Restoring price competition -- ban resale of goods for 30 days?

ApoAlaia · February 2022

trpajzla wrote: »

ApoAlaia wrote: »

I personally don't see the problem.

I see the increase in price of certain items over time, but fail to see why this is an issue.

As I already wrote, inflation is a huge issue mainly for long term players with some savings in golds in a bank.
It is not very funny to spent hal of the game time just trying to buy gold mats for decent price in golds just to protect myself from the inflation whichis 300 percent+ per year on PC EU platform.
Now golden mats are working as unoficiall currency on PC EU as golds are losing value so fast.

I know that developers are lazy and they don't bother to separate rules for writs on console / PC but running automated writs on PC and create tons of easy golds daily is something that is really a big issue.
It is not affecting richplayers too much as they tend to spent on very rare/collectible/hard to obtain thingswich are increasing the value (for example shivering cheese was around 300k a year ago now 1,8M so it is "only" 6 times more expensive).

The richest ppl and flip floppers are in reality profitting from the inflation.
New players have not any savings yet so they are not at least badly affected.
Now show me some "typical" middleclass player, who has not nearly any golds but 100 shivering cheeses and 1000 chromium platings in the bank... lol.

You can detach yourself from the inflation.

You can be completely self-sufficient.

If anything the large volume of gold in circulation and the prices at which selected few items are traded has made certain objectives significantly easier, like 'real state' for instance.

What you cannot expect to do is engaging only in the activities that you find entertaining - if these as you imply are not the kind that directly increase your wealth or resources - and still have your 'needs' met at the expense of those who devote a significant part of their playing time to furthering their resources.

The players who engage with the trading system do not exist to subsidise your play style choices. We are not here to make sure that you can always find traders stocked with the items you want under the pricing and conditions of supply you deem appropriate.

Northwold · February 2022

ApoAlaia wrote: »

I personally don't see the problem.

I see the increase in price of certain items over time, but fail to see why this is an issue.

First and foremost, this is 'the way the game is meant to be played'. The developers set the 'rarity' of the items, not us.

Furthermore the majority of items that have seen a dramatic increase over time fall in two categories:

- Furniture and cosmetics. ZOS sets the rate at which these can be acquired and the player base sets the price they are prepared to pay for them.
- Gold 'tempers', mostly purple/gold platings and wax. Same as above.

There is more gold in circulation but again this is by design, ZOS sets the rate at which gold can be accrued, you cannot exceed that limit without methods that would violate the TOS; you can only determine what rate is achievable within the given framework for yourself. In other words, what activities in the game you prioritise in your allocated gaming time, activities that generate wealth or activities that reward you in ways that do not directly generate wealth.

When I see threads like these what I read between the lines is that there is a portion of the player base that simply does not want to engage on farming/acquiring wealth themselves - which is something perfectly achievable and not limited to a 'chosen few', the tools are available for any player to make use of - but want to dictate at what prices they would like to acquire what they want/need from others so they can carry on as they were.

That, convenient as it may appear to them, is very unlikely to happen.

I personally don't want to be the purveyor of services and goods to other players within a framework of their choosing.

I think what you're actually seeing in threads like these is people saying that increasingly the game is not actually fun to play any more because, you're right, many people do not want to spend hours and hours of their limited free time going from node to node just to be able to build a table or whatever and so would previously have gone to traders to make up the difference.

But the prices have been racing (on PC), and are matched. Which makes the guild store system a complete waste of time compared to an auction house, so yet more of your free time is spent going from guild store to guild store only to be met with the same prices.

At a certain point, it's just plain boring and a waste of players' time and this cannot be how the guild store system was intended to function.

And you can blame it on inflation, you can blame it on flipping, you can blame it on addons like Tamriel Trade Centre, you can blame it on ZOS adding more and more requirements to crafted items and the total and utter mess they made of the green champion points tree. But something has gone awry here.

If an MMO becomes so bent out of shape that it starts to appeal only to a very hardcore minority, then that may be good for the members of that minority but it ceases to be an appealing prospect for anyone else to play. If all the game offers is grind, then it doesn't offer an experience worth playing.

And if certain aspects of the game, like furnishings, already appear strongly designed to push you to the crown store and then a group of players start driving prices in the non-crown store gameworld up, that starts leaving such an unpleasant taste in the mouth that there is a danger that playing ESO starts feeling more like encouraging ZOS to price gouge than an actual entertainment experience.

silvereyes · February 2022

TX12001rwb17_ESO wrote: »

Simple solution to reduce the amount of gold in the game is add a soft cap for gold, if you go over it you will be taxed of your gold once per day on that account until you go below the soft cap, most will not be effected, those who do get effected are likely the ones responsible for the inflation.

Currently the maximum gold you can is somewhere above 2,000,000,000, way too much gold for any one player, make the soft cap something like 99,999,999, high enough that most players will not be effected, going above it would give you the "Too Rich" penalty where you will lose 1% of it everyday until your go below the soft cap, someone with a billion gold for instance would lose 10,000,000 gold per day, unless they can make more then that everyday they will be in a losing battle.

Wouldn't work. People would just hold their wealth in assets instead. Inflation would get infinitely worse for those items, as supply for them dried up and all that gold that was previously sitting in banks got instantly circulated.

silvereyes · February 2022

Northwold wrote: »

And if certain aspects of the game, like furnishings, already appear strongly designed to push you to the crown store and then a group of players start driving prices in the non-crown store gameworld up, that starts leaving such an unpleasant taste in the mouth that there is a danger that playing ESO starts feeling more like encouraging ZOS to price gouge than an actual entertainment experience.

There are plenty of ways to enjoy the game that don't involve buying high-price items.

However, if what you really want is to decorate housing all day without paying RL money, farming the furniture crafting mats yourself or doing activities that generate gold income ... well then, I don't know what to tell you.

Northwold · February 2022

silvereyes wrote: »

Northwold wrote: »

And if certain aspects of the game, like furnishings, already appear strongly designed to push you to the crown store and then a group of players start driving prices in the non-crown store gameworld up, that starts leaving such an unpleasant taste in the mouth that there is a danger that playing ESO starts feeling more like encouraging ZOS to price gouge than an actual entertainment experience.

There are plenty of ways to enjoy the game that don't involve buying high-price items.

However, if what you really want is to decorate housing all day without paying RL money, farming the furniture crafting mats yourself or doing activities that generate gold income ... well then, I don't know what to tell you.

All through this thread people are ignoring what other people are saying because they're absolutely fine doing just what they do, without considering whether their experiences are representative of what other players even WANT.

What I'm saying is, the situation is getting considerably worse and actually, no i don't want to pay more real life money and no I don't want to spend my real life virtually farming ever increasing crafting requirements. If this keeps going, I simply won't want to play at all. I have a job in the real world and I find it quite bizarre to be lectured by people that I need to work harder *in a video game*. If a game feels like a simulacrum of work, it's not a game any more. And I really don't think I'm alone in feeling that way.

There is nothing wrong with people dedicating all their free time to an MMO. But those people are in a minority. The "middle class" players do not want to play like that and will not play like that and, right now, it feels like the gameplay balance is tipping away from them.

And, well, that's fine. But this has not been a constant feeling in my playing experience. It is getting far worse than it used to be.

silvereyes · February 2022

Skinfaxe_DK wrote: »

I personally think that the listing fee should be increased and the listing time should be reduced (to 10 days perhaps).

The taxes and fees are already high enough that some forego the system in lieu of direct trades as it is. If you increase them much, more people will just start organizing direct trades instead.

colossalvoids · February 2022

LMAO that's probably most hilarious post of the year, props for that. But yeah it's more like banning groups going for teifectas too fast because speed limit.

Arunei · February 2022

Kwoung wrote: »

Once again, if people were only buying up underpriced items and re-listing them at market value, that would be fine, and was what used to happen and still does on consoles.

But that isn't the problem, the problem is player X or player X and a few of their friends buying up ALL (or most) of a particular item and artificially inflating it's value. That was not ever an intended feature of the game and I can guarantee ZOS didn't think about there being very robust addons that would turn their design of disparate guild traders scattered about the world into what has basically become a centralized auction house with a one stop shopping website.

The time and effort involved in buying up all of a particular item without a website telling you when and where every instance of that item comes up for sale, it neigh impossible to accomplish.

People keep saying this over and over, that "one person" or a "small group" is buying all the stock of something and then marking it up to high prices. I would like to see some proof of this, because if it's happening as much as people like to spout, surely there must be proof? Because otherwise I find it impossible to believe that one person or even a group of people have the time to scout the trade guilds daily for certain items to buy and then relist at super high prices. There are too many guilds and too many items for someone to regularly do this before they run out of gold, even if they're using TTC (which a lot of people don't seem to realize how that actually works, either, yet love to blame it in their conspiracy theories).

And I'll ask the same thing that's been asked before and never gets an answer, because people conveniently ignore or overlook it. What is any given item's market value? ZOS has only given items in the game a vendor value, so technically that should be any given item's value, but I'm sure the same people complaining about things being too expensive would complain that the item they worked hard to farm isn't worth the piddly 50g the game assigns it for vendoring.

I'll tell you what the market value of any given item is. It's what you're willing to pay. I'm not willing to pay 1k+ per piece of Heartwood, but just because that's not market value for me doesn't mean anything. The fact that it's selling for that much clearly means many others do consider that market value. You not being willing to pay a certain price for something doesn't make that price unfair, and people going on about things being priced over market value just sound like they want to pay minimum price for something they aren't willing to farm themselves.

silvereyes · February 2022

Northwold wrote: »

silvereyes wrote: »

Northwold wrote: »

And if certain aspects of the game, like furnishings, already appear strongly designed to push you to the crown store and then a group of players start driving prices in the non-crown store gameworld up, that starts leaving such an unpleasant taste in the mouth that there is a danger that playing ESO starts feeling more like encouraging ZOS to price gouge than an actual entertainment experience.

There are plenty of ways to enjoy the game that don't involve buying high-price items.

However, if what you really want is to decorate housing all day without paying RL money, farming the furniture crafting mats yourself or doing activities that generate gold income ... well then, I don't know what to tell you.

All through this thread people are ignoring what other people are saying because they're absolutely fine doing just what they do, without considering whether their experiences are representative of what other players even WANT.

Trust me, I'm sympathetic. There are definitely problems with the in-game economy right now. I just disagree that flipping is the problem, and I also don't think the proposed cooldown would stop flippers at any rate.

FWIW, I have zero skin in the flipper game. I'm terrible at it, and I've gotten stuck holding the bag too many times with items that didn't sell. These days, I prefer to focus on pure profit activities like writs.

Northwold wrote: »

What I'm saying is, the situation is getting considerably worse and actually, no i don't want to pay more real life money and no I don't want to spend my real life virtually farming ever increasing crafting requirements.

I get that. The furniture crafting requirements are absolutely ridiculous. I wouldn't consider myself wealthy in game, but I have invested heavily in leveling writ alts so that I can get access to gold with a few hours of writs when I need to. Even years before all the recent inflation, though, housing was so expensive that I tended to not engage with it much.

ZOS can fix that particular problem at any time without blowing up an entire game system in the process. They just don't, because, well, money.

Northwold · February 2022

silvereyes wrote: »

Northwold wrote: »

silvereyes wrote: »

Northwold wrote: »

And if certain aspects of the game, like furnishings, already appear strongly designed to push you to the crown store and then a group of players start driving prices in the non-crown store gameworld up, that starts leaving such an unpleasant taste in the mouth that there is a danger that playing ESO starts feeling more like encouraging ZOS to price gouge than an actual entertainment experience.

There are plenty of ways to enjoy the game that don't involve buying high-price items.

However, if what you really want is to decorate housing all day without paying RL money, farming the furniture crafting mats yourself or doing activities that generate gold income ... well then, I don't know what to tell you.

All through this thread people are ignoring what other people are saying because they're absolutely fine doing just what they do, without considering whether their experiences are representative of what other players even WANT.

Trust me, I'm sympathetic. There are definitely problems with the in-game economy right now. I just disagree that flipping is the problem, and I also don't think the proposed cooldown would stop flippers at any rate.

FWIW, I have zero skin in the flipper game. I'm terrible at it, and I've gotten stuck holding the bag too many times with items that didn't sell. These days, I prefer to focus on pure profit activities like writs.

Northwold wrote: »

What I'm saying is, the situation is getting considerably worse and actually, no i don't want to pay more real life money and no I don't want to spend my real life virtually farming ever increasing crafting requirements.

I get that. The furniture crafting requirements are absolutely ridiculous. I wouldn't consider myself wealthy in game, but I have invested heavily in leveling writ alts so that I can get access to gold with a few hours of writs when I need to. Even years before all the recent inflation, though, housing was so expensive that I tended to not engage with it much.

ZOS can fix that particular problem at any time without blowing up an entire game system in the process. They just don't, because, well, money.

The reason I raised flipping specifically was that it kept coming up in the middle of other threads but no one was discussing it specifically and I was interested to hear what people had to say about possible remedies (a lot, it seems).

Personally I think there are a whole host of factors that have all come together to make the economy completely dysfunctional and ALL of them need to be addressed in some way.

If you take housing as the easiest example, people are expected to pay real world money equivalent, in some cases, to the price of a triple A game. If they are on ESO plus they have 700 slots to play with and a few crowns from the subscription. Let's say that leaves 670 slots to fill by other means, for the sake of argument (which says something about the absolutely staggering prices in the Crown store).

If we assume a casual, non hardcore player, and if we assume that they can buy 300 of the furnishings they want from normal shops in the game, that's still 370 items they are either going to craft using their own materials or want to buy from guild traders.

With a casual gamer's playing style, you might be looking at generating one furnishing per day as things stand at the moment. Two if they play a bit more.

So they've bought a house for the pleasure of decorating it. And the game's economy is currently so utterly dysfunctional that that will take them literally a year or six months if they play a bit more.

That is nuts and it's at the point where the effort / reward gameplay loop looks truly broken.

silvereyes · February 2022

Northwold wrote: »

So they've bought a house for the pleasure of decorating it. And the game's economy is currently so utterly dysfunctional that that will take them literally a year or six months if they play a bit more.

That is nuts and it's at the point where the effort / reward gameplay loop looks truly broken.

I don't disagree, and at the same time, for the size of many large houses, 700 slots is nowhere near enough to properly decorate it.

Skinfaxe_DK · February 2022

silvereyes wrote: »

Skinfaxe_DK wrote: »

I personally think that the listing fee should be increased and the listing time should be reduced (to 10 days perhaps).

The taxes and fees are already high enough that some forego the system in lieu of direct trades as it is. If you increase them much, more people will just start organizing direct trades instead.

What people specifically?

Wouldn't this be sellers who are sitting on excess mats or who want a higher margin?

If they want to sell through direct trades they still have to compete with the market price and likely sell for lower? Isn't that a good thing?

Araneae6537 · February 2022

Northwold wrote: »

silvereyes wrote: »

Northwold wrote: »

silvereyes wrote: »

Northwold wrote: »

And if certain aspects of the game, like furnishings, already appear strongly designed to push you to the crown store and then a group of players start driving prices in the non-crown store gameworld up, that starts leaving such an unpleasant taste in the mouth that there is a danger that playing ESO starts feeling more like encouraging ZOS to price gouge than an actual entertainment experience.

There are plenty of ways to enjoy the game that don't involve buying high-price items.

However, if what you really want is to decorate housing all day without paying RL money, farming the furniture crafting mats yourself or doing activities that generate gold income ... well then, I don't know what to tell you.

All through this thread people are ignoring what other people are saying because they're absolutely fine doing just what they do, without considering whether their experiences are representative of what other players even WANT.

Trust me, I'm sympathetic. There are definitely problems with the in-game economy right now. I just disagree that flipping is the problem, and I also don't think the proposed cooldown would stop flippers at any rate.

FWIW, I have zero skin in the flipper game. I'm terrible at it, and I've gotten stuck holding the bag too many times with items that didn't sell. These days, I prefer to focus on pure profit activities like writs.

Northwold wrote: »

What I'm saying is, the situation is getting considerably worse and actually, no i don't want to pay more real life money and no I don't want to spend my real life virtually farming ever increasing crafting requirements.

I get that. The furniture crafting requirements are absolutely ridiculous. I wouldn't consider myself wealthy in game, but I have invested heavily in leveling writ alts so that I can get access to gold with a few hours of writs when I need to. Even years before all the recent inflation, though, housing was so expensive that I tended to not engage with it much.

ZOS can fix that particular problem at any time without blowing up an entire game system in the process. They just don't, because, well, money.

The reason I raised flipping specifically was that it kept coming up in the middle of other threads but no one was discussing it specifically and I was interested to hear what people had to say about possible remedies (a lot, it seems).

Personally I think there are a whole host of factors that have all come together to make the economy completely dysfunctional and ALL of them need to be addressed in some way.

If you take housing as the easiest example, people are expected to pay real world money equivalent, in some cases, to the price of a triple A game. If they are on ESO plus they have 700 slots to play with and a few crowns from the subscription. Let's say that leaves 670 slots to fill by other means, for the sake of argument (which says something about the absolutely staggering prices in the Crown store).

If we assume a casual, non hardcore player, and if we assume that they can buy 300 of the furnishings they want from normal shops in the game, that's still 370 items they are either going to craft using their own materials or want to buy from guild traders.

With a casual gamer's playing style, you might be looking at generating one furnishing per day as things stand at the moment. Two if they play a bit more.

So they've bought a house for the pleasure of decorating it. And the game's economy is currently so utterly dysfunctional that that will take them literally a year or six months if they play a bit more.

That is nuts and it's at the point where the effort / reward gameplay loop looks truly broken.

IMHO, the only things that ZOS could do to improve the situation is to reduce the materials needed for many recipes or increase furnishing material drop rates. Maybe they should also change the color of furnishing materials from white to purple or gold to reflect their rarity and value? I wonder how many players without ESO+ and without add-ons vendor these materials without knowing their value.

I don’t think it’s the economy that’s broken but rather the barriers to furnishings. It does seem ridiculous to me that common/basic/rough furnishings require these special materials and in significant quantities!

LightningWitch · February 2022

SilverBride wrote: »

Don't buy overpriced items and the prices will go down.

This won't work either.

A person with 10M in the bank will see an item at 100K being inexpensive where a person with 1M in the bank will see this as 10% of their total.

When there's immense piles of gold in a game that doesn't actually have a true economic system, "expensive" is relative.

wolfie1.0. · February 2022

getting rid of addons won't solve the issue.

Mitigate it? perhaps. but generally speaking PC servers have various aspects that you don't have on consoles. Yes add ons are one of those factors. But we have also had numerous bot issues over the years. We Also seem to have more players that are into the trade game and have a different server culture. For whatever reasons gold is way more plentiful on PC than consoles, and very likely a more dedicated traders. All removing them would do is relocate price discussions to discord groups and you would likely have similar effects.

jaws343 · February 2022

wolfie1.0. wrote: »

getting rid of addons won't solve the issue.

Mitigate it? perhaps. but generally speaking PC servers have various aspects that you don't have on consoles. Yes add ons are one of those factors. But we have also had numerous bot issues over the years. We Also seem to have more players that are into the trade game and have a different server culture. For whatever reasons gold is way more plentiful on PC than consoles, and very likely a more dedicated traders. All removing them would do is relocate price discussions to discord groups and you would likely have similar effects.

Everything you listed is also true for console:
Console has tons of bot issues. Bots everywhere farming mats to sell.
More players into the trading game is utter nonsense. The trading community on console is just as robust.

Gold is more prevelant on PC for two reasons: Add-ons make gold gain far more efficient. And PC has been around longer. Nothing to do with more dedicated traders.

Console pricing discussions already happen within guilds and on discord, and, surprise, surprise, the market is mostly fine and really only fluctuates minimally around updates and events. Why is that? Because, while there is pricing discussion, there is no centralized, real time, interface to see what the market prices are across the server. That is the problem on PC, players can see live pricing and real time sales info and buy up items that are underpriced more readily.

Add-ons are the only significant difference between PC and Console markets. And that includes both QOL, which increase gold gain efficiency, and Market add-ons which centralize the market more effectively. You remove both of those things from the PC infrastructure and you will find prices are far more stable, inflation is far less inflammatory, and flipping is far more difficult to effectively do with any regularity.

FlopsyPrince · February 2022

Northwold wrote: »

Lots of comments lately about inflation and how the vast majority of traders end up posting goods for sale at the same price.

But a subset of that is people complaining that when people DON'T sell at the same price their items get snatched up at speed and resold at a profit at the same price as everyone else.

So what do people think of banning resale of an item bought in a guild store for, say, 30 days, to try to discourage this and improve price competition?

Silly idea. Nothing will prevent this.

People will always find a way around it.

jaws343 · February 2022

I find this entire discussion funny because the usual go to is: "Give us an auction house." But what people fail to realize is that a large majority of the trading issues right now on PC are because add-ons have created a pseudo auction house for the platform by centralizing sales and listings data across the server.

There is a reason why players can snap up underpriced items fairly easily, you have an add-on that tells you where and how much, with none of the effort of trader/zone hopping to search through stores that console has. You want to flip items on console? Great, be prepared to troll manually through 200+ traders, one by one.

LalMirchi · February 2022

jaws343 wrote: »

I find this entire discussion funny because the usual go to is: "Give us an auction house." But what people fail to realize is that a large majority of the trading issues right now on PC are because add-ons have created a pseudo auction house for the platform by centralizing sales and listings data across the server.

There is a reason why players can snap up underpriced items fairly easily, you have an add-on that tells you where and how much, with none of the effort of trader/zone hopping to search through stores that console has. You want to flip items on console? Great, be prepared to troll manually through 200+ traders, one by one.

Rather igneous if not absolutely rubbish, this assumes a player will actually do these very time-consuming activities for a rather small benefit. We DO not need a global auction house, however much this is implied in comments.

DragonRacer · February 2022

jaws343 wrote: »

I find this entire discussion funny because the usual go to is: "Give us an auction house." But what people fail to realize is that a large majority of the trading issues right now on PC are because add-ons have created a pseudo auction house for the platform by centralizing sales and listings data across the server.

There is a reason why players can snap up underpriced items fairly easily, you have an add-on that tells you where and how much, with none of the effort of trader/zone hopping to search through stores that console has. You want to flip items on console? Great, be prepared to troll manually through 200+ traders, one by one.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

jaws343 · February 2022

LalMirchi wrote: »

jaws343 wrote: »

I find this entire discussion funny because the usual go to is: "Give us an auction house." But what people fail to realize is that a large majority of the trading issues right now on PC are because add-ons have created a pseudo auction house for the platform by centralizing sales and listings data across the server.

There is a reason why players can snap up underpriced items fairly easily, you have an add-on that tells you where and how much, with none of the effort of trader/zone hopping to search through stores that console has. You want to flip items on console? Great, be prepared to troll manually through 200+ traders, one by one.

Rather igneous if not absolutely rubbish, this assumes a player will actually do these very time-consuming activities for a rather small benefit. We DO not need a global auction house, however much this is implied in comments.

Wait what? I am saying that an Auction house would be bad and that the current PC market is proof of that. There is literally nothing in my comment that implies otherwise.

LalMirchi · February 2022

jaws343 wrote: »

LalMirchi wrote: »

jaws343 wrote: »

I find this entire discussion funny because the usual go to is: "Give us an auction house." But what people fail to realize is that a large majority of the trading issues right now on PC are because add-ons have created a pseudo auction house for the platform by centralizing sales and listings data across the server.

There is a reason why players can snap up underpriced items fairly easily, you have an add-on that tells you where and how much, with none of the effort of trader/zone hopping to search through stores that console has. You want to flip items on console? Great, be prepared to troll manually through 200+ traders, one by one.

Rather igneous if not absolutely rubbish, this assumes a player will actually do these very time-consuming activities for a rather small benefit. We DO not need a global auction house, however much this is implied in comments.

Wait what? I am saying that an Auction house would be bad and that the current PC market is proof of that. There is literally nothing in my comment that implies otherwise.

Sorry, my brain [snip] upp, I blame the skooma

[edited for profanity bypass]

wolfie1.0. · February 2022

Northwold wrote: »

silvereyes wrote: »

Northwold wrote: »

silvereyes wrote: »

Northwold wrote: »

And if certain aspects of the game, like furnishings, already appear strongly designed to push you to the crown store and then a group of players start driving prices in the non-crown store gameworld up, that starts leaving such an unpleasant taste in the mouth that there is a danger that playing ESO starts feeling more like encouraging ZOS to price gouge than an actual entertainment experience.

There are plenty of ways to enjoy the game that don't involve buying high-price items.

However, if what you really want is to decorate housing all day without paying RL money, farming the furniture crafting mats yourself or doing activities that generate gold income ... well then, I don't know what to tell you.

All through this thread people are ignoring what other people are saying because they're absolutely fine doing just what they do, without considering whether their experiences are representative of what other players even WANT.

Trust me, I'm sympathetic. There are definitely problems with the in-game economy right now. I just disagree that flipping is the problem, and I also don't think the proposed cooldown would stop flippers at any rate.

FWIW, I have zero skin in the flipper game. I'm terrible at it, and I've gotten stuck holding the bag too many times with items that didn't sell. These days, I prefer to focus on pure profit activities like writs.

Northwold wrote: »

What I'm saying is, the situation is getting considerably worse and actually, no i don't want to pay more real life money and no I don't want to spend my real life virtually farming ever increasing crafting requirements.

I get that. The furniture crafting requirements are absolutely ridiculous. I wouldn't consider myself wealthy in game, but I have invested heavily in leveling writ alts so that I can get access to gold with a few hours of writs when I need to. Even years before all the recent inflation, though, housing was so expensive that I tended to not engage with it much.

ZOS can fix that particular problem at any time without blowing up an entire game system in the process. They just don't, because, well, money.

The reason I raised flipping specifically was that it kept coming up in the middle of other threads but no one was discussing it specifically and I was interested to hear what people had to say about possible remedies (a lot, it seems).

Personally I think there are a whole host of factors that have all come together to make the economy completely dysfunctional and ALL of them need to be addressed in some way.

If you take housing as the easiest example, people are expected to pay real world money equivalent, in some cases, to the price of a triple A game. If they are on ESO plus they have 700 slots to play with and a few crowns from the subscription. Let's say that leaves 670 slots to fill by other means, for the sake of argument (which says something about the absolutely staggering prices in the Crown store).

If we assume a casual, non hardcore player, and if we assume that they can buy 300 of the furnishings they want from normal shops in the game, that's still 370 items they are either going to craft using their own materials or want to buy from guild traders.

With a casual gamer's playing style, you might be looking at generating one furnishing per day as things stand at the moment. Two if they play a bit more.

So they've bought a house for the pleasure of decorating it. And the game's economy is currently so utterly dysfunctional that that will take them literally a year or six months if they play a bit more.

That is nuts and it's at the point where the effort / reward gameplay loop looks truly broken.

at the end of the day though restricting how many times an item can be traded, or even putting a cool down on it will only make the issue worse and increase prices overall. It will not reduce anything except supply. Also remember that not a small amount of trading occurs outside of the guild traders, this would also be impacted by what you want to do here.

Actions that would alleviate pricing concerns are items like these:

Reduce gold income from daily crafting writs by 70-80% replace gold with furnishing mats dropped from that skills tree
Enable crafting surveys to reward furnishing mats
Reduce the number of furnishing materials needed to complete items
Allow Furnishings to be deconstructed
reduce the amount of improvement items needed to complete gear sets (ie caps of 4 or 6)
reduce the number of grains to make a plate from 10 to 8, 6, or 5.
Make motif knowledge account wide. Note: since the outfit stations release this really has been the case with the only differences being really on crafted sets and master writ completion
Introduce curated recipe/motif generation, that would work to improve your chances of obtaining a motif/recipe from a source if you don't already know it.

among other suggestions that have been made. The above list are about either increasing supply or reducing player demand. these changes will help. IF ZOS decides to implement them.

As for how players can help. well for starters if you don't like how expensive an item is. don't buy it, and encourage others to not do so as well. Secondly, shop around. Don't buy from trader hubs. go elsewhere for your stuff. lastly, Farm, farm, farm, farm.

wolfie1.0. · February 2022

Skinfaxe_DK wrote: »

silvereyes wrote: »

Skinfaxe_DK wrote: »

I personally think that the listing fee should be increased and the listing time should be reduced (to 10 days perhaps).

The taxes and fees are already high enough that some forego the system in lieu of direct trades as it is. If you increase them much, more people will just start organizing direct trades instead.

What people specifically?

Wouldn't this be sellers who are sitting on excess mats or who want a higher margin?

If they want to sell through direct trades they still have to compete with the market price and likely sell for lower? Isn't that a good thing?

many already do this to bypass guild trader fees. changing the listing fee wont change anything really. nor would listing times. if anything it will increase prices.

wolfie1.0. · February 2022

jaws343 wrote: »

wolfie1.0. wrote: »

getting rid of addons won't solve the issue.

Mitigate it? perhaps. but generally speaking PC servers have various aspects that you don't have on consoles. Yes add ons are one of those factors. But we have also had numerous bot issues over the years. We Also seem to have more players that are into the trade game and have a different server culture. For whatever reasons gold is way more plentiful on PC than consoles, and very likely a more dedicated traders. All removing them would do is relocate price discussions to discord groups and you would likely have similar effects.

Everything you listed is also true for console:
Console has tons of bot issues. Bots everywhere farming mats to sell.
More players into the trading game is utter nonsense. The trading community on console is just as robust.

Gold is more prevelant on PC for two reasons: Add-ons make gold gain far more efficient. And PC has been around longer. Nothing to do with more dedicated traders.

Console pricing discussions already happen within guilds and on discord, and, surprise, surprise, the market is mostly fine and really only fluctuates minimally around updates and events. Why is that? Because, while there is pricing discussion, there is no centralized, real time, interface to see what the market prices are across the server. That is the problem on PC, players can see live pricing and real time sales info and buy up items that are underpriced more readily.

Add-ons are the only significant difference between PC and Console markets. And that includes both QOL, which increase gold gain efficiency, and Market add-ons which centralize the market more effectively. You remove both of those things from the PC infrastructure and you will find prices are far more stable, inflation is far less inflammatory, and flipping is far more difficult to effectively do with any regularity.

I would argue that there is a different server culture on PC than on consoles as well. But i will also state that i am ignorant of market conditions on console servers as i do not own accounts there. So in all honesty i can't really speak to that, other than to say that what players may consider appropriate pricing on one server may not apply to another. there are other factors such as playtime and in game activity choices to consider as well.

I will concede that QOL addons and time saving addons contribute to the issue. But they are not the only factor involved. TTC, MM, ATT, lazy writ, and writworthy are probably likely targets for add on bans, and maybe they should be. MM has been proven to be a drain on server resources and TTC requires a third part app to function. Harvest map and destination pins would also need to go too.

Lazy writ and writ worthy have in game alternatives not so they can go, but it wont' change how writs work or how much gold they can provide.

If you really want to be annoying though, you target he craft bag. cap it, or remove it. that would flood the market

Necrotech_Master · February 2022

if you couldnt relist something for 30 days...there would be a LOT more WTS chat spam everywhere lol

stopping trader listings wont stop people from doing in person trades

binding on purchase is also not good idea, there are a lot of items that will never "bind" like materials and as others noted you might want to purchase an item to gift to someone else or as a proxy because you are at the right place at the right time

literally every MMO that has tradeable items will have an economy and it will have its flippers

the only thing i see too much of right now is entitlement to everything lol

im still trying to collect motifs and furnishing blueprints, but i refuse to buy stuff i feel is too expensive and just wait on it, even though i have several motifs only missing 1 pc

silvereyes · February 2022

wolfie1.0. wrote: »

jaws343 wrote: »

wolfie1.0. wrote: »

getting rid of addons won't solve the issue.

Mitigate it? perhaps. but generally speaking PC servers have various aspects that you don't have on consoles. Yes add ons are one of those factors. But we have also had numerous bot issues over the years. We Also seem to have more players that are into the trade game and have a different server culture. For whatever reasons gold is way more plentiful on PC than consoles, and very likely a more dedicated traders. All removing them would do is relocate price discussions to discord groups and you would likely have similar effects.

Everything you listed is also true for console:
Console has tons of bot issues. Bots everywhere farming mats to sell.
More players into the trading game is utter nonsense. The trading community on console is just as robust.

Gold is more prevelant on PC for two reasons: Add-ons make gold gain far more efficient. And PC has been around longer. Nothing to do with more dedicated traders.

Console pricing discussions already happen within guilds and on discord, and, surprise, surprise, the market is mostly fine and really only fluctuates minimally around updates and events. Why is that? Because, while there is pricing discussion, there is no centralized, real time, interface to see what the market prices are across the server. That is the problem on PC, players can see live pricing and real time sales info and buy up items that are underpriced more readily.

Add-ons are the only significant difference between PC and Console markets. And that includes both QOL, which increase gold gain efficiency, and Market add-ons which centralize the market more effectively. You remove both of those things from the PC infrastructure and you will find prices are far more stable, inflation is far less inflammatory, and flipping is far more difficult to effectively do with any regularity.

I would argue that there is a different server culture on PC than on consoles as well. But i will also state that i am ignorant of market conditions on console servers as i do not own accounts there. So in all honesty i can't really speak to that, other than to say that what players may consider appropriate pricing on one server may not apply to another. there are other factors such as playtime and in game activity choices to consider as well.

I will concede that QOL addons and time saving addons contribute to the issue. But they are not the only factor involved. TTC, MM, ATT, lazy writ, and writworthy are probably likely targets for add on bans, and maybe they should be. MM has been proven to be a drain on server resources and TTC requires a third part app to function. Harvest map and destination pins would also need to go too.

Lazy writ and writ worthy have in game alternatives not so they can go, but it wont' change how writs work or how much gold they can provide.

If you really want to be annoying though, you target he craft bag. cap it, or remove it. that would flood the market

MM isn't so much a problem. It's scope is limited to your current guilds, which are capped at 5. It and it's predecessor, ShopKeeper, have been around since shortly after launch.

Not sure why you mention writ worthy, as there's not really a huge problem with master writ prices. Never used ATT, so can't speak to that. Lazy Writ Crafter, as you said, won't really affect things too much, other than to create inventory issues, since people can just multi-craft ahead of time in-game, and even without that, the in-game UI literally shows you where to click.

And you just try banning people's map addons, and you will really see how feisty people can get, lol. The big problem with farming is more bots anyways, which won't care about any of this. For other serious farmers, it's not hard to memorize a route, once you do it enough. Imo, I think anyone who targets those farming helper addons would really be giving them too much credit.

silvereyes · February 2022

wolfie1.0. wrote: »

Actions that would alleviate pricing concerns are items like these:
...
2. Enable crafting surveys to reward furnishing mats

Man, if surveys started dropping heartwood and culandas ... I've got a couple hundred just eating up space in my housing bank that would like to get in on this action.

FlopsyPrince · February 2022

LalMirchi wrote: »

jaws343 wrote: »

I find this entire discussion funny because the usual go to is: "Give us an auction house." But what people fail to realize is that a large majority of the trading issues right now on PC are because add-ons have created a pseudo auction house for the platform by centralizing sales and listings data across the server.

There is a reason why players can snap up underpriced items fairly easily, you have an add-on that tells you where and how much, with none of the effort of trader/zone hopping to search through stores that console has. You want to flip items on console? Great, be prepared to troll manually through 200+ traders, one by one.

Rather igneous if not absolutely rubbish, this assumes a player will actually do these very time-consuming activities for a rather small benefit. We DO not need a global auction house, however much this is implied in comments.

I would agree with the last comment. The point that TTC acts as that demonstrates how useful it would be. Finding things and finding good pricing on the console was a real pain in my time there.

The current system just adds complexity, it doesn't stop economic wizards. In fact, I am personally convinced most who love the current system greatly benefit from its flaws.

jaws343 · February 2022

wolfie1.0. wrote: »

jaws343 wrote: »

wolfie1.0. wrote: »

getting rid of addons won't solve the issue.

Mitigate it? perhaps. but generally speaking PC servers have various aspects that you don't have on consoles. Yes add ons are one of those factors. But we have also had numerous bot issues over the years. We Also seem to have more players that are into the trade game and have a different server culture. For whatever reasons gold is way more plentiful on PC than consoles, and very likely a more dedicated traders. All removing them would do is relocate price discussions to discord groups and you would likely have similar effects.

Everything you listed is also true for console:
Console has tons of bot issues. Bots everywhere farming mats to sell.
More players into the trading game is utter nonsense. The trading community on console is just as robust.

Gold is more prevelant on PC for two reasons: Add-ons make gold gain far more efficient. And PC has been around longer. Nothing to do with more dedicated traders.

Console pricing discussions already happen within guilds and on discord, and, surprise, surprise, the market is mostly fine and really only fluctuates minimally around updates and events. Why is that? Because, while there is pricing discussion, there is no centralized, real time, interface to see what the market prices are across the server. That is the problem on PC, players can see live pricing and real time sales info and buy up items that are underpriced more readily.

Add-ons are the only significant difference between PC and Console markets. And that includes both QOL, which increase gold gain efficiency, and Market add-ons which centralize the market more effectively. You remove both of those things from the PC infrastructure and you will find prices are far more stable, inflation is far less inflammatory, and flipping is far more difficult to effectively do with any regularity.

So in all honesty i can't really speak to that, other than to say that what players may consider appropriate pricing on one server may not apply to another.

I don't think anyone is trying to do this with pricing between servers. I think players understand that pricing will be different. But at the end of the day, only one platform has players complaining that they are being priced out of the market on a regular basis.

The problem with trying to "fix" PC issues by changing the base game is that you will end up breaking the market entirely on the remaining 2/3rds of the platforms. All to fix and entirely player made problem.

At the end of the day, I know that on console I can buy/sell Gold Platings, for example, for 80-100K on a regular basis. Around patches, that top end number may jump up to 120K, maybe. A 20-50% increase in price at the most. That pricing has remained pretty much the same since jewelry crafting launched. Hovering around the 100K mark. And very unlikely to change from that for the foreseeable future.