Northwold wrote: »

Carrying on from @Tommy_The_Gun 's thinking, basically there is a whole segment of the player base who will not use the current selling mechanics but who, if they did have access to the selling side of the economy, would contribute vastly to increasing the supply of items, at which point you could expect the price of more common materials to become more sane relative to what they are used for AND you could plug those players into the economy so that they did not experience so much inflation.

For whatever reason, ZOS has made clear multiple times that a central auction house is not going to be a thing and the guild traders are here to stay. So be it.

But why not an auction house minus?

- You have "emporia" or something at various key cities, or even at bad locations, that are functionally similar to guild stores but are *open to every player and nothing to do with guilds*.

- Each player gets a very limited number of selling slots to stop the emporia completely overtaking the guild stores that ZOS want to preserve.

- If you like, sales at emporia attract a tax to disadvantage them compared to guild stores.

I do not think guild stores are a good idea, least of all for a game like ESO which deliberately courted and courts a non-diehard MMO playerbase. But, plainly, the view is that they are sacred. But the game really, really needs a mechanic to allow players who want nothing to do with guild stores to sell.

Whole game mechanics depend on the player economy to work properly. Most obviously housing and the crafting of furnishings have been aimed at single players and fail the fun test if it takes players literally years to do what they are trying to do. If they fail the fun test, people will stop playing. And while it might seem terribly clever to charge the equivalent of over 70 pounds (in the UK) to someone for a house and then drive them to the Crown store to spend 5 pounds a pop on plants, it isn't in the end. It's exploitative, players will not engage with it and will resent it, and those players will leave.

Spamming zone chat with "WTS" is a joke solution to the problem.

wolfie1.0. wrote: »

Northwold wrote: »

Carrying on from @Tommy_The_Gun 's thinking, basically there is a whole segment of the player base who will not use the current selling mechanics but who, if they did have access to the selling side of the economy, would contribute vastly to increasing the supply of items, at which point you could expect the price of more common materials to become more sane relative to what they are used for AND you could plug those players into the economy so that they did not experience so much inflation.

For whatever reason, ZOS has made clear multiple times that a central auction house is not going to be a thing and the guild traders are here to stay. So be it.

But why not an auction house minus?

- You have "emporia" or something at various key cities, or even at bad locations, that are functionally similar to guild stores but are *open to every player and nothing to do with guilds*.

- Each player gets a very limited number of selling slots to stop the emporia completely overtaking the guild stores that ZOS want to preserve.

- If you like, sales at emporia attract a tax to disadvantage them compared to guild stores.

I do not think guild stores are a good idea, least of all for a game like ESO which deliberately courted and courts a non-diehard MMO playerbase. But, plainly, the view is that they are sacred. But the game really, really needs a mechanic to allow players who want nothing to do with guild stores to sell.

Whole game mechanics depend on the player economy to work properly. Most obviously housing and the crafting of furnishings have been aimed at single players and fail the fun test if it takes players literally years to do what they are trying to do. If they fail the fun test, people will stop playing. And while it might seem terribly clever to charge the equivalent of over 70 pounds (in the UK) to someone for a house and then drive them to the Crown store to spend 5 pounds a pop on plants, it isn't in the end. It's exploitative, players will not engage with it and will resent it, and those players will leave.

Spamming zone chat with "WTS" is a joke solution to the problem.

OK, I am going to give this an honest effort. For this idea to work the emporium(s) need to be inferior to guild traders in multiple ways so that it doesn't interfere with how they function. Also, for this to work there has to be strong limits or it could crash the game. So how about we say this.

30 item listing limit per week per account. Items once listed can not be canceled for 3 days. Items expire at 14 days.

To sell in the emporium you must pay a flat fee of 100k gold weekly.

Listing fee is 14% of the sale price, none of which is returned upon cancelation.

Fees and gold are removed from the game.

Something along these lines. Are conditions that would need to be met. The guild stores need to have an appeal to them and on the other side the system would need to be able to limit how many players can sell, how much, and the frequency. The very real reason for this is that too much of it at once will crash the system. It's something that needs to be addressed before venturing outside of the established system.

wolfie1.0. wrote: »

Northwold wrote: »

wolfie1.0. wrote: »

Love it or hate it we are probably stuck with the system we have until/unless ZOS does a complete and comprehensive economic overhaul

Honestly at this point i think they really *do* need to do that. The game has evolved in so many different directions with so many different systems that impact on one another that it feels like someone needs to take a step back and consider whether *all* those systems actually play the way they are expected to play, objectively, and whether they are interacting with each other in a way that enhances or damages the gameplay experience. In other words, "if we started this game from nothing, would we want X system to be impacting on Y system like this. If no, we need to fix it."

It's very telling that if you go in as a new player the game's systems and storytelling are now so astonishing complex and counterintuitive that you have literally no idea what's going on. "Veterans" of ESO then condescend to tell newbies to "just Google it". That a game needs people to trawl the internet to even understand where to start is a good sign that the game needs a root and branch rethink.

Honestly I can't disagree with you. There are stats that exist in game that are not recorded anywhere without addons. I can't count the number of times that I have been asked why sets that add critical chance are flat values and not % values on gear and what the actual max crit chance value is and all of the in game help tos are... inadequate and the story is convoluted. There are legacy vet ranked crafting mats that are...well useless. And explaining why gear stops at cp 160 is a pain.

We will see whY actions ZOS takes. I never expected them to go for AwA so anything can happen.

The real concern though is that with economy, changes can make matters worse not better.

A good example is druegh wax. You can go back and look at the prices and history and DW started climbing with armor passive changes and sticker book. 2/3rds of the armor in game are improved by DW. And most non tank builds use all light/med or a combo of the two. Add in the drop rate combined with the nearly infinite craft bag and you have potential problems.

I am not even confident zos could successfully complete such a overhaul without causing more inflation problems

wolfie1.0. wrote: »

Northwold wrote: »

wolfie1.0. wrote: »

Northwold wrote: »

Carrying on from @Tommy_The_Gun 's thinking, basically there is a whole segment of the player base who will not use the current selling mechanics but who, if they did have access to the selling side of the economy, would contribute vastly to increasing the supply of items, at which point you could expect the price of more common materials to become more sane relative to what they are used for AND you could plug those players into the economy so that they did not experience so much inflation.

For whatever reason, ZOS has made clear multiple times that a central auction house is not going to be a thing and the guild traders are here to stay. So be it.

But why not an auction house minus?

- You have "emporia" or something at various key cities, or even at bad locations, that are functionally similar to guild stores but are *open to every player and nothing to do with guilds*.

- Each player gets a very limited number of selling slots to stop the emporia completely overtaking the guild stores that ZOS want to preserve.

- If you like, sales at emporia attract a tax to disadvantage them compared to guild stores.

I do not think guild stores are a good idea, least of all for a game like ESO which deliberately courted and courts a non-diehard MMO playerbase. But, plainly, the view is that they are sacred. But the game really, really needs a mechanic to allow players who want nothing to do with guild stores to sell.

Whole game mechanics depend on the player economy to work properly. Most obviously housing and the crafting of furnishings have been aimed at single players and fail the fun test if it takes players literally years to do what they are trying to do. If they fail the fun test, people will stop playing. And while it might seem terribly clever to charge the equivalent of over 70 pounds (in the UK) to someone for a house and then drive them to the Crown store to spend 5 pounds a pop on plants, it isn't in the end. It's exploitative, players will not engage with it and will resent it, and those players will leave.

Spamming zone chat with "WTS" is a joke solution to the problem.

OK, I am going to give this an honest effort. For this idea to work the emporium(s) need to be inferior to guild traders in multiple ways so that it doesn't interfere with how they function. Also, for this to work there has to be strong limits or it could crash the game. So how about we say this.

30 item listing limit per week per account. Items once listed can not be canceled for 3 days. Items expire at 14 days.

To sell in the emporium you must pay a flat fee of 100k gold weekly.

Listing fee is 14% of the sale price, none of which is returned upon cancelation.

Fees and gold are removed from the game.

Something along these lines. Are conditions that would need to be met. The guild stores need to have an appeal to them and on the other side the system would need to be able to limit how many players can sell, how much, and the frequency. The very real reason for this is that too much of it at once will crash the system. It's something that needs to be addressed before venturing outside of the established system.

Well aside from the weekly fee, which I think is OTT to the point of defeating the very point of the mechanic, I'd be all for that, but a listing fee needs to be refundable if the item doesn't sell (indeed, it needs to be taken at time of sale). This is meant to be mechanic to create an OPTION for sellers who will not use the existing mechanics to sell SOMETHING so that they are not crushed by inflation. It's not meant to be a gold sink on the very players whom it's supposed to assist.

If anything I'd argue for a considerably lower item cap -- maybe 5-10 items, and a percentage of 20-35%. It's not supposed to be equivalent to guild stores, but the item limit, if low enough, should be enough to cripple it for those players who want to get heavily into selling without bonkers listing fees beyond the percentage of sale.

Purpose of the entry fee is to sink gold out of the system at a flat rate or entry fee as it were. Similar to bidding on a trader. We have to at least partially replicate that process. Amount should be high enough to discourage use all of the time, but low enough to allow its use for new and casual players. So 25 to 50k may be better. This is designed so that it requires a player to both participate and initiate the process.

The listing fees and listings need to be designed in such a way as to still offer incentives for the hardcore traders to prefer the guild traders. They is why I set the listing fee as 15% and had it all sunk out of the game instead of returning some in the cancelation process. There is no house cut in what I gave. When you list an item in a guild store you and cancel it then you don't get your listing fee back. If it sells then 3.5% gets deleted from the game and the rest goes to the guild. So to account for this let's drop it down to 3.5% listing fee that you don't get back and and an additional 5.5% that is lost if the item is sold.

I also want to clarify what I mean buy listing limits. 30 items listed per week, total. The number can fluctuate a bit maybe go as high as 50 or down to 25. But this means that if you sell all of your 30 listings that you can't sell anything else till reset. This differs from guild traders that allow you to restock.

The reason for my choices is are for a few reasons. First, the impression that I get is that players that don't like trade guilds want to sell infrequently. And second we honestly just can't allow everyone to be able to sell at the same time without causing major game disruptions. And lastly there has to be gold sinks involved from its users. For it to still make it appealing to use traders there needs to be an entry fee, a listing fee, and a sales fee.

Xebov wrote: »

Iam not arguing that the game shouldnt evolve. Iam arguing why it should evolve in certain areas. If players choose to not take part in player trade than there is no argument to be made when it comes to not having gold. If players chose to not run trials they have no trial gear either, but you wouldnt say its an issue. This is the exact same thing. If you want to change something you have to provide a clear reason why and "players decide to ignore it" is not a reason when alot of players on the other side actively engage.

WrathOfInnos wrote: »

HumbleThaumaturge wrote: »

Contributing to price inflation:
Yesterday, I watched one of my ESO "friends" convert real-world cash into in-game gold via selling Crowns. Crown sellers might raise 50 million to 100 million in gold in a flash (using just a few hours of real-world overtime pay). After that, they buy whatever they want (no farming required), and they simply don't care how much items costs. They just pay whatever is asked for whatever they want. Hence, prices rise. Lots of sellers list items for way above market price, just hoping some ESO hectomillionaire or billionaire will buy at the high price without hesitation. And they do!

I can see how this seems like "buying gold", but the consequences are different. If you could buy gold in the crown store directly that would be a massive problem, because again it would be creating gold aka printing money into the economy. But since the gold spent on exchanging crowns is going from one player to another player it has almost no impact on inflation. The only problem with crown/gold trading IMO is that there is no safe way to perform these trades.

I would argue that crown selling as it exists today is actually good for inflation. Prior to crown gifting, there was much more of a black market gold selling system, that involved hundreds if not thousands of bots farming gold from NPC enemies (creating gold and flooding the economy). I don't see much of this with the crown trading system we have now.

As for TTC and other addons, they certainly result in more consistent prices across the board (not price fixing, just players being informed enough to avoid a bad deal), and expedite the adjustment of prices to match inflation (the prices would rise with or without addons, just would be more delay before players realized inflation was happening without addons). I think the benefits outweigh the downsides though, and being able to search a website instead of traveling to hundreds of guild traders searching for an item is a massive convenience.

Arthtur wrote: »

ESO is an MMO not a single player game. If ppl are refusing to join guilds its their decision but they cant excpect having benefis that guild offers. And ppl have to understand this fact because... If we "remove" this "inflation" the economy will be dead.
There is no way to bring prices so low that gold from mobs is enough for living. Its just impossible. U would have to wipe servers every few years so everyone would start from the start.
Also u can trade without guilds.
But yea, if you are refusing taking part in this its your decision and you are suffering from consequences.

If those players are playing single player game why they even need gold? Sorry but look at this in this way: those players are adding "demand" on stuff because They need it while not adding anything to the "supply" as They refuse to trade. Its not healthy in MMO. If u buy stuff from guilds then u should join them and seel some stuff too. If u dont wanna join because u want single player game - dont buy anything from traders and farm everything yourself.

"Inflation" is a normal thing in MMO. In small scale or high after some time farming gold from mobs just isn't enough as trading become more important. Just because somebody doesnt like the price of the time of diffrent ppl doesnt mean he is right.

And if this still isn't obvious: making something more common so it easier to drop for some ppl will affect everyone. If we double the chances on dropping Dreugh Wax so person B can have 20 instead of 10 it will affect person A who will have 200 instead of 100 as he plays everyday. Do u see the problem or still no? Any single change that will make farming easier for those single players will affect everybody and could even destroy the market.

While higher supply usualy means lower prices u need to engage in the market in order to take part in this. Increasing supply because someone doesnt want to engage is just...
There is no way to make single players able to get everything for gold from mobs without making all of the items worthless like style pages from events. Of course at this point trading would be just dead.

HumbleThaumaturge wrote: »

Contributing to price inflation:

Yesterday, I watched one of my ESO "friends" convert real-world cash into in-game gold via selling Crowns. Crown sellers might raise 50 million to 100 million in gold in a flash (using just a few hours of real-world overtime pay). After that, they buy whatever they want (no farming required), and they simply don't care how much items costs. They just pay whatever is asked for whatever they want. Hence, prices rise. Lots of sellers list items for way above market price, just hoping some ESO hectomillionaire or billionaire will buy at the high price without hesitation. And they do!

The other issue: Overuse of Tamriel Trade Centre (TTC). There are many players who manipulate prices in TTC. Even if TCC excludes outliers (high and low prices), this price manipulation tends to drive TTC prices higher, and buyers believe they are getting a fair deal if they are paying "the suggested price."

There are gold launderers: These folks sell items at guild stores for prices much, much higher than normal (like 25 times higher than normal). Let's not explain the process of gold laundering, since that is probably against forum rules. Such sales happen day after day, week after week, month after month, so maybe TTC averages also include these outrageous prices. Again, folks look at TTC and think they are seeing the fair market price.

The Craft Bag (which everyone loves) has probably contributed greatly to price inflation of materials. Before the Craft Bag, players were forced to sell materials due to inventory limitation. Now that players with Craft Bag rarely sell materials, fewer mats are available for sale, resulting in high mat prices.

Personally, I'd like to see TCC and others like it banned. But that will never happen.

BloodMagicLord wrote: »

I can't say I really agree with your suggestions of putting an additional fee on things like upgrading, which as you say are already difficult for newer players due to increasing material costs.

But more gold sinks are clearly needed.
Perhaps a better idea would be an ability to convert gold into some of the rare currencies, maybe transmute crystals at 5,000 gold each or something.

Northwold wrote: »

In game gold and the means of making it is potentially relevant to *everything*.

Youyouz06 wrote: »

Oreyn_Bearclaw wrote: »

alberichtano wrote: »

Oreyn_Bearclaw wrote: »

Paralyse wrote: »

ESO economy right now is kind of like real life economy. 10% of the players are insanely wealthy and the other 90% are barely scraping by to afford the basics.

i have maybe 4 million gold, all told, and yet I still don't have enough to gold out all of my gear and mats, or run the best food and potions on all of my toons. Mats cost keeps going up daily.

IMO this might be unpopular opinion but I think when ZOS refused to make crown selling a TOS violation/bannable offense, it opened the door to this massive inflation as people who had the means to do so were suddenly able to dump hundreds or even thousands of dollars into the game to obtain massive amounts of gold quickly.

The other aspect of that would be the fact that the trade guilds control the economy. With the largest traders having billions of gold (not an exaggeration) they exert a tremendous amount of influence on the economy. Players must use guild traders to buy things they don't wish to farm or craft on their own, and a percentage of those guild trader purchases (and sales to other players) goes straight into the trade guild leaders' pockets.

It would be like having a large city with, say, 500000 residents, but less than 200 total stores, all of which sold literally everything you could ever want or need to buy. The people who owned and ran those 200 stores would be unimaginably wealthy. The only other way to obtain things would be to farm them or build them yourselves, or standing on a street corner shouting that you have something to sell and hoping someone else is shouting that they have something you want to buy or that they want to buy from you. (Guild traders and zone chat in ESO.) Someone could have exactly what you want to buy but be 5 blocks away and you'd never know about it. At least IRL you'd have want ads and classifieds and such, but ESO has nothing of the sort.

Hard to disagree with most of that. Easy to get caught up in the gold source and gold sink argument (guilty of this myself), certainly an important factor, but wealth inequality absolutely drives inflation as well. Look around in the real world right now. Just enough people have absurd amounts of money. Especially on luxury items, prices are increasing at an enormous pace. I am not sure this fits into a classic inflation model, but its happening in plain sight.

I make pretty good money in real life. I have thought many times of just selling like 50k crowns, just to buy all the motifs and style pages I am missing. Could probably do it in an afternoon and buy the first ones I see listed. I would end up richer than I started, and while that amount of RL money could be earned in an hour or two it would take months of dedicated in game activities. Sure, no new currency is created, but it still drives prices up.

I used to do that once a year, it would take like 2 million gold to buy the motifs I was missing, but that number kept increasing to the point I stopped doing it.

I can see why ZOS wouldn't ban Crown selling. Allowing it makes it more attractive to buy crowns, even if only for selling it for gold. To them it doesn't matter why you buy the crowns, as long as you do buy them. It is a source of income, after all.

Oh they will never ban crown selling. All crown selling does is increase crown sales. They could care less that a middle man is involved. To ZOS, a sale is a sale.

WrathOfInnos wrote: »

HumbleThaumaturge wrote: »

Contributing to price inflation:
Yesterday, I watched one of my ESO "friends" convert real-world cash into in-game gold via selling Crowns. Crown sellers might raise 50 million to 100 million in gold in a flash (using just a few hours of real-world overtime pay). After that, they buy whatever they want (no farming required), and they simply don't care how much items costs. They just pay whatever is asked for whatever they want. Hence, prices rise. Lots of sellers list items for way above market price, just hoping some ESO hectomillionaire or billionaire will buy at the high price without hesitation. And they do!

I can see how this seems like "buying gold", but the consequences are different. If you could buy gold in the crown store directly that would be a massive problem, because again it would be creating gold aka printing money into the economy. But since the gold spent on exchanging crowns is going from one player to another player it has almost no impact on inflation. The only problem with crown/gold trading IMO is that there is no safe way to perform these trades.

I would argue that crown selling as it exists today is actually good for inflation. Prior to crown gifting, there was much more of a black market gold selling system, that involved hundreds if not thousands of bots farming gold from NPC enemies (creating gold and flooding the economy). I don't see much of this with the crown trading system we have now.

As for TTC and other addons, they certainly result in more consistent prices across the board (not price fixing, just players being informed enough to avoid a bad deal), and expedite the adjustment of prices to match inflation (the prices would rise with or without addons, just would be more delay before players realized inflation was happening without addons). I think the benefits outweigh the downsides though, and being able to search a website instead of traveling to hundreds of guild traders searching for an item is a massive convenience.

I was firmly in that camp for a long time, but I think my position has shifted. Yes, with crown selling, no new money enters economy, and yes, it certainly puts a downward pressure on bots, which do print new money into the system. On it's face, I agree with the premise.

The one thing crown sales potentially do is consolidate wealth. A few hundred bucks and you can be a worth 100 million gold. That makes it very easy to buy things over market value, thus driving up the price of goods. Maybe there is a better word for this phenomenon than inflation, but the practical effect is the same, price increase.

The correct term is 'manipulation', Oreyn. When it's a decided factor and there is no work around.

I'd like to see a big change in the crownstore/the way it works/how we interact with/possibilities to sell...We've been on this discourse boat for quite some time now. I'd really like to see a change and have things put directly into the game to give the game, well...'credibility'. (No bash, personal opinion)

Oreyn_Bearclaw wrote: »

Youyouz06 wrote: »

Oreyn_Bearclaw wrote: »

alberichtano wrote: »

Oreyn_Bearclaw wrote: »

Paralyse wrote: »

ESO economy right now is kind of like real life economy. 10% of the players are insanely wealthy and the other 90% are barely scraping by to afford the basics.

i have maybe 4 million gold, all told, and yet I still don't have enough to gold out all of my gear and mats, or run the best food and potions on all of my toons. Mats cost keeps going up daily.

IMO this might be unpopular opinion but I think when ZOS refused to make crown selling a TOS violation/bannable offense, it opened the door to this massive inflation as people who had the means to do so were suddenly able to dump hundreds or even thousands of dollars into the game to obtain massive amounts of gold quickly.

The other aspect of that would be the fact that the trade guilds control the economy. With the largest traders having billions of gold (not an exaggeration) they exert a tremendous amount of influence on the economy. Players must use guild traders to buy things they don't wish to farm or craft on their own, and a percentage of those guild trader purchases (and sales to other players) goes straight into the trade guild leaders' pockets.

It would be like having a large city with, say, 500000 residents, but less than 200 total stores, all of which sold literally everything you could ever want or need to buy. The people who owned and ran those 200 stores would be unimaginably wealthy. The only other way to obtain things would be to farm them or build them yourselves, or standing on a street corner shouting that you have something to sell and hoping someone else is shouting that they have something you want to buy or that they want to buy from you. (Guild traders and zone chat in ESO.) Someone could have exactly what you want to buy but be 5 blocks away and you'd never know about it. At least IRL you'd have want ads and classifieds and such, but ESO has nothing of the sort.

Hard to disagree with most of that. Easy to get caught up in the gold source and gold sink argument (guilty of this myself), certainly an important factor, but wealth inequality absolutely drives inflation as well. Look around in the real world right now. Just enough people have absurd amounts of money. Especially on luxury items, prices are increasing at an enormous pace. I am not sure this fits into a classic inflation model, but its happening in plain sight.

I make pretty good money in real life. I have thought many times of just selling like 50k crowns, just to buy all the motifs and style pages I am missing. Could probably do it in an afternoon and buy the first ones I see listed. I would end up richer than I started, and while that amount of RL money could be earned in an hour or two it would take months of dedicated in game activities. Sure, no new currency is created, but it still drives prices up.

I used to do that once a year, it would take like 2 million gold to buy the motifs I was missing, but that number kept increasing to the point I stopped doing it.

I can see why ZOS wouldn't ban Crown selling. Allowing it makes it more attractive to buy crowns, even if only for selling it for gold. To them it doesn't matter why you buy the crowns, as long as you do buy them. It is a source of income, after all.

Oh they will never ban crown selling. All crown selling does is increase crown sales. They could care less that a middle man is involved. To ZOS, a sale is a sale.

WrathOfInnos wrote: »

HumbleThaumaturge wrote: »

Contributing to price inflation:
Yesterday, I watched one of my ESO "friends" convert real-world cash into in-game gold via selling Crowns. Crown sellers might raise 50 million to 100 million in gold in a flash (using just a few hours of real-world overtime pay). After that, they buy whatever they want (no farming required), and they simply don't care how much items costs. They just pay whatever is asked for whatever they want. Hence, prices rise. Lots of sellers list items for way above market price, just hoping some ESO hectomillionaire or billionaire will buy at the high price without hesitation. And they do!

I can see how this seems like "buying gold", but the consequences are different. If you could buy gold in the crown store directly that would be a massive problem, because again it would be creating gold aka printing money into the economy. But since the gold spent on exchanging crowns is going from one player to another player it has almost no impact on inflation. The only problem with crown/gold trading IMO is that there is no safe way to perform these trades.

I would argue that crown selling as it exists today is actually good for inflation. Prior to crown gifting, there was much more of a black market gold selling system, that involved hundreds if not thousands of bots farming gold from NPC enemies (creating gold and flooding the economy). I don't see much of this with the crown trading system we have now.

As for TTC and other addons, they certainly result in more consistent prices across the board (not price fixing, just players being informed enough to avoid a bad deal), and expedite the adjustment of prices to match inflation (the prices would rise with or without addons, just would be more delay before players realized inflation was happening without addons). I think the benefits outweigh the downsides though, and being able to search a website instead of traveling to hundreds of guild traders searching for an item is a massive convenience.

I was firmly in that camp for a long time, but I think my position has shifted. Yes, with crown selling, no new money enters economy, and yes, it certainly puts a downward pressure on bots, which do print new money into the system. On it's face, I agree with the premise.

The one thing crown sales potentially do is consolidate wealth. A few hundred bucks and you can be a worth 100 million gold. That makes it very easy to buy things over market value, thus driving up the price of goods. Maybe there is a better word for this phenomenon than inflation, but the practical effect is the same, price increase.

The correct term is 'manipulation', Oreyn. When it's a decided factor and there is no work around.

I'd like to see a big change in the crownstore/the way it works/how we interact with/possibilities to sell...We've been on this discourse boat for quite some time now. I'd really like to see a change and have things put directly into the game to give the game, well...'credibility'. (No bash, personal opinion)

Not sure I totally agree with that as the term, but its academic. If I am intentionally buying selling high in an effort to raise prices (maybe I have lots of the item in question), sure that's manipulation. If I am simply willing to over pay for things I need simply because I am absurdly wealthy, that to me suggest currency devaluation, and inflation is a reasonable term for that.