What I really want to hear about today is how ZOS is going to fix their broken in game economy

f047ys3v3n · January 2022

We have had a problem for a long time. The problem does not seem to be being addressed, and the problem is clearly getting much worse, especially on PCNA. Now it is so blatant that you can't go a day without seeing gold spammers advertising gold for sale in zone chats for less than three bucks a million. Sure you report them but there are more, every day. The inflation is absolutely rampant one everything in game and we are at the point where the entire economy is pretty much broken. I sold a simple motif that is a drop from a basic mobs for 500k a few days ago. It's crazy and it needs to be fixed.

Let me be clear on what the problem is. ESO ON PC HAS SOME SORT OF GOLD DUPE BUG.

I could go into detail as to why every other explanation I have read is clearly bunk (crafting writs, lol, yea, that's why gold mats are getting so expensive, because crafting writs clearly account for a higher percent of the gold in game than the gold mats so when you do more the mats cost more) (Crown sales, lol, that sure explains why consoles aren't having the issue) but nobody wants to read all that. We need some answers from the admins on how then intend to fix this economic problem because the economy in this state is not working for anybody for a variety of reasons.

1) Newer, more casual, or anyone getting their gold the old fashion way (quest and mob drops) really can't participate in the economy. at like 5k or so an hour they will never afford gold armor, let alone jewelry. Heck, even that crappy motif I sold would represent 100 in game hours of solid play to afford.

2) The inflation has translated to guild store prices and guilds who are not buying gold with crowns or through illicit means really can't afford traders any more and the stress is hell on the poor guys running them. In my social guild we used to easily pay for our trader with taxes and donations. It's not even close now.

3) All fixed gold sinks, such as repair costs, luxury vendor items, and even golden items are either already meaningless or getting there fast.

Please, ZOS, give us some hope on ESO's economic collapse today.

Casul · January 2022

I am really curious if addons have anything to do with it. Ps4 had bots and gold seller but crown prices never went above 100:1, PC is like 1000-1200:1 on NA.

I'm pretty sure xbox was also 100:1

f047ys3v3n · January 2022

BuildMan wrote: »

I am really curious if addons have anything to do with it. Ps4 had bots and gold seller but crown prices never went above 100:1, PC is like 1000-1200:1 on NA.

I'm pretty sure xbox was also 100:1

One of my buddies thinks that it is though the add on system that people have figured out how to either duplicate or create the gold that is flooding the system. He programs and thinks it is shocking and very insecure how much access the add on system grants. You can effectively create entirely new quests, characters, and items in the system as demonstrated a few years ago when one of that add on makers dropped in a quest with NPC's and a fun wabbajack that transformed your mount into a random data-mined one (though the transformation was only visible to you.) That is certainly an avenue ZOS should examine but it's well beyond my pay grade.

Certainly though, consoles, with no add-ons, appear to have a stable economy and PC, especially on NA is utterly melting down with gold worth less than 1/10th of it's value on X-box. It would therefore seem likely that more than 9 / 10 pieces of gold on PC is effectively counterfeit.

Fhritz · January 2022

I mean, newer player can farm these motifs too right ? Yes, the inflation is real, but since almost everything in the economy is player-based, you can't just fix that with a thanos snap or anything. It's like in real word : you can't easily stop the inflation.
And ESO is gaining popularity and player base, that mean more trader and more gold in the economy.

I think the best ZoS could do is making a in-game fixed price for crown, but you can't really influence the price of other player items unless you want to destroy the economy more.

Lysette · January 2022

Casuals not able to afford gold armor - well, why would we even want gold armor - ask yourself that? - there is no problem, if one goes for "good enough" instead of "the best".

f047ys3v3n · January 2022

Fhritz wrote: »

I mean, newer player can farm these motifs too right ? Yes, the inflation is real, but since almost everything in the economy is player-based, you can't just fix that with a thanos snap or anything. It's like in real word : you can't easily stop the inflation.
And ESO is gaining popularity and player base, that mean more trader and more gold in the economy.

I think the best ZoS could do is making a in-game fixed price for crown, but you can't really influence the price of other player items unless you want to destroy the economy more.

You are confusing the idea of fixing prices with the idea of fighting inflation. Fixing prices is something you can't really do effectively. When you try to set the price of a commodity lower than market sellers stop selling on the open market, fewer of the commodity are produced, buyers get desperate, and a black market quickly results. This is price fixing though. Fighting inflation is actually much easier. Both ESO and the global economy have fiat currency systems where the currency is created by an authority and has no intrinsic value.

In the case of the real world you can end the U.S.'s current 7% inflation tomorrow by selling fed assets, increasing the federal funds rate, or even (rarely done) increasing the reserve requirement for banks. All of these have the effect of reducing the amount of cash in the system and they do so quite rapidly given the nature of fractional reserve banking systems. If you don't understand any of this do not worry, you are not meant to. You are meant to earn money through labor. Your betters are meant to earn money though the lending of capital much of which they burrow from the fed for basically nothing. Of course, the fed did not raise interest rates yesterday, because it is scared that when it ends 10+ years of super foolish monetary policy it will crash the stock market. That is almost certainly true. Better to dig the hole deeper I guess.

ESO has a totally different problem in it's Fiat system though. Clearly somebody(s) has set up his own printing press and is making his own currency. This printing press is quite prolific and now seems to be producing most of the gold in the ESO world. To fix this ZOS needs to find the press, destroy it, and make the currency harder to counterfeit so more presses aren't make. Given that ESO is all one big data set and the devs have access to all transaction records, it really shouldn't be very hard to find the sources of the massive amount of counterfeit gold, shut those sources down, and find the hole in the spaghetti code they are using to make it. OK, maybe finding the hole is not so easy, that is probably the problem. Lots of very stringy spaghetti code and not enough secret service agents to catch all those slippery counterfeiters. ZOS will, of course also have an interesting problem to deal with when and if it fixed it's counterfeiting issue. Many folks who simply sold stuff in this market will have massively inflated gold hoards of mostly fake gold but that they legitimately earned in he broken economy. Folks like me. Not so easy to deal with that issue as those folks would be permanently unfathomably rich. There is a huge silver lining in the ESO world though. No matter how rich those folks got, they would not be able to buy influence with ZOS such that they controlled the fate of everybody else. The real would is very different in this way.

Tandor · January 2022

Nothing would surprise me about this game's trading system or the effect of addons generally. Although on PC I have nothing to do with either of them.

So far as gold sellers are concerned, I hadn't realised they had become a problem until recently when they started advertising on Zone English (which I have therefore disabled) as opposed to merely being on Zone chat (which I have had disabled since launch). As for them interfering with the game's economy, that is so borked by the combination of a very restricted trading system and ingame gold/crown trading that it doesn't constitute a real game economy anyway in my opinion.

doesurmindglow · January 2022

There isn't a gold dupe, at least that I'm aware of.

There IS inflation. It's arisen probably from a series of nerfs to the gold sinks and buffs to the gold sources (ie. reduced cost and increased gold CP, free respecs via Armory) combined with an increasing player population. The game probably needs new gold sinks if wayshrines, respecs, repair costs, bounties are reduced by CP while gold drops from quests, treasure chests, and other sources are increased.

etchedpixels · January 2022

f047ys3v3n wrote: »

ESO has a totally different problem in it's Fiat system though. Clearly somebody(s) has set up his own printing press and is making his own currency.

The printing press is 18 toons per account doing crafting writs every day plus the vast piles of gold from scrying and rare motif farming. If you are inclined to sit on your backside for 8 hours a day you can generate enormous amounts of gold to sell and it's "new" gold magicked into existence by the game without enough effective sinks.

It's also inevitable because you've got crowns for gold and crowns for dollars therefore there is an absolute and meaningful link between in game gold and dollars.

The other darker side of it is that some of the pricing is driven by 'and now I have your card details to sell on the dark net"

Kidgangster101 · January 2022

Fhritz wrote: »

I mean, newer player can farm these motifs too right ? Yes, the inflation is real, but since almost everything in the economy is player-based, you can't just fix that with a thanos snap or anything. It's like in real word : you can't easily stop the inflation.
And ESO is gaining popularity and player base, that mean more trader and more gold in the economy.

I think the best ZoS could do is making a in-game fixed price for crown, but you can't really influence the price of other player items unless you want to destroy the economy more.

Yes in fact a newer player can farm them..... But selling them is a whole different matter. Zos is actually one of the causes of this market due to the way they handle their trading system. No global auction house allows people to manipulate the market due to needing a guild to access the guild traded.

So yes a new player can in fact farm them, but to get a good location trader you need to join a trader that costs a lot of gil to sell (or be part of it and sella certain number of items). Because of this system items become rarer and rarer due to new players not "flooding" the market to lower prices.

I've said it a million times this market is literally designed for the rich to get richer. If you have the gold you can buy a cheap items and resell them for a huge I crease (yes I know it can be done because I literally made billions of gold by this method). Someone gets a bad trader location that barely is traveled. They place X item for 4000 gold because well they don't know the actual price. They don't have a sale history or anything so they place it blind guessing. Someone like me knows X item sells for 100,000 gold and I buy it and make a huge return on my investment.

So yes people will tell you they love this but it in fact doesn't help much at all it just hurts everything.....

FluffWit · January 2022

On Playstation NA mat prices dipped like 25% with CP2.0 (as you'd expect) and never recovered.

Beyond that our economy has been nice and boring ever since One Tamriel.

Arunei · January 2022

For one, just because an item drops from a basic mob doesn't mean all the drops themselves are trash. People are willing to pay high prices for things they don't feel like farming themselves, or don't have the time for.

For another, absolutely no addon is capable of duplicating gold, nor can any addon add new quests, items, or give you things to turn one of your mounts into another. If you're going to make claims like that you need to provide proof, because I've been playing this game since closed beta and never heard anything about that. Addons can only access information, they can't add or change data in the game, and in terms of accessing they're restricted to what the API and thus ZOS allow.

Psiion · January 2022

Greetings all,

After review of this thread, we have decided to go ahead and close it down as Conspiracy Theories and Misinformation are non-constructive and against the Forum's Community Rules as stated below:

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