Inflation caused by excessive "cornering the market"

crispience · February 2022

I'm a fairly new player and have been shopping the guild traders regularly for several months now (while using TTC) and am dismayed by how fast and bad the inflation is.
(Man, it's bad enough in RL; does it have to be *worse* in a game?)

I've also noticed a trend: prices for many items are virtually identical across hundreds of trader kiosks. Any lower-priced items vanish virtually instantly.

I suspect most sales are to other guild traders for resale at the "correct price". When all the supply is bought up, it is easy to mark prices up and there is a steady march of prices going up.

I suspect guild traders now have enough combined wealth to "corner the market" on most goods of any demand.

This doesn't just happen with rare goods. E.g. TTC shows 50 pages (500+) of listings for Recipe: Bewitched Sugar Skulls; yet its price is still 50k+ and is not coming down like you would expect.

One of the problems is that there is virtually no penalty for overpricing. The system is set up for inflation and price-fixing.

I think the inflation problem can be substantially addressed by:

1. Increasing the house cut for unsold goods: it should be the same whether the item sold or not. This would stop encouraging sellers to overprice.
2. Shortening the listing time. 30 days is a very long time to cycle prices and contributes to the steady climb. It should be more like 7 days.
3. The house cut should increase across the board. Say 15-20%. This would ensure that the penalty for overpricing and not selling isn't insignificant.
4. Reducing the number of listing slots per seller. This would increase the pressure to sell goods quickly to move unsold inventory.

woufff · February 2022

Why should it be addressed? Just let the market do

As we do not have an auction house in ESO, it would very difficult and time consuming IMHO to buy all items from the guild traders just to firing up inflation...

I could be wrong though

spartaxoxo · February 2022

While flipping does have it's own impact on inflation, this is too drastic a fix and you're greatly overestimating how much power the traders have. A lot of people who aren't in those big trader guilds just copy the prices of those guilds because that is a price they know they can get.

Some items are not needed frequently or by a lot of players, that is the reason for the 30 day wait. For example old motifs tend to be slow sellers even when priced fairly low, because a lot of people already have them learned and it's mostly people buying them for alts or new players that buy them. Since that is a low customer pool, it can be a while before anyone buys it, especially on console which does not have ttc nor an inflation problem. So players in addition to wanting your motif have to actually find you.

A 7 day window would only be adequate for items people regularly need thus sell quickly. The margins on those items is not high.

PeacefulAnarchy · February 2022

crispience wrote: »

This doesn't just happen with rare goods. E.g. TTC shows 50 pages (500+) of listings for Recipe: Bewitched Sugar Skulls; yet its price is still 50k+ and is not coming down like you would expect.

The fact that it's happening for things with plentiful supply indicates it isn't just an issue of cornering the market. If things sell people will push the price up regardless of supply.

1. Increasing the house cut for unsold goods: it should be the same whether the item sold or not. This would stop encouraging sellers to overprice.
2. Shortening the listing time. 30 days is a very long time to cycle prices and contributes to the steady climb. It should be more like 7 days.
3. The house cut should increase across the board. Say 15-20%. This would ensure that the penalty for overpricing and not selling isn't insignificant.
4. Reducing the number of listing slots per seller. This would increase the pressure to sell goods quickly to move unsold inventory.

Restricting supply is not going to lower prices. For a lot of items there are already people who could supply it but don't want to waste a slot. If you reduce slots people are going to go for higher margins on those remaining slots. If you increase the house cut, and especially the listing fee, a lot of those expensive things are going to be rarer because people will hesitate to list, rather than list lower. The rich and flippers, on the other hand, will just list even higher to compensate. I'm not sure the 30 day listing time matters much either way.

crispience · February 2022

spartaxoxo wrote: »

While flipping does have it's own impact on inflation, this is too drastic a fix and you're greatly overestimating how much power the traders have. A lot of people who aren't in those big trader guilds just copy the prices of those guilds because that is a price they know they can get.

Yes, this is the collective "cornering the market" I meant. I didn't mean that any one guild or person corners the market; I meant that most sales are to guild traders for reselling, and the combined effect of all guild traders doing this is highly inflationary, and the system is designed to encourage it.

It would be interesting to know what percentage of sales are for reselling. It would only take 1 bit of database storage for Zenimax to track this. If (as I suspect) the majority of sales are for reselling, cutting down on that volume could also improve the performance and cost of the guild trading system.

spartaxoxo · February 2022

crispience wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

While flipping does have it's own impact on inflation, this is too drastic a fix and you're greatly overestimating how much power the traders have. A lot of people who aren't in those big trader guilds just copy the prices of those guilds because that is a price they know they can get.

Yes, this is the collective "cornering the market" I meant. I didn't mean that any one guild or person corners the market; I meant that most sales are to guild traders for reselling, and the combined effect of all guild traders doing this is highly inflationary, and the system is designed to encourage it.

It would be interesting to know what percentage of sales are for reselling. It would only take 1 bit of database storage for Zenimax to track this. If (as I suspect) the majority of sales are for reselling, cutting down on that volume could also improve the performance and cost of the guild trading system.

The guild trader itself does not encourage inflation, as it actually is a less centralized method of trade making flipping more difficult not less.

Console doesn't have this issue whatsoever because of that.

bmnoble · February 2022

crispience wrote: »

I think the inflation problem can be substantially addressed by:

1. Increasing the house cut for unsold goods: it should be the same whether the item sold or not. This would stop encouraging sellers to overprice.
2. Shortening the listing time. 30 days is a very long time to cycle prices and contributes to the steady climb. It should be more like 7 days.
3. The house cut should increase across the board. Say 15-20%. This would ensure that the penalty for overpricing and not selling isn't insignificant.
4. Reducing the number of listing slots per seller. This would increase the pressure to sell goods quickly to move unsold inventory.

All I see 1 and 3 doing is:

-Increasing the number of people in zone spamming their wares to doge the tax hike

-players raising their prices further to adjust for the tax hike(Seen it happen in SWTOR they upped the sales tax, all that happened was sellers adjusted their prices so they got the same amount of credits from each sale as before)

As for 2 and 4:

Those two things would dramatically reduce the usefulness of guild traders, a lot of members do not even max out their listing slots, maybe half do on a regular basis making up the majority of the stock available on the trader, meaning less to buy at the traders as a whole meaning more shopping around to find what you need.

For example lets say you reduce listing slots to 20 that is potentially 1/3rd of the possible supply on traders across the server unavailable, reduce it to 15 and half the supply is gone, you think prices will go up or down as a result of the reduced supply?

So reducing the number of listing slots per player would result in players prioritizing the most valuable stuff to sell, while low value stuff would become less common I doubt many people would be listing intricate gear anymore as an example.

When you make low value items more annoying to offload, players will leave those mats in their craft bags, they will donate cheap motifs for trade guild auctions, they will vendor cheap set pieces and intricate gear.

Because if they don't they have to play inventory management online to hold onto the stuff till they are able to sell it for low value stuff that is not worth it, its already being sold cheap and is often slow to sell limiting the slots and listing time will just make players who have more valuable stuff to sell stop bothering with those items for the most part.

That and 1 and 2:

Bottle-necking the supply of valuable mats like gold upgrade mats for example, with a combination of shorter listing time and less listing slots would have a good chance at driving up the prices further, people are not going to risk the big stacks with your proposed larger house cut for unsold stuff.

So they will sell their stockpiles a little at a time and likely be able to charge a higher price due to the sudden drop in readily purchasable gold mats from the reduced number of listings across the server.

You might say buy in zone screw those greedy guild traders, often its the exact same people selling in zone and even when its not most price match or only undercut slightly the prices that guild traders use even when selling in zone chat.

So in short I don't see your measures doing anything short of reducing supply and causing price hikes.

Those are my thoughts at least, I could be wrong but that is what I would expect to happen if what you suggested was implemented.

pelle412 · February 2022

If prices are not to your liking, farm the stuff you want yourself. It's free.

sarahthes · February 2022

Inflation isn't likely to decrease until more effective gold sinks are added to the game.

Fennwitty · February 2022

Inflation is when there's too much money.

High prices are a symptom of inflation, not a cause.

There is a 'herd mentality' effect caused by TTC. But enough people literally have the money or can produce the money to buy at the high prices so demand remains high.

Arthtur · February 2022

(All data is from PC EU)
For the start, Recipe: Bewitched Sugar Skulls is rare. There is only 1 time per year when u can get it. In next 4 months the price will go only up. Also farming it isnt the most fun thing to do...
Also i just checked PC EU. There is 72 pages of those and the cheapest are for 20k. So its rly not bad for something u can farm only once per year.

There is also diffrence between inflation over time and increased demand for something. Last patch (Deadlands) put a lot of preasure on upgrade materials (Zircon plating went up by almost 100%) and its not fault of inflation. We just dont have enough supply for those things. With next patch prices will go ever higher because there will be available furnishings plans from Blackwood for doing master writs. And the prices arent going down because supply barely meets demand every day, so every time there is increased demand even a little = prices go up and dont go down.

But im not saying that we dont have inflation. Of course we have. This game is rly old so we have it for sure. Its just not inflation fault that we have prices like that. Its normal thing that after some time trading with other ppl is more improtant than farming gold from mobs. And if somebody wants to tell me "but consoles dont have inflation" then well... prices on upgrade materials are low because They have bots. And if those are low then the rest is lower too. U spend less gold on doing master writs so u can sell for less and still have good profit, etc etc.

And if we talk about motifs.... Bloodforge helmets motif went up to 250k at some point. And ppl were buying it. Week later it dropped to like 50k because ppl started farming this motif again. So its again just supply and demand...
Blueprints? The same. Im gonna be hated by this but hey... I got Redguard plan for some lamp. There were 0 of those on website but the client was saying that its worth 60k. I listed it for for 2kk. 2 weeks later there were few other ppl who listed it for like 500k-1.5kk. I canceled my offert and listed it again for 300k... i sold it next day. So yeah, I made 5x more gold because i know what to do. But why im saying about this? Its simple. There is a lot of ppl who is looking at the price from TTCs client and then put staff without looking on website. And then u see zircon plating for 50k when u can sell it for 70k in Mournhold. And ppl are flipping it because its free 10k+ gold. And then They get blamed for manipulation.... when its just some ppl who dont know the prices.
Dont get me wrong. I wont make profit from person who put 10 dreugh wax for 20k instead of 200k. I will return it to him. But if i would have to return all of those things because ppl are too lazy to check prices.... sorry but i dont have that much time. And im not even doing it to make money. Im just running around searching master writs and why should i leave free gold when i see it? And not only that. Because ppl are flipping they pull more gold from the game as the same thing will be sold twice. So they are making goldsink more effective. So flippers rly arent the problem. At least in my opinion.

If we want to talk about your ideas...
1) Why? Thats just too punishing. What if I have a guild thats often doesnt have a trader? Why should i be punished for that? Also it will make more ppl just selling/buying in zone chat.
2) It would work only for most popular things. Im selling blueprints pretty often and I have a blueprint that i cant sell for 2 months even tho its the cheapest one avaiable. There is a lot that sell after 2 weeks too. Most often there is 1 person who buyes a bunch of missing ones and is not looking for 1 specific thing. So there wont be much problem with things like Dreugh Wax but with the rest.... no thank you.
3) I would put my stuff for 15-20% more or stop using guild traders. In the end it punishes the buyers as They have to pay more and there is less stuff on traders. Also imagine that zone chat spam....
4) Well as i said earlier... im selling blueprints. Most often im geting 40-50 blueprints in 1 go and then put them on traders. After 2 weeks im getting new blueprints and listen them again. Less trade slots would only make my life harder as i would need more guilds to have space for stuff i want to sell. Also it would make my trading feel like a work because i need to focus on it sooooo much. 30 spots for stuff is good. I have 2 guilds for selling which means 60 slots. Thats is exacly what i need.

So after all of this some ppl will call me "stupid" because its all inflation fault... But hey i asked for it writing this all xD

In the end... i have a friend who has 200 chromium platings, few k of Dreugh Wax etc etc... And he is not selling it. Because he doesnt need gold... there is nothing for him to buy. So yeah. Thats not that simple. Punishing ppl will only make things worse. Maybe if there would be more things to buy for gold instead of crowns.... who knows ;p

merpins · February 2022

I agree that PC NA/EU has very inflated prices, but your speculation is incorrect. Without a central auction house, buying up everything to then increase the price is difficult (though not impossible). It's probably happening for some things that are in high demand but low supply, but those prices would eventually increase to meet the median of the supply->demand regardless of any market manipulation. The high prices are caused by an excess of gold, people can and do make gold quickly and in large quantities, so this inflation of price isn't things increasing in price, it's the price of gold that is reduced. But it's in large quantities: why?
Because very little gold introduced into the game is taken out of the game. Gold changes hands and is taxed a little, but most of the gold that has existed in game still exists, and only continues to grow. The game has been around for nearly 10 years now, and they don't have any real good gold sinks in game that remove gold from the game.

I have an example of this inflation actually: 1 year ago, people sold crowns at 1 crown to 300 gold, or 1:300, and in some cases for 1:250. Now, one year later, it's 1:600 and sometimes as high as 1:800. The dollar price of crowns has not increased, but the gold cost has. Because gold is worth less, because there is too much of it. And just adding gold sinks won't particularly help if they are widespread, since taxing low-income players isn't something they should do. In my opinion, they should regulate the gold to crowns, make it actually tradeable with in-game gold tax involved, and make certain things just outright buyable for gold (houses for example), if not just make crowns buyable for gold. NOT as a way to make it easier to get cosmetics, this is purely to remove gold from the game. Possibly make the buying for crowns for in-game gold an annual thing, just to annually remove lots of gold from the game.

It would need to be late-game gold sinks that are introduced, not early and mid game gold sinks, to make players with a large fund spend their millions of gold in a way where it doesn't just change hands. It needs to disappear into the ether for the gold price to bounce back, because again:
There is too much gold in the market, thus the value of gold is low.

spartaxoxo · February 2022

MovesLikeJaguar wrote: »

I have an example of this inflation actually: 1 year ago, people sold crowns at 1 crown to 300 gold, or 1:300, and in some cases for 1:250. Now, one year later, it's 1:600 and sometimes as high as 1:800. The dollar price of crowns has not increased, but the gold cost has

That is incorrect, the dollar price of the crowns has increased significantly for PC users, while it's been the same for PS and XBOX users. There used to be an workaround to getting cheap crowns that PC users could use by changing their region when buying crowns (or something like that IDK I'm not PC, just seen a LOT of PC players talk about it over the past couple of years). This is no longer the case, and as a result crown prices increased.

On Playstation and XBOX the prices have remained largely static at 100 per crown.

The game actually has great gold sinks for the generation that comes strictly from in-game means, it's when external factors like crown buying exploit getting sealed, the add-ons, the crown discords etc get factored in that the game can't keep up with.

merpins · February 2022

spartaxoxo wrote: »

MovesLikeJaguar wrote: »

I have an example of this inflation actually: 1 year ago, people sold crowns at 1 crown to 300 gold, or 1:300, and in some cases for 1:250. Now, one year later, it's 1:600 and sometimes as high as 1:800. The dollar price of crowns has not increased, but the gold cost has

That is incorrect, the dollar price of the crowns has increased significantly for PC users, while it's been the same for PS and XBOX users. There used to be an workaround to getting cheap crowns that PC users could use by changing their region when buying crowns. This is no longer the case, and as a result crown prices increased.

On Playstation and XBOX the prices have remained largely static at 100 per crown.

The game actually has great gold sinks for the generation that comes strictly for in-game means, it's when external factors like crown buying exploit getting sealed, the add-ons, the crown discords etc get factored in that the game can't keep up with.

The game has lots of small gold sinks, and the way to get cheap crowns was an exploit and not intended. The price of crowns in dollars has been the same since the game came out.
There are no big gold sinks, and the gold sinks that are there are only help on the small scale. Once you are trading in the millions, there are few gold sinks because the gold is just exchanging hands. And sure, part of the reason people can make tons of gold quickly is due to addons sure. But the majority of players that make large amounts of gold are making it through methods that take millions of gold to do, which is only possible when there is a lot of gold in the market.

WrathOfInnos · February 2022

Interesting ideas. A few points that should be considered:
- Shorter time limit for sale would make it hard to list some rarer items, less in demand, especially the valuable ones
- Higher fees could be good, on unsold goods to encourage pricing to sell, and serve as a gold sink. However if it goes too high then trades will just move to zone chat and avoid the trader system.
- Reducing the number of slots is counterproductive, it means less for sale overall, lower supply, and will only drive prices up and profits down. It would also result in more players needing to fill all 5 guild slots with trade guilds, instead of social, PVE or PVP guilds.

AlnilamE · February 2022

1. Increasing the house cut for unsold goods: it should be the same whether the item sold or not. This would stop encouraging sellers to overprice.
Or it will encourage people to list things higher because they have to make up for the extra cost.

2. Shortening the listing time. 30 days is a very long time to cycle prices and contributes to the steady climb. It should be more like 7 days.

I don't understand your reasoning here. If prices are going up, then longer listings are better because they will keep the price more stable. If I list something for 10k for 30 days while prices are going up, then someone might buy it for 10k, whereas if it's only listed for 7 days and doesn't sell, I will then see that the price has gone up and list it for higher instead.

4. The house cut should increase across the board. Say 15-20%. This would ensure that the penalty for overpricing and not selling isn't insignificant.

I hope you realize that there are a lot of things in the game that are listed at or below vendor price. If you increase the house cut then it won't be worth selling things at that price and there will be a corresponding increase across the board.

6. Reducing the number of listing slots per seller. This would increase the pressure to sell goods quickly to move unsold inventory.

This might work for things that occupy inventory space, but alternatively, they can also just be deconned. Meanwhile, if I don't have enough stuff to list from my inventory, I do list crafting mats from my crafting bag. If don't have free slots, these things will not get listed.

I also want to point out that the item you picked, Bewitched Sugar Skulls, is an event item that only drops during the Witches' Festival in October. So the prices are going to keep going up until then, when they will majorly crash like they do every year.

You will see this happen shortly with the Dubious Camoran Throne recipe that drops during the upcoming Jesters' Festival.

spartaxoxo · February 2022

MovesLikeJaguar wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

MovesLikeJaguar wrote: »

I have an example of this inflation actually: 1 year ago, people sold crowns at 1 crown to 300 gold, or 1:300, and in some cases for 1:250. Now, one year later, it's 1:600 and sometimes as high as 1:800. The dollar price of crowns has not increased, but the gold cost has

That is incorrect, the dollar price of the crowns has increased significantly for PC users, while it's been the same for PS and XBOX users. There used to be an workaround to getting cheap crowns that PC users could use by changing their region when buying crowns. This is no longer the case, and as a result crown prices increased.

On Playstation and XBOX the prices have remained largely static at 100 per crown.

The game actually has great gold sinks for the generation that comes strictly for in-game means, it's when external factors like crown buying exploit getting sealed, the add-ons, the crown discords etc get factored in that the game can't keep up with.

The game has lots of small gold sinks, and the way to get cheap crowns was an exploit and not intended. The price of crowns in dollars has been the same since the game came out.
There are no big gold sinks, and the gold sinks that are there are only help on the small scale. Once you are trading in the millions, there are few gold sinks because the gold is just exchanging hands. And sure, part of the reason people can make tons of gold quickly is due to addons sure. But the majority of players that make large amounts of gold are making it through methods that take millions of gold to do, which is only possible when there is a lot of gold in the market.

It doesn't matter if it was an exploit in terms of it's impact on the economy. The people who sell the crowns still saw an increase in the amount of money they had to spend to sell the same crowns and raised their prices accordingly. As ones that weren't using that exploit saw how successful those prices were, they obviously price matches. No good reason to sell your crowns for 200 if they are easily sold for more than double that.

Part of those big money transactions is stuff like TTC, which is also an external factor.

If it was just about coin generated through natural play, console would be feeling it too.

Amottica · February 2022

crispience wrote: »

I've also noticed a trend: prices for many items are virtually identical across hundreds of trader kiosks. Any lower-priced items vanish virtually instantly.

It tends to be the case that people will buy the lower-priced item first. This is very normal in every MMORPG I have seen. I could not imagine someone seeing the same item posted twice and choosing to pay the higher price.

wenchmore420b14_ESO · February 2022

Kudos @Arthtur . Very well said!

MovesLikeJaguar wrote: »

I agree that PC NA/EU has very inflated prices, but your speculation is incorrect. Without a central auction house, buying up everything to then increase the price is difficult (though not impossible). It's probably happening for some things that are in high demand but low supply, but those prices would eventually increase to meet the median of the supply->demand regardless of any market manipulation. The high prices are caused by an excess of gold, people can and do make gold quickly and in large quantities, so this inflation of price isn't things increasing in price, it's the price of gold that is reduced. But it's in large quantities: why?
Because very little gold introduced into the game is taken out of the game. Gold changes hands and is taxed a little, but most of the gold that has existed in game still exists, and only continues to grow. The game has been around for nearly 10 years now, and they don't have any real good gold sinks in game that remove gold from the game.

I have an example of this inflation actually: 1 year ago, people sold crowns at 1 crown to 300 gold, or 1:300, and in some cases for 1:250. Now, one year later, it's 1:600 and sometimes as high as 1:800. The dollar price of crowns has not increased, but the gold cost has. Because gold is worth less, because there is too much of it. And just adding gold sinks won't particularly help if they are widespread, since taxing low-income players isn't something they should do. In my opinion, they should regulate the gold to crowns, make it actually tradeable with in-game gold tax involved, and make certain things just outright buyable for gold (houses for example), if not just make crowns buyable for gold. NOT as a way to make it easier to get cosmetics, this is purely to remove gold from the game. Possibly make the buying for crowns for in-game gold an annual thing, just to annually remove lots of gold from the game.

It would need to be late-game gold sinks that are introduced, not early and mid game gold sinks, to make players with a large fund spend their millions of gold in a way where it doesn't just change hands. It needs to disappear into the ether for the gold price to bounce back, because again:
There is too much gold in the market, thus the value of gold is low.

First off, yes it is practically impossible to corner the market on a item.
You would have to travel to 230+ vendors to buy all items. Then you only have 5 outlets to sell them through. There is absolutely NO logic in that being doable.

As far as gold sinks, you realize a half billion or more gold is taken out every week?
Most prime trader spots are 10 - 15 million a week. Even a so-so trader is 1 - 5 million a week.
Yes, there is inflation. You see it after events as lots of people got rare goodies, so they make more gold.
Before Witches Festival, you will see Nickle rise as it will be in demand during the event.
The ESO economy is running just fine, supply and demand is what drives this market.
IMO, OP's ideas will just make things harder and worse.

Just my 2 drakes.
Huzzah!

merpins · February 2022

spartaxoxo wrote: »

MovesLikeJaguar wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

MovesLikeJaguar wrote: »

I have an example of this inflation actually: 1 year ago, people sold crowns at 1 crown to 300 gold, or 1:300, and in some cases for 1:250. Now, one year later, it's 1:600 and sometimes as high as 1:800. The dollar price of crowns has not increased, but the gold cost has

That is incorrect, the dollar price of the crowns has increased significantly for PC users, while it's been the same for PS and XBOX users. There used to be an workaround to getting cheap crowns that PC users could use by changing their region when buying crowns. This is no longer the case, and as a result crown prices increased.

On Playstation and XBOX the prices have remained largely static at 100 per crown.

The game actually has great gold sinks for the generation that comes strictly for in-game means, it's when external factors like crown buying exploit getting sealed, the add-ons, the crown discords etc get factored in that the game can't keep up with.

The game has lots of small gold sinks, and the way to get cheap crowns was an exploit and not intended. The price of crowns in dollars has been the same since the game came out.
There are no big gold sinks, and the gold sinks that are there are only help on the small scale. Once you are trading in the millions, there are few gold sinks because the gold is just exchanging hands. And sure, part of the reason people can make tons of gold quickly is due to addons sure. But the majority of players that make large amounts of gold are making it through methods that take millions of gold to do, which is only possible when there is a lot of gold in the market.

It doesn't matter if it was an exploit in terms of it's impact on the economy. The people who sell the crowns still saw an increase in the amount of money they had to spend to sell the same crowns and raised their prices accordingly. As ones that weren't using that exploit saw how successful those prices were, they obviously price matches. No good reason to sell your crowns for 200 if they are easily sold for more than double that.

Part of those big money transactions is stuff like TTC, which is also an external factor.

If it was just about coin generated through natural play, console would be feeling it too.

If there was an exploit that made crowns more abundant, we would have seen crown prices decrease for a time, but that wouldn't explain the increase in crown prices.
The value of a dollar in crowns has not increased or decreased since the game came out. There have been exploits, sure, but when it comes to crowns, it will only effect the crown prices, not the value of gold in the marketplace. Since the dollar price of crowns hasn't increased, but the gold price has increased, then there is literally only one thing that could have happened: The value of gold has decreased, thus the price of crowns in gold has increased to reflect the new values. And the only reason these things happen is because money continues to be printed at a higher rate than it is being taken away.
I'm not an economist, and I wouldn't be able to tell you why the console players aren't having inflation problems in the same way the PC players are. But that does not change the fact that the inflation is caused by the decrease in value of the gold piece, and the main way to increase that value again would be to remove a lot gold from the game full-stop.

Sylvermynx · February 2022

Amottica wrote: »

crispience wrote: »

I've also noticed a trend: prices for many items are virtually identical across hundreds of trader kiosks. Any lower-priced items vanish virtually instantly.

It tends to be the case that people will buy the lower-priced item first. This is very normal in every MMORPG I have seen. I could not imagine someone seeing the same item posted twice and choosing to pay the higher price.

Well.... my time is worth more to me than gold is. If I can't find something I need in Vivec, at a price I'm willing to pay, I'll just do without it. I'm NOT going to chase all over hell's half acre for a small discount on a style page for a master writ. I dump the writ, and go buy one I already know the style for.

spartaxoxo · February 2022

MovesLikeJaguar wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

MovesLikeJaguar wrote: »

spartaxoxo wrote: »

MovesLikeJaguar wrote: »

I have an example of this inflation actually: 1 year ago, people sold crowns at 1 crown to 300 gold, or 1:300, and in some cases for 1:250. Now, one year later, it's 1:600 and sometimes as high as 1:800. The dollar price of crowns has not increased, but the gold cost has

That is incorrect, the dollar price of the crowns has increased significantly for PC users, while it's been the same for PS and XBOX users. There used to be an workaround to getting cheap crowns that PC users could use by changing their region when buying crowns. This is no longer the case, and as a result crown prices increased.

On Playstation and XBOX the prices have remained largely static at 100 per crown.

The game actually has great gold sinks for the generation that comes strictly for in-game means, it's when external factors like crown buying exploit getting sealed, the add-ons, the crown discords etc get factored in that the game can't keep up with.

The game has lots of small gold sinks, and the way to get cheap crowns was an exploit and not intended. The price of crowns in dollars has been the same since the game came out.
There are no big gold sinks, and the gold sinks that are there are only help on the small scale. Once you are trading in the millions, there are few gold sinks because the gold is just exchanging hands. And sure, part of the reason people can make tons of gold quickly is due to addons sure. But the majority of players that make large amounts of gold are making it through methods that take millions of gold to do, which is only possible when there is a lot of gold in the market.

It doesn't matter if it was an exploit in terms of it's impact on the economy. The people who sell the crowns still saw an increase in the amount of money they had to spend to sell the same crowns and raised their prices accordingly. As ones that weren't using that exploit saw how successful those prices were, they obviously price matches. No good reason to sell your crowns for 200 if they are easily sold for more than double that.

Part of those big money transactions is stuff like TTC, which is also an external factor.

If it was just about coin generated through natural play, console would be feeling it too.

If there was an exploit that made crowns more abundant, we would have seen crown prices decrease for a time, but that wouldn't explain the increase in crown prices.
The value of a dollar in crowns has not increased or decreased since the game came out. There have been exploits, sure, but when it comes to crowns, it will only effect the crown prices, not the value of gold in the marketplace. Since the dollar price of crowns hasn't increased, but the gold price has increased, then there is literally only one thing that could have happened: The value of gold has decreased, thus the price of crowns in gold has increased to reflect the new values. And the only reason these things happen is because money continues to be printed but not taken away.
I'm not an economist, and I wouldn't be able to tell you why the console players aren't having inflation problems in the same way the PC players are. But that does not change the fact that the inflation is caused by the decrease in value of the gold piece, and the main way to increase that value again would be to remove a lot gold from the game full-stop.

Exploit makes crowns cheaper > people sell for cheap > exploit gets closed > people raised prices > market absorbs these increase prices due to there being a lot of wealthy players on the server thanks to various external things who's ability to afford those prices did not fall with time as their wealth got transferred to sellers

That's what happened.

This was a PC exclusive chain of events, and that is why it only effects PC's crown price, which if you remember correctly you originally made the claim that inflated crown price was what proved the devaluing of gold. That is the point I was responded to, not the price of temps or whatever other item you may be thinking of.

What other items have increased as drastically in price as crowns that can't be explained by updates to the game/event e.g. housing mats and upgrade mats?

Amottica · February 2022

Sylvermynx wrote: »

Amottica wrote: »

crispience wrote: »

I've also noticed a trend: prices for many items are virtually identical across hundreds of trader kiosks. Any lower-priced items vanish virtually instantly.

It tends to be the case that people will buy the lower-priced item first. This is very normal in every MMORPG I have seen. I could not imagine someone seeing the same item posted twice and choosing to pay the higher price.

Well.... my time is worth more to me than gold is. If I can't find something I need in Vivec, at a price I'm willing to pay, I'll just do without it. I'm NOT going to chase all over hell's half acre for a small discount on a style page for a master writ. I dump the writ, and go buy one I already know the style for.

I doubt you will choose the higher-priced items if the choice was before you. That is my point which explains OP seeing the lower priced item selling while higher-priced items remain is to be exptected.

TX12001rwb17_ESO · February 2022

An easy solution to remove gold from the game would be to tax the rich

Make 99,999,999 the softcap but if you go over this you will lose 1% of your total gold stored on that sccount every day until your bsck st 99,999,999.

Kwoung · February 2022

crispience wrote: »

I suspect guild traders now have enough combined wealth to "corner the market" on most goods of any demand.

I am just going to address this fallacy... as I see many posts about "guilds" taking over the market, setting pricing, etc...

Guilds don't do a thing and there is no "combined wealth" in this game. Every single player is on their own, most who are into trading, belong to numerous trade guilds and could care less about any single guild, other than the location of their trader. They don't participate in guild events, they don't chat in guild chat and rarely if ever participate on the guild's Discord, unless it is a requirement or has a features that enhance your ability to trade like FGM has on it's Discord.

I really wish folks would get over the entire guild cabal idea that so many seem to think exists, it doesn't. If a number of players hook up and decide to do something like corner the market, there is a 99.99% chance it has nothing to do with any of the random guilds they belong to, it is a couple (or group) of players working together on their own to accomplish that feat. As a matter of fact, it behooves them to all belong to entirely different guilds if their goal is to corner the market or raise pricing on an item, as that makes it look like it is a game wide thing, and not just some random player buying everything up and pushing it out through one vendor.

TLTR: Guilds don't control anything, individual players set pricing and control the market.

Vylaera · February 2022

TX12001rwb17_ESO wrote: »

An easy solution to remove gold from the game would be to tax the rich

Make 99,999,999 the softcap but if you go over this you will lose 1% of your total gold stored on that sccount every day until your bsck st 99,999,999.

I mean, taxing the rich doesn't work in real life because the rich own assets, and whatever liquid cash they have is going to be in offshore banks

So what people would do is just buy up assets (which will grow in value since the market is inflating, in turn making them even more money), and make alts when ESO goes on sale to store gold in those banks.

bmnoble · February 2022

TX12001rwb17_ESO wrote: »

An easy solution to remove gold from the game would be to tax the rich

Make 99,999,999 the softcap but if you go over this you will lose 1% of your total gold stored on that sccount every day until your bsck st 99,999,999.

Wouldn't that increase the inflation since a lot more of those peoples fortunes would end up in circulation instead of being hoarded.

While the gold is hoarded its not in circulation, sure those people can buy whatever they want but if there was a lot they wanted or needed to buy their gold hoards would not have gotten to that extent in the first place.

Some people just like making more gold they should not be penalized for that especially when most of it never leaves their banks to affect the economy in the first place.

That and the prices in ESO's economy are nothing compared to the inflation I saw when I played SWTOR a few years ago where some items could in the extreme end of the market cost five times your proposed soft cap alone, for a single listing of an in demand item off the cash shop listed on there global auction house. Probably gotten even worse since I left, fortunes in the tens if not hundreds of billions were common there.

FlopsyPrince · February 2022

This can't be happening! So many state all the time that this kind of thing only happens with a Central Auction House, right?

notyuu · February 2022

What about tackling the other end of the problem and increasing the supply of the goods?

heck you could even roll in a little gold sink to by making a new vendor that only shows up on weekends the "luxary crafting vendor" which sells furnshing mats, upgrade mats and rare furnishing plans (which roate every week)

spartaxoxo · February 2022

FlopsyPrince wrote: »

This can't be happening! So many state all the time that this kind of thing only happens with a Central Auction House, right?

You mean similar to the system that the trading add-on creates for PC but is not much of a thing on console?

TX12001rwb17_ESO · February 2022

bmnoble wrote: »

TX12001rwb17_ESO wrote: »

An easy solution to remove gold from the game would be to tax the rich

Make 99,999,999 the softcap but if you go over this you will lose 1% of your total gold stored on that sccount every day until your bsck st 99,999,999.

Wouldn't that increase the inflation since a lot more of those peoples fortunes would end up in circulation instead of being hoarded.

While the gold is hoarded its not in circulation, sure those people can buy whatever they want but if there was a lot they wanted or needed to buy their gold hoards would not have gotten to that extent in the first place.

Some people just like making more gold they should not be penalized for that especially when most of it never leaves their banks to affect the economy in the first place.

That and the prices in ESO's economy are nothing compared to the inflation I saw when I played SWTOR a few years ago where some items could in the extreme end of the market cost five times your proposed soft cap alone, for a single listing of an in demand item off the cash shop listed on there global auction house. Probably gotten even worse since I left, fortunes in the tens if not hundreds of billions were common there.

They would lose their gold to the void, it would not go into circulations.