Sellers have little information to work with on how to price things. I'd really rather have this moved more to the buyer's court with auctions, crafting bounties, finder's fees, and the like.The prices sellers on the traders set are very arguably not remotely based on supply and demand
JHartEllis wrote: »Sellers have little information to work with on how to price things. I'd really rather have this moved more to the buyer's court with auctions, crafting bounties, finder's fees, and the like.The prices sellers on the traders set are very arguably not remotely based on supply and demand
This is one of the biggest things in my opinion. We got nothing new for combat since Scribing released, and Subclassing really only made it so all of our alts were totally unnecessary. It didn’t even change the meta gear that Arcanists already had for ages.spartaxoxo wrote: »There needs to be a reason to use all those materials we've been getting flooded with again. People hated the gear treadmill for gameplay reasons but it was a big part of the economy.
The big reasons people ran group content and farmable stuff was 1) Monster Helm styles and 2) Motif pages. And now that there have been several free motif events and a lot fewer people buying them, even the motifs aren’t as good sellers anymore. And as for the helms, we get those pages from the Archive now for way cheaper than we could get them from dungeons, and it’s not like ZOS is good at activating those drops in the first place. We still have 5 old styles from before this year that have never even seen a release, from up to 5 years old a dungeon.spartaxoxo wrote: »There needs to be new farmable stuff in group content. This stuff needs to feel actually obtainable but not so common it has no value. Too rare and nobody will bother, the few that do will command too high of a price to address the issue. Too common and it will be worthless.
spartaxoxo wrote: »PvP and Tales of Tribute need to be more rewarding. They nerfed Tales rewards and PvP hasn't had stuff the general playerbase would have high demand for in a while. What little they do have had been too rare. Niche activities are good places to put desirable items because it inherently limits supply since people will want them item but not want to do the activity to get it.
tomofhyrule wrote: »This is another thing. Tribute coffers have basically nothing, and it’s not exactly a popular activity. I don’t understand why they nerfed the drop rates for things, especially the emote/houseguest fragments that I don’t know anyone who has seen one in two years now. But they also have style pages there, and those seem to never drop either.
A lot of traders just seem to be completely detached from reality. They think just because they hoard hundreds of millions that means everyone else does too. 1mil for a heroism script? Are you out of your damn mind? It's like 15k when it comes around to the NPC shop, or better yet - you will most likely get dozens of them from daily quests. 10k per dreugh wax?! No, thanks, I'm not spending 20% of my total wealth on a single gear piece upgrade, keep your wax, I'll get mine from daily writs. Who do you think is going to need to browse guild stores more - a broke newbie looking to upgrade their gear or a vet who's got golden mats flowing out of their ears? Same goes for cosmetics and decorations. Make your prices sensible - people will start buying more things.
Exactly. Some players here simply don't understand or refuse to see reality that demand is cratering as player base is declining after U46, especially whales.A lot of traders just seem to be completely detached from reality. They think just because they hoard hundreds of millions that means everyone else does too. 1mil for a heroism script? Are you out of your damn mind? It's like 15k when it comes around to the NPC shop, or better yet - you will most likely get dozens of them from daily quests. 10k per dreugh wax?! No, thanks, I'm not spending 20% of my total wealth on a single gear piece upgrade, keep your wax, I'll get mine from daily writs. Who do you think is going to need to browse guild stores more - a broke newbie looking to upgrade their gear or a vet who's got golden mats flowing out of their ears? Same goes for cosmetics and decorations. Make your prices sensible - people will start buying more things.
This is like a subsistence fisherman in the Maldives saying he would buy more semiconductors if the prices came down.
Maybe this is just my inexperienced economic knowledge talking, but lower prices/deflation seem like a good thing (at least in ESO). As an average player, prices were getting way too high for me to afford anything. From Crowns, to motifs, to furnishings, it was just unattainable.
I'm not going to log on and dedicate my entire time for weeks to farming gold just to afford some basic things from Guild Stores. For the average player you accumulate gold gradually from in-game activities, daily rewards, etc. From what I could tell having friends in trading guilds it was only ever the ultra-high gold earners that bought those things for many years.
JHartEllis wrote: »ESO has a good variety of gold sinks, but it does not have gold generators to keep up. At least on PC, the in-game economy has been in a runaway deflationary death spiral, causing things like achievement furnishings and houses to become increasingly unattainable. Trading guilds are brutally demoralized. This is complex, but causes of this are partially a reduction in calendar rewards as well as the 14-day listing duration necessitating more frequent relistings. The market is generally oversupplied in most categories as items are randomly generated into the economy at a rate higher than player demand. A big separate issue would be how to boost demand in various item categories.
A stable to slightly inflationary environment would be better for the game. The higher the inflation, the more affordable all the fixed-cost purchases become, and guild trader activity mostly self regulates potential runaway inflation.
There would be bad, good, and great ways to add more gold to the game to keep the economic engine running. Generally speaking, whatever activities are given additional gold rewards will see more action. The best thing to add gold rewards to would be whatever is underperforming expectations, which I would put mostly at group content like dungeons, trials, and battlegrounds.
The coming consolidated leaderboard change presents a good opportunity to up the rewards with extra gold. The higher the prize, the more people will try for them. Something like 200-500k seems like a large feasible ballpark for actually feeling rewarding.
Golden Pursuits would be a good place to put larger gold rewards. A 500k-1m capstone reward for completing a wide variety of tasks would be very appealing. Individual task rewards of 20-100k for bigger things like specific trials would encourage those groups to form.
Bumping up the prizes from weekly coffers would help as well.
Ultimately, the current state of things precludes the development of additional gold sinks. For example, a unique mount at 5,000,000g would probably be extremely popular but would further exacerbate the deflation problem. Good gold generators would allow for great gold sinks to be added. It's time to look at both sides of this equation.
lower prices/deflation seem like a good thing (at least in ESO).
The problem with ESO is that it's just 6 servers, performance you could solve with hardware but an auction system can become to large, you will get two effects, for more common objects people underbid each others as you have limited slots so you need to move the item, this is very visible with event stuff.I would have thought the most obvious problem with the economy is the existence of the guild traders themselves. A double-gated selling system, via which guilds must bid for trading spots (and via which you cannot sell unless a guild member), means real world (potential) supply and (actual) demand and the trading system can be completely disconnected from one another.
The prices sellers on the traders set are very arguably not remotely based on supply and demand, but on:
1. Nostalgic expectations of achieving prices from years ago.
2. Reduced / extremely distorted (because of the trader bids -- see below) competition among sellers because to sell stuff you have to join a guild, so prices respond glacially in cottoning on to reality when buyers' expectations of what a reasonable price is go down.
3. The guild trader bids, which lead to selling prices being set in order to be able to meet outdated perceptions of what those bids should be, rather than at the level required by demand.
4. Legacy sellers' exaggerated purchasing power compared to the purchasing power of all players. They have a pile of gold already in the bank to spend (so long as they keep playing the game)
ESO has two separate economies going on that only partly -- and hideously inefficiently -- interact. People who sell via the guild traders, and people who don't. That situation should never have been created in the first place but has been allowed to continue for a crazy long time, leading seemingly to the ever greater random gold rewards thrown at players (we saw 100k not so long ago in daily rewards) to try to help people not in the system keep up with the prices in the system.
It is in my opinion the single worst "feature" of ESO and I plain don't understand why it still exists in its current form. This model of trading economy would make a whole lot of sense for an MMO themed entirely around trading. For a do anything play as you like MMO it's unfathomable.
And, quite frankly, given that ZOS seem to have noticed that housing is a major selling point of the game all its own, perhaps it's time to scrap this system once and for all and replace it with open access traders, introduce open access traders that are more heavily taxed than guild traders to run side by side with guild traders, or just get an auction house (although, yes, that would affect the character of trading). Because housing in this game doesn't stay hugely appealing to people who don't trade once they realise that every single thing they want to buy costs as much gold or more than they have in their account.
Yes it sounds a lot like that I was thinking of. Except I did not think of buying ESO+ for it.Good post, now I think the reason why crowns/ gold exchange range has changes is because in the start it was lots of people with years of crowns from ESO+ but did not care much about cosmetic, this has dried up but you also have lots of players with lots of gold who finally spend it while not only is the caches of ESO+ crown used up but its plenty of restrictions on crown gifting.
Now I would like an system there you bought an 1000 crown box with 1000 crowns in it in the crown store.
This box is like any other tradable item, you could gift it or sell it other could buy it and later sell it for an higher price if some sweet items was sold. if opened you receive 1000 crowns.
Zaria, this resembles the EVE Online mechanics.
The ingame currency is called ISK (interstellar credits), though it is not relevant how it is called, lets call it gold.
EVE has one more currency called PLEX (Pilot's License EXchange) it is a premium currency bough with a real money, quite similar to Crowns in ESO
PLEX can be used (mostly) for paying a subscription (and without subscription EVE experience is noticeably limited) and to buy cosmetics.
The major difference is that PLEX tokens are tradable. So unsubscribed players who learned how to make millions of "gold" can spend that gold to buy premium currency to pay theirs subscription.
Rich players who want to get cool shiny spaceships, but also to save theirs time buy PLEXes and put them on Auction House, poor players who can not afford subscription gladly spend theirs hard earned gold. win-win. a lot of moneyz are rotating.
Implementing this approach would, definitely, change a lot in ESO economy. This would not decrease the amount of gold in circulations, but speed up "gold velocity" as quite a lot of goods players really want are Crown Store exclusives.
Though i seriously doubt Zenimax would implement anything like that.
Veinblood1965 wrote: »... and the most recent blow, subclassing caused more people to leave than it drew in. ZoS just does not get it I don't think. Changes like these bring in relatively few new players that actually stay versus the amount of long term players that leave.
Trust has been broken. It's hard to get someone who has left to come back. I'll be one of those once my season pass runs out...
but we have more quieck way to farm gold(by the way, they kinda already did that a bit with scribing: you can do 3 guild quests a day and have 3 scripts of the value of 999 each. It's basically 90.000 gold guaranteed per month, outside of the gold you would make on the side of that doing those dailies. More than 100K/month are then guaranteed and they don't even require too much effort/time)
And the guild trader bidding adds an huge gold sink who mostly take gold from rich players.
Much less players => much less demand and with the same or increased supply => prices going down (deflation).
I don't know why you partially quoted me, just look at crown to gold ratio how fast is crashing which I posted first, it's pretty clear who left and leaving the game after U46 and 47 or simply decided to completely stop spending (my case) but are still in the game or plan to leave.Much less players => much less demand and with the same or increased supply => prices going down (deflation).
Flawed premise. Even if the first point is true, it doesn't mean the second point is. It depends on who is playing less.
If older players, who have most motifs, plans, and have filled their houses are leaving then demand is unaffected and supply is affected.
If newer players, who have little to no motifs, plans, and no housing are leaving then demand is affected and supply is unaffected.
It depends entirely on the balance between leaving and joining.