Lags wrote: »

prices were disgustingly over inflated. So personally i dont think its thats bad. You really have to ask yourself why were wax like 8k on xbox and 40k on pc. Or why crowns were 100 on xbox and 1600-2000 on pc. Its gross. The prices of many items make way more sense now. Higher than console but not insanely high.

However, I dont think its a good thing that it seems like a ton of people aren't interested in trading anymore. That seems like a bad thing, and it seems like it started with the trader and mail time changes. Which honestly seems really stupid to me. Its just not that big of a deal, but maybe it is to the people who only trade and move a ridiculous amount of items. Which brings me to my next point.

Ive said for years i think the reason prices on PC were so over inflated, compared to console, is because of addons like TTC make it a lot easier for richest players in the game to manipulate the market. People do it on console as well, but its much easier with something like TTC being a central auction house for many people. Maybe one of the reasons the prices have dropped so much is that many of those players arent trading or playing anymore because the trade and mail time reductions made it too annoying for them. And it probably doesnt help that the game is bleeding players in general. Idk, it could be a lot of things but thats my guess.

Again, its not a good thing in every way but personally i am happy to be far away from 40k wax, 26k temps, etc. Il admit I do miss selling my hakeijos for 100k though.

While you were paying 25k for a Dreugh Wax on PC in the past, you could sell yours for 25k as well. Materials are pretty easy to farm once you've spent enough skill points in crafting lines, so it wasn’t very hard to make a lot of money and then make expensive items/materials affordable.

The same applies now: prices are lower and theoretically materials are easier to buy, but at the same time, you can't make as much money as you could before the economy crashed.

Regarding the the Crown price... well, it’s never been official, and I think it’s only regulated by supply and demand. There are probably more players on PC, which is why you can sell Crowns at a better price.

Economy crashed a year ago. Now in a few weeks we will have another anniversary event.

Desiato wrote: »

No one knows for certain. There are countless theories.

IMO, the introduction of the Arcanist with the Necrom Chapter followed that summer by the Epic giveaway on PC drove demand for many items.

As the prices of those items rose, so did activities to produce them: especially crafting writs for surveys and master writs.

The supercharged economy then triggered an increase in speculation. Players who buy and sell items to make a profit. There were so many flippers, flippers were probably selling to flippers who would sell to flippers, and so on..

And as players became more wealthy, they started throwing their gold around to buy vanity items, crowns, and services like carries.

When demand began to slow as console players who switched to PC during the Epic giveaway finished gearing up and most enthusiasts already had their Arcanists levelled and geared, prices stagnated for a while....

And then the 2024 Jubilee event hit. As far as I can recall, it was the most rewarding ever and players were highly engaged in getting the most out of it, flooding the game with rare materials -- AND, one method people used to get gift boxes was completing crafting writs on multiple characters, which meant more surveys and master writs being generated. The crafting writ turn-in areas were packed.

Most experienced sellers know there is a lull in activity and sales in the lead-up to a new chapter launch, so they sat on their inventory, expecting prices to rebound when the chapter hit. When this didn't happen, sellers started liquidating and the commodity bubble was revealed.

As prices began to drop, players started to panic sell and the process fed itself.

IMO, the ESO economy had been a bubble for years prior to these events because the craft bag makes it so easy to hoard resources. The extent of this bubble only became apparent after it burst.

On top of all of that, some would say ESO suffered a dip in player activity through 2024.

This was my response to a similar question posted not too long ago.

Regardless of whether it was a speculative bubble or if there were other reasons, enough time has passed to call what happened a correction, IMO. The values today are more reflective of supply and demand than before the crash.

The bottom line is items have little value because they are so abundant.

Lags wrote: »

prices were disgustingly over inflated. So personally i dont think its thats bad. You really have to ask yourself why were wax like 8k on xbox and 40k on pc. Or why crowns were 100 on xbox and 1600-2000 on pc. Its gross. The prices of many items make way more sense now. Higher than console but not insanely high.

However, I dont think its a good thing that it seems like a ton of people aren't interested in trading anymore. That seems like a bad thing, and it seems like it started with the trader and mail time changes. Which honestly seems really stupid to me. Its just not that big of a deal, but maybe it is to the people who only trade and move a ridiculous amount of items. Which brings me to my next point.

Ive said for years i think the reason prices on PC were so over inflated, compared to console, is because of addons like TTC make it a lot easier for richest players in the game to manipulate the market. People do it on console as well, but its much easier with something like TTC being a central auction house for many people. Maybe one of the reasons the prices have dropped so much is that many of those players arent trading or playing anymore because the trade and mail time reductions made it too annoying for them. And it probably doesnt help that the game is bleeding players in general. Idk, it could be a lot of things but thats my guess.

Again, its not a good thing in every way but personally i am happy to be far away from 40k wax, 26k temps, etc. Il admit I do miss selling my hakeijos for 100k though.

Players can't manipulate the market beyond just a day or two after new items appear. To many locations to try and monitor. If you are looking for bargains on TTC they will most likely be gone before they even get posted. Sometimes a few might slip through. TTC isn't a live representation of the items available.
I do think add-ons were a big part of why PC prices were higher. It is much easier to make gold using add-ons. Doing daily crafting writs is basically one click at each station then go turn in. More gold in shorter time
of course will devalue the gold. The PC servers needed a correction and I think all the events helped force that issue. We had an almost perfect storm of supply outweighing demand and that caused an over correction. Prices are now slowly creeping back to where it will be worth the effort to farm items.
I doubt we will ever see the high prices sellers enjoyed before the anniversary events began.

Events should be enjoyable and we should look forward to them. Instead we see the approaching anniversary event as a bogeyman for the economy...
This should make ZOS think...

If somebody has already mentioned this, I missed it so I apologize for repeating it, but they upped the drop rate of some materials we use in furnishing plans for housing as well, such as mundane runes and heartwood. 🌳

Rishikesa108 wrote: »

Events should be enjoyable and we should look forward to them. Instead we see the approaching anniversary event as a bogeyman for the economy...
This should make ZOS think...

I understand this kind of opinion, but it is not and never will be the opinion of the vast majority of players. The anniversary event is indeed expected with great appreciation for the more casual players and some newcomers who have the possibility of earning rare items by doing simple missions.

The event is a bogeyman only for sellers who want to accumulate more and more money, and these same sellers continue to make money, but on a smaller scale.

I think this type of discussion is healthy and I think it's even healthier to look for other ways to make money, as long as the price of crowns falls proportionally

Please do not understand my speech/opinion as a criticism of yours, I found it very important for showing an opinion on this subject. I hope that this topic will continue to be a great debate of ideas, because in the end, many different points can be presented and make us reflect on this subject, in a civilized way.

Rishikesa108 wrote: »

Events should be enjoyable and we should look forward to them. Instead we see the approaching anniversary event as a bogeyman for the economy...
This should make ZOS think...

Many of us ARE looking forward to the rewards. You just need to adjust to the demand. Ttc, mm, and ESO hub tools help greatly.

kargen27 wrote: »

katanagirl1 wrote: »

Treeshka wrote: »

Economy crashed a year ago. Now in a few weeks we will have another anniversary event.

Ah, that reminds me…just about everyone said the drop in the economy was caused only by cheap mats from last year’s anniversary and the market would recover by the end of the year. There was a lot of denial that the shorter guild listing times was a factor. Now we are approaching the next anniversary and at least on console, the economy has not recovered and it is still hard to sell anything. Just today I got back an alchemy writ for 5 vouchers that did not sell for 3k.

You want to hold onto your alchemy writs until there is a double XP event. Prices always increase for those events. Maybe not as much as they used to but they will increase.

I only sell the ones with expensive ingredients like mudcrab chitin, violet coprinus, and torchbug thorax as I don’t have space to keep them all.

I have nothing but good things to say about the efforts ZoS has made to reset the market prices. Prices were downright silly. I recall regularly being able to sell a single stack of Columbine - a regular, base game Alchemy ingredient used for regular base game things - for 750k to 1mil gold on the regular for a while there.

Which was nice enough, sure. But there's absolutely no reason for that kind of bloat, and it's absolutely off-putting and discouraging for new &/or casual players to stare down prices like that for basic materials. And shrieking that those people could also go play fetchy market games at the Guild Traders isn't actually helpful - not everyone logs in to a video game in their finite leisure time with the burning desire to analyze market patterns and dive in to econ-simulator Purgatory.

Yes: I make less gold now than I did then. But I feel like I have staggeringly more buying power with the money I do make than I did during those market "heights". People got greedy, and they could afford to put things up for ridiculous prices and just wait for desperate whales. I may have been making millions, but those millions also didn't go very far. Those big numbers were so pointless.

I can make 500k with a few hours of dedicated materials farming these days, and I feel like that 1/2 million goes WAAAAAYYYYY further than it did before. I buy so many more furnishing materials, motif pages, furnishing plans, etc with a smaller pool of gold than I ever did "making millions".

These are all good changes. I hope the pattern continues. There are a lot of people screaming that the sky is falling for no reason other than "big number get smaller!!! no like!!!". And the problem is simply not that dire, if you even consider it a problem (I do not).

And yes, I'm fully aware there are gold sinks with static pricing that are affected by this. It's harder to buy expensive Achievement properties with gold now than it was during the "market heights". But it isn't, in my experience, astronomically harder. A 3 million gold property is still very attainable with the current market - you just will probably have to save up for more than a day or two, or a week. Which, honestly: seems like intended design. That a 3 million gold palatial property is supposed to be a reward for a grind, not chump change.

The markets will become exactly as stupid as the developers let them. I log into Star Trek Online once every six months and laugh at the "everything costs BILLIONS" economy, play Space Barbie for five minutes, and then leave for another six months. I'm very grateful ZoS has taken steps to mitigate that kind of effect.

prices were disgustingly over inflated. So personally i dont think its thats bad. You really have to ask yourself why were wax like 8k on xbox and 40k on pc. Or why crowns were 100 on xbox and 1600-2000 on pc. Its gross. The prices of many items make way more sense now. Higher than console but not insanely high.

However, I dont think its a good thing that it seems like a ton of people aren't interested in trading anymore. That seems like a bad thing, and it seems like it started with the trader and mail time changes. Which honestly seems really stupid to me. Its just not that big of a deal, but maybe it is to the people who only trade and move a ridiculous amount of items. Which brings me to my next point.

Aaah... so basically you enjoy the low prices but can't understand why less people are even bothering spending their ingame time to feed your demands for less and less revenue. Gotcha. Maybe it's somehow connected!? Just a wild guess... idk.

Anyways, one more thing that contributed to the changes in the market situation was the introduction of the sticker book and the ability to reproduce an infinite number of items. That basically made gear farming redundant. A MS inferno staff went for 300k back in the day. Now it's like 5k because the trait doesn't matter.

I`ve actually went down to one guild store to try and make something so yeah the market is very bad. The prices have dropped so much that i`m actually getting more from a regular merchant than my guilds. Very sad but I will do what I have to do.

Economy is ok on PS - is this a PC-only thing?

Please give us a new class or even a new race, I'd buy that so friggen fast.