Where's the gold come from?

krachall · February 2018

I posted about motif drop rates and how my time is far more productive farming raw mats and using the gold to buy motifs than it actually is to farm motifs.

That got me thinking...where's all this gold come from?

I'm sitting a hair shy of 9mm gold and the vast, VAST majority of it has come from selling raw mats. I have a friend who is approaching 200MM gold from either selling mats or reselling items.

I make almost no gold from the game itself. I recently power-leveled a character from 1 to 50 and he had 30,000 gold, all from in-game rewards, when he reached 50. That's insignificant compared to the gold made from other players. But that gold all came from in-game sources. Selling items you get from corpses may generate 30-50 gold a pop but that may end up being a few thousand a day. Are there major sources?

Quest rewards give a couple hundred. vet trial rewards give a couple thousand. But there are hundreds of millions of gold being tossed around by players every day and every single piece came from an in-game source. Is it simply a matter of the number of players? Meaning if there are 10 million players earning a few thousand gold a day, that gold is keeping the economy running? When you consider that there are massive gold sinks (houses) but no massive gold generators, I've got to think something else is feeding currency into the economy.

starkerealm · February 2018

Theft. Theft is a major way a lot of players, especially lowbies, can make a lot of cash quickly. Ornate drops are another.

Individually that doesn't add up to the full scope of the money flowing around in the system, but that's because there are a lot of players scampering around, hoovering up small gains here and there, only to turn around and buy moderately priced items, which then gets pooled and buys your stock.

There's also quests and dailies. Again, they don't pay out much individually, but I'm usually seeing somewhere around 15k per day from just doing basic writs on three characters, before I get into cracking the boxes.

Prof_Bawbag · February 2018

The game's been out for years now. Of course there's gonna be millions floating around. Someone buys my wares, I get the vast majority of that gold and so on. I suspect more gold gets given to the players than disappears into the gold sinks. No foil hat needed.

krachall · February 2018

starkerealm wrote: »

Theft. Theft is a major way a lot of players, especially lowbies, can make a lot of cash quickly. Ornate drops are another.

Individually that doesn't add up to the full scope of the money flowing around in the system, but that's because there are a lot of players scampering around, hoovering up small gains here and there, only to turn around and buy moderately priced items, which then gets pooled and buys your stock.

There's also quests and dailies. Again, they don't pay out much individually, but I'm usually seeing somewhere around 15k per day from just doing basic writs on three characters, before I get into cracking the boxes.

Good points. I hadn't thought of writs.

I think stealing is overrated though. Even with max passives, and assuming you fill up your limit, you're probably only going to make about 15k a day...and that assumes an average sell price of 100g. It would take HOURS to pickpocket or steal just the blues and purples needed to go higher.

krachall · February 2018

krachall wrote: »

starkerealm wrote: »

Theft. Theft is a major way a lot of players, especially lowbies, can make a lot of cash quickly. Ornate drops are another.

Individually that doesn't add up to the full scope of the money flowing around in the system, but that's because there are a lot of players scampering around, hoovering up small gains here and there, only to turn around and buy moderately priced items, which then gets pooled and buys your stock.

There's also quests and dailies. Again, they don't pay out much individually, but I'm usually seeing somewhere around 15k per day from just doing basic writs on three characters, before I get into cracking the boxes.

Good points. I hadn't thought of writs.

I think stealing is overrated though. Even with max passives, and assuming you fill up your limit, you're probably only going to make about 15k a day...and that assumes an average sell price of 100g. It would take HOURS to pickpocket or steal just the blues and purples needed to go higher.

For reference, that 15k a day is about what you need to buy a single stack of raw silk.

starkerealm · February 2018

krachall wrote: »

starkerealm wrote: »

Theft. Theft is a major way a lot of players, especially lowbies, can make a lot of cash quickly. Ornate drops are another.

Individually that doesn't add up to the full scope of the money flowing around in the system, but that's because there are a lot of players scampering around, hoovering up small gains here and there, only to turn around and buy moderately priced items, which then gets pooled and buys your stock.

There's also quests and dailies. Again, they don't pay out much individually, but I'm usually seeing somewhere around 15k per day from just doing basic writs on three characters, before I get into cracking the boxes.

Good points. I hadn't thought of writs.

I think stealing is overrated though. Even with max passives, and assuming you fill up your limit, you're probably only going to make about 15k a day...and that assumes an average sell price of 100g. It would take HOURS to pickpocket or steal just the blues and purples needed to go higher.

Stealing is overrated, but that's still something that gets suggested to new players on a regular basis. There are a lot of players engaging in it, and the ROI is better than questing. That said, a lot of advice on stealing skims over teaching players how to engage with the system in an efficient way, and I still question people who view it as their primary source of income. But, with practice you can hoover up a lot of cash in fairly short order.

VaranisArano · February 2018

When I started playing, I made gold from selling materials to Vendors because I didn't have a guild yet and I was very familiar with making money in Skyrim and Oblivion. You know, you pick up every little piece of "some may call this junk, me, I call them treasures" and sell it to a vendor. So that was my early game. Gold came from NPCs.

Then I got a guild, and crucially, some kind person in my guild informed me that those Columbine I was selling for 20g apiece thinking that was a high price were actually worth considerably more than that. That started my career in selling materials. Most of my fortune (2-6 million, depending on whether I'm spending all my gold on housing or motifs at the moment) is built off of farming materials and selling them to players.

I can still make a fair amount of gold just off of in-game sources. There's the justice system, where if I'm dedicated I can get about 10-14k or so with one days worth of fencing items. There's opening chests while I'm farming and vendoring the junk gear I get from there (seriously, people who leave junk gear in the chests don't realize how much that adds up if you've got the bag space to vendor it). Then there's rewards of the worthy with about 210ish gold for each one, so even if I PVP I can make a little gold. Plus I get money for killing mobs while I farm.

If I did not use a guild trader and sell items to other players, I would not have as much gold as I do. But its not like I couldn't make any money either.

So if I had to guess, money in the game originally came from people selling stuff to vendors because those are practically unlimited. If you want to vendor items, nodes and junk gear is limited only by the amount of time you want to spend farming. Once people have money and start trading, it becomes a matter of economy.

It may also be of interest to note that the 90th percentile on players on PC had around 800-900K gold.

pauli133 · February 2018

I strongly suspect that the majority of the gold in the economy enters via vendor trashing.

Mayrael · February 2018

Wow mindblown

was never thinking about it, undaunted plunder can be one of the sources to. Next thing. I have grinded like 7 or 8 of my all characters and during that grind, especially when lvling skill lines (when you loot160cp trash gear) I was earning realy nice amounts of gold justfriom selling that trash to vendor.

magictucktuck · February 2018

starkerealm wrote: »

krachall wrote: »

starkerealm wrote: »

Theft. Theft is a major way a lot of players, especially lowbies, can make a lot of cash quickly. Ornate drops are another.

Individually that doesn't add up to the full scope of the money flowing around in the system, but that's because there are a lot of players scampering around, hoovering up small gains here and there, only to turn around and buy moderately priced items, which then gets pooled and buys your stock.

There's also quests and dailies. Again, they don't pay out much individually, but I'm usually seeing somewhere around 15k per day from just doing basic writs on three characters, before I get into cracking the boxes.

Good points. I hadn't thought of writs.

I think stealing is overrated though. Even with max passives, and assuming you fill up your limit, you're probably only going to make about 15k a day...and that assumes an average sell price of 100g. It would take HOURS to pickpocket or steal just the blues and purples needed to go higher.

Stealing is overrated, but that's still something that gets suggested to new players on a regular basis. There are a lot of players engaging in it, and the ROI is better than questing. That said, a lot of advice on stealing skims over teaching players how to engage with the system in an efficient way, and I still question people who view it as their primary source of income. But, with practice you can hoover up a lot of cash in fairly short order.

i think its over rated because people don't consider that with everything maxed you can do it fast and you get tons of furnishing mats and recipes you can sell. i got purple recipes i sold for 30k twice last week. not counting all the furnishing and stuff that were 1-3k that you get a bunch of every day

i didnt think it was worth it either until i was trying to max my thievery skills and used guild store for things i found

Prof_Bawbag · February 2018

C'mon people, lets be honest with the guy, we make all our gold from Alkahest.

The amount of Alkahest that drops in this game is insane. Vendors for a hefty price too.

Bax · February 2018

krachall wrote: »

starkerealm wrote: »

Theft. Theft is a major way a lot of players, especially lowbies, can make a lot of cash quickly. Ornate drops are another.

Individually that doesn't add up to the full scope of the money flowing around in the system, but that's because there are a lot of players scampering around, hoovering up small gains here and there, only to turn around and buy moderately priced items, which then gets pooled and buys your stock.

There's also quests and dailies. Again, they don't pay out much individually, but I'm usually seeing somewhere around 15k per day from just doing basic writs on three characters, before I get into cracking the boxes.

Good points. I hadn't thought of writs.

I think stealing is overrated though. Even with max passives, and assuming you fill up your limit, you're probably only going to make about 15k a day...and that assumes an average sell price of 100g. It would take HOURS to pickpocket or steal just the blues and purples needed to go higher.

And 15k a day times X players who do that times Y days during they do that can give you some quite a nice amount of gold.

Also don't be fooled by riches of yourself and few people you know. A lot of players keep their money relatively low and what they earn they give to the economy (buying things out of the guild stores). Not everyone got huge amount of gold stacked, but everyone keeps earning gold.

And even without stealing, what I do is playing the game however I want and NPCing mostly everything I got with very few exceptions (things I actually need or things which are worth selling in guild store). I can earn like 10-15k from game sources just by casually playing the game an hour or two. That seems low individually, but aggregated by thousands of game hours people spend playing the game daily it gives millions of gold into the economy.

idk · February 2018

Writs are a great source of gold. Doing vet trials I can easily make a few hundred k a week all directly from the game vs it moving between players.

TarrNokk · February 2018

krachall wrote: »

starkerealm wrote: »

Theft. Theft is a major way a lot of players, especially lowbies, can make a lot of cash quickly. Ornate drops are another.

Individually that doesn't add up to the full scope of the money flowing around in the system, but that's because there are a lot of players scampering around, hoovering up small gains here and there, only to turn around and buy moderately priced items, which then gets pooled and buys your stock.

There's also quests and dailies. Again, they don't pay out much individually, but I'm usually seeing somewhere around 15k per day from just doing basic writs on three characters, before I get into cracking the boxes.

Good points. I hadn't thought of writs.

I think stealing is overrated though. Even with max passives, and assuming you fill up your limit, you're probably only going to make about 15k a day...and that assumes an average sell price of 100g. It would take HOURS to pickpocket or steal just the blues and purples needed to go higher.

That's wrong. While I do the stealing tour I loot a lot of good recipes and motifs. So when I sold my 140 stolen continent for ~17k, I have items which I sell on guild trader depending on quality for 30-100k or more.

Bax · February 2018

TarrNokk wrote: »

krachall wrote: »

starkerealm wrote: »

Theft. Theft is a major way a lot of players, especially lowbies, can make a lot of cash quickly. Ornate drops are another.

Individually that doesn't add up to the full scope of the money flowing around in the system, but that's because there are a lot of players scampering around, hoovering up small gains here and there, only to turn around and buy moderately priced items, which then gets pooled and buys your stock.

There's also quests and dailies. Again, they don't pay out much individually, but I'm usually seeing somewhere around 15k per day from just doing basic writs on three characters, before I get into cracking the boxes.

Good points. I hadn't thought of writs.

I think stealing is overrated though. Even with max passives, and assuming you fill up your limit, you're probably only going to make about 15k a day...and that assumes an average sell price of 100g. It would take HOURS to pickpocket or steal just the blues and purples needed to go higher.

That's wrong. While I do the stealing tour I loot a lot of good recipes and motifs. So when I sold my 140 stolen continent for ~17k, I have items which I sell on guild trader depending on quality for 30-100k or more.

The topic is about generated gold from NPCs, not about earning gold from players

krachall · February 2018

TarrNokk wrote: »

krachall wrote: »

starkerealm wrote: »

Theft. Theft is a major way a lot of players, especially lowbies, can make a lot of cash quickly. Ornate drops are another.

Individually that doesn't add up to the full scope of the money flowing around in the system, but that's because there are a lot of players scampering around, hoovering up small gains here and there, only to turn around and buy moderately priced items, which then gets pooled and buys your stock.

There's also quests and dailies. Again, they don't pay out much individually, but I'm usually seeing somewhere around 15k per day from just doing basic writs on three characters, before I get into cracking the boxes.

Good points. I hadn't thought of writs.

I think stealing is overrated though. Even with max passives, and assuming you fill up your limit, you're probably only going to make about 15k a day...and that assumes an average sell price of 100g. It would take HOURS to pickpocket or steal just the blues and purples needed to go higher.

That's wrong. While I do the stealing tour I loot a lot of good recipes and motifs. So when I sold my 140 stolen continent for ~17k, I have items which I sell on guild trader depending on quality for 30-100k or more.

Actually, selling recipes and motifs on the guild trader doesn't generate gold. It moves gold from one player to another.

WhitePawPrints · February 2018

krachall wrote: »

starkerealm wrote: »

Theft. Theft is a major way a lot of players, especially lowbies, can make a lot of cash quickly. Ornate drops are another.

Individually that doesn't add up to the full scope of the money flowing around in the system, but that's because there are a lot of players scampering around, hoovering up small gains here and there, only to turn around and buy moderately priced items, which then gets pooled and buys your stock.

There's also quests and dailies. Again, they don't pay out much individually, but I'm usually seeing somewhere around 15k per day from just doing basic writs on three characters, before I get into cracking the boxes.

Good points. I hadn't thought of writs.

I think stealing is overrated though. Even with max passives, and assuming you fill up your limit, you're probably only going to make about 15k a day...and that assumes an average sell price of 100g. It would take HOURS to pickpocket or steal just the blues and purples needed to go higher.

I make 15k in 30 minutes of theft. It’s not the best way to make gold but I do want that achievement by stealing a mil worth of loot.

Cpt_Teemo · February 2018

Prof_Bawbag wrote: »

The game's been out for years now. Of course there's gonna be millions floating around. Someone buys my wares, I get the vast majority of that gold and so on. I suspect more gold gets given to the players than disappears into the gold sinks. No foil hat needed.

Dupes, Botted, Hacked mostly i've seen screenshots of people with over 1b gold and I doubt that was from pure legit sources.

Malamar1229 · February 2018

I make 4k a day just in writs. If 100k players did that, that is introducing 400,000,000 gold daily to the game.

ValkynSketha · February 2018

Bots

AlnilamE · February 2018

krachall wrote: »

krachall wrote: »

starkerealm wrote: »

Theft. Theft is a major way a lot of players, especially lowbies, can make a lot of cash quickly. Ornate drops are another.

Individually that doesn't add up to the full scope of the money flowing around in the system, but that's because there are a lot of players scampering around, hoovering up small gains here and there, only to turn around and buy moderately priced items, which then gets pooled and buys your stock.

There's also quests and dailies. Again, they don't pay out much individually, but I'm usually seeing somewhere around 15k per day from just doing basic writs on three characters, before I get into cracking the boxes.

Good points. I hadn't thought of writs.

I think stealing is overrated though. Even with max passives, and assuming you fill up your limit, you're probably only going to make about 15k a day...and that assumes an average sell price of 100g. It would take HOURS to pickpocket or steal just the blues and purples needed to go higher.

For reference, that 15k a day is about what you need to buy a single stack of raw silk.

Yes, but you only buy raw silk if you want to refine it in order to get gold improvers to sell.

A lot of my gold comes from looting mobs and vendoring items. Stealing as well (as another player mentioned, there are achievements connected with it), and quest rewards. If you can combine all three into one, that's even better.

Ardan147 · February 2018

Enemies in public dungeons (mainly humanoid enemies though) tend to drop a lot of gold - and there are usually a lot of them and they tend to redrawn quickly. Although they can be a bit challenging for newer players.

Ydrisselle · February 2018

krachall wrote: »

krachall wrote: »

starkerealm wrote: »

Theft. Theft is a major way a lot of players, especially lowbies, can make a lot of cash quickly. Ornate drops are another.

Individually that doesn't add up to the full scope of the money flowing around in the system, but that's because there are a lot of players scampering around, hoovering up small gains here and there, only to turn around and buy moderately priced items, which then gets pooled and buys your stock.

There's also quests and dailies. Again, they don't pay out much individually, but I'm usually seeing somewhere around 15k per day from just doing basic writs on three characters, before I get into cracking the boxes.

Good points. I hadn't thought of writs.

I think stealing is overrated though. Even with max passives, and assuming you fill up your limit, you're probably only going to make about 15k a day...and that assumes an average sell price of 100g. It would take HOURS to pickpocket or steal just the blues and purples needed to go higher.

For reference, that 15k a day is about what you need to buy a single stack of raw silk.

Refined silk is always cheaper.

Robo_Hobo · February 2018

Almost all of my money comes from in-game sources (thieving, quests, vendoring stuff). I'm not rich at all by any means, but I did get that 1m gold fenced achievement, and working on it again with another character. (The most gold I've ever had at one time is 300k though...bad spending habits)

I think it really is just sheer mass amount of players - and bots too probably make up some portion of it. Think of all of those bot trains back in the day doing quests in Windhelm for the high tier quest reward as a new character, before they made a limit of deleting 3 characters a day.

VaranisArano · February 2018

Ydrisselle wrote: »

krachall wrote: »

krachall wrote: »

starkerealm wrote: »

Theft. Theft is a major way a lot of players, especially lowbies, can make a lot of cash quickly. Ornate drops are another.

Individually that doesn't add up to the full scope of the money flowing around in the system, but that's because there are a lot of players scampering around, hoovering up small gains here and there, only to turn around and buy moderately priced items, which then gets pooled and buys your stock.

There's also quests and dailies. Again, they don't pay out much individually, but I'm usually seeing somewhere around 15k per day from just doing basic writs on three characters, before I get into cracking the boxes.

Good points. I hadn't thought of writs.

I think stealing is overrated though. Even with max passives, and assuming you fill up your limit, you're probably only going to make about 15k a day...and that assumes an average sell price of 100g. It would take HOURS to pickpocket or steal just the blues and purples needed to go higher.

For reference, that 15k a day is about what you need to buy a single stack of raw silk.

Refined silk is always cheaper.

Yes. But refined silk doesn't give them the chance to refine dreugh wax and other improvement mats from it, which is the only reason to buy raw ancestor silk over refined silk.

Prof_Bawbag · February 2018

Cpt_Teemo wrote: »

Prof_Bawbag wrote: »

The game's been out for years now. Of course there's gonna be millions floating around. Someone buys my wares, I get the vast majority of that gold and so on. I suspect more gold gets given to the players than disappears into the gold sinks. No foil hat needed.

Dupes, Botted, Hacked mostly i've seen screenshots of people with over 1b gold and I doubt that was from pure legit sources.

That's not the norm though, is it? As mentioned by others, this game will generate billions daily just through legit means.

Anotherone773 · February 2018

Lets assume the average account does the following:

* Loots 5 chests = 250 gold
* Gets gold off 10 dead mobs =200 gold
* Does 10 writs = 6000 gold
*Fences 140 items =8000 gold
* Completes 5 quests =1500 gold
* Vendors Trash/ornate = 200 gold.

That is 16,150gold per account per day. Lets assume 10k unique account logins a day. So then we have 161,500,000 gold generated daily x 365= just shy of 59 billion gold generated a year.

I didnt consider anything not open world in that. For example lets say doing the daily heist averages you 300 gold per account( fron laundered goods) and 10% of accounts do the heist daily. That adds 300k a day or another 109.5 million a year generated from laundered goods from that one task that im going suspect not a lot of people do.

My numbers are conservative by the way. When you do thieving and writs, you generate new gold quickly and a lot of people who do them go all in on one or the other or both.

SASQUATCH0 · February 2018

200mil?!? Even over the span of 3 years I can’t imagine ever getting that much.

Ermiq · February 2018

Alcagest, Ornate items, Soul Gems, crafting writs.

LiquidPony · February 2018

krachall wrote: »

I posted about motif drop rates and how my time is far more productive farming raw mats and using the gold to buy motifs than it actually is to farm motifs.

That got me thinking...where's all this gold come from?

I'm sitting a hair shy of 9mm gold and the vast, VAST majority of it has come from selling raw mats. I have a friend who is approaching 200MM gold from either selling mats or reselling items.

I make almost no gold from the game itself. I recently power-leveled a character from 1 to 50 and he had 30,000 gold, all from in-game rewards, when he reached 50. That's insignificant compared to the gold made from other players. But that gold all came from in-game sources. Selling items you get from corpses may generate 30-50 gold a pop but that may end up being a few thousand a day. Are there major sources?

Quest rewards give a couple hundred. vet trial rewards give a couple thousand. But there are hundreds of millions of gold being tossed around by players every day and every single piece came from an in-game source. Is it simply a matter of the number of players? Meaning if there are 10 million players earning a few thousand gold a day, that gold is keeping the economy running? When you consider that there are massive gold sinks (houses) but no massive gold generators, I've got to think something else is feeding currency into the economy.

I've recently power leveled a PC toon from CP40 to CP180 over the past week or so. I started with almost zero gold and have nearly 400k banked now.

I found 1 Aetherial Dust and got 1 master writ worth 98 vouchers. Roughly 40% of my gold came from those two things.

Other than that, it's just been gold drops and selling vendor trash. Running loops through places like Crimson Cove and Vile Manse generates much more gold than "a few thousand a day." I just ran a loop through Crimson Cove.

I went in with 46/115 bag space used and 118,425 gold on hand.

I came out with:

129,146 gold on hand (+10,721 gold)
Dustman sold 1,554g in trash
A blue diagram worth about ~3k according to TTC
Several BoE items worth a combined ~9k according to TTC
Additional gear (non-ornate) worth about 3k which was all broken down since I need the mats

Now I'm on a low CP account, I don't have a merchant, and my bag space isn't maxed ... and the stuff listed above is about ~25k potential gold earned in maybe 30 minutes of farming. A higher CP toon could farm it more efficiently with a Merchant on hand to sell trash and I would guess earn well over 40k gold an hour just running in circles in Crimson Cove.

Waffennacht · February 2018

Waffennacht wrote: »

There's only so many possibilities.

First there's:
Non-Player Interactions that make gold, and
Player interactions that make gold

Player interactions that make gold (outside of say guilds and raffles, gambling, black market etc) is selling items

Non-Player Interactions vary on time vs gold rewards. Unless there is mob grind location with gold drop vs gear damage done that I dunno about, the best methods are:

Daily Writs, my math (not extensively done) is that 4 characters, 2 max, 2 min is the best time and material vs gold reward ratio I've found. Easy to farm the necessary mats and do all writs within an hour. Making 14 k gold everyday

Stealing, 15k (results vary of course) within an hour (usually 1.6k per 6 min for 40 min to do 140 items)

Cyrodiil Daily Town Quests, Bruma, Cropsford Chey - can be done in as little as 20 min each netting approx 7k gold per town

Of course these activities can provide items that can also be sold (writs, gold items, motifs, etc) but those are not guaranteed money so I don't include them in my calculations (but do add a hefty amount of items that can be liquidated at any time)

This is a daily routine of approximately 50k within 2 hours without human interaction.