gold inflation is insane.

Ratzkifal · May 2022

We need a new gold sink. Manor sized homes should be purchasible with gold, if not immediately then at the very least the next time they enter the store again. The ESO economy was in a very similar state before the housing update. The housing update fixed it, but they have stopped releasing houses you can buy with gold. One medium sized home for 1million once a year is not enough.

[snip]
[edited for bashing]

deleted220614-000183 · May 2022

Gold sink will never be introduced.
As I said before , ZOS priority is earn real world currency [snip]
To achieve this, they need to introduce as much as possible crownstore exclusive content and reduce as much as possible
ingame/regular/gold economy content what is perfectly what are we witnessing.

So the problem will persist as long as players are not pissed enough to stop playing at all (and stop buying cronws).

What I'm noticing now it already happens as the game is more or less dead with the exception of major events and after release of the new chapter.

[edited for bashing]

freespirit · May 2022

Ratzkifal wrote: »

We need a new gold sink. Manor sized homes should be purchasible with gold, if not immediately then at the very least the next time they enter the store again. The ESO economy was in a very similar state before the housing update. The housing update fixed it, but they have stopped releasing houses you can buy with gold. One medium sized home for 1million once a year is not enough.

[snip]

Oh I so agree with this, my biggest ever hit to my wealth was buying the three manors to get the Countess title and ofc I wanted the houses!!

It took me quite a long while to recover financially ingame from that.

Now I own every house avaialable for gold in the game and still have piles of gold. Furnishing mats do eat into my wealth BUT if I need an influx of gold I just sell some of my hoards of stuff.

I refuse to use my gold to buy Crown Store items, for my own reasons, however I certainly would buy any and every previous Crownstore houses if they were available for gold!! 😁

[edited to remove quote]

_adhyffbjjjf12 · May 2022

Zos allows people to freely buy and sell gold.
Zos regularly rotates in new gearsets that are more powerful than anything else, or new furniture
People buy/craft sets/furniture
Zos balances sets/ brings in more stuff.
People buy more gold.
People get richer over time as generally you buy slightly more than you need.

Everyone is buying, often without worrying about getting the cheapest price (its easy to get more gold) = inflation.

GOAT4EVAR · May 2022

You know what else this game needs? To stop handing out 5k 10k 100k gold for daily login rewards and endeavor. Its billions of gold added to the ingame economy.

Ratzkifal · May 2022

trpajzla wrote: »

Gold sink will never be introduced.
As I said before , ZOS priority is earn real world currency [snip]
To achieve this, they need to introduce as much as possible crownstore exclusive content and reduce as much as possible
ingame/regular/gold economy content what is perfectly what are we witnessing.

So the problem will persist as long as players are not pissed enough to stop playing at all (and stop buying cronws).

What I'm noticing now it already happens as the game is more or less dead with the exception of major events and after release of the new chapter.

That actually doesn't really affect ZOS. As long as ZOS doesn't change the price of crown store items they will make the same money, because crown sellers still need to buy crowns from ZOS first. If anything a lower gold cost of crowns would be to their benefit because more people might want to buy crowns with gold again and they don't have to worry about the number of crown sellers going down either because they have a monopoly on crown store items, so if there are no crown sellers people will have to spend their own money for their own crowns again.

ZOS cannot lose in this. Their only "loss" is having to actually come up with a solution and putting in a few work hours to make it work, and that is probably why they aren't doing it.

Edit: For clarity, I'm mainly talking about adding any gold sink here, not necessarily about making houses purchasible with gold, even though that was my suggestion. But even then, my suggestion was to have houses be purchasible with gold the second time they enter the store, so ZOS would still make most of their money as the people who would only buy houses with gold weren't going to buy them with crowns anyway.

[edited to remove quote]

FeedbackOnly · May 2022

Housing material prices are no joke

Reaver999 · May 2022

I find that a lot of people who have a problem with "inflation" tend to not take an active role in the games economy. Mats are not at all outrageous, I actually think they sell for pretty cheap. Rubedite ore typically goes for 1-2k a stack. You could purchase mats to make a set of/upgrade decent purple gear for 20k or less. If you are talking about gold mats, yeah they may seem pricey if you don't take an active role in the economy, but "legendary" gear should not be so easy to come by. Even in that case on PC NA it's really just d wax that is pretty pricey. I could buy stacks of gold mats , but I usually just run around in purple gear. If you are just questing for gold I can see a problem, as quests are the least productive in rewarding gold, but as you quest there if you are picking up nodes and looting you'll come across things that are sellable at a decent price. Fish for a few hours and get some perfect roe. There has to be things in the game that take work and saving up for. The economy is like any other aspect of the game and is almost a game in itself. I don't think players who actively play the economy should in some way have to pay more for things or have their activities restricted. When other players are PvPing, questing, doing trials, etc., sellers are checking traders everywhere for good buys that they can flip for more in popular trade spots and there is nothing wrong with that, because if you really don't want to pay the inflated price you will go look for the deal, or grind for it yourself because there is nothing being sold that you can't obtain for yourself. This game has been out for a while so there are some banks balances could never be dwindled. I don't think it is as big as a problem as people think.

kargen27 · May 2022

Playboy_Shrek wrote: »

kargen27 wrote: »

Crowns prices have little to do with in game economy. Changes were made to how crowns could be purchased and that caused a price increase for many that were selling crowns. Also had a change where ZoS allowed homes to be gifted so that increased demand.

There has been some inflation in game but it isn't runaway inflation by any means. For the most part the economy is fluid and adjusts well to supply and demand. Items priced below market value being snatched up and flipped isn't causing inflation. If we could see average price the original price would be higher to match the true market value.

Furnishing materials have shot up in price because demand has greatly increased.

there has nothing to do with supply and demand, less people play this game now than they did in 2020 or 2021. the prices of mats and generally everything have to do with the lack of in game gold sink and flipping. ridiculous argument

Less players would mean less people farming materials. Doesn't matter though as my point is still valid. The popularity of housing is but one reason demand has increased. Players buying items under market value and then selling them at market value isn't causing inflation.
Flipping is not causing inflation. Again if there were a feature in place that shows average prices of items being sold all that would happen is items would be priced at market value the first time. Buying and selling items does not create gold in the game. Buying and selling redistributes gold and actually provides a small gold sink. If inflation exists in the game it would be driven by gold being created not by gold being redistributed.
What you are seeing is a healthy and fluid market that flows with the changes to supply and demand.

Again to be clear. Flipping redistributes gold. Flipping does not create gold. Flipping would not be the cause of inflation as inflation happens from a saturation of currency. Gold coming into the game might cause inflation. Gold changing hands would not.
And yeah there is some inflation in the game but not near the level you seem to believe.

Jpk0012 · May 2022

Xbox is 300:1 crown. PC is 1300:1? Or is OP exaggerating. My experience has been that PC is cheaper than Xbox.

merpins · May 2022

Jpk0012 wrote: »

Xbox is 300:1 crown. PC is 1300:1? Or is OP exaggerating. My experience has been that PC is cheaper than Xbox.

No, op is right. It's around 1300:1 right now. A bit over a year ago, it was 250:1.

merpins · May 2022

Inflation is pretty bad, but I have to say; the ways to make gold now-a-days are also fairly numerous. It's not like it was a couple years ago where it was basically just PVP, writs, and the odd expensive motif. Now, there's dozens of ways to make gold. It used to be only master crafters and PVP players had bank, and PVE players struggled because the ways to make money as a PVE player amounted to basically just luck. It makes sense that the economy would become worse because of the increase in gold making options. Just a couple years ago I struggled having more than 100k at a time, and I've been playing pretty regularly since closed beta. Of course I only had 1 master crafter and didn't like PVP at all back then. Now, I still don't like PVP, but I have 3 master crafters. income isn't hard in ESO now, since you can just choose to do one of like 9 different things to make gold in PVE. You can still do the old way with Tel'Var or boxes in Cyrodiil if you're a PVP player, and you'll probably make gold much faster than any of the PVE methods if you're good at the PVP methods. But the PVE methods are good enough to were I can afford to gold out my gear every couple weeks if I wanted to, rings included. Not that I'd want to gold out my rings right now, back when it was only 150k for Chromium Plating it was expensive, but now it's 300-400k a plating so it's not worth it. I'll wait for the price of that to drop, but still.

Vylaera · May 2022

jecks33 wrote: »

I have near 50 milions gold just doing daily writs on 11 maxed characters, selling yellows mats, junk and overland sets.
Just with daily writs you can easily make 2/3 milions a month but if you are too lazy to relog all your chars every day, it's not Eso's problem

Thanks for inadvertently proving the point being made. You can effortlessly make 50mil apparently. But gold isn't inflated? Can't be both.

The gold economy is inflated to such a horrendous degree because the game generates a few hundred billion gold a year. Just creates it out of thin air. More gold existed today than existed yesterday. A LOT more gold exists today than did a year ago. You don't think that inflates the economy?

Arthtur · May 2022

I just wanna say that the more gold is in game the more gets removed. At some point it will stop as Trading will remove more gold than players create.
Why? Because we generate fixed number of gold and remove %.
For example player A did daily writs and got 5k gold for quests and sold Chromium Plating for 200k. Gold removed - 9k.
Player B got the same amount of gold but sold Chromium Plating for 300k. Gold removed - 13.5k.
Those numbers are just to show how this works.

And if somebody is flipping its means that the same Item is sold 2 times which removes even more gold....

wolfie1.0. · May 2022

Playboy_Shrek wrote: »

kargen27 wrote: »

Crowns prices have little to do with in game economy. Changes were made to how crowns could be purchased and that caused a price increase for many that were selling crowns. Also had a change where ZoS allowed homes to be gifted so that increased demand.

There has been some inflation in game but it isn't runaway inflation by any means. For the most part the economy is fluid and adjusts well to supply and demand. Items priced below market value being snatched up and flipped isn't causing inflation. If we could see average price the original price would be higher to match the true market value.

Furnishing materials have shot up in price because demand has greatly increased.

there has nothing to do with supply and demand, less people play this game now than they did in 2020 or 2021. the prices of mats and generally everything have to do with the lack of in game gold sink and flipping. ridiculous argument

Please explain to me why then green provisioning recipes can not be sold for more than 100 gold? Or why certain event motifs and styles sell for less? I have 1500 Firepot pieces of each type that I can't sell for 25 gold each. If inflation were not impacted by supply and demand then I should be able to sell those for several thousand gold each right?

Supply and demand are major factors of the in game economy, they are just not the only factors. Less people are playing right now.

And yes players flip items. But players doing the flipping have been doing it for years.

And yes I agree that we need more stuff to buy with gold preferably cosmetics. Zos really should consider more options around that.

wolfie1.0. · May 2022

Arthtur wrote: »

I just wanna say that the more gold is in game the more gets removed. At some point it will stop as Trading will remove more gold than players create.
Why? Because we generate fixed number of gold and remove %.
For example player A did daily writs and got 5k gold for quests and sold Chromium Plating for 200k. Gold removed - 9k.
Player B got the same amount of gold but sold Chromium Plating for 300k. Gold removed - 13.5k.
Those numbers are just to show how this works.

And if somebody is flipping its means that the same Item is sold 2 times which removes even more gold....

You are assuming all trades are done via a guild trader. A lot of flipper buy via zone chat.

PeacefulAnarchy · May 2022

Some event style pages are dirt cheap, while others are sky high. Some motifs have fallen and don't get up, but others seem very resilient even after jubilee. Gold mats and a select number of alchemy mats have gone through the roof, while base crafting mats and many other alchemy mats have stayed rather stable. The economy is not a monolith. There is undoubtedly inflation in some markets, but it is not universal.The problem with these discussions is that people always come in with single causes they think are the issue, rather than examining the very varied issues going on. The divide is not simply one time use vs reusable. The divide, if you actually look at the specifics is who the buyer is. The economy is in a rich get richer situation, and the things the rich want to buy that have some kind of limited supply is what is inflating, because those people are willing to pay what it takes.

Flippers are a symptom, not the cause. People only flip if someone is buying the upmarked items. If demand was lower or supply was higher or people didn't have that much gold to spend on those things then flippers leave that market. You don't see flippers driving up chromium or wax prices anymore, because they've reached a point where you can't push the price up significantly. Note that there can still be individual flippers in such a market, but they make a living by snatching up deals, whether in traders or zone chat spam, and selling at market value. That's different from flippers that try to control supply to raise the going price. That does happen on really rare items because it's easier to keep up with anyone selling low, and if you can control the market even just for a few days, new listings will match your newly set rate.

Same with crown sellers. Crown sellers allow players to become in game rich by spending real money and it's one way to access the top end of the market, but they aren't causing inflation of anything in game. If there were no crown selling the current people buying crowns would have even more gold and less to spend it on, driving the prices of the few ingame things they are interested in higher. Crown prices have risen not because everyone in the game is richer, but because the top segment is richer, and that top segment is willing to pay higher.

The bottom end of the market is rather steady, so solutions that involve reducing the gold in the economy on a wide scale seem like they will hurt the poor while keeping the current divide. The only solution I can see is a gold sink that appeals to the rich and somehow scales to their ability to pay while not taking away from the poorer players. And it needs to in some way be repeatable, similar to the lux/golden vendors. Houses are nice, but they're one time things. ZOS doesn't seem to care, so I doubt they'd be interested in putting in the design work to make something that would work as a real repeatable gold sink.

kargen27 · May 2022

BroughBreaux wrote: »

jecks33 wrote: »

I have near 50 milions gold just doing daily writs on 11 maxed characters, selling yellows mats, junk and overland sets.
Just with daily writs you can easily make 2/3 milions a month but if you are too lazy to relog all your chars every day, it's not Eso's problem

Thanks for inadvertently proving the point being made. You can effortlessly make 50mil apparently. But gold isn't inflated? Can't be both.

The gold economy is inflated to such a horrendous degree because the game generates a few hundred billion gold a year. Just creates it out of thin air. More gold existed today than existed yesterday. A LOT more gold exists today than did a year ago. You don't think that inflates the economy?

In that sense inflation does exist in the game. Income is keeping up with (and surpassing) price increase so some inflation is necessary to maintain supply and demand consistencies. There is not runaway inflation as the OP is trying to portray.

The ESO economy is healthy and fluid. Players at any level can afford all that they need and most of what they want. The wanted items may take a while for a new player to obtain but that has been the case since day one.

Amottica · May 2022

Playboy_Shrek wrote: »

this game needs more ingame gold sinks and a live updated built in list to show people the average listing price to at least reduce flipping. you literally cant craft to make gold anymore because the mats sell for more than what the crafted items are actually worth.

Add more in-game gold sinks and the same people who struggle with prices today will struggle with prices after the gold sinks are added. It comes down to those good with their gold, both doing what it takes to earn it and not spending it willy-nilly, who will still have more gold and can buy what they need.

Also, crown sellers will sell their crowns for what they feel is worth their real-world money vs the artificial fake currency of the game. It is all relative and those selling the crowns are in control.

@Arthtur provides a great explanation of what is really going on.

deleted220614-000183 · May 2022

As I said before, they (ZOS) will never introduce new gold sinks [snip]
All you can buy for gold is more or less garbage with the exception of couple of necessary things like crafting stations but even these have more fancy crownstore countrerparts.
I tell you something, look what sort of housing items are sold let's say under 1M golds in guild shops and look at any top end fully decorated house how many items like that you will observe. Couple of platforms, couple of statues, couple of trees and that's all.
Everything else you will observe are crownstore (and what's even worse, crown crates) items, furnishing packs, limited stuff and so on.
Why ? Because people wants to show the best they can do.
Nobody decorating a house and earning 50M+ per week (which is quite normal for the owner of writ factory or crownseller) is wiling to put gold economy garbage (under 1M gold a piece) as a decoration for the house and ZOS knows that and that's why they focus on these people and let them spent on very rare items.

No gold sink babies will be introduced. Just suffer and cry and observe how your gold savings are shrinking to zero whatever you do (except of investing them into something useful, for example attunable crafting stations, rare motifs after event ends and they are temporarily cheap etc).

P.S: inflation is biting all of us, not only "players who are not economically active" The only different is that people earning 50M per week don't care as some 500k loss due to inflation per week is under their ability to notice.

[edited for mild bashing]

deleted220614-000183 · May 2022

Oh, one more thing.
I told a lot about crownsellers. One could admit, that crownsellers are not causing inflation as they dont add new golds in the game. Well, yes and no.

ZOS (in polite words) missmanaged crownsellers. Couple of these crownsellers ruined whole comunities of active players as 500 players in a trading guild were not able compete in weekly bids against one crownseller. What we were witnessing were empty crownseller guilds in premium spots just because these toxic idiots (crownsellers) have nothing else to do with the easy made golds then invest them in ridiculously high weekly bids. Dozens of trading guild with long history quit in the last 2 years and ZOS was not moving a finger.
Unless they noticed that these crownsellers are running laundering schema with stolen credit cards and buying crowns in Argentina and selling for European players and that ZOS is losing revenue in Europe.
Then they finally fixed it (it took them half an year or so) but the damage was done and will never be fully recovered as these old guilds quited and these who survived are permanently under huge pressure because crownsellers and writ factory owners were never fully eliminated from the game.

So crownsellers are not causing inflation directly by adding golds but they are causing it anyway, as starting players are struggling join active trading guild with good located NPC seller.

Amottica · May 2022

trpajzla wrote: »

Oh, one more thing.
I told a lot about crownsellers. One could admit, that crownsellers are not causing inflation as they dont add new golds in the game. Well, yes and no.

ZOS (in polite words) missmanaged crownsellers. Couple of these crownsellers ruined whole comunities of active players as 500 players in a trading guild were not able compete in weekly bids against one crownseller. What we were witnessing were empty crownseller guilds in premium spots just because these toxic idiots (crownsellers) have nothing else to do with the easy made golds then invest them in ridiculously high weekly bids. Dozens of trading guild with long history quit in the last 2 years and ZOS was not moving a finger.
Unless they noticed that these crownsellers are running laundering schema with stolen credit cards and buying crowns in Argentina and selling for European players and that ZOS is losing revenue in Europe.
Then they finally fixed it (it took them half an year or so) but the damage was done and will never be fully recovered as these old guilds quited and these who survived are permanently under huge pressure because crownsellers and writ factory owners were never fully eliminated from the game.

So crownsellers are not causing inflation directly by adding golds but they are causing it anyway, as starting players are struggling join active trading guild with good located NPC seller.

Gold sellers, the bots, add gold to the game since much of their source of gold is selling trash from what mobs drop. Many of us have seen the bot trains going around killing trash.

Monte_Cristo · May 2022

GOAT4EVAR wrote: »

You know what else this game needs? To stop handing out 5k 10k 100k gold for daily login rewards and endeavor. Its billions of gold added to the ingame economy.

That's how some of us get 100k gold. We're not all playing the game for the economy simulator.

PeacefulAnarchy · May 2022

Amottica wrote: »

Gold sellers, the bots, add gold to the game since much of their source of gold is selling trash from what mobs drop. Many of us have seen the bot trains going around killing trash.

On PC? The only bots I've seen are the ones that do harvesting loops, and even those are pretty rare. I haven't seen any bot trains on PCNA in the 2 years I've been playing.

Freelancer_ESO · May 2022

I'd question if the gold sellers are getting their money from trash mobs drop on PC. The price gap between gold on PC and gold on Console was pretty large last I looked and one would not think it'd be that big if you were just killing mobs for trash drops in both places.

My impression would be that they are likely exploiting something they can't do on console/can't get away with or they deal heavily in goods that are sold on Guild Traders and are impacted by the price differences between PC and Consoles.

deleted220614-000183 · May 2022

PeacefulAnarchy wrote: »

Amottica wrote: »

Gold sellers, the bots, add gold to the game since much of their source of gold is selling trash from what mobs drop. Many of us have seen the bot trains going around killing trash.

On PC? The only bots I've seen are the ones that do harvesting loops, and even those are pretty rare. I haven't seen any bot trains on PCNA in the 2 years I've been playing.

In some locations you will meet only bots, running in circles all the day/night opening treasure chests.
They even don't bother to pretend they are not bots, they have names like "bot564"and so on.

deleted220614-000183 · May 2022

chessalavakia_ESO wrote: »

I'd question if the gold sellers are getting their money from trash mobs drop on PC. The price gap between gold on PC and gold on Console was pretty large last I looked and one would not think it'd be that big if you were just killing mobs for trash drops in both places.

My impression would be that they are likely exploiting something they can't do on console/can't get away with or they deal heavily in goods that are sold on Guild Traders and are impacted by the price differences between PC and Consoles.

True. They were harvesting resources in the past but now they are focused on normal daily writs.
They run thousand multiaccount factories which are fully automated - login, running to the pick-up/drop-off points, crafting, selling and banking. Just go to Vivec and observe what's happening there.
Dolgubon's Lazy Writ Crafter is not available on console plus they cant automate bot routes, that's why this problem affects PC platform mostly.

Unfortunatelly, this strategy is the most efficient way how to produce gold currency and it is present in the game with impunity as ZOS is reluctant to punish suchbehavior as long as such created golds are not sold on the black market for the real money.

So for the ZOS is absolutely OK if these golds are partly used for bids on guildtraders and the result is that thousands of beginers can't join trading guilds and ingame economy and sell their surplus items even if they would like to sell it under the current market price and curb inflation a bit.

FlopsyPrince · May 2022

Playboy_Shrek wrote: »

EF321 wrote: »

Playboy_Shrek wrote: »

a single flipper in one of my guilds makes 50+ million a week in gold.

As in, they buy from others for 0 gold total, and sell for 50 million total?

well. its better to not assume people are that stupid or post condescending comments, but the amount of money they make will keep compounding as their capital increases further making them spend more money on things and adding to the loop of inflation.

I assume he meant buying and selling at a higher price. That is what "flipping" means.

That works mostly because the current guild trader system is so bad. Hard to find a good price and even the things you want.

While flipping happened on the central AH in WoW, it was much more limited. This system is primed to reward some for flipping.

====

As to the price of Crowns: I sold Crowns for the first (and possibly last) time recently. 3K gold per Crown made it worthwhile in one case. It was too cheap to make it of interest before.

deleted220614-000183 · May 2022

Trading system would work perfectly if ZOS is not pushing crownstore and monetizing the game to the extreme.
In current situation everybody is beaten except of payers and cheaters.

And it has consequences as payers and cheaters are not the people making the core of the game community.

Xinihp · May 2022

kargen27 wrote: »

Crowns prices have little to do with in game economy. Changes were made to how crowns could be purchased and that caused a price increase for many that were selling crowns. Also had a change where ZoS allowed homes to be gifted so that increased demand.

There has been some inflation in game but it isn't runaway inflation by any means. For the most part the economy is fluid and adjusts well to supply and demand. Items priced below market value being snatched up and flipped isn't causing inflation. If we could see average price the original price would be higher to match the true market value.

Furnishing materials have shot up in price because demand has greatly increased.

None of the things you mention track with observations, and I would argue it IS runaway inflation.

3 years ago the average crown exchange rate was 400:1. More than that was considered high.

The issue with Steam sale prices in other countries cracking down on VPN's etc. was a minor blip as was house gifting.

Year after year, even month by month, crown prices in gold have climbed with no proportional increase in game gold availability. Antiquities being released two years ago doesn't account for the more than 50% increase in just the last 6 months.

It is also consistent over the entire RMT scene. Carry guilds have begun organizing in Discord to raise prices for "consistency" because a handful of top sites (not posting names) decided to DOUBLE their rates from 4 million gold for titles/personality runs to 8 million, with trial carries running upwards of 30 MILLION GOLD.

All this is a direct result of the runaway crown to gold conversion rate.

It is not a conspiracy to observe that ZOS benefits from this increase, while new players (and players in general) suffer as their gold and thus TIME is worth less and less.

How does ZOS benefit? With 1 or 2 massive crown exchange sites effectively corning the market and rigging prices higher and higher, the number with gold to buy crowns through gifting decreases, and the number who can't afford the gold or just give up and buy it with money increases.

This directly increases ZOS's earnings in the short term, while contributing to FOMO burnout in the long term.

The handful of super-monopolists only have so much they are interested in or can buy with that gold or crowns. But by effectively allowing the exchange rate to skyrocket out of control, ZOS effectively creates a defacto scenario that walks back their crown gifting system by making it inaccessible to the average player, who just ends up spending real money.

It also creates a very bad image of the company in the eyes of the average customer being pushed out and effectively told their time is no longer worth even half what it was just 3 years ago.

The best thing ZOS could do at this point is what WoW did with tokens, and just set a sliding scale exchange rate and allow people to buy things directly from the crown store with gold just like houses, and cut out the increasingly corrupt and greedy middlemen who are driving customers away with their exclusive price fixing.