What if: Price averaging

Crazy thought:

Imagine that the market were modified as follows: The price of a transaction is the average (either arithmetic or geometric mean -- they'd have different effects) of the lowest listing and highest bid price.

So if I list for 1 inf, and you bid 100M, you pay 50M.

Advantage: Unless you match exactly, you always get a better deal than you were willing to accept.

What would go horribly wrong with this? What effects would it have? Discuss.

It would benefit sellers at the expense of buyers; it would take away most of the "gamesmanship" of the marketplace; it would get rid of half the built in influence sink we currently have (which most agree is too low as it is); we would be one step closer to having purples sold in stores; and I would probably find the marketplace so boring that I would find a new game.

But that's just me.

I suspect that's all right, which is why this is a "what if" and not an "oh do let's!"

Yeah, what you said! Strike that, reverse it!

It would make the marketeering game too boring, which would probably make me quit since marketeering is, as the only form of PVP available, often more interesting than PVE.

From the title, I was expecting a request for some complex formula that looked at "You bid 200,000 on four Demonic Threat Reports (50,000 each)" and a supply which included three below 50k each and lots above, bought the three low ones at the listed cost and used the "change" to buy one of the higher priced ones, so that the average was still 50k.

I would be against a system like that, since it would be too much dev work to be worthwhile, and it would screw over the people who listed low, and encourage prices up, since few people would want to be the low seller.

But that's not what the OP suggested, so it doesn't matter!

To the OP: bad idea, for the same reason. The current system encourages listing lower than your competition. Doing this would encourage prices to rise, because nobody would be willing to risk the potentially huge loss if they listed too low on a big ticket item.

Adjusting the market in a way that benefits the buyer will almost never actually help the buyer, because helping the buyer hurts the seller. Since the seller doesn't want to eat the loss, they'll sell at a higher point to absorb the additional loss. Who pays for that adjustment? The buyer, who is now paying even more than we "helped" them. And if the seller can't recoup the extra loss, then they may choose not to sell at all, which hurts the buyer even more, because now they have to bid an even larger amount, HOPE that it's higher than the other bids, and wait indefinitely for one to show up (see: PVP 3% def IO).

I'm against the idea for a few reasons.


1> Many folks are already unhappy with the "blind" part of our system (not
seeing bids or lists). With this idea, not only bids/lists are blind, but so too
are actual prices.

To clarify a bit: if the Last 5 prices are 10M, what does that tell you
about the bids - were they 20M (because the lists were at 1), or were
they 10M, or some entirely different number?

As a seller, what this would mean to me is that I'd always list HIGH so that
I get expected value for the IO rather than a chopped price due to
averaging.

2> I'd imagine this system would be much more prone to "gaming"
With the current system, all you can really do is paint the tape, but I would
speculate that you could additionally manipulate the averages with the
right mix of bids and lists - particularly in a slow market with few players.

3> As others have said, this hurts sellers (and therefore the mythical
casual gamer). By that, I mean this: What do we always tell the beginners?
"Play normally, and instead of vendoring your drops, sell them for 11 at the
market" -- Bingo - they're now in an averaged crapshoot. It could work out
well for them, but making sense of the pricing would be even harder than it
is today, and overall, I predict it would be less effective than today.

4> For premier items... Why risk it if you're a seller? If there's a chance I'd
get 1/2 of what I expect for a premium recipe, I'm not selling at market -
I'm selling in forum for the true value.


Color me /unsigned on this one.


Regards,
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