound like everyone's broken record but the games economy is in a really bad way. Sale have flat-lined, commodity prices are about 1/4 of what they were a year ago and still in free-fall. there just isnt much of a incentive to buy or sell. This has now been a problem for months and the games economy feels like it is at the breaking point. At this point ZOS needs to add some new mechanisms to stimulate it, such as a massive new resource sink. the fact is that previously much of the economy was due to a increasing player base and that is just not sustainable. This is something that really needs to be fixed by year end or many trading guilds are gonna suffer as will people trying to sell stuff. To be honest any other suggestions that would work would be good.

Forgive me but if you perceive a lack of incentive to *buy* that's most likely because people *selling* aren't adjusting their prices to the market (including the guild trader bids) and just expect to carry on selling at the same prices they did a year ago. So what you're arguing boils down to "please bring back high prices and inflation".

daim

kargen27 wrote: »

Nothing is wrong with the economy. Players (mostly high end traders) are not adjusting to the market dynamics. High market prices led to players deciding to farm some items on their own. Couple that with recent events and celebrations and there has been a major shift in demand compared to supply. Supply right now is high and even on rare items where supply hasn't changed demand has gone down.
The market corrected and the players have not. Eventually the trading community will catch up with the market. The time to worry will be when the market no longer fluctuates based on supply and demand.

Are we playing the same game ? supply and demand + the reacent events have a part a play yes but thats not the main reason for the current situation.

But hey, players wanted deflation and now we have it. Personally I don't even bother sell something for a few k.

zaria

dk_dunkirk wrote: »

I don't know what people are complaining about. You know the economy is a joke when they give us a daily reward of 5,000g and all you could do was laugh at how little that was. Gee, I guess I'll buy ONE COLUMBINE. The situation is finally becoming sane again. Back when I came back to the game after a hiatus, and re-geared for the current meta, a deadly dagger -- even in a crap trait like training -- cost 1.5M. Now, you could either farm AP in PVP for many weeks and fight the RNG boss (and the enemies on the way to Bruma) to open coffers, or do writs on 10 fully-leveled crafting toons every day for an entire month to buy on at a guild trader. Given those 2 choices, I sold crowns. You can make a bit of gold just by adventuring and selling your crap. In the economy of 6-12 months ago, that money meant NOTHING. Now, it is actually starting to mean something again. I could not possibly be happier with the recent changes.

Deadly daggers goes for around 150K on PC-EU. I remember then reconstruction was released I looked at deadly prices, found them to be deadly so went to Bruma with over one million AP, bought lots of deadly stuff and ended up selling the duplicates for more gold than AP spent in total

Now its looks like its only daggers who are expensive. You only need one then reconstruct the rest.

karthrag_inak

Khajiit is GM of trading guild on NA PC, and has been for a few years now. Some observations:

There's nothing sellable in the game that players cannot acquire for themselves (aside from some tiny amount of exceedingly rare items that have been rendered obsolete due to game changes like Lire/Jaeda runes). What folks are paying for when they purchase from a guild trader is convenience.

Unfortunately, a relatively small portion of the population realized that there was really no immediate penalty for greed, for charging whatever they wanted for this convenience, and so certain items, such as certain materials, experienced over the years a massive, but ultimately undeserved, explosion in price. For example, platinum dust was never 20x rarer than rubedite ore, and yet that was pricing.

Khajiit says "immediate" penalty because there was a long-term consequence that is now being felt. Buyers were trained to not be lazy but rather self-sufficient by the rampant greed of a relatively small fraction of the community, and now, when prices have, by necessity come down to match the shorter allowed listing time, the consumers consume no longer.

The listing duration change introduced a motivation for sellers to be less greedy, but there is currently no reason for consumers to become lazy again.

It is just desserts for some, but unfortunately the rest of us are also being served.

On the bright side, trader bids have come down nicely.

Aurielle

Zodiarkslayer wrote: »

Yeah, I disagree, too. ZOS shouldn't do anything at this point. The economy seems healthy for now. After all, we are witnessing the aftermath of a burst speculation bubble.

If you want to look for reasons, why that speculation bubble finally burst, there are several factors that coincided.
1) 10th Anniversary and all its "festivities". The double drop events and the loot boxes, that were litterally thrown in your faces, is the biggest one.
2) The grindy experience of ESO (and the seemingly worsening RNG) is driving players away from a competitive and intense playstyle to a more laid back way of engaging with the game. Sometimes even getting players to quit or take a pause.
3) A really weak chapter release, that brakes the usual seasonality of players returning and that doesn't inspire confidence in the producers of the game.

There are more contributers. Like the shortened listing times, but they do not influence the "demand" side of things. So, I do not count them as main reasons.

You forgot the Luminous Ink grind, which is also a significant contributor. Drop rate for Luminous Ink is quite low, and Ink was way overpriced for several weeks, so people who might not ordinarily harvest crafting mats been harvesting everything in sight. We have less reason to buy mats now because of this, and also need to offload the excess mats we harvested while grinding for Ink.

What’s funny is that when ink prices were initially sky high, the career traders greedily insisted the drop rate was fine (because they were benefiting from it). Now that crafting mat prices and ink prices have both tanked, the sky is falling. I guess the drop rate wasn’t fine, after all…

Aliniel

My two cents...

The game's materials come in waves and they never reset. The endgame mats have been the same for the past several years. It is expected the prices of those are heading to zero as the demand for them will ultimately disappear. The game is simply moving in one direction and dragging everything old with it. This is very unlike other MMOs (such as WoW) where the economy resets every few years due to mats being completely replaced.

As long as there are new playing coming in, the mats will be in demand. But without new players, the existing ones have little to no reason to buy mats. They either have a lot of them stacked up, or they already have all the gear they wanted. Sure, every once in a while players decide to change gear, but they already have mats for that, or they simply farm it. Even if they decide to buy mats for the new gear, it's still pretty low in the grand scheme.

In my opinion, this "One Tamriel" design has its perks in being friendly to the new players, but the endgame suffers greatly because of it. Not to mention ZOS makes these decisions which affect economy greatly. Jewelcrafting rework was a nice change imo, but by introducing some of the PvP pots, the Alchemy market sunked into Oblivion. These things need to be balanced. We don't want to pay 2k per flower, but we also don't want the flowers to cost 20g either. And then there's the issue of "useless" mats no one buys. New pots and poisions could be introduced to make things more interesting.

I think ZOS is quite scared of changes. They rarely make them, and the game is becoming stale because of it. The current economy state is the result of it.

Orbital78

Aliniel wrote: »

I think ZOS is quite scared of changes. They rarely make them, and the game is becoming stale because of it. The current economy state is the result of it.

There is less need for the craft bag now at least, I find myself selling much more to NPC's for quick gold with no fees.

dk_dunkirk

zaria wrote: »

dk_dunkirk wrote: »

I don't know what people are complaining about. You know the economy is a joke when they give us a daily reward of 5,000g and all you could do was laugh at how little that was. Gee, I guess I'll buy ONE COLUMBINE. The situation is finally becoming sane again. Back when I came back to the game after a hiatus, and re-geared for the current meta, a deadly dagger -- even in a crap trait like training -- cost 1.5M. Now, you could either farm AP in PVP for many weeks and fight the RNG boss (and the enemies on the way to Bruma) to open coffers, or do writs on 10 fully-leveled crafting toons every day for an entire month to buy on at a guild trader. Given those 2 choices, I sold crowns. You can make a bit of gold just by adventuring and selling your crap. In the economy of 6-12 months ago, that money meant NOTHING. Now, it is actually starting to mean something again. I could not possibly be happier with the recent changes.

Deadly daggers goes for around 150K on PC-EU. I remember then reconstruction was released I looked at deadly prices, found them to be deadly so went to Bruma with over one million AP, bought lots of deadly stuff and ended up selling the duplicates for more gold than AP spent in total

Now its looks like its only daggers who are expensive. You only need one then reconstruct the rest.

Price is currently about the same on PC-NA, and of course reconstruction is the whole point. You're not going to find one with a trait you want at a vendor. I too spent a lot of AP farming Deadly coffers, to try to recoup the cost of buying one for my sticker book, but I did NOT. It goes to show how the RNG can flip a good idea to a bad one in this game, or vice versa. My point is that you'll need one of these daggers to gear up with the current meta (Arcanist with Pillar body and Deadly weapons) and this piece now represents 30 "toon-days" of crafting, instead of 300. From a game design point of view, that seems much more reasonable and approachable.

Heren

Aliniel wrote: »

My two cents...

The game's materials come in waves and they never reset. The endgame mats have been the same for the past several years. It is expected the prices of those are heading to zero as the demand for them will ultimately disappear. The game is simply moving in one direction and dragging everything old with it. This is very unlike other MMOs (such as WoW) where the economy resets every few years due to mats being completely replaced.

But some (a lot ? ) materials are consumed, even if they stay the same : take columbine for example, you do potions with it and then consume these, effectively destroying it. Therefore it make little sense to say that "It is expected the prices of those are heading to zero as the demand for them will ultimately disappear" : the demand for them will still be there, as long as people are chugging potions, and they will always have a price given the demand and the supply are balance.

Sure if tomorow everyone get one million columbine for free as a daily reward, prices will go down and stay down for a certain amount of time, and to a lesser degree this is what seems to be happening with high supply and seemingly a stable or maybe declining demand, so prices are going down ( or maybe it's ZOS tinkering with economy, or maybe the latest ban waves of gold sellers, or else, there's quite a lot of theoretical explanations ).

But I think it's just plainly wrong to say that prices are going down because there's no reset of the must have materials, like in wow. Must have materials remain largely the same, but they are destroyed in the process, so the flow remain. Sure the market would more dynamic with resets every years or so like in wow, but when I read all the complaining from the sellers here, I don't think most of them can adapt to that kind of economy, truly - you will be broke in a matter of days.

Necrotech_Master

the economy is great right now, items are not ridiculously overpriced anymore so ive been buying more stuff lol

AngryPenguin

katanagirl1 wrote: »

Yeah I’m not sure I want them tinkering with the game economy now. Console didn’t have PC inflation and I’ve had to drop listing prices considerably to get any sales. It’s still hard to find good bargains, though. We need time to recover.

Game fixes would go a long way to get players back and stimulate the economy I would think.

It feels like some of the recent changes, along with the crashing economy, are causing players to just not care about ESO anymore and log on a lot less now days. This is why I fear the economy is not likely to ever bounce back from where it is now.

XSTRONG

I think this economy crisis many people are feeling are PC issues.

Economy in Eso is simple, if you where selling items before for 10 now sell them for 5, if you cant sell an item in 14 days but used to sell it in 30 days what to do?

Lower the price.

AngryPenguin

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

the economy is great right now, items are not ridiculously overpriced anymore so ive been buying more stuff lol

How do you explain so many of the trade guilds closing up shop due to the economy then?

Necrotech_Master

AngryPenguin wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

the economy is great right now, items are not ridiculously overpriced anymore so ive been buying more stuff lol

How do you explain so many of the trade guilds closing up shop due to the economy then?

guilds come and go all the time, if they are closing shop, they are unable to adjust to the current market and still trying to post ridiculously high unsustainable bids every week

AngryPenguin

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

AngryPenguin wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

the economy is great right now, items are not ridiculously overpriced anymore so ive been buying more stuff lol

How do you explain so many of the trade guilds closing up shop due to the economy then?

guilds come and go all the time, if they are closing shop, they are unable to adjust to the current market and still trying to post ridiculously high unsustainable bids every week

Guilds have never gone extinct as fast as they are dying off now days.

kringled_1

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

AngryPenguin wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

the economy is great right now, items are not ridiculously overpriced anymore so ive been buying more stuff lol

How do you explain so many of the trade guilds closing up shop due to the economy then?

guilds come and go all the time, if they are closing shop, they are unable to adjust to the current market and still trying to post ridiculously high unsustainable bids every week

If the competition for the traders is posting unsustainable bids, then your choices are to either bid unsustainably and hope you have more reserves to tap into, or to take a substantial chance of losing any trader and hoping your members don't mostly leave for somewhere else.

Necrotech_Master

kringled_1 wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

AngryPenguin wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

the economy is great right now, items are not ridiculously overpriced anymore so ive been buying more stuff lol

How do you explain so many of the trade guilds closing up shop due to the economy then?

guilds come and go all the time, if they are closing shop, they are unable to adjust to the current market and still trying to post ridiculously high unsustainable bids every week

If the competition for the traders is posting unsustainable bids, then your choices are to either bid unsustainably and hope you have more reserves to tap into, or to take a substantial chance of losing any trader and hoping your members don't mostly leave for somewhere else.

or just bid more fiscally responsible across several traders, the guilds that bid unsustainably cant keep it up forever

thats why a lot of these bigger guilds end up requiring dues from members to pad the unsustainable bids

i feel no pity for them, losing a trader for 1 week wont kill a guild, there was a time when there were no traders and all sales were internal only

if the guild collapses, they did not manage their funds properly, always an option to just join another guild

majority of the trade guilds im in, im in so i can sell stuff, if any of them collapsed for whatever reason (which has happened numerous times over the years, ive lost track how many different trade guilds ive been in), you just join another guild if you want to continue selling

Aurielle

AngryPenguin wrote: »

Necrotech_Master wrote: »

the economy is great right now, items are not ridiculously overpriced anymore so ive been buying more stuff lol

How do you explain so many of the trade guilds closing up shop due to the economy then?

It’s because some trading guilds are still posting ridiculously high bids for traders, causing the rest to follow suit. If items are selling for less gold overall, the average bid needs to come down to make it worthwhile for the trading guilds, simple as that.

kargen27

daim wrote: »

kargen27 wrote: »

Nothing is wrong with the economy. Players (mostly high end traders) are not adjusting to the market dynamics. High market prices led to players deciding to farm some items on their own. Couple that with recent events and celebrations and there has been a major shift in demand compared to supply. Supply right now is high and even on rare items where supply hasn't changed demand has gone down.
The market corrected and the players have not. Eventually the trading community will catch up with the market. The time to worry will be when the market no longer fluctuates based on supply and demand.

Are we playing the same game ? supply and demand + the reacent events have a part a play yes but thats not the main reason for the current situation.

But hey, players wanted deflation and now we have it. Personally I don't even bother sell something for a few k.

There is a belief that the 14 day listing change is the cause. The 14 day listing might have instead prevented an even more drastic price drop. The claim is that sellers don't want to list items now because of the shorter time they will be listed. That attitude would lead to a shortage of goods as sellers are reluctant to post items. Less goods being posted would mean higher prices if demand did not change.
Some of the price drop was panic on the players part thinking oh no now my goods will not sell. They were quick to adjust their prices down and others followed. The 14 day listing is not why prices dropped other than players over reaction to the change. If there is a problem with the current economy it is a player created one and players can correct it.