If there were no market fees...

How would your behavior change if there were no market fees? What would the market look like?

The most obvious difference is that we'd have one less influence sink, which would lead directly to inflation.

I think a second, more subtle result would be an increase in perceived supply. The total number of items dropped wouldn't change, but the number which are available for purchase at any given point in time would probably go up.

Right now, I think a lot of people list things for 1 inf, or for 75% of the going rate, because they are afraid of being stuck with an unsold item and having to sacrifice the listing fee if they yank the item off the market and relist it for a lower amount. As a result, a lot of people get to buy things for less than they are really worth, which results in the shelves emptying out pretty quickly.

If we didn't have any fees, I think people would experiment with listing things really high, waiting for a bit, then dropping the price. Of course, that's exactly the sort of behavior the market fee was intended to discourage, but would it really be so bad? If things were listed at too high a price and no one bought them, then at least they'd be on the market. Right now we have a lot of places where there are 0 items for sale. If someone does list an item for too much, then they could relist them lower without penalty, which would make the items more available to people.

I'm not really seeing a downside here, except for the loss of an inf sink. What if the listing fee vanished, but the sales fee became a flat 10% of the sale price? The inf sink would remain, but the artificial downward pricing pressure would vanish. Prices in some areas would go up, but so would supply. I'm happy with that trade-off.

No listing fees would remove the risk from marketeering, and no 10% sales fees would remove one of very few influence sinks in the game. I can't see how either of them would not be a huge downside.

If you want to know what the market would be like without a listing fee, just look at EVE Online's economy, which allows you to change your bid/sales prices for either a nominal fee or no fee at all, I can't remember which. What happens is that you'll put up something for 100k, say, and ten seconds later someone else sees you're undercutting them and edits their price on the same item to 99,999.99. Another five seconds later someone else edits theirs to be 99,999.98. And so on and so forth. It's the only reason I don't consider their market completely superior to ours.

The listing fee mechanism rewards you for picking a good price and sticking to it. It forces players who cannot afford the listing fee to list at below the floor price of an item, generating lowball sales. It presents the choice of whether to relist an item that's not selling (time and market slot cost), or losing the listing fee and relisting at a price that's more likely to sell (influence cost). I think these are all good things, because they introduce risk and make market dynamics more interesting. There are far worse ways for the market to be distorted in any case.

Market fees are just a cost of doing business. Just view them as a challenge you must overcome.

I would destroy more inf.(Not doing at Fulmens levels but i try to contribute)

I think the market system in CoX needs a major overhaul no matter how you look at it.
but there are also a fair amount of players that are trying to alter prices some realize it some don't. like the 308 people that are bidding on lvl 50 Acc IOs but they are bidding less than 100,000inf well sorry to say when i make extras of that enhancement I NEVER sell it for less than 400,000 mostly because it cost more than that to make the things in the first place and that is the cost without even talking about salvage or the cost of the recipe (if it is not already memorized) now personally i think that the cost of enhancements that you have memorized is WAY WAY WAY too high. and that is also something that needs to be reworked in this game, not to mention that we still have to pay to add a base item that we either Built ourselves or earned by some other means. I mean why should i have to pay Inf. to place an item in my base when i already built the item in my base... just my $0.04

No, we can't. Price caps are a bad idea.

Wait, what do you mean by the "official market"? Do you mean Wentworths? Because prices at WW are set by the PLAYERS so it doesn't seem like an 'official' market.