the problem with creating a good sink is finding a good spot on the cost

if the sink is too cheap, it wont be effective as an actual sink
if the sink is too expensive, it would be prohibitive for most players to actually make use of

housing furniture from achievement and luxury vendors are decent sinks, but the problem at that point comes where each player has a limited amount of houses with a limited amount of space per house

25 notable houses at 700 slots each is 17,500 total slots, if every slot was filled with a furnishing item that cost 250,000 gold, that would eat 4.3 billion gold, which i doubt any single player has, but thats not really decorating a house either, there is going to be varying costs

if you only bought furniture from NPC vendors (where gold is destroyed) and the avg cost is like 25k gold (with some being higher and lower), the player would only end up spending about 400 million gold to fully furnish 25 notable size houses to actually look "decorated"

now how many players have 25 notable houses to furnish, or the 400 million just sitting around to fully furnish them all at once (excluding time spent actually decorating), so while housing sounds like a good gold sink, its really not if the avg cost to furnish 1 notable house with entirely NPC bought furnishings (using the same avg 25k gold spent per item) would only consume about 17.5 mil gold, and unless the person wants to completely destroys all of the furnishings to start over they likely wont spend that again

for me personally i find that kind of cost prohibitive, and while i own 69 total houses (of varying sizes), ive basically not decorated any of them because the cost feels too much for me

edit to add: for some things like mats, its almost entirely a supply/demand issue, perfect roe price has gone up, likely because less people are fishing, mundane runes are expensive because they arent common but housing furniture crafting has a high demand, rosin for woodworking temper is significantly cheaper than dreugh wax or tempering alloy because its not needed for much

Xinihp wrote: »

What if ZOS implemented a sliding scale tax on sale items so that the higher the price went, the higher the "tax?"

This fee would be IN ADDITION to the guild store fee and would not go to the guild store. It would effectively serve as a money sink.

Much like in real life, people will keep raising prices until there are consequences.

Claiming "the price is what people pay" completely ignores the reality of cornering the market and price fixing.

People always claim they want to see more money sinks in game, until someone actually suggests one.

ZOS has the ability to track sales prices for each item over time on every guild store. Based on that they could write a simple algorithm to scale the unit tax accordingly.

Just a simple suggestion which I am almost certain will never be implemented.

The prices rise due to RNG and players not playing or doing in certain things in the game anymore. Whales and well established players now hold the resources and charge each other exuberant prices because they both know how long it takes to get the items. Both don't want to waste time with RNG and want to farm newer items that will lower the times for them to complete the current and previous content faster... Strange dilemma that. It's why my new rule after 20 years of playing MMOs is "if DPS is the talking point in a game, it's a bad game" Previous MMOs I was a tank or healer. They were important.

ANYWAYS

The average player is swept up in this crossfire and some quit. At the beginning of the game there is so many people picking up stuff, doing the dungeons, etc. That is when they usually have the highest number of players playing. This works for a while, but once people move up to the end game, those items and mats stop being farmed. On top of that, the limited inventory space makes people not want to pick up things due to a RNG chance they might get something out of it. It's best to just buy it outright to save space.

Now lets speak on the company side, all those players in the game? This is where the slow cook occurs. This is when the company slowly starts to add things that certain players dislike and others want no matter what and accept without question. Those people who accept without question is who they want to target. Of course even they have their limits but they can make a change in their decision maybe say...3 months?

Anyways they are now finding the base they can get as much profit out of with whatever tactic. Everybody is doing it, YT, FB, GG, AZ, NF, APL, DIS, Peacock, WB, etc. That data can probably be shared and bought and used by most huge companies. That data has the keys to every human beings flaws and how to exploit them to make them feel heard, loved, hated, a part of something bigger, need something, etc.

Every game developer sees how random normal non-gamers throw money to overcome a difficulty in the game and want to tap into that. Even if it's a fraction. They also use many human aspects taken from data against the human to get them to gamble and not feel bad about spending their money, etc. The amount of people may be lower than launch but these are the people who spent 10X to 100X the amount of money in the game than those who left. Then the company starts to cater to this new core that won't leave them until the end of time. They are hooked and also the human aspect of sinking too much money into something and not walking away from it. That's what the slow cook is.

As the prices go up and the dungeons become emptier, Fewer and fewer new players will reach end game. At a certain point the well established players will start to leave. Once that dips below the new players reaching endgame, the game is on it's death march. It still is profitable to the devs because all they have to do is give their base partially 3/4 of what they want. They need them to fight an artificial hurtle and give them access to the answer in the newer content.

I know solutions that can turn things around. The problem is it's experimental and may not profitable. It's best try it on a new game and to go down the tried and true path with the current game and know when the death of the game is coming so that when it happens one is prepared.

We are all playing the MMO of yesteryears. Nowadays companies see mobile games bring in billions. I see traditional games that I still speak about to this day that gave me feeling. Nobody wants to find a true middle ground as that is where the true innovation occurs.

The hope is the newer generation born on the internet will replace people like me. Build them in an echo chamber that makes them feel loved and wanted. The more money they spend, the more they are put up on a pedestal.




TLDR

Inflation is caused by people not doing RNG dungeons/mat retrieval/overland and whales and established players knowing the time it takes to get those materials. As it stops them from farming the new problem to get the new answer to lower the times of the new problem and everything before it. RNG exists to try and keep a player in the game. However, by not placing a way to progress in the game, RNG becomes detrimental over time. (Stickerbook and the chances of getting something that hasn't dropped addresses some of those problems by the way. The problem is it hasn't been done with materials as there are few ways everybody can get their hands on them in a forward progressing manner)

Gold sinks will never EVER replace the most costly thing ever....TIME. Why do you think DPS is so revered in this game? So the prices will always be high. They are not targeting you the average player or the newer player, they are targeting those who they know have big banks and don't want ANY of their time wasted.

Kisakee wrote: »

What you ask for is already in game, only 50% of the fee goes to guild bank.

And 100% of what goes into guild bank is burned on next bid.

With over 200 vendors, guilds being able to sell to guild mates without a vendor and zone sales allowed there is no way a market can be cornered. Everything found in a guild store can also be found out in the world just by playing the game. That helps keep prices in check. The market moves on supply and demand as any healthy market would.
If this market truly mirrored a real world market added cost would get passed along to the consumer causing an increase in price. Gold sinks need to take place where the cost isn't passed along to other consumers.

Vaoh wrote: »

Remove gold from all daily writs.

That would probably screw up the console market badly. It is a primary income source for a quite stable market. Solutions should target the markets that are the problem, not wide-sweeping changes that would upend healthy ones.

Vaoh wrote: »

Remove gold from all daily writs.
That would at least cut off the majority of gold being generated on PC.

Then introduce Crown Gem items for high gold prices which correlate to the inflation rates of each megaserver. It must be done on a per megaserver basis because console is mostly fine - PC is where there is truly mass inflation.

I don’t think ZOS has any interest in mitigating the inflation though or else this situation would have been stopped years ago.

Oreyn_Bearclaw wrote: »

Vaoh wrote: »

Remove gold from all daily writs.
That would at least cut off the majority of gold being generated on PC.

Then introduce Crown Gem items for high gold prices which correlate to the inflation rates of each megaserver. It must be done on a per megaserver basis because console is mostly fine - PC is where there is truly mass inflation.

I don’t think ZOS has any interest in mitigating the inflation though or else this situation would have been stopped years ago.

Totally on your side here, but boy is it an unpopular opinion. Gold rewards from writs are the elephant in the room when it comes to inflation on PC, but almost nobody wants to admit it. The proof is in the pudding as they say. Prices are so much higher on PC than console because it is so much easier to spam 18 writs and print 100k out of thin air.

Of course there are a million things that affect inflation, but the two most obvious (especially in a closed economy like ESO) are money coming into the game, and money going out of the game. Everyone wants to focus on Gold Sinks, which certainly are an important part of the discussion, but if your sink is overflowing, first thing you do is turn off the faucet. Writs are the biggest faucet in Tamriel, way more so on PC. Exactly what we would expect to happen by any reasonable economic analysis IS happening.

Unpopular opinion indeed. I mean... what would be the point in doing writs then? Without the gold you are making a loss there. Are writs only meant to level up your crafting skill? That can't be right. Provisioning and Alchemy writs would probably still result in a material gain which would be fine and jewelry would be unaffected due to the value of chromium, but I don't think woodworking, clothier, enchanting and blacksmith writs would serve a point anymore. The upgrade mats you can get from your hirelings and refinement.
You could say the same thing about ornate gear, PvP campaign rewards, antiquities, thievery and even quest and loot rewards. The only source of gold that I think should be nerfed/removed from the game is gold from the login rewards, because those do not even require effort and are absurdly high - higher than most people have the endurance for if they tried to gain the same amount through writs. But all that would be meaningless anyway.

Even if you reduce the influx of gold to the economy, without something to actually spend (and I mean burn) gold on like new manor sized homes available directly with gold, the problem won't go away. It makes no difference if something costs 10k gold or 10 million gold if the affordability is the same. We need to make things more affortable by increasing the amount of different things you can buy, growing the economy to match the inflation. By offering something new to buy with gold, practically increasing the competition for sellers, the value of gold increases as it is drained from circulation and prices go down. Individual buying power goes up but it will become increasingly hard to own every single thing that gold can buy - thus making people actually play the game to earn gold and revitalizing the economy.

Vaoh wrote: »

Remove gold from all daily writs.
That would at least cut off the majority of gold being generated on PC.

Then introduce Crown Gem items for high gold prices which correlate to the inflation rates of each megaserver. It must be done on a per megaserver basis because console is mostly fine - PC is where there is truly mass inflation.

I don’t think ZOS has any interest in mitigating the inflation though or else this situation would have been stopped years ago.

The real income from writs are the sale of upgrade mats and then high cp master writs.
Now change the gold to furniture mats and we have an double effect.
Probably triple as most fat cats keeps their mats as prices are going up.

Vaoh wrote: »

Remove gold from all daily writs.

We had daily writs for years, daily writs are not the reason for goldinflation. Daily writs take a lot of time and preparation, so not many players even do them. Not to mention, daily writs have an upper limit of 5.1k gold per character!!
The goldinflation began with the introduction of excavation. Excavation allowed even players with low amounts of time to amass huge amounts of wealth easily. Excavation also does not have an upper limit of how many you can make per day or per character, you can just keep excavating the 250g and 1k items every time. over and over. Excavation made gold more accessible, and it should be.

Nothing should be done about inflation... prices level themselves out. As any economy does.

PS: Threads about inflation are foolish. Any changes ZOS would make in relation to the economy would massively change the game, or even break the game.

Dagoth_Rac wrote: »

The normal gold sinks in a game are not gold sinks in ESO. Mounts? Houses? Costumes? Very little is available for gold. So all you get is either gold accumulating because players spend crowns instead of gold, or people doing the quasi-gold-for-crowns thing with gifting. And that just shuffles gold around. It is not a gold sink. It does not remove gold from game economy.

What the game really needs is a native method of buying crown store items with gold. Where you pay some NPC and the gold disappears, rather than the current scheme where gold goes to another player. But if you could buy crown store items with gold, it would hurt crown sales.

Gold accumulation and inflation in ESO is almost impossible to stop as long as ZOS is focused on making desirable items a "crown sink" rather than a "gold sink".

To me this would be the ideal solution, removing gold from all daily writs would break the game.

@Necrotech_Master
I think one other issue of the housing market being a gold sink is that not everyone is interested in it and therefore, it can only sink golds from a portion of the player base. I think we could get good gold sinks results by having ones that appeal to different and wider player styles.

We could get costumes and polymorphs for companions, additional bank space, blacksmith vendors that charge a premium to over repair equipment. We could have some merchant guild hall that we have to donate to to help furnish and to get npcs that sell special items in it.

Vaoh wrote: »

Look at some people legit defending inflation in here lmao. I play on console where our economies are totally fine.

Somehow only PC players are the ones dealing with mass inflation. But yeah nothing to see here, it must be purely by chance. Inflation is actually a good thing irl too we all love it.

So.... wait. You play on console but you're fine stating that PC needs to do whatever to "fix inflation"? Hmmm.

Ratzkifal wrote: »

Sarannah wrote: »

Vaoh wrote: »

Remove gold from all daily writs.

We had daily writs for years, daily writs are not the reason for goldinflation. Daily writs take a lot of time and preparation, so not many players even do them. Not to mention, daily writs have an upper limit of 5.1k gold per character!!
The goldinflation began with the introduction of excavation. Excavation allowed even players with low amounts of time to amass huge amounts of wealth easily. Excavation also does not have an upper limit of how many you can make per day or per character, you can just keep excavating the 250g and 1k items every time. over and over. Excavation made gold more accessible, and it should be.

Nothing should be done about inflation... prices level themselves out. As any economy does.

PS: Threads about inflation are foolish. Any changes ZOS would make in relation to the economy would massively change the game, or even break the game.

Prices level themselves out? Since when? Excuse me, but I am sitting on a ton of gold and have nothing to buy with that. Tons of people do. So where do they turn with all their gold? People who are selling crown store items for gold, which drives the price up to absurd heights. And because crown sellers are funding their trading guilds through their business, the trading bids climb up further and further, making it hard for people to compete without spending real money, while forcing to up their quotas (and prices) too.
Inflation has killed the trading guild I was in because it pained the leaders to kick players who couldn't meet their quota anymore and they refused to start selling crowns or up their quotas further. Massive changes to the economy are needed. Nobody complained about the Housing update deflating the economy, instead everyone was joyed.

Crown store item prices are outside the game. They have zero to do with any perceived in game inflation. There is a shortage of people willing to sell crowns and that is why you are seeing the price increase. Also much more to gift with some of those gifts costing more crowns. Being able to gift homes caused a sudden huge demand for crowns. A demand that still exists as supply has failed to keep pace.
The very top tier selling locations have been increasing in price. There are plenty of other spots available though that are easily affordable and can generate really good profits. The absolute top trading guilds are competing for those prime foot traffic spots more out of prestige than anything else. That is why those locations demand the high costs. I'm in a social guild that gets a trader about once a month. The guild has no dues required. Last time we got the trader I brought in about 3.5 million gold. It is nowhere near a prime spot.