Well, the 116 gold is a byproduct of the game scaling to your level. As you go up in level, the amount of gold changes and then stays the same until you level to the next threshold. As for your original question, I haven't a clue as to why this is the case. Perhaps the market was simply oversaturated during the event.

There are so many because they were way too easy to get. Every boss you killed gave you a chance. The other motif from the winter event is different because that had 9 iirc different quests to go do and became a pain in the ass, personally I stopped doing it once I had my characters taken care of.

zos learned from the first event how over populated the market got with the hollowjack motifs and made the pages more tedious to get, the daily quests limited your chance at getting a loot box from every world boss killed to 9 or so quest rewards per player a day,

As for the 116 gold in chests, its because your not wearing prosperus gear like the rest of us

Because everyone who participated in the witche's festival had hollowjack motifs flowing our their ass, and some people rather than putting them up for sale right away when the market was overflowing with them held on and put them up for sale now where there is less motifs being sold, and due to morrowind release a greater chance of new/reurning people who don't have the motif.

On a side note, we didnt farm for the motifs, but those stupid boxes. One of the achievements was that you had to get a 100 boxes

The Witches Festival allowed you to get a Plunder Skull (the grab bags) every 5 minutes (I think, it might have actually been every 3 minutes). In contrast the New Life Festival limited you to 9 boxes per day, per character (with a single one shot box), and the Jester's Festival limited you to 3 per day, per character (with another one shot box you could get at the beginning).

This means there is way more Halloween stuff in circulation than for either of the other events. It's part of why the Double Bloody Mara is worth a fraction of what the Hissmir Fish Eye Rye recipe will set you back. And, part of why the Dubious Camoran Throne recipe is so expensive.

This meant that players went through (in some cases, literally) thousands of Plunder Skulls.

Beyond that, the gold drops from Halloween (the two masks, anyway) were much rarer than anything else. The New Life Festival runeboxes were far more common, and easier to obtain, so their value is much lower. There's more towels than scarecrow masks, in spite of how many people were cracking Plunder Skulls.

But, yeah, basically, there's a lot of Hollowjack pages in circulation. Less so with Skinchanger.

As everyone has said that event was farmed to hell. People went less crazy in later ones. That's said there are loads of Skinchanger pages about too

Haha you might be waiting a while, recipes on the other hand.... Gold mine!

Yeah, Dubious Camoran Throne recipe is now beyond rare on the XBox EU server. A complete search of every guild store in game the other day produced zero results. It seems the recipe is no longer available at all on the XBox EU server.

These are all REALLY GOOD answers. I knew the Grim Harlequin was sold in the Crown Store and I hope it will be again this fall. Hollowjack is still not too expensive in the guild stores. I was really, really new at the game when the Halloween Festival was going on, so I didn't really do anything involved with it.

Now I've just got to find one of those bath towels somewhere since I never got one of those either! LOL!

I never thought of changing out a piece of my armor for something with the prosperous trait! That was just plain stupid on my part!

@Donari , Yes, I am indeed on PC/NA! I would be delighted to take that bath towel off your hands for whatever you think is a fair price...if I have it. I have about 140K in gold spread across my characters and the bank.

I should have way more gold than that, but I am an admitted guild store shopaholic.

The Hollowjack motifs dropped quite often from the Plunder Skulls - these Plunder Skulls were dropped by all bosses, including delve bosses and dolmen bosses. I farmed them in Deshaan, at Lagomere Dolmen. A world boss is basically next to the dolmen and just as the dolmen was finished, the world boss would spawn. That's 2 Plunder Skulls in just a few minutes. I remember how many of us were farming there, it was a heavily populated spot.

There were 2 main reasons for the amount of Hollowjack motifs, aside of the reason above. First, there is an achievement that requires you to get 100 plunder skulls, and this achievement is needed, just like the other ones, to get the final Witches' Festival achievement for the title. Second, many people farmed the skulls for the 2 runeboxes which were quite rare. I believe these 2 reasons were mainly responsible for the crazy amount of Hollowjack Motifs.

When they first appeared people would buy them for even 3k gold per piece, maybe even more. Just after a few days they were basically being given away for free by players including myself. There were just too many, they wouldn't even sell for 100 gold. As time passed and new players came, they slowly started to disappear from guild stores, but there are still so many I doubt they would all sell before the next Witches' Festival.

So yeah, although your question was already answered, here is my part.

With the number of times players turned in the daily quest rewards during the festival with the numerous characters they have, no doubt there was a massive build up of duplicate chapters left over.