jaws343 wrote: »

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.

I hate to say this, but ZOS does have a tendency to upset one part of the playerbase for the sake of another part of it. (ie every major game update)

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.

Yes I agree with this. The guild store idea is about price competition. One reason on PC price competition isn't happening is that everyone can see what the prices are everywhere because of tools like TTC. In which case guild stores are the opposite of a great idea. They become an auction house but one where you have to go to a hundred different locations to chase things. So all the drawbacks of an auction house but not the major advantage of it all being managed in one, single system.

Part of that will be because of ease of flipping. But a significant part of it is that people can see the prices everywhere.

I sell at reduced prices knowing full well that a flipper will eventually buy it. I make more money doing this than selling at market value.

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.

So what exactly are you trying to buy? Furnishing plans? Or the materials to craft housing items?

Because finding a specific furnishing plan can be hard, but they are being put for sale by people who spend a lot of time farming. I know a few people that spend a good chunk of their game time opening containers to find plans to sell. They are allowed to sell those for whatever amount they feel is worth their time.

Now the materials are a different thing. If you want to decorate your house with items crafted those materials are going to be your bottleneck. I think in that case, one thing ZOS could do to help would be put furnishing materials in surveys, which is not a thing right now.

But I feel like there aren't a lot of motifs being sold for dirt cheap and being snapped up by flippers, so keeping people from relisting them is not going to help much.

On the bright side, the Jubilee event is coming up, so we'll be able to catch up on motifs.

Just curious but have you tried flipping using TTC? yes you can "see" prices but have you tried actually running around and capturing deals? Its not quite all you make it out to be. It also can be manipulated.

AlnilamE wrote: »

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.

So what exactly are you trying to buy? Furnishing plans? Or the materials to craft housing items?

Because finding a specific furnishing plan can be hard, but they are being put for sale by people who spend a lot of time farming. I know a few people that spend a good chunk of their game time opening containers to find plans to sell. They are allowed to sell those for whatever amount they feel is worth their time.

Now the materials are a different thing. If you want to decorate your house with items crafted those materials are going to be your bottleneck. I think in that case, one thing ZOS could do to help would be put furnishing materials in surveys, which is not a thing right now.

But I feel like there aren't a lot of motifs being sold for dirt cheap and being snapped up by flippers, so keeping people from relisting them is not going to help much.

On the bright side, the Jubilee event is coming up, so we'll be able to catch up on motifs.

Motifs are a market all of their own and honestly hard to flip. that is mostly because for the most part they decrease in price over time since the demand decreases. There are instances in which that is not the case, and it really just depends on whether or not players are farming said motifs, the drop rates, and the difficulty involved in said drops.

Im sorry, but after following this thread, I just have to say:
No, "flipping items" does not affect the prices. At least in a major overall way. That is a misconception. It is literally impossible for a person, or guild for that matter, to affect the pricing across all kiosks and items.
It is purely a "Supply and Demand" type economy.
It is the same "misconception" that Guild Leaders are like Cartel Bosses and getting rich off their guilds.

To Re-state what others have said:
TTC "Does Not" tell you what a items sells for, only what it is listed for.
I could put up Cornflower and charge 1 Million Gold each for it, and TTC will show that. It is just an average of LISTING PRICE!
MM will show what a item ACTUALY sells for.
Also, if you find the location of a item and go there and it's not there, it's probably just someone beat you to it. It's not always a "flipper" grabbed it.
Also, TTC is NOT real time based. You can post a item and it may not show up in TTC for 12 -24 hours.
Just my 2 drakes on a few of the misconceptions about trading, pricing and such.
Huzzah!

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?

Very bad idea. Additional to all the other problems listed by other players this would lead to some people buying items listed too cheap and destroy them just to get them out of the market, thus pushing the prices of the remaining items even higher.

If anything, ZOS should disable TTC from the API functions

Okay I’m not a fan of this idea but I’m seeing a whole lot of logical fallacies with the counter points

1) Adding a “marker” wouldn’t require a new stack they can add a timer without splitting anything just do it on the back say 58 / 176 are available for selling/trading. Code the game to sell the items without a timers first much like the game uses crafting bag mats before player held ones. At the same time code it to use items with a timer first for balance. You can’t sell items on timers in guild or in trades so you can’t loophole the system.

2) This would in no way increase prices if the only reason an item was purchased was to repost it then yes over all total number of sells would go down but so would prices. You see the “supply” never went down if a player sells DR Wax for 3k and it’s purchased and resold for 6k. Only to be purchased and resold for 10k the supply never changed only the price did. So no this would cause the prices to go up cause of a drop in supply their would be a drop in sell and a sharp drop in price hikes as using TC to find and resell underpriced items wouldn’t be profitable.

3) Inflation is a very big problem. Yes many players have fun running the game like the stock market but if you play to get away from life and it’s taking more and more and more gold to get what you need to have fun then you end up grinding more (no fun for people like this) no matter if it’s for the mats or gold. Players leaving the game in end of itself is not a problem it happens to every game the problem starts when players find other games and game communities to join then you are far less likely to gain that player back.

Amottica wrote: »

Considering one of the few items that have seen its price climb is Chromium because Zenimax intended it to be rare and more challenging to upgrade jewelry it seems that a small change in focus and especially how one plays the game is what is needed.

These items, and using chromium again as an example, are not that important. Yes, upgrading jewelry to gold does increase the damage a small amount but it is far from the end of the world not having it. It is also easy to obtain on one's own. In less than a year of playing and only three characters, obviously, two of the characters were leveled more recently, I have obtained 8 or 9 of the platings and I do not do the writs every day.

Well this is the thing, I'm not personally worried by chromium plating, but more generally about how difficult it is getting to obtain many things, including basic materials, whether on account of ludicrously low drop rates and new items gated behind the need to obtain materials through "pointless grind of the day" activities, or because things are no longer available at sensible prices. And I am not going to change how I play the game to dedicate the entirety of my free life to staring at a computer screen to compensate. Real life is too short.

And if that is genuinely what ZOS intended, well, it is plain psychologically unhealthy, but it is also not a good way to make people stay in the game.

It is taking longer and longer in ESO to do exactly the same thing. And at a certain point there is no fun left. If I'm not having fun, I will give up on ESO. And I know for sure I'm not alone in that sentiment.

I see precious little indication that ZOS even care about these points. The end result in the short term for them, I suppose, is that the crown store becomes a bigger cash machine. But that only works so long as enough people find the experience entertaining enough to actually play it at all.

Many, many answers in this thread have been completely self serving responses about how they're fine, thank you, and don't change it to make it easier for anyone else because they're on top of the pile (I'm not directing this at you but across the thread).

Many of the arguments deployed make literally no logical sense: "stopping flipping would raise prices" -- a completely vacuous and baseless assertion that, any way you think about it, does not compute; "you can't prevent flipping because then no one would be able to give gifts" -- why not? Is it beyond the wit of man to create an exception for gifting? People point out that ESO can be used as an economics game, which is perfectly true but not an argument that the economy should be allowed to get progressively more broken from many different directions purely to maintain the enjoyment of those players who inhabit that niche.

And such responses are not surprising as people using this forum have self-selected and gone through the registration hoop. They are already likely to be more invested than most players. And good for them.

But an MMO needs to keep more than that small minority of people happy to keep going.

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.

This, an global auction house would simple take the effects seen from TTC and magnify them over all platforms.
I find it interesting how much prices changes between traders in premium trading spots, on materials not rare stuff.
In short an unified auction house would drop prices on cheaper items but increase them on rare ones.
I sold an purple blueprint for over one million anniversary event before Elsweyr, I sold green ones for over 10K questing in Morrowind at its launch.
Too much gold an no restraints. Exploit it.

kendellking_chaosb14_ESO wrote: »

Okay I’m not a fan of this idea but I’m seeing a whole lot of logical fallacies with the counter points

1) Adding a “marker” wouldn’t require a new stack they can add a timer without splitting anything just do it on the back say 58 / 176 are available for selling/trading. Code the game to sell the items without a timers first much like the game uses crafting bag mats before player held ones. At the same time code it to use items with a timer first for balance. You can’t sell items on timers in guild or in trades so you can’t loophole the system.

That's not how it would work because ZOS won't even stack things like potions that you get from daily rewards and potions you get from crates, even if they are the same potions. As well as some of the XP scrolls don't stack.

What you would get would be a separate stack for each time stamp, just like Siege doesn't stack because it has a durability.

And people who go around buying items for their own use would be penalized as well.

Like, the other day I needed some mudcrab chitin, so I looked around my own guilds and then some other traders, since all I could find were stacks of 5 to 20. I ended up making about 10 purchases, so that would be 10 inventory slots until the 30 days ran out, unless I used them up before then.

I really don’t understand some players problems here. I don’t have any problem with prices going up, because it is happening with all the prices, and also all players incomes are rising the same way. You get more from completing quests since CP change, you can sell mats, motifs, perfect roe, whatever you want for higher prices. What difference does it make if something is more expensive, if you can afford it due your greater income? Some ideas here are againts players income, and that would make problem indeed. Gold cap? Decreasing gold from writs? To what purpouse? To make players poor? Is that what you want to achieve? Just to protect some idea of how much x is supposed to cost? Imagine a news speaker saying „due to increasing prices of bread we decided to reduce your sallary”.

Arunei wrote: »

Northwold wrote: »

hafgood wrote: »

What you need to look at is why things go up in value.

Take housing materials, we've just been given a new house and had New Life, both these put pressure on the housing material market.

Housing mats are in short supply at the best of times and now there are more people wanting them. This pushes up prices, and sadly they are not coming back down because more people get the housing bug and then there is a bigger demand than there is supply, and they drop so rarely the demand is never going to be met.

It doesn't matter what controls you try to put on the market there simply isn't enough to go round.

Dreugh wax is the same, lots of people running light amd medium armour wanting 40 dreugh per set dent the supply. These are easier to farm yourself but many choose not to and are reliant on those who sell them. Sellers will see that they are being bought really quickly and so will increase their price the next time around. This will keep happening so long as the demand out weighs the supply.

Motifs start high and then tend to drop in value, some peak just before the anniversary event (especially worm cult) and then Tank after the event until they slowly reach their peak again. Others drop and stay dropped for a while before the content gets too old and people stop doing it (good example Dro'mathra motif which has massively increased in value)

Flipping moves stuff from random lower tier traders to higher tier traders that are more accessible, and yes it may increase the cost of the item but it does make them available to those who don't want to visit the boondock traders. Without flipping many of those items would actually remain unsold even though they are cheap because the average buyer visits three or four sales locations to find what they want. So stopping flipping would have a massively detrimental effect on the economy.

(I play PlayStation)

I think this does raise the Tamriel Trade Centre point. What you're describing is, from everything I've heard, how the guild store system was intended to work. It was deliberately different from an auction house. But because TTC exists on PC, what you have is in effect an auction house but one that is insanely annoying to use. All of the disadvantages are present, with the intended advantages (most especially price competition) and interesting character of guild stores having been cancelled out.

(And, if anyone's so inclined, yes everyone knows that TTC is not the same as a live feed from Bloomberg. It's not going to be educational to "teach" us that.)

Except there have been people who have literally claimed TTC gives real-time pricing information, so clearly "everyone knows this isn't the case" isn't true. There are very obviously people who don't understand how TTC or the other trading addons work, and as such, it very much is educational to explain why, so people quit relying on them for a scapegoat so heavily.

I don't use TTC, but doesn't the interface literally tell you how long ago a specific item was scanned?