PC/EU - Guild store market is being heavily manipulated (corn flower, spell pots and tempers)

Varana · March 2019

Sergykid wrote: »

didn't notice, i never buy crafting stuff anyway

what i noticed though, is a sudden price increase for 3 piece jewelry. 1-2 months ago i struggled to sell an arcane willpower ring with 1k, both in zone chat or guild store. Now, i place one with 4k and sells in the same day

I suspect it's not about 3-piece-jewelry specifically, but about purple stuff.
A while ago, they changed Jewelry Writs to reliably drop gold grains. This means that crafters have a somewhat steady source of gold materials. Purple ones, though, come only from deconstructing purple jewelry, with the usual RNG and the stupid grain system still applying.
So prices for purple jewelry have risen, and you see that esp. with the 3-piece-jewelry because the regular dungeon pieces can't be sold.

Skwor · March 2019

😆 it is called economics and some of us saw this coming. Feel free to buy my cornflower (I have thousands literally) and my wax (lost count of how many stacks) and my gold plates, I have around 25 atm, kind of low stock on those.

Some of us play ESO for the market 🤑

dtsharples · March 2019

A lot of the time it's actually one of the big trader guilds doing this.
They have the funds to buy up every piece of a certain item on sale from other guild stores, to completely clear them out.
They then stock them on their own trader(s) and hike up the prices exponentially, permanently changing the market value of said item.
A very well known trade guild on PC EU did this with Gold Blacksmith Tempers ages ago, like over 12 months ago - and it's taken until very recently for Tempers to fall back in line with the costs of the other upgrade materials.

NoTimeToWait · March 2019

bharathitman wrote: »

By this time it should be obvious to most end game raiders or people who are playing seriously that some weird things are going on when it comes to
Spell Power Pots

Corn Flower

Dreugh Waxes

A single individual with loads of gold is going around and buying all the stacks of pots, corn flower and waxes. Prices are through the roof now, people are buying Corn Flower at like 600g per unit and spell power pots are very hard to find. Dreugh Wax prices have shot up from 4k ish to 7k now.
The lack of easy access to spell power pots have unintended consequences to people who don't have a huge stock pile. This is adversely affecting mag dd's who want to train / progress through a trial. I and many of my guild mates think twice before bringing a mag dd to a raid.
I know it's an open market and people can do whatever they want, but this is getting out of hand

Sorry, but you are clueless. Don't you see, that we just got a new update, that has significant changes in both PVP and PVE areas as well as enticing new players to participate there? That means a huge demand for the things you mentioned.

And of course traders will use this demand in their interests

Kikke · March 2019

The market in ESO is the closest to a free trade market in any MMO. Yes, even with a free market someone with tons of gold (usually done by a team of players) can take control over small portions of the market and cause a form of monopoly on said portion for a while.

However, as ESO has tons of guild stores, there will always be product out there for Market Price. You just have to look for it. And the free market will correct itself quickly as the market manipulators wont get to sell their products for inflated prices.

TL;DR: Don't buy the overpriced ones, find those that are at market price.

bharathitman · March 2019

NoTimeToWait wrote: »

bharathitman wrote: »

By this time it should be obvious to most end game raiders or people who are playing seriously that some weird things are going on when it comes to
Spell Power Pots

Corn Flower

Dreugh Waxes

A single individual with loads of gold is going around and buying all the stacks of pots, corn flower and waxes. Prices are through the roof now, people are buying Corn Flower at like 600g per unit and spell power pots are very hard to find. Dreugh Wax prices have shot up from 4k ish to 7k now.
The lack of easy access to spell power pots have unintended consequences to people who don't have a huge stock pile. This is adversely affecting mag dd's who want to train / progress through a trial. I and many of my guild mates think twice before bringing a mag dd to a raid.
I know it's an open market and people can do whatever they want, but this is getting out of hand

Sorry, but you are clueless. Don't you see, that we just got a new update, that has significant changes in both PVP and PVE areas as well as enticing new players to participate there? That means a huge demand for the things you mentioned.

And of course traders will use this demand in their interests

This thing has been going on from a few weeks, wrathstone has nothing to do it. Only certain items are being completely cleared out of the market and then being re-listed at inflated price. One of them being lorkhan's tears, very difficult to even find stock of it in some cities now

bharathitman · March 2019

mcagatayg wrote: »

people need to stop it with "JUST GO AND FARM LOOOOOOL", as a person who works 8 hours that is a really stupid thing to do, last thing i want before trials is to farm some flowers

This was my point exactly, I don't have time to go and farm flowers and water satchels to make potions. Before I was using whatever plunder I got from trials to restock on my potions. But now that equation is not balancing itself

NoTimeToWait · March 2019

bharathitman wrote: »

This thing has been going on from a few weeks, wrathstone has nothing to do it. Only certain items are being completely cleared out of the market and then being re-listed at inflated price. One of them being lorkhan's tears, very difficult to even find stock of it in some cities now

Yes, that's because not a single trader, but quite a bunch of them were stashing the ingredients you mentioned for the chance to sell them at higher prices after update. Just as a friendly reminder, you might want to stock up on some things before anniversary hits, if you don't want to buy them later at premium.

And you are not very good at searching. Just bought 800 of Lorkan's tears at 37g per item.

Enzym3 · March 2019

bharathitman wrote: »

NoTimeToWait wrote: »

bharathitman wrote: »

By this time it should be obvious to most end game raiders or people who are playing seriously that some weird things are going on when it comes to
Spell Power Pots

Corn Flower

Dreugh Waxes

A single individual with loads of gold is going around and buying all the stacks of pots, corn flower and waxes. Prices are through the roof now, people are buying Corn Flower at like 600g per unit and spell power pots are very hard to find. Dreugh Wax prices have shot up from 4k ish to 7k now.
The lack of easy access to spell power pots have unintended consequences to people who don't have a huge stock pile. This is adversely affecting mag dd's who want to train / progress through a trial. I and many of my guild mates think twice before bringing a mag dd to a raid.
I know it's an open market and people can do whatever they want, but this is getting out of hand

Sorry, but you are clueless. Don't you see, that we just got a new update, that has significant changes in both PVP and PVE areas as well as enticing new players to participate there? That means a huge demand for the things you mentioned.

And of course traders will use this demand in their interests

This thing has been going on from a few weeks, wrathstone has nothing to do it. Only certain items are being completely cleared out of the market and then being re-listed at inflated price. One of them being lorkhan's tears, very difficult to even find stock of it in some cities now

hit me up man i'll sell you some, i sell anything that i can self-generate

OgreShlong · March 2019

bharathitman wrote: »

Tasear wrote: »

Just go to imperial city and get something to some. Make it an guild event and stock up for guild too.

The stuff that you get out of the apothecary parcels and alchemy surveys is again based on RNG. Spending hours to farm corn flower just so that I can make pots for my raids is just not a great use of everyone's time don't you think.

Farming flowers in ic almost always gives around 200 cornflower for 130-150k stones, luck doesnt play a huge part. you get loads of other flowers too that can be sold so that you can buy cornflower from traders

zaria · March 2019

starkerealm wrote: »

redspecter23 wrote: »

starkerealm wrote: »

redspecter23 wrote: »

The market can only handle so much of this unless there is a very limited supply. It will crash at some point.

I've noticed similar with Dreugh Wax on PC/NA the last few days. I was attributing it at least partly to the lack of Awesome Guild Store and people not wanting to go through the hassle of digging through their bag to post mats, saving them until AGS is fixed. I might be off on that and there is probably something else to it as well.

There was a rumor going around that the Dreugh Wax drop rate was being reduced with Wrathstone. I haven't seen it personally (my drop rate seems pretty normal), but it's possible that we're seeing the effects of that change in the wild.

I haven't noticed a change in drop rates, but any rise in price could happen after any large bot banning sweep from ZOS. We tend to get used to certain prices that are artificially low due to botting. If the botting goes away or is slowed down, the prices are bound to go up.

This is also possible. As @Ri_Khan suggested, it's also possible this is simply a demand spike, with the recent racial changes predominantly affecting mag builds. Now, generally speaking, I'd expect this would come along with a spike to Rosin, which I haven't seen, but I haven't been watching the market closely this week, for a number of reasons.

Demand spike and you probably have some buying up stuff as they see the price go up.
Perhaps an bot ban campaign.

If some tried to manipulate marked it would be more visible.
Probably also pretty hard as lots of players has lots of stuff in their crafting bags so if price goes high they will start to sell.
Players selling don't risk anything except the listing cost.

Jeremy · March 2019

bharathitman wrote: »

By this time it should be obvious to most end game raiders or people who are playing seriously that some weird things are going on when it comes to
Spell Power Pots

Corn Flower

Dreugh Waxes

A single individual with loads of gold is going around and buying all the stacks of pots, corn flower and waxes. Prices are through the roof now, people are buying Corn Flower at like 600g per unit and spell power pots are very hard to find. Dreugh Wax prices have shot up from 4k ish to 7k now.
The lack of easy access to spell power pots have unintended consequences to people who don't have a huge stock pile. This is adversely affecting mag dd's who want to train / progress through a trial. I and many of my guild mates think twice before bringing a mag dd to a raid.
I know it's an open market and people can do whatever they want, but this is getting out of hand

This isn't possible because the guild trader system makes market manipulation impossible.

ATomiX96 · March 2019

If you think its bad now, wait until only IC gets opted out of all campaigns and there will be only one campaign dedicated to IC, its gonna make telvar farming even harder and potion / reagent prices are gonna go up even further.

zaria · March 2019

Jeremy wrote: »

bharathitman wrote: »

By this time it should be obvious to most end game raiders or people who are playing seriously that some weird things are going on when it comes to
Spell Power Pots

Corn Flower

Dreugh Waxes

A single individual with loads of gold is going around and buying all the stacks of pots, corn flower and waxes. Prices are through the roof now, people are buying Corn Flower at like 600g per unit and spell power pots are very hard to find. Dreugh Wax prices have shot up from 4k ish to 7k now.
The lack of easy access to spell power pots have unintended consequences to people who don't have a huge stock pile. This is adversely affecting mag dd's who want to train / progress through a trial. I and many of my guild mates think twice before bringing a mag dd to a raid.
I know it's an open market and people can do whatever they want, but this is getting out of hand

This isn't possible because the guild trader system makes market manipulation impossible.

Not impossible simply harder.
You can do this in real life to and it has happened.
You can also get people seeing an trend of raising prices and buy like in any marked.
Just the rumor of an drop rate nerf will raise price as people will buy.

lunawisp · March 2019

I'm not sure prices are being 'manipulated' as such. I've been looking around the various stores to see what's going on and it seems to me that, with Awesome Guild Store not working on the PC platform at least, people have little idea of the current consensus for prices. With that and having to deal with the default clunky interface, it looks to me as if people are just not posting much to sell. The stores are emptying fast. Those high prices have always existed and have been generally ignored. You're seeing them now because all the reasonably priced stock has been bought up and it's not being replaced.

Jaimeh · March 2019

bharathitman wrote: »

By this time it should be obvious to most end game raiders or people who are playing seriously that some weird things are going on when it comes to
Spell Power Pots

Corn Flower

Dreugh Waxes

A single individual with loads of gold is going around and buying all the stacks of pots, corn flower and waxes. Prices are through the roof now, people are buying Corn Flower at like 600g per unit and spell power pots are very hard to find. Dreugh Wax prices have shot up from 4k ish to 7k now.
The lack of easy access to spell power pots have unintended consequences to people who don't have a huge stock pile. This is adversely affecting mag dd's who want to train / progress through a trial. I and many of my guild mates think twice before bringing a mag dd to a raid.
I know it's an open market and people can do whatever they want, but this is getting out of hand

I don't know about corn flower/dreugh wax, but can attest to the spell power pots being limited, and the prices having gone though the roof, I've been noticing it for a few days. Cheapest deal I could find in Deshaan was 100 for 19.5k which is considerably more than usual for this amount. It happens from time to time with certain materials to drive prices up, but normalizes again, though it sucks for those who don't have a lot of time to farm materials.

Jolipinator · March 2019

All I want to know is, where are all the Silver Dawn Shoulders motifs?

VaranisArano · March 2019

West1389 wrote: »

Wait this cant happen, it only happens in the auction house.

It's not that it can't happen with a Guild Trader system that we have here.

Its that it takes a lot more effort to make happen over a long period of time with the people doing it having to search through guild stores to collect items to relist, instead of getting them all at once.

On PC/NA, we've seen this happen with limited items like the Minotaur Chest motif, where at the start of the Outfitting System, someone bought them and relisted for 150k.

It typically doesnt last that long, since it takes a lot of effort to stay on top of the market.

The argument, in non-straw man form, is simply that its easier to accomplish market manipulation in an Auction House system, and therefore incidents like this would be mkre common. Its not impossible to do in the Guild Trader system, but it requires a lot more work from the market manipulators, and thus its rarer.

VaranisArano · March 2019

Jeremy wrote: »

bharathitman wrote: »

By this time it should be obvious to most end game raiders or people who are playing seriously that some weird things are going on when it comes to
Spell Power Pots

Corn Flower

Dreugh Waxes

A single individual with loads of gold is going around and buying all the stacks of pots, corn flower and waxes. Prices are through the roof now, people are buying Corn Flower at like 600g per unit and spell power pots are very hard to find. Dreugh Wax prices have shot up from 4k ish to 7k now.
The lack of easy access to spell power pots have unintended consequences to people who don't have a huge stock pile. This is adversely affecting mag dd's who want to train / progress through a trial. I and many of my guild mates think twice before bringing a mag dd to a raid.
I know it's an open market and people can do whatever they want, but this is getting out of hand

This isn't possible because the guild trader system makes market manipulation impossible.

Nothing's impossible to the sufficiently determined.

Ixtyr · March 2019

Dreugh Wax has seen price increases on PC/NA as well. This is fairly typical as new patches come in with major balance adjustments. Many people reworking gear and changing builds means higher demand and the same supply.

Hakeijos are up, Alloys are up, several potion types are up, Wax is up. It's not the first time and won't be the last that prices go through these cycles. I've seen Alloys go from 12k to 6k back to 12k then back down to 4k then back up to 10k, it happens.

therift · March 2019

bharathitman wrote: »

NoTimeToWait wrote: »

bharathitman wrote: »

By this time it should be obvious to most end game raiders or people who are playing seriously that some weird things are going on when it comes to
Spell Power Pots

Corn Flower

Dreugh Waxes

A single individual with loads of gold is going around and buying all the stacks of pots, corn flower and waxes. Prices are through the roof now, people are buying Corn Flower at like 600g per unit and spell power pots are very hard to find. Dreugh Wax prices have shot up from 4k ish to 7k now.
The lack of easy access to spell power pots have unintended consequences to people who don't have a huge stock pile. This is adversely affecting mag dd's who want to train / progress through a trial. I and many of my guild mates think twice before bringing a mag dd to a raid.
I know it's an open market and people can do whatever they want, but this is getting out of hand

Sorry, but you are clueless. Don't you see, that we just got a new update, that has significant changes in both PVP and PVE areas as well as enticing new players to participate there? That means a huge demand for the things you mentioned.

And of course traders will use this demand in their interests

This thing has been going on from a few weeks, wrathstone has nothing to do it. Only certain items are being completely cleared out of the market and then being re-listed at inflated price. One of them being lorkhan's tears, very difficult to even find stock of it in some cities now

Wrathstone information was released waaaaay back in the middle of January. Based on the changes, a large number of people began buying up low-priced items in anticipation of future demand.

In other words, PTS patch notes provide invaluable insight for professional traders.

Androconium · March 2019

My problem relates to the absence of lockpicks. These come from urn drops.
There is now a shortage, as the number of people farming delves, has dropped.

Wherever there is a shortage, prices go up.

Recently, beetles were nerfed to drop less scuttle. As a farmer, I have responded by making less and charging more for camoran throne.

There are now less farmers. You pvpers can either make your own pots, or pay what the remaining farmers charge.

You can thank bitters for the current situation. All nerfing of mats is in response to over farming by bots.

Androconium · March 2019

dtsharples wrote: »

A lot of the time it's actually one of the big trader guilds doing this.
They have the funds to buy up every piece of a certain item on sale from other guild stores, to completely clear them out.
They then stock them on their own trader(s) and hike up the prices exponentially, permanently changing the market value of said item.
A very well known trade guild on PC EU did this with Gold Blacksmith Tempers ages ago, like over 12 months ago - and it's taken until very recently for Tempers to fall back in line with the costs of the other upgrade materials.

Other times it's just me, a trader and guild hopper.

As to the big guilds, now you know why they wanted the ability to hide their bank contents.

Androconium · March 2019

bharathitman wrote: »

By this time it should be obvious to most end game raiders or people who are playing seriously that some weird things are going on when it comes to
Spell Power Pots

Corn Flower

Dreugh Waxes

A single individual with loads of gold is going around and buying all the stacks of pots, corn flower and waxes. Prices are through the roof now, people are buying Corn Flower at like 600g per unit and spell power pots are very hard to find. Dreugh Wax prices have shot up from 4k ish to 7k now.
The lack of easy access to spell power pots have unintended consequences to people who don't have a huge stock pile. This is adversely affecting mag dd's who want to train / progress through a trial. I and many of my guild mates think twice before bringing a mag dd to a raid.
I know it's an open market and people can do whatever they want, but this is getting out of hand

Do i, as a farmer tell you how to PvP? No, because I don't know what I'm talking about there.

The market is certainly changing. From my perspective as a farmer, the root cause of this is the loss of long term players that specialise in farming AND creating foods, pots and set item pieces..

Last week I finally finished researching all the jewellery traits. I have spent literally millions buying recipes, earning writ vouchers to get research timer scrolls, and waiting months to develop crafting skills.

I spend eight hours a day picking flowers and hitting rocks. Just for you.

For the past two years you out PvP ers have been spoilt with cheap mats, harvested by bots. I remember seeing one player with thirty stacks of beetle scuttle at one guild trader.

At the current drop rate, I think it would take months to get 60000 pieces of scuttle .
You have three choices.
Pay the current prices.
Sacrifice skill points and time and learn to craft.
Go without.

Enjoy your day.

Cryptical · March 2019

West1389 wrote: »

Wait this cant happen, it only happens in the auction house.

Give that person an awesome!

In fact, grab one of their other comments and hit that with an awesome too, just to make it stick!
https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/profile/reactions/West1389?reaction=agree

MLGProPlayer · March 2019

Androconium wrote: »

bharathitman wrote: »

By this time it should be obvious to most end game raiders or people who are playing seriously that some weird things are going on when it comes to
Spell Power Pots

Corn Flower

Dreugh Waxes

A single individual with loads of gold is going around and buying all the stacks of pots, corn flower and waxes. Prices are through the roof now, people are buying Corn Flower at like 600g per unit and spell power pots are very hard to find. Dreugh Wax prices have shot up from 4k ish to 7k now.
The lack of easy access to spell power pots have unintended consequences to people who don't have a huge stock pile. This is adversely affecting mag dd's who want to train / progress through a trial. I and many of my guild mates think twice before bringing a mag dd to a raid.
I know it's an open market and people can do whatever they want, but this is getting out of hand

Do i, as a farmer tell you how to PvP? No, because I don't know what I'm talking about there.

The market is certainly changing. From my perspective as a farmer, the root cause of this is the loss of long term players that specialise in farming AND creating foods, pots and set item pieces..

Last week I finally finished researching all the jewellery traits. I have spent literally millions buying recipes, earning writ vouchers to get research timer scrolls, and waiting months to develop crafting skills.

I spend eight hours a day picking flowers and hitting rocks. Just for you.

For the past two years you out PvP ers have been spoilt with cheap mats, harvested by bots. I remember seeing one player with thirty stacks of beetle scuttle at one guild trader.

At the current drop rate, I think it would take months to get 60000 pieces of scuttle .
You have three choices.
Pay the current prices.
Sacrifice skill points and time and learn to craft.
Go without.

Enjoy your day.

This.

The "low" prices people have gotten used to are thanks to botting. I'm glad someone is trying to restore the market to a more reasonable state for farmers, but it's a short term solution. Until ZOS starts banning the bots, going around and buying up all the stock of every material daily isn't feasible.

If you're a flipper, you know who all the botters are. These guys can supply you with 1000+ tempers on a weekly basis at well below market cost lol. Just to put things into perspective. It takes 1 hour to farm 4 dreugh wax at optimal efficiency. That means it would take a single farmer, farming 24/7 (so not sleeping, eating, or going to the washroom) 1 week to farm 672 dreugh wax. Thes botters supply twice that weekly. And since obviously everyone has to eat and sleep and go to the washroom, and to go to work of course, you're looking at 3-4 hours of farming per day at most. That means that a legitimate player can only farm 96-112 dreugh wax per week, and that's assuming you're farming in ESO for 21-28 hours a week (which is a lot).

The same applies for all the mats since you have node and hide botters, I just used dreugh wax since it's a simple example.

Iluvrien · March 2019

therift wrote: »

bharathitman wrote: »

NoTimeToWait wrote: »

bharathitman wrote: »

By this time it should be obvious to most end game raiders or people who are playing seriously that some weird things are going on when it comes to
Spell Power Pots

Corn Flower

Dreugh Waxes

A single individual with loads of gold is going around and buying all the stacks of pots, corn flower and waxes. Prices are through the roof now, people are buying Corn Flower at like 600g per unit and spell power pots are very hard to find. Dreugh Wax prices have shot up from 4k ish to 7k now.
The lack of easy access to spell power pots have unintended consequences to people who don't have a huge stock pile. This is adversely affecting mag dd's who want to train / progress through a trial. I and many of my guild mates think twice before bringing a mag dd to a raid.
I know it's an open market and people can do whatever they want, but this is getting out of hand

Sorry, but you are clueless. Don't you see, that we just got a new update, that has significant changes in both PVP and PVE areas as well as enticing new players to participate there? That means a huge demand for the things you mentioned.

And of course traders will use this demand in their interests

This thing has been going on from a few weeks, wrathstone has nothing to do it. Only certain items are being completely cleared out of the market and then being re-listed at inflated price. One of them being lorkhan's tears, very difficult to even find stock of it in some cities now

Wrathstone information was released waaaaay back in the middle of January. Based on the changes, a large number of people began buying up low-priced items in anticipation of future demand.

In other words, PTS patch notes provide invaluable insight for professional traders.

This.

I regularly do analysis on ESO market trends just to keep my hand in.

As soon as I noticed that a gold mat was starting to uptick, I informed my trading guild through chat, and checked what other mats were doing the same. Our GM posted that info to our discord.

This isn’t about one person controlling the market. This is about the market responding naturally to a mechanics shift.

LordTareq · March 2019

Someone wicked also bought all the Repora runestones in Rawl this morning....I was forced to buy glyphs and disassemble those to get my Repora runes, and the glyphs were suddenly 50 gold each instead of the normal 30 or so.

Ratzkifal · March 2019

West1389 wrote: »

Wait this cant happen, it only happens in the auction house.

@West1389 It would be even worse in the auction house because you can always buy these things from guild traders in remote places for decent prices.

Jhalin · March 2019

LordTareq wrote: »

Someone wicked also bought all the Repora runestones in Rawl this morning....I was forced to buy glyphs and disassemble those to get my Repora runes, and the glyphs were suddenly 50 gold each instead of the normal 30 or so.

a full 200 stack of Repora only goes from 6k to 10k

it would take regearing 15 characters (7 armor, 3 weapons, 3 jewels) to use that many, which turns into a whopping 667 gold per character

It’s hardly a huge price if you can cover the costs by selling a couple white tier gear pieces

Or you go farm them yourself. Farmers are allowed to value their time, just like you value your gold