Zos should put more effort and time into Eso economy

Northwold

VoxAdActa wrote: »

Northwold wrote: »

Ultimately, a single, transparent market structure would likely reduce market manipulation, increase fair competition, improve player accessibility, and even discourage botting by centralizing economic oversight. While your concerns about price manipulation are valid, the guild trader system hasn’t solved them; it has only obscured them from easy view.

I'd go so far as to say the guild trader system actually makes these issues very considerably worse, because the reality is that it is an economy based in Mournhold, Vivec, etc --ie a small subset of the total number of people actually selling -- because so many players simply cannot be bothered to look at traders further afield. So a small fraction of players paticipating in the overall economy can manipulate prevailing market prices in ALL of it, and there is no real countervailing force from sellers located outside those locations. The latter are basically irrelevant, economically speaking, except as a paradise for flippers to perpetuate price-maintaining behaviour.

There have been a number of threads that go into the fallacies of "the guild traders prevent manipulation", "the guild traders stop inflation" (they don't -- the bidding system *causes it*, as does driving players to use non-trading means to get gold to buy things by putting a hoop in the way of being able to sell), etc in huge depth so I'm keeping it short here!

Only if you're not willing to go somewhere else.

Of course, actually comparison shopping for things instead of making assumptions will show that prices fluctuate perfectly naturally, there's no artificial deflation or inflation happening, and the "I don't want to leave Elden Root" premium on guilds in that city (where it's most noticeable) is only about 15%. Popping over to Skywatch or Daggerfall (or even Belkarth) solves that problem.

An AH is "pay what you pay." You don't have the option to buy something quick vs find a deal. It's all the lowest possible price in a race to the bottom. Yeah, that's great for you. I get it. You get the Wal-Mart effect until the smaller individual harvesters can no longer stay in business and quit.

I just love how folks who have spent, at best, a fraction of the time carefully analyzing the markets of multiple MMOs, with spreadsheets and pattern-revealing graphs and direct experimentation, as I have are sitting here telling me I'm wrong about the system I've most deeply interacted with since 2016.

I dunno, maybe macroeconomics is totally different on console.

Just to point out that I haven't argued for an auction house. You started that conversation with yourself, very early on in this thread.

sans-culottes

Yes

VoxAdActa wrote: »

Northwold wrote: »

Ultimately, a single, transparent market structure would likely reduce market manipulation, increase fair competition, improve player accessibility, and even discourage botting by centralizing economic oversight. While your concerns about price manipulation are valid, the guild trader system hasn’t solved them; it has only obscured them from easy view.

I'd go so far as to say the guild trader system actually makes these issues very considerably worse, because the reality is that it is an economy based in Mournhold, Vivec, etc --ie a small subset of the total number of people actually selling -- because so many players simply cannot be bothered to look at traders further afield. So a small fraction of players paticipating in the overall economy can manipulate prevailing market prices in ALL of it, and there is no real countervailing force from sellers located outside those locations. The latter are basically irrelevant, economically speaking, except as a paradise for flippers to perpetuate price-maintaining behaviour.

There have been a number of threads that go into the fallacies of "the guild traders prevent manipulation", "the guild traders stop inflation" (they don't -- the bidding system *causes it*, as does driving players to use non-trading means to get gold to buy things by putting a hoop in the way of being able to sell), etc in huge depth so I'm keeping it short here!

Only if you're not willing to go somewhere else.

Of course, actually comparison shopping for things instead of making assumptions will show that prices fluctuate perfectly naturally, there's no artificial deflation or inflation happening, and the "I don't want to leave Elden Root" premium on guilds in that city (where it's most noticeable) is only about 15%. Popping over to Skywatch or Daggerfall (or even Belkarth) solves that problem.

An AH is "pay what you pay." You don't have the option to buy something quick vs find a deal. It's all the lowest possible price in a race to the bottom. Yeah, that's great for you. I get it. You get the Wal-Mart effect until the smaller individual harvesters can no longer stay in business and quit.

I just love how folks who have spent, at best, a fraction of the time carefully analyzing the markets of multiple MMOs, with spreadsheets and pattern-revealing graphs and direct experimentation, as I have are sitting here telling me I'm wrong about the system I've most deeply interacted with since 2016.

I dunno, maybe macroeconomics is totally different on console.

sans-culottes wrote: »

While your concerns about potential market manipulation under an auction house system are understandable,

Point of correction: directly observed, not "understandable."

the current guild trader setup doesn’t actually prevent the very behaviors you describe.

No? So we've been in a race to the bottom without natural price fluctuations responding to events, scarcity, and changing demand curves? Oh wait, we have. Multiple add-ons and a website anyone can access have been specifically designed to catalogue and report on exactly that, if you don't want to take my word for it.

In fact, top trading guilds—often run or coordinated by the same small circle of players—frequently engage in exactly the kind of price arbitrage and market manipulation you’re worried about.

Do they? Like how? What commodities are currently under the thumb of a price-fixing cartel that's so vast you can't escape it by going to a different city and looking in different traders? Where, specifically, have you observed this phenomenon?

The absence of a centralized marketplace doesn’t eliminate flipping

I never said "flipping" was the problem, I said the problem was bots that scrape AH price data, either in real time or at specific time intervals, will find prices lower than the arbitrary set price, triggering other bots to buy them immediately and relist them at the arbitrary set-price, ensuring only the very lucky can get a commodity or an item for even 1gp less, while also ensuring a huge quantity of the commodity or item that must be completely sold through before it can be sold for even 1gp more.

it simply makes price transparency opaque, giving even more power to those willing and able to exploit informational asymmetry.

There's a whole website that addresses this exact issue. There are multiple add-ons that will tell you if you're getting a deal or if you're getting ripped off, in the guild trader UI, with little popup tooltips. And if you're averse to both websites and add-ons, and are that concerned about paying bottom dollar, you have five stores right next to you wherever you're standing, and five more in every city in the game, right next to wayshrines, so shopping around is trivial.

And even in the cases where a local market has adapted to the lack of desire of customers to shop around, the premium tops out at about 15%, excluding the cases where someone has listed a stack of jazbay grapes at 10,000gp because they're using their guild trader and system mail as an ersatz storage chest.

Furthermore, your argument that introducing a centralized marketplace would empower bot-farmers and crash prices doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny.

Boy, it would sure be nice if we had a dozen other games with a central AH to look at to see which of us was right.

Bots and farmers already exist precisely because of ESO’s fragmented system, which incentivizes cornering local markets and flipping goods in multiple small trader stalls.

You're not going to make the ~500 million gp every week to corner all five Belkarth traders on leather from Auridon bears. Once trader bidding is gone, though, it doesn't matter how fast you make the profit, which means bots doing high-volume-low-margin sales become extremely profitable over time.

A unified marketplace, by contrast, would actually make such behaviors more visible—and easier for Zenimax to monitor and intervene against.

That's exactly the opposite effect that every prior game I've engaged with that has an AH has seen. A guild consisting of 500 bots is much easier for ZOS to see.

Accessibility isn’t about catering solely to solo-oriented players, but about addressing a widespread frustration among players who find it cumbersome—or exclusionary—to have their ability to engage economically tied directly to joining high-fee guilds. The current system doesn’t encourage social play so much as gatekeep economic participation behind high guild fees and insider access.

All they have to do is wait 45 seconds in any first-zone of any alliance to see a guild recruitment advertising a dues-free trader. Wait 5 minutes and they'll have their pick of 5 or 6. It's not about "high fees" (which are negligible until you get to the serious high-end traders in Belkarth; even my casual low-dues/low-sales guild sometimes manages to get a spot in Elden Root or Rawl). It's about not wanting to interact with other humans even when it's made as easy as it could possibly be.

Moreover, suggesting harvesters would suddenly stop providing essential materials due to an auction house ignores basic economic incentives. Supply adjusts to demand, and if ruby ash or other resources became scarce or undervalued, then their prices would rise, incentivizing gatherers to resume production.

Really? Hasn't happened for wood below Ruby. Hasn't happened for filled soul gems. Hasn't happened for leather. Hasn't happened for potency runes. Hasn't happened for provisioning items.

Your hypothetical scenario—woodcutters vendoring ruby ash out of frustration—is not realistic.

And yet, after taxes, it's still more profitable to vendor sanded wood and most types of leather than it is to list them. It's already happened for certain commodities right now. It's there. Out in the world. Right now. An AH is not going to make that better; it's going to make it worse.

Materials necessary for daily writs will always maintain stable demand; there’s no rational reason sellers would choose negligible vendor prices over a liquid auction market.

And yet, we'll frequently not bother picking nirnroot because it's just not worth the time to hunt it out, and just barely worth the time to watch the animation if it's between us and something more profitable.

Ultimately, a single, transparent market structure would likely reduce market manipulation, increase fair competition, improve player accessibility, and even discourage botting by centralizing economic oversight.

Boy, it sure would be nice if we had a dozen other games with a central AH that we could look at to see which of us is right.

I appreciate your thoughtful points, but I think your claims overlook some practical realities about ESO’s current system—especially considering the console experience on PSN, where many of the tools you mentioned (addons, pricing websites, etc.) simply don’t exist.

You argued that the decentralized guild trader system prevents market manipulation and bots, but the reality is quite different. In practice, a small group of high-tier guilds dominate major trade hubs like Rawl’kha, Elden Root, Vivec City, and Mournhold, effectively controlling prices across the entire economy. Because many players, especially console players, can’t realistically or conveniently comparison-shop across numerous traders (no addons, no easily accessible databases), this dramatically reduces price transparency and gives outsized power to a select group of players who can afford premium trader locations.

Moreover, your concern that a centralized auction house would inevitably produce a destructive “race to the bottom” hasn’t played out in practice in other MMOs such as WoW, GW2, or FFXIV. Instead, centralized markets tend to stabilize prices by clearly showing supply-demand dynamics. Sellers quickly adapt to these market signals, adjusting supply rationally to maintain profitability. Indeed, commodities with built-in demand (like crafting materials used for writs or consumables) consistently remain stable and profitable in other games precisely because their demand is steady and guaranteed.

Further, your concern that auction houses encourage botting and price-scraping ignores a crucial point: centralized marketplaces make bot-driven price manipulation far more visible and easier for developers to track and counter. In ESO’s fragmented guild trader system, bots and market manipulators operate less visibly, leveraging informational asymmetry and inconvenience to buyers, particularly pronounced on consoles where none of the pricing tools you referenced even exist.

Additionally, the argument that joining a guild trader is trivially easy misses the broader issue: requiring guild membership itself creates an artificial economic barrier that many players simply find frustrating. It’s not about being antisocial or unwilling to engage socially, but about the unnecessary hassle of economic participation being gatekept by guild affiliation at all.

Ultimately, your analysis, though thoughtful, relies on assumptions that don’t hold true in practice—especially on console servers, like PSN, where the opacity and inconvenience of the current trading system exacerbate precisely the issues you’re worried about.

I appreciate your perspective and clear dedication, but practical evidence from elsewhere—and especially from the console experience—suggests a centralized marketplace would improve fairness, transparency, and accessibility, rather than harm them.

Jestir

No

As long as the ToS is not being violated the only thing ZOS should be doing to the economy is to continue releasing new motifs and other such things to get players to spend gold

Smitch_59

Maybe?

Over the years I've grown tired of the current trading system. I used to be in a trading guild with weekly dues; they had a regular trader, usually in Mournhold. I generally sold enough to cover my dues, but after a while I just got tired of how much time I was spending with it. Eventually fatigue drove me to quit trading as a seller. Now I decon/destroy everything I can't sell to NPC merchants, and life is much simpler.

As a buyer on console with no add-ons, I hate traveling to multiple cities looking for a specific item at a price I'm willing to pay. So, I rarely shop or buy from guild traders because it's usually an exercise in frustration.

I don't know what the solution is, but I really dislike the current system.

VoxAdActa

No

Ok, you're right. All of my price charts and years of experience, all of Tamriel Trade Center's data, all of Master Merchant's data, all of Bonanza's data, all of the personal experiences of other people in the forums regarding WoW, and all of my experiences regarding GW2 (et. al), are all wrong. [snip]

[edited for baiting]

DreamyLu

Maybe?

I'm not sure what would make sense.

For me, the market is not a real supply/demand market, because every times a resource has a high price, players start to complain: they don't want to "grind" for that resource/item, but at same time, they don't want to pay a high price either!

Usually, it doesn't take long until ZOS give up and increase the drop rate of the concerned resource. The price then decrease massively, and the resource becomes more or less equivalent to a common one. I can recall that for ink, heartwood, runestones, columbines, and so on...

Aside of that, there are also rich players who play with the market, by purchasing all of a certain resource, thus causing a sudden increase of the price, or overflooding the market with a certain resource, thus crashing it's price down. I thought it would be a legend, but recently I saw it happening sort of "in front of my eyes".

So all in all, for me, the market concept in this game is biased in different ways and the actions from ZOS up to now where on my opinion not in the right direction. So, I prefer to vote "no".

Edited for an add: Sorry, I wrongly voted "Maybe", so my vote is wrong. My bad.

sans-culottes

Yes

VoxAdActa wrote: »

Ok, you're right. All of my price charts and years of experience, all of Tamriel Trade Center's data, all of Master Merchant's data, all of Bonanza's data, all of the personal experiences of other people in the forums regarding WoW, and all of my experiences regarding GW2 (et. al), are all wrong. [snip]

Your years of spreadsheets and price charts aside, the central claim that ESO’s guild-trader system effectively prevents market manipulation still doesn’t square with reality—particularly on console servers like PSN, where we simply don’t have the luxury of add-ons or real-time pricing websites you referenced.

Far from promoting genuine transparency or reducing manipulation, the decentralized trader system creates ideal conditions for exactly the kind of arbitrage and monopolistic behaviors you’re worried about. Players on PSN, for instance, face severe informational asymmetry precisely because there’s no easy way to gather pricing data, allowing traders with premium trader locations (Mournhold, Vivec, Elden Root) to set prices server-wide, virtually unchallenged. Your suggested solution—“just go somewhere else”—ignores this fundamental inconvenience, making your argument less persuasive, not more.

Your repeated claims about a centralized AH causing a catastrophic “race to the bottom” and endless bot armies also aren’t supported by the evidence from other MMOs (WoW, FFXIV, GW2), where centralized markets stabilize prices rather than endlessly driving them downward. In these games, resource gatherers have not disappeared due to supposed price crashes; supply and demand naturally balance out as market conditions shift. ESO, by contrast, already incentivizes bot-driven flipping—exactly what you’re trying to avoid—because the lack of transparency and ease of access provides cover for those manipulations.

Ultimately, your argument depends on assuming the very conditions ESO has clearly failed to prevent. While you’re obviously committed to defending the current system, its supposed virtues haven’t materialized, particularly on console, where your theoretical solutions (price databases, add-ons, etc.) simply don’t exist. Rather than protecting players, the guild-trader setup creates barriers, enriches gatekeepers, and makes genuine competition harder, not easier.

I get that your mileage may vary, but pointing to years of tracking prices in ESO doesn’t mean you’ve refuted these basic points. It might mean, instead, you’ve just gotten used to the way this market dysfunction operates—though that’s hardly an argument in its favor.

[edited to remove quote]

spartaxoxo

Yes

sans-culottes wrote: »

Players on PSN, for instance, face severe informational asymmetry precisely because there’s no easy way to gather pricing data, allowing traders with premium trader locations (Mournhold, Vivec, Elden Root) to set prices server-wide, virtually unchallenged.

They go unchallenged because most people want convenience, not because there's market manipulation on the same scale as AH systems. AH systems makes it far, far easier to drive prices upwards (buy low, sell high) and leads to prices going up beyond the normal market conditions.

If traders in Elden Root don't sell reasonably, people will just go elsewhere. Because they know they can find it better priced if they just shop around. They largely don't because prices are more or less at market value everywhere, so they go to the easiest location.

There's still trading guilds that take up most of the good spots or people that make coin flipping goods, obviously. But not at the same volume an auction house allows because of the sheer amount of effort it takes to do these things.

This is why games with Auction Houses tend to have much, much higher prices as times go on than when the games launch, especially older games. Whereas console has a much more stable market and if anything is actually experiencing deflation, which benefit buyers not sellers.

sans-culottes

Yes

spartaxoxo wrote: »

sans-culottes wrote: »

Players on PSN, for instance, face severe informational asymmetry precisely because there’s no easy way to gather pricing data, allowing traders with premium trader locations (Mournhold, Vivec, Elden Root) to set prices server-wide, virtually unchallenged.

They go unchallenged because most people want convenience, not because there's market manipulation on the same scale as AH systems. AH systems makes it far, far easier to drive prices upwards (buy low, sell high) and leads to prices going up beyond the normal market conditions.

If traders in Elden Root don't sell reasonably, people will just go elsewhere. Because they know they can find it better priced if they just shop around. They largely don't because prices are more or less at market value everywhere, so they go to the easiest location.

There's still trading guilds that take up most of the good spots or people that make coin flipping goods, obviously. But not at the same volume an auction house allows because of the sheer amount of effort it takes to do these things.

This is why games with Auction Houses tend to have much, much higher prices as times go on than when the games launch, especially older games. Whereas console has a much more stable market and if anything is actually experiencing deflation, which benefit buyers not sellers.

These are reasonable points, particularly about convenience shaping players’ shopping behavior, and I agree that ESO’s decentralized guild trader model does introduce friction that, at least theoretically, might limit large-scale price manipulation or widespread inflation.

However, just as a point of interest in this discussion—without implying intentional manipulation or even necessarily market dysfunction—it seems notable to consider the recent price changes for Fortified Nirncrux. Over the last couple of months, its price has roughly doubled, and the increases have been closely mirrored across most major guild traders (such as those in Elden Root and Mournhold). That uniformity itself might reflect something as simple as traders monitoring competitors and adjusting accordingly. It’s also possible external factors—like shifts in player population (potentially decreasing on console, for example)—could be influencing this scenario, reducing supply as fewer people actively farm the material, and thus naturally leading to rising prices.

But even if this rise results from entirely benign causes, the interesting takeaway here is that the decentralized system hasn’t prevented broad price alignment and inflation from occurring. Prices have moved uniformly upward despite the market’s fragmentation, and there’s minimal evidence of meaningful undercutting or price variation among these major hubs. In a fully efficient market, we’d generally expect some notable differences to persist among various traders as competition played out.

So, while your overall point stands that ESO’s system introduces friction that might discourage the kind of market manipulation we typically associate with centralized auction houses, this example suggests that uniform pricing and rising prices can still emerge broadly, perhaps influenced by factors like declining supply, decreased farming activity, or simply traders matching one another’s moves. It doesn’t invalidate your broader claim outright—just introduces some additional complexity and nuance to consider when evaluating the overall stability of ESO’s economy.

VoxAdActa

No

sans-culottes wrote: »

it seems notable to consider the recent price changes for Fortified Nirncrux. Over the last couple of months, its price has roughly doubled, and the increases have been closely mirrored across most major guild traders (such as those in Elden Root and Mournhold).

I wasn't going to respond to you any more because you've primarily just been repeating yourself, but I couldn't stay away from this one.

This is nonsense. Fort crux used to be one of my blue-chip commodities, so I'm very familiar with the price. Between 2018 and the recent Pan-Tamriel event, it dropped from 8-9k/ea to 6-7k/ea. The price was slowly creeping back up toward 7.5k/ea (I could sell it at that, but it would sit for a while), and then the Pan-Tamriel even happened, and the price has crashed. It's hovering down around 4k/ea now, and instead of stabilizing as the event mats sell through, it's actually continued to fall. I'm being undercut in my own guilds by people selling it for 3k/ea, and I hope that's where the floor is.

I'm currently sitting on almost half a stack of it because I don't want to flood the market even further by selling it in the bargain bin.

[snip]
[edited for baiting]

sans-culottes

Yes

VoxAdActa wrote: »

sans-culottes wrote: »

it seems notable to consider the recent price changes for Fortified Nirncrux. Over the last couple of months, its price has roughly doubled, and the increases have been closely mirrored across most major guild traders (such as those in Elden Root and Mournhold).

I wasn't going to respond to you any more because you've primarily just been repeating yourself, but I couldn't stay away from this one.

This is nonsense. Fort crux used to be one of my blue-chip commodities, so I'm very familiar with the price. Between 2018 and the recent Pan-Tamriel event, it dropped from 8-9k/ea to 6-7k/ea. The price was slowly creeping back up toward 7.5k/ea (I could sell it at that, but it would sit for a while), and then the Pan-Tamriel even happened, and the price has crashed. It's hovering down around 4k/ea now, and instead of stabilizing as the event mats sell through, it's actually continued to fall. I'm being undercut in my own guilds by people selling it for 3k/ea, and I hope that's where the floor is.

I'm currently sitting on almost half a stack of it because I don't want to flood the market even further by selling it in the bargain bin.

[snip]

I get that you think this is a good counterexample. However, you’ve stated that you play on PC. I am referring to, of course, the console market. I encourage you to take some time to reflect on the purely theoretical nature of this discussion and would request that you refrain from personal attacks and hyperbole.

PS. To be more specific, the resource in question was once selling for around 4,000 to 5,000 gold, max. It now sells for 10,000 to 12,000 gold. Your example for PC may be accurate for that market, but it doesn’t reflect what’s happening on console. I haven’t been following PC prices, nor do I have any reason to, as my point has been specifically about the console market. If you believe the price trends you’re seeing are signs of a stable or healthy market, then that’s fine. But on PSN, the price has more than doubled across major traders in a relatively short time. That seems to contradict the idea that ESO’s system inherently prevents widespread price inflation or major market shifts.

I think this actually highlights a key issue: the decentralized guild-trader system doesn’t inherently protect markets from substantial volatility or dramatic inflation, as your own dramatically different experience on PC compared to mine on console demonstrates. If anything, then this divergence suggests that prices can vary sharply and unpredictably—far from the stable, manipulation-resistant market you’re describing.

In any case, I think it’s more useful simply to recognize how differently these markets behave under the same system, suggesting that the decentralized approach may not be as effective or universally beneficial as you suggest.

[edited to remove quote]

VoxAdActa

No

I guess the fact that different instances of the same system have wildly different outcomes for different commodities is somehow proof that it's not organic market behavior as it adapts to local conditions, and it is actually evidence for

top trading guilds—often run or coordinated by the same small circle of players—frequently engage in exactly the kind of price arbitrage and market manipulation you’re worried about.

Wild how they're manipulating the price in totally opposite directions between console and PC.

Definitely not a reflection of a fresher player base that more frequently needs fort nirn for research (increasing demand) and that has fewer high-level characters farming it in Craglorn (decreasing supply). No, fort nirn at prices close to PC's in 2017 (when they had a fresher player base) is absolutely manipulation.

spartaxoxo

Yes

sans-culottes wrote: »

-snipped for brevity-

But even if this rise results from entirely benign causes, the interesting takeaway here is that the decentralized system hasn’t prevented broad price alignment and inflation from occurring. Prices have moved uniformly upward despite the market’s fragmentation, and there’s minimal evidence of meaningful undercutting or price variation among these major hubs. In a fully efficient market, we’d generally expect some notable differences to persist among various traders as competition played out.

The major traders tend to be attract more players with a better understanding of market conditions. More casual traders tend to just copy the prices of the big traders. Although some smaller traders get their money by undercutting the bigger ones. Some people will shop specifically for these deals when prices are too high. And some flippers do exist.

Regardless, no system can completely prevent this flipping behavior nor should it. Otherwise the market is too tightly controlled by devs, which can lead to it's own problems. But, this game's market is notably much more stable than any other game I have played. This doesn't mean every single item will never fluctuate. But the overall health of the market is very stable with fluctuations typically being easy to understand through simple supply and demand, like certain events guaranteeing drops in prices of motifs due to increased supply. Or some content creator makes a popular build and suddenly the price for items go up thanks to demand.

sans-culottes

Yes

VoxAdActa wrote: »

I guess the fact that different instances of the same system have wildly different outcomes for different commodities is somehow proof that it's not organic market behavior as it adapts to local conditions, and it is actually evidence for

top trading guilds—often run or coordinated by the same small circle of players—frequently engage in exactly the kind of price arbitrage and market manipulation you’re worried about.

Wild how they're manipulating the price in totally opposite directions between console and PC.

Definitely not a reflection of a fresher player base that more frequently needs fort nirn for research (increasing demand) and that has fewer high-level characters farming it in Craglorn (decreasing supply). No, fort nirn at prices close to PC's in 2017 (when they had a fresher player base) is absolutely manipulation.

It’s not an either/or scenario. No one is arguing that supply and demand play no role in price shifts. The point is that ESO’s decentralized system doesn’t inherently prevent widespread price alignment, price-setting behavior, or market influence from dominant trading guilds.

The fact that Fortified Nirncrux prices have diverged on different platforms isn’t proof that those prices are entirely organic—it just means that different factors are at play in different markets. What matters is that, on each platform, prices move in strikingly consistent ways across major trading hubs, which suggests that players are largely matching or reacting to existing price points rather than setting them independently. That behavior is structural, not purely organic.

On PSN, given that prices have doubled across all major traders within a short period, with little undercutting in key locations, this suggests that prices are being reinforced by top traders setting an accepted baseline. Whether that’s explicit coordination or just passive price mirroring, the outcome is the same: a fragmented system isn’t preventing price-setting behavior from emerging.

Meanwhile, on PC, if prices are dropping due to an influx of supply and a fresher player base, then that’s a separate factor influencing that platform’s economy. That doesn’t disprove anything about how ESO’s trading system allows for price-setting behavior to take hold—it just shows that platform conditions can shape which direction prices move, not whether traders influence them at all.

spartaxoxo

Yes

An economy isn't any singular item's price change across a relative short amount of time. Neither is the assertion that no flipping or coordination is possible for any item.

It's that friction creates substantially less of this behavior resulting in an overall healthier economy. The price of any one item doesn't negate that.

kind_hero

I am not sure how to respond here...

I get it that for some players is very easy to make gold (without crowns/carries), and thus there are players with hundreds of millions or even billions of gold, but for me it is quite difficult to gather enough resources to fully decorate a house, which should be some sort of benchmark point for getting into an end game type of game.

I wonder how it is for new players, new crafters, people who just started housing. I have the feeling it is not easy. For me it takes about a year to fully decorate a house. I have several houses that are waiting for years, and are just wasted. I would sell them for gold to other players to be able to decorate others.

TBH, I wouldn't mind if I could just buy gold tokens with crowns/gems, even if this would be a limited time opportunity etc.

---
My main issue with ESO economy is the lack of an in game search system for traded items, having to rely on external websites. I really dislike this situation. I am not asking for a central auction house, but some sort of in game index of all the items listed everywhere.

twisttop138

Maybe?

Man, this conversation turned stimulating and informative. It's made me think about ESO in a way I've never really seen it before. Im not going to give an AH opinion as I've played only a few MMOs over the years and have played this one the longest (2018 with a 4 year break im just returning from) While it's not hard to get into a guild with a free trader, I'm in 2 with those. It's been hard for me on PSN to sell things because to go around to the different stalls and look up everything I have to sell to price check is so tedious.

My wish is for an add on like TTC. Now that we're getting add on support on console my hope is something like that will be forthcoming. I'm not a huge advocate of add ons. I think the existence of them is proof that the development team is lacking in QOL additions to the game. I know many people will appreciate these add ons if or when they come. We'll have to see what the future brings. At the end of the day though, I have to remember that this is a game with fake money so it's not that serious.

Edit to add missing sentence.

sans-culottes

Yes

spartaxoxo wrote: »

An economy isn't any singular item's price change across a relative short amount of time. Neither is the assertion that no flipping or coordination is possible for any item.

It's that friction creates substantially less of this behavior resulting in an overall healthier economy. The price of any one item doesn't negate that.

I think we might be talking past each other a bit. I wasn’t trying to say that a single item’s price defines the entire economy—just that the way Fortified Nirncrux prices have moved in sync across major trading hubs suggests that price-setting still happens, even within the guild trader system. Whether that’s through direct coordination or just traders naturally following existing price trends, it’s clear that the system doesn’t eliminate that kind of behavior.

I also don’t think it’s clear that the “friction” of the guild trader system significantly reduces flipping or market control. If anything, then dominant trading guilds still secure the best locations and set the standard for pricing. It might make it harder for casual players to engage in flipping, but that doesn’t mean the economy is free from price manipulation—it just means fewer people have access to it.

I get that you’re looking at the bigger picture in terms of overall market health, but I think the real question is whether the guild trader system actually prevents the kind of price-setting seen in auction house economies. From what I’ve observed, it doesn’t really stop it—it just changes how it happens.

El_Borracho

No

I don't know what they could do to "fix" the economy. Its supply/demand. Drop less motifs or whatever is in demand? That would infuriate most players.

VoxAdActa

No

All right, let's roll with this idea of a shadowy cabal of price-fixers in ESO, instead of perfectly rational market demands (like a small-time trader saying "Wow, looks like this commodity is moving at prices higher than I've been selling them for; I could make more money on them!").

In this system, it takes hundreds of people. Even if we assume this could be sustained at 80% guild pop, that's still 400 people working in each guild, and to even control a single city's trade, you'd need five separate guilds.

That's 2,000 people all colluding to control one city.

Let's make it even easier, and assume 75% of them are bots. Now you just need 500 people working together in tight lock-step to control one city of traders. Ok, so let's assume each player is in 5 guilds, so one cabal group can control an entire city by themselves. That's a paltry 100 people!

But the claim is that this intentional, non-market-driven price-fixing behavior is going on across the whole game. To make that more favorable, we'll assume "across the whole game" is ONLY the seven most desirable trading spots: Belkarth, Rawl, Mournhold, Vivec, Elden Root, (arguably) Wayrest, and whatever city is the newest release at any given moment (we'll call it New Chapter City). Not counting outlaw's refuges, not counting any other cities or DLCs, not counting the traders out next to wilderness wayshrines. Just the "top spots."

With 80% guild population, and 75% of those being bots, we still need a total of 700 people and 2100 bots. That's 700 extremely trustworthy, loyal people, none of whom have ever snitched, and none of whom have ever slipped up and allowed any evidence of their activities to be discovered (except the prices themselves). Operating a grand total of 2,800 individual accounts (400 per guild x 7 cities, assuming each bot/player is in 5 guilds and controls a whole city by themselves).

And that's just the effort required to price-fix the top spots. There's still going to be competition. The effort required to eliminate all of their potential competition is an order of magnitude greater.

That's madness. We can probably stop here. But let's keep going anyway.

How much money would they have to be bringing in every 7 days to control the 35 most valuable trading spots? A single Belkarth trader could go for 100mil in any given week. Just that one city could be half a billion gold. For simplicity's sake, let's say that each of the other six cities costs half as much as Belkarth to totally control. That's a total of 2 billion gold a week.

Every guild member gets 30 spots. That's a lot of spots, for sure. It comes out to 420,000 slots for goods to sell (400 guild members x 30 slots x 5 traders x 7 cities).

In order to break even bidding for guild traders, each slot has to go for at least 4762gp before any profit is made at all. Each guild member needs to make 142,858gp every 7 days to break even. In the grand scheme of things, that's not a lot, sure. But you can't do it on anything that sells for less than 4762gp per stack.

Is maple selling for 4800gp per stack on console?

Just about all of the basic crafting mats are safe. The easily farmable stuff, like wood, leather, ore, rank 1 and rank 10 solvents, provisioning items, cheap motifs (like Dwarven), runes, and half of the furniture mats (ochre, bast, and clean pelts) are safe. They can't be a part of this scheme because they don't sell for enough to keep it going.

Well, let's just work with fortified nirncrux, because that's the only specific example I've been given to work with.

At 10k/ea, each bot and player would have to sell 15 f.nirn a week. Half of their trader slots would be just f.nirn. Is that what you see on the top traders? 6,000 f.nirn listings on every trader in all 7 of the top cities?

The demand for f.nirn must be through the roof if the cabal is selling 210,000 fortified nirncruxes every week. Not counting the other guilds they don't control selling fortified nirn.

Ok, maybe they control the whole trade in fortified nirncrux. They are using their 2100 bots to fully despoil the entire Craglorn wilderness of everything that can drop f.nirn, including all the camels, daggerbacks, and jackals. Nobody else can get any, but this massive amount of precisely targeted bot activity has never been caught.

That's the kind of thing your claim requires in this system. 700 real people, operating 2,800 accounts, with 2,100 of those being devoted to farming/selling bots, completely stripping Craglorn of all the vegetation, animal life, and ores 24/7, so they can sell 210,000 f.nirn a week just to break even.

Now how many people do you think it would take to do something similar when there's effectively 1 guild trader in the whole game, which is free, has no limit on trader slots, and has no time limits? (Spoiler: The answer was +/- 12, and the profit was so large that it's the thing that ultimately got them caught.)

sans-culottes

Yes

VoxAdActa wrote: »

All right, let's roll with this idea of a shadowy cabal of price-fixers in ESO, instead of perfectly rational market demands (like a small-time trader saying "Wow, looks like this commodity is moving at prices higher than I've been selling them for; I could make more money on them!").

In this system, it takes hundreds of people. Even if we assume this could be sustained at 80% guild pop, that's still 400 people working in each guild, and to even control a single city's trade, you'd need five separate guilds.

That's 2,000 people all colluding to control one city.

Let's make it even easier, and assume 75% of them are bots. Now you just need 500 people working together in tight lock-step to control one city of traders. Ok, so let's assume each player is in 5 guilds, so one cabal group can control an entire city by themselves. That's a paltry 100 people!

But the claim is that this intentional, non-market-driven price-fixing behavior is going on across the whole game. To make that more favorable, we'll assume "across the whole game" is ONLY the seven most desirable trading spots: Belkarth, Rawl, Mournhold, Vivec, Elden Root, (arguably) Wayrest, and whatever city is the newest release at any given moment (we'll call it New Chapter City). Not counting outlaw's refuges, not counting any other cities or DLCs, not counting the traders out next to wilderness wayshrines. Just the "top spots."

With 80% guild population, and 75% of those being bots, we still need a total of 700 people and 2100 bots. That's 700 extremely trustworthy, loyal people, none of whom have ever snitched, and none of whom have ever slipped up and allowed any evidence of their activities to be discovered (except the prices themselves). Operating a grand total of 2,800 individual accounts (400 per guild x 7 cities, assuming each bot/player is in 5 guilds and controls a whole city by themselves).

And that's just the effort required to price-fix the top spots. There's still going to be competition. The effort required to eliminate all of their potential competition is an order of magnitude greater.

That's madness. We can probably stop here. But let's keep going anyway.

How much money would they have to be bringing in every 7 days to control the 35 most valuable trading spots? A single Belkarth trader could go for 100mil in any given week. Just that one city could be half a billion gold. For simplicity's sake, let's say that each of the other six cities costs half as much as Belkarth to totally control. That's a total of 2 billion gold a week.

Every guild member gets 30 spots. That's a lot of spots, for sure. It comes out to 420,000 slots for goods to sell (400 guild members x 30 slots x 5 traders x 7 cities).

In order to break even bidding for guild traders, each slot has to go for at least 4762gp before any profit is made at all. Each guild member needs to make 142,858gp every 7 days to break even. In the grand scheme of things, that's not a lot, sure. But you can't do it on anything that sells for less than 4762gp per stack.

Is maple selling for 4800gp per stack on console?

Just about all of the basic crafting mats are safe. The easily farmable stuff, like wood, leather, ore, rank 1 and rank 10 solvents, provisioning items, cheap motifs (like Dwarven), runes, and half of the furniture mats (ochre, bast, and clean pelts) are safe. They can't be a part of this scheme because they don't sell for enough to keep it going.

Well, let's just work with fortified nirncrux, because that's the only specific example I've been given to work with.

At 10k/ea, each bot and player would have to sell 15 f.nirn a week. Half of their trader slots would be just f.nirn. Is that what you see on the top traders? 6,000 f.nirn listings on every trader in all 7 of the top cities?

The demand for f.nirn must be through the roof if the cabal is selling 210,000 fortified nirncruxes every week. Not counting the other guilds they don't control selling fortified nirn.

Ok, maybe they control the whole trade in fortified nirncrux. They are using their 2100 bots to fully despoil the entire Craglorn wilderness of everything that can drop f.nirn, including all the camels, daggerbacks, and jackals. Nobody else can get any, but this massive amount of precisely targeted bot activity has never been caught.

That's the kind of thing your claim requires in this system. 700 real people, operating 2,800 accounts, with 2,100 of those being devoted to farming/selling bots, completely stripping Craglorn of all the vegetation, animal life, and ores 24/7, so they can sell 210,000 f.nirn a week just to break even.

Now how many people do you think it would take to do something similar when there's effectively 1 guild trader in the whole game, which is free, has no limit on trader slots, and has no time limits? (Spoiler: The answer was +/- 12, and the profit was so large that it's the thing that ultimately got them caught.)

You’ve built an elaborate scenario that doesn’t reflect what was actually argued. There’s no claim of a massive, secret cartel running ESO’s economy. The reality is that a few dominant trading guilds in the most visible locations naturally shape market prices without needing explicit coordination.

Most players don’t travel across Tamriel comparing traders. They buy from the major hubs—e.g., Mournhold, Vivec City—where the most active trading guilds operate. When prices across these locations remain consistent, that sets the perceived market rate. If an item is listed below that, then it’s quickly bought and relisted at the prevailing price, reinforcing stability at the upper end.

This doesn’t require thousands of people or bots—just a small number of well-positioned traders taking advantage of how ESO’s economy actually functions. The guild trader system doesn’t stop price-setting; it just makes it less transparent.

VoxAdActa

No

There’s no claim of a massive, secret cartel running ESO’s economy.

Oh, so I misread this, I guess:

The point is that ESO’s decentralized system doesn’t inherently prevent widespread price alignment, price-setting behavior, or market influence from dominant trading guilds.

sans-culottes wrote: »

The reality is that a few dominant trading guilds in the most visible locations naturally shape market prices without needing explicit coordination.

Then that's not price-fixing. That sounds closer to mass-population mind control.

Most players don’t travel across Tamriel comparing traders. They buy from the major hubs—e.g., Mournhold, Vivec City—where the most active trading guilds operate.

Right. Which, at 80% guild pop and 75% bots, is still 700 people across all those cities.

When prices across these locations remain consistent, that sets the perceived market rate.

And how are these 700 people doing this without coordination? All it takes is 1% of them to start lowering their prices, and now the other 693 people are sitting on 10k f.nirn that won't sell. It can't happen without active coordination.

If an item is listed below that, then it’s quickly bought and relisted at the prevailing price, reinforcing stability at the upper end.

So now we have a team of people checking 35 traders every single day, which still leaves 23 hours to sell an apparently very hot commodity to a real player for a lower price. Or are they checking every hour? Or more frequently? Or maybe they operate 35 inconspicuous bots that ping the trader they're standing next to constantly, 24/7, and have just never been noticed?

sans-culottes

Yes

VoxAdActa wrote: »

There’s no claim of a massive, secret cartel running ESO’s economy.

Oh, so I misread this, I guess:

The point is that ESO’s decentralized system doesn’t inherently prevent widespread price alignment, price-setting behavior, or market influence from dominant trading guilds.

sans-culottes wrote: »

The reality is that a few dominant trading guilds in the most visible locations naturally shape market prices without needing explicit coordination.

Then that's not price-fixing. That sounds closer to mass-population mind control.

Most players don’t travel across Tamriel comparing traders. They buy from the major hubs—e.g., Mournhold, Vivec City—where the most active trading guilds operate.

Right. Which, at 80% guild pop and 75% bots, is still 700 people across all those cities.

When prices across these locations remain consistent, that sets the perceived market rate.

And how are these 700 people doing this without coordination? All it takes is 1% of them to start lowering their prices, and now the other 693 people are sitting on 10k f.nirn that won't sell. It can't happen without active coordination.

If an item is listed below that, then it’s quickly bought and relisted at the prevailing price, reinforcing stability at the upper end.

So now we have a team of people checking 35 traders every single day, which still leaves 23 hours to sell an apparently very hot commodity to a real player for a lower price. Or are they checking every hour? Or more frequently? Or maybe they operate 35 inconspicuous bots that ping the trader they're standing next to constantly, 24/7, and have just never been noticed?

You keep trying to turn this into an argument about an impossibly elaborate conspiracy, when in reality, this is just basic market behavior. No one is claiming that ESO’s economy is controlled by some vast network of perfectly coordinated players. The point is that ESO’s trader system creates conditions where dominant guilds naturally shape market pricing, even without explicit coordination.

Most players buy from the major hubs, not random out-of-the-way traders. If high-traffic locations all list an item within the same general price range, then that becomes the accepted market rate. Players who list below that get bought out and relisted at the higher price, reinforcing price stability at the top end. This doesn’t require a vast conspiracy—just a small number of well-positioned traders taking advantage of how the system actually works.

Your argument assumes that for price stability to exist, every single trader must be working in perfect sync, when in reality, all it takes is a handful of major trading guilds consistently listing items at similar prices in the most visible locations. That’s not “mass-population mind control”—that’s just how decentralized markets behave when a small group dominates visibility.

VoxAdActa

No

sans-culottes wrote: »

No one is claiming that ESO’s economy is controlled by some vast network of perfectly coordinated players.

I'm sorry, but I can't read "The reality is that a few dominant trading guilds in the most visible locations" in the context of "the price of fortified nirncrux is being artificially inflated" any other way.

The point is that ESO’s trader system creates conditions where dominant guilds naturally shape market pricing, even without explicit coordination.

Ok, I'll bite: How do you believe this is happening?

I can't even get people in my own guild to stop undercutting me, even with an open communication channel through Discord. How are a minimum of 700 people (assuming there are ONLY 100 real players in each top guild, and they're all in 5 top guilds), without communicating with each other, managing to sell everything at the exact same price and never undercut each other?

You're very invested in this theory, but the details don't add up. And you have provided no additional details to modify the picture. Only one specific commodity, no specific cities, and no mechanism other than "it just works like this." And you're literally copy/pasting stuff I've already addressed from previous posts, with no additional facts, observations, or specifics.

Players who list below that get bought out and relisted at the higher price, reinforcing price stability at the top end.

BUT HOW? Specifically, how is this happening without communication or coordination? What is the specific, rational, feasible, sustainable mechanism behind this? How are these people sucking up all of the f.nirn from 35 different traders before anyone else can buy it, so they can flip it and keep the price artificially high? What method is making this possible?

You're ignoring all of the logistical details required even when there is active collaboration, and you're claiming that all of this "just happens"?

This doesn’t require a vast conspiracy—just a small number of well-positioned traders taking advantage of how the system actually works.

But it does tho! It requires at least 700 people (again, at the very minimum) all thinking the same way and being in total lockstep with each other and never being willing to take even a 500gp profit loss in return for literally all of the business, before the person/people, through unspecified-but-definitely-existent means, buys it all up at once and flips it to make an extra 500gp, which they have to wait X days to get while the product sits. Without any coordination at all.

sans-culottes

Yes

VoxAdActa wrote: »

sans-culottes wrote: »

No one is claiming that ESO’s economy is controlled by some vast network of perfectly coordinated players.

I'm sorry, but I can't read "The reality is that a few dominant trading guilds in the most visible locations" in the context of "the price of fortified nirncrux is being artificially inflated" any other way.

The point is that ESO’s trader system creates conditions where dominant guilds naturally shape market pricing, even without explicit coordination.

Ok, I'll bite: How do you believe this is happening?

I can't even get people in my own guild to stop undercutting me, even with an open communication channel through Discord. How are a minimum of 700 people (assuming there are ONLY 100 real players in each top guild, and they're all in 5 top guilds), without communicating with each other, managing to sell everything at the exact same price and never undercut each other?

You're very invested in this theory, but the details don't add up. And you have provided no additional details to modify the picture. Only one specific commodity, no specific cities, and no mechanism other than "it just works like this." And you're literally copy/pasting stuff I've already addressed from previous posts, with no additional facts, observations, or specifics.

Players who list below that get bought out and relisted at the higher price, reinforcing price stability at the top end.

BUT HOW? Specifically, how is this happening without communication or coordination? What is the specific, rational, feasible, sustainable mechanism behind this? How are these people sucking up all of the f.nirn from 35 different traders before anyone else can buy it, so they can flip it and keep the price artificially high? What method is making this possible?

You're ignoring all of the logistical details required even when there is active collaboration, and you're claiming that all of this "just happens"?

This doesn’t require a vast conspiracy—just a small number of well-positioned traders taking advantage of how the system actually works.

But it does tho! It requires at least 700 people (again, at the very minimum) all thinking the same way and being in total lockstep with each other and never being willing to take even a 500gp profit loss in return for literally all of the business, before the person/people, through unspecified-but-definitely-existent means, buys it all up at once and flips it to make an extra 500gp, which they have to wait X days to get while the product sits. Without any coordination at all.

You keep insisting that price stability can only happen through explicit coordination, but that’s not how markets work. A small number of dominant trading guilds in major hubs create price anchors by consistently listing items within a predictable range. That’s not a conspiracy—it’s just how visible markets influence pricing.

Most players shop at the same high-traffic locations. When an item is consistently priced within a certain range in those hubs, that becomes the accepted market rate. Sellers who undercut that price too aggressively get bought out and relisted at the prevailing price—not because of a coordinated effort, but because flippers take advantage of the opportunity.

Your argument assumes that for price stability to exist, every trader must be in perfect agreement and in constant communication. That’s not necessary. All it takes is a handful of high-volume traders consistently pricing within a certain range for those prices to become self-sustaining. That’s how markets work in any system where certain locations dominate visibility.

You’re demanding a level of minute-by-minute coordination that simply isn’t required for price trends to emerge naturally. You can keep asking for an exact logistical breakdown, but the reality is simple: a small number of traders in high-traffic locations shape the market because their listings are the ones most players see. That’s not speculation—that’s just how decentralized but visible markets behave.

VoxAdActa

No

Ok, you're not actually answering any of my questions, and you're directly copy/pasting previous replies. You've provided no examples, no mechanisms, no additional observations to support the claim that "it just works," and no explanation for how the far more than 700 people controlling the top trading spots have accidentally stumbled on the specific, inflated price, why they all refuse to consider gaining a competitive advantage for a slight reduction in margin, how they manage to fully control the prices through strategic flipping, or even why they do it when the gains at each price point step will be negligible (or, after taxes, nonexistent).

Here, try this: Why hasn't anyone decided to be a wholeseller to these top-trading flipping guilds that never talk to each other? Spend a day farming f.nirn, price it 100gp lower than the "totally not a cartel" price, and start advertising where my trader is in zone chat. All the uncoordinated flippers will flock to me and buy me out in a heartbeat, giving me a huge amount of money while they make a 100gp profit per unit, or, more likely, eat a marginal loss after listing fees and taxes. Then do it again next week.

Right? That's how the console economy works, right? The top traders all decided on a price purely by coincidence, and they all have decided (again, purely by coincidence) to flip everyone who sells it lower? But nobody's caught on to this as a way to make a quick couple million gold every week?

Imagine if more than one person caught on! How many f.nirns can they buy to make less than 100gp profit on each? What if 10 people did it? 20? Would some of that product sit around to be found by real players who need it? No, I guess not. And nobody else would ever price it 100gp lower than me, because the console economy doesn't "just work" like that.

Well, that's fine. After several weeks of making multiple-millions of gold, I might have enough to bid on a better trader, and then do it again in a more popular spot. Rinse and repeat, until I'm in a top spot and making 9.9k on every f.nirn within seconds of listing it. I won't even have to wait; buying agents will be right there, standing next to me, waiting for my next drop. I'm making tons of cash while they're losing a couple gp on every trade.

Or maybe they won't do that, and real players will be looking for my drops, forcing the not-a-cartel of people who think exactly alike to lower their prices to compete? No, definitely not.

There's an easy-money well just waiting to be tapped here. It's foolproof, if the console economy works the way you say it does.

Anyway, I think I'm going to bow out of this one, because I've read the same three paragraphs at least three times now, and I won't make you type them again.

spartaxoxo

Yes

sans-culottes wrote: »

-snipped for brevity-

You can keep asking for an exact logistical breakdown, but the reality is simple: a small number of traders in high-traffic locations shape the market because their listings are the ones most players see. That’s not speculation—that’s just how decentralized but visible markets behave.

Market manipulation isn't players in the dominant spots naturally responding to the real market price of an item, and then other casual users copying the price of the leaders of the industry. That's a natural market condition in both Auction House systems and our guild trader system.

When you look at how the average video game traders make their money (buy low, sell high), you quickly realize why decentralized trade leads to better prices for consumers. The harder it is find low priced items to flip, the less people will participate. So, there's less demand because there's less artificial demand. But, also the people buying the item are significantly more likely to be buying it for self-use. Therefore, there's less people re-listing the item at a higher price.

Auction Houses make it much easier to resale. Therefore, more people do it and prices go up.

(Edited my post for brevity/repeating points).

Vulkunne

No

wolfie1.0. wrote: »

Depends on what you mean by economy and how you suggest a shake up.

Right now things are settling still from the last shake up.

Exactly. *Round of Applause and Cheers*

Northwold

VoxAdActa wrote: »

Ok, you're not actually answering any of my questions, and you're directly copy/pasting previous replies. You've provided no examples, no mechanisms, no additional observations to support the claim that "it just works," and no explanation for how the far more than 700 people controlling the top trading spots have accidentally stumbled on the specific, inflated price, why they all refuse to consider gaining a competitive advantage for a slight reduction in margin, how they manage to fully control the prices through strategic flipping, or even why they do it when the gains at each price point step will be negligible (or, after taxes, nonexistent).

Sans-culottes is describing how markets with imperfect price transparency and high levels of concentration actually work in the real world. How do you want your "questions" answered when you keep insinuating that this requires some sort of mass conspiracy and deliberate price control by every market participant. It doesn't. You've previously suggested dazzling expertise in macro (sic) economics. Perhaps refer to that? You could start with typical pricing scenarios in highly concentrated markets, including price following. In the antitrust world, actual, deliberate cartels (which you seem to assume are the only way what sans-culottes describes can be true) are often notoriously difficult to differentiate from normal, not consciously coordinated profit-seeking behaviour resulting in undesirable, uncompetitive market outcomes because of the inherently poor structure of the market itself.

sans-culottes

Yes

Northwold wrote: »

VoxAdActa wrote: »

Ok, you're not actually answering any of my questions, and you're directly copy/pasting previous replies. You've provided no examples, no mechanisms, no additional observations to support the claim that "it just works," and no explanation for how the far more than 700 people controlling the top trading spots have accidentally stumbled on the specific, inflated price, why they all refuse to consider gaining a competitive advantage for a slight reduction in margin, how they manage to fully control the prices through strategic flipping, or even why they do it when the gains at each price point step will be negligible (or, after taxes, nonexistent).

Sans-culottes is describing how markets with imperfect price transparency and high levels of concentration actually work in the real world. How do you want your "questions" answered when you keep insinuating that this requires some sort of mass conspiracy and deliberate price control by every market participant. It doesn't. You've previously suggested dazzling expertise in macro (sic) economics. Perhaps refer to that? You could start with typical pricing scenarios in highly concentrated markets, including price following. In the antitrust world, actual, deliberate cartels (which you seem to assume are the only way what sans-culottes describes can be true) are often notoriously difficult to differentiate from normal, not consciously coordinated profit-seeking behaviour resulting in undesirable, uncompetitive market outcomes because of the inherently poor structure of the market itself.

Northwold, I appreciate that you’ve articulated this so clearly. The recurring issue here seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding—perhaps a deliberate one—of how highly concentrated markets function even without explicit coordination. It’s as if the only acceptable explanation, in Vox’s view, must be an elaborate and perfectly orchestrated cartel rather than the more mundane reality: that dominant market players rationally settle into pricing patterns that reflect their shared incentives, limited competition, and an understanding that unnecessary undercutting is self-defeating.

The insistence on some grand mechanism—as if no market forces could ever lead to equilibrium pricing without a shadowy guild cabal manually setting it—is fascinating. Perhaps it’s simply easier to refute a cartoonish conspiracy theory than to engage with the reality that, in fragmented, opaque markets, patterned pricing emerges naturally because deviation is rarely rewarded. As you note, this isn’t speculative; it’s well-documented across real-world markets with similar structural inefficiencies.

I’m curious if, rather than continuing to demand increasingly baroque levels of proof for the obvious, Vox might apply that economic expertise to addressing why ESO’s economy should be uniquely exempt from these principles. Otherwise, we may simply find ourselves in yet another loop where the impossibility of perfect proof conveniently allows the status quo to be endlessly defended.