Inflation caused by excessive "cornering the market"

  • spartaxoxo
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    bmnoble 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.

    They'd spend it or pass it on to an alt rather than let that happen, unless you're suggesting they should be ambushed and have millions wiped from their accounts out of nowhere.
  • FlopsyPrince
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    spartaxoxo 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?

    I was joking (a bit). I prefer a central AH, ESPECIALLY on consoles. Finding things there is extremely difficult. Knowing a good price to sell something at is also tough. (I had 3.5+ years on the PS4.)

    TTC makes the system more bearable on the PC, but the system is still annoying.
    PC
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  • Xebov
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    Before you making assumtions about the market you should learn how it works in general, how fats some goods actually sell and why certain rare items are rare.
    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.

    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.

    They simply get sold, i can put up items that are 1 gold cheaper and they get sold within minutes. Items with demand are items with demand for a reason. Of course it can happen that someone notices an item being sold heavily under price, but thats rare. Most of the time its normal sales going on. There is also noone guarding anything, its tousends of traders that simply put up items cheaper than others.
    crispience wrote: »
    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.

    Why should it? Its an item that only available during a event happeing in October. Ppl are not in a hurry to sell them because they know there is no more supply coming in until that event.
    crispience wrote: »
    One of the problems is that there is virtually no penalty for overpricing. The system is set up for inflation and price-fixing.

    There is no overpricing. There are goods for a price and ppl willing to pay for them. I have ATT running and i can see exactly what item was sold when for which price.
  • Xebov
    Xebov
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    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.

    In that case ppl would just keep their goods and not sell them anymore. You would effectively take down parts of the market and increase inflation because less goods are up for sale.
  • Brrrofski
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    Nothing needs to happen to them. It seems like it's purely a PC issue.

    This isn't an issue on Xbox EU and NA.

    Prices for most thing largely remain static.

    In fact, on EU (and maybe NA but not played there long enough to know), prices of many thing have dropped massively.

    Gold mats like tenpas have halved in price since the first few years. You can find temps, rosins and kutas for 5-6k, and wax for 4k.

    Some things do inflate in price. But, as someone pointed out, these are usually items only available at certain times of the year, like bewitched sugar skulls recipe for instance. The further away from the event, the more people will charge. Which makes sense.

    Game mechanics will alter price too. For instance, iridium and zircon platings have gone up recently. But, chromium hasn't. Which, my theory is, from doing dungeons before, you'd get quite a lot of jewellery which people would decon. But now we have the curation system, jewellery drops less, so there are probably fewer zircon and iridium grains coming in to people's inventories.

    But on average, prices stay fairly consistent on Xbox. So we don't need sweeping changes to combat something that doesn't exist.

    It seems to me that add ons are the culprit here. Things like TTC, which make it easy to check for low prices, buy them, and then sell for 'standard' price. That's a lot harder to do on console so people don't really bother as much, especially outside of main trading hubs.
  • hafgood
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    I think one of the fallacies that gets trotted out each time this thread pops up is the cost of crowns.

    Crowns cost cannot be looked at in inflationary terms, you cannot say something bought with real money has shot up by 1,000% (or whatever) in pretend money and claim its due to inflation.

    Because Crowns are bought with money there is very much a supply and demand element to their price. We are still in the grip of a worldwide pandemic, many people have lost jobs, or seen their spending power decrease through the effects of real world inflation, energy crisis, etc. This may well be reflected in people buying fewer Crowns, with more housed and other stuff in the crown store, with changes to the crate season, demands for Crowns goes up.

    Higher demand for Crowns even with the same supply as before would see crown to gold go up.

    Why doesn't it on console? It is, not as fast as on PC (where there is more gold) but crowns have doubled in cost and are slowly creeping up.

    So crowns is a supply and demand issue, and people realising that there money is worth more than what was being offered. Want crowns but not prepared to pay the gold for them? Break open your wallet and buy them yourself
  • Coatmagic
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    woufff wrote: »
    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 B)

    Just want to comment here that though many forget, the trade aspect of a game is 'the game' to many people.
    Manipulation of markets and (possibly) hoarding gold is what they enjoy, just as much as others may enjoy doing dungeons or questing or crafting or housing.

    I myself (long ago in another world) used to quite enjoy buying low and selling high and had a notepad with lists of high vendor trash items etc.

    Is it more time consuming in ESO,? Not as bad as you may think, and the extra travel time may even add to that 'buzz' for those getting to that super low price item first ;)
  • ZOS_Icy
    ZOS_Icy
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    Greetings,

    To consolidate all feedback into one place, we are going to close this thread down, so that the discussion may continue here.

    Thank you for your understanding.
    Staff Post
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