seebs

What makes a price "stupid" as opposed to "high"?

Serious question. Within the last month or so, I've spent well over $10 on a piece of plastic with a tiny, tiny, bit of aluminum in it, probably cost all of ten cents to make. I've been known to spend $50 on those. I've been known to pay as much as $50 for about five, maybe ten cents worth of wood, pulped until it wasn't even sturdy anymore. Heck, some guy just offered me nearly $2k for a collection of bits that will cost an immeasurably small fraction of a cent to deliver to him.

I propose the following hypothesis:

You will not find any meaningful definition of a "stupid" price that has the following two characteristics simultaneously:

1. It is possible to objectively apply it to an economic circumstance.
2. Economists who read it do not laugh at you.

I have often never bothered to slot Stamina. Even without an end mod enhancement in it, it makes a very noticeable difference in available blue. Similarly, Health is quite noticeable unenhanced.

It can pretty much destroy a spawn, they just sit there choking. Very effective.

... ACK!

You know, I have GOT to stop believing things that I see in the "detailed info" window.

I once played a warlock who treated ALL channels as IC. So when people showed up asking what people thought about RP, she'd go into rants about how horrible it was.

Because, see, people who are pretending to be "computer gamers" don't take things seriously, and they just laugh when you torture them.

Timi: One of the few things I still miss about WoW.

Yeah, I used to live in China. Food was guaranteed to be cheap, but they could run out, and they couldn't get more -- because getting more would cost more than food could be sold for. So you'd go to the store and there'd be a large empty display with prices marked. Wonderful prices, extremely affordable.

It's basic economics. If it costs more to produce more X than you can make selling X, you won't produce more X. If that means there's not enough X, you end up with rationing or you just plain don't have enough to go around.

When prices match the intersection of supply and demand, there's enough stuff. If you price things above that point, you have excess supply -- say, look at the US housing market right now. There's a ton of condos and the like near us that are empty because they cost more than people are willing to pay. If you price things below that point, you run out -- say, look at special sale items.

Ever go to a store, see that something is discounted, and note that there's none of it on the shelf? The price was below the supply/demand intersection, they sold out. If it had been food, there would be no food to be had. (Or at least, none of that specific food.)

Ever go to the WW market, and look at the last N transactions on the really valuable PvP IOs? There usually aren't any. There aren't any because they are worth more than 2B inf, thus, no one is going to sell them at that price or lower.

The difference with the game is just that the developers can create as many of a given recipe as they want. Same with anything else; you can just create mu vestments or whatever. As a result, there's no problem with running out of supply in terms of things the developers do.

However, the fact remains: The developers have complete statistics on what sells, and how many of them there are. They also control the drop rates of everything in the game. Their response to the previous state of the market was to introduce a pricing scheme in which purples are driven towards costing at least ten times as much as the best orange procs. (If they cost any less, it is more efficient to use a-merits to buy the orange procs, sell those, and buy the purples with the resulting inf.)

Similarly, they've put in AE ticket purchases of salvage and recipes, and reward merit purchases of recipes, in order to create a way for people to bypass the market if they want to -- and the costs they've picked reflect their feeling on how valuable these things should be.

I know it came from muds. I was there. I was playing Abermud II and IV back in the 80s.

Now consider this text:

Note: "A mobile". Not "A mobile object". The word is mobile, the abbreviation is mob. There is no acronym here.

They already have this with merits and tickets.

If they added one with inf... Well, obviously, it'd cap prices at those values. Mostly it would mean a LOT more people would get these things, because if you set the prices low enough that they matter, you're setting them way below the market value. So you get a ton of people buying at those prices.

I'd guess it'd be a very effective inf dump, but I don't think it would help.

You're making a huge assumption here, which is that the devs actually intend to lower these prices. If they did, they would have done so ages ago by increasing drop rates.

Heck, look at A-merits. The devs just took action to INCREASE the cost of purples. Increase. They wanted purples, and PvP IOs, to cost more.

I sorta doubt this.

This is an interesting thought.

See, for real markets, this idea is fully into pants-on-head territory. We know what happens when people set "common sense" price caps on food; they have devastating shortages and people starve.

But in this case, the "price cap" is implemented by creating more supply. You're not limiting what people can charge for the existing supply, but rather, providing more, such that there is always enough supply to meet whatever the demand would be at the cap. There might be more supply, but there can never be less.

If the devs had wanted to increase drop rates, they would have.

Basically, the problem here is that your "common sense" prices have nothing to do with what things are worth; they're just arbitrary limits pulled out of the air.

Furthermore, we have compelling evidence that your "common sense" prices are much lower than the prices the devs want to see for things.

The devs can read this forum. They watch the marketplace. They know what things sell for. They know how many alchemical silvers drop, how many are sold, how many are deleted. If they felt alchemical silver was overpriced, they would increase the drop rate.

The intention of the system is that people can't just automatically have something at a low price. (And empirically, the prices you are advocating must be far lower than market value, or you wouldn't really be proposing the feature.) It is that people who get something and people who want something can make deals which are mutually satisfactory... and that is exactly what the current system offers.

The devs have offered additional ways to purchase specific things, such as recipes or arcane salvage. The prices they've placed on those are non-trivial, such that people would often prefer to use the market. That suggests that, in effect, they've already imposed those caps -- only they've imposed them in alternative formats, such as a-merits and reward merits and tickets. But you can still quickly figure out what those are worth, and whether you'd rather spend them or buy something with inf.

This is a very good point. Every day, I check my marketing stuff across something like 15 toons. The bulk of the time it takes, many days, is waiting for the 30 second logout timer. If I do have stuff to do, it takes a couple of minutes and generates many millions of inf.

I don't wait around for orders to fill or anything. I pick a price I think will probably fill in the next day, place my order, and log out and on to the next toon. For recipes, I might have bids on 5 each at 8 consecutive levels or something like that, especially for procs where level isn't a crucial thing. Keep one or two up for sale, run with it.

This has been my experience, whether I'm playing deathknights and bears or Dark Armor. I go into the first spawn, I do my job normally, I see what happens. If people aren't having any trouble, I speed up a bit, start leaving a couple of things for them to finish killing. If five seconds after I enter a group there's not a blue bar in sight among the enemies, I worry a lot less about leaving a couple of things for a scrapper to mop up.

It's short for "mobile". It's just a shortening of a word. Programmers do this all the time:

string => str
instruction => insn
mobile => mob
internationalization => i18n
macro => m4
message => msg
object => obj
procedure => proc (NOT an acronym for "Pogramed Random OCcurrence")
window => win
diagnostic => diag

People love to try to make up backronyms for these things, but they're just abbreviations. What happens is, someone learns that it's a technical term, and writes it in all caps, and then other people infer that it must be an acronym and try to make up the acronym for it.

All of these are just abbreviations, not acronyms. They are shortenings of single words.

(ETA: To further emphasise how stupid my claim that acronyms had to be initialisms was, consider that I already knew that DEFCON was an acronym.)