On the nature of ebil and marketeering

Recent visitors to our board have implicitly posed a moral question about what we do as marketeers. Effectively the question comes down to the following: Is it evil to be ebil?

I propose to examine different ways to make inf off the market and determine if it is possible for an outside observer using Millsian principles to determine that what we are doing is in some way immoral or destructive to the game as a whole.

Forms of marketeering:

I. Flipping -- the most basic of all forms of marketeering. Flipping has a tendency to lower the high end of an items range while raising the low end of its range. The goal is to bid higher than the bottom an item hits and ask low enough to sell in enough volume to make it worth doing. The more people flip an item, the lower the spread between the high and low ends will be with less volatility. Lower volatility is a common good and therefore this activity passes the test for not being "evil" persay. Flipping does have some side forms though....

a) Flipping and destroying -- this is where a flipper buys a bunch of something then relists it much higher then buys intervening stock and destroys it (sells to vendor or deletes). Because this reduces supply I'd say this is not working towards the common good. That said, the current rules allow it despite it being a win-lose play.

b) Destroying to no good end -- this is where someone with large sums of inf buys and destroys (vendor?) a large portion of the outstanding stock of an item. Usually done with common salvage but also seen with cheaper recipes. This causes a temporary rise in the price of these items. Since there is no objective to profit from it its less malicious than flip and destroy but I imagine it probably reduces the overall utility of the gaming community as a whole. Perhaps when done to common salvage it encourages players to play content not AE which would be a plus though.

II. Buy recipe, craft, sell -- this is where a marketeer purchases recipes and crafts them to pocket the spread between the build cost (recipe + salvage + crafting cost) and the finished product cost (sale price of the IO). This tends to raise the price of recipes and lower the price of finished IOs. It also saves purchasers the trouble of doing the crafting themselves and when done in larger stacks (5's, 10's) it creates economies of scale which allow more competed IOs to be made in less total player hours spent. Because it increases the rate at which IOs are created and tends to lower the price of crafted IOs this works towards the common good. Once again there are some variants on this strategy.

a) Cornering a recipe/IO -- this is where a marketeer attempts to gain all or nearly all of the supply of an IO and its recipes specifically to be able to increase the price on it. This strategy is very hard to pull off on 2 kinds of items: the very rare ones and the very common. Ultra Rare items are hard to corner because first and foremost they're mainly traded off-market now and I don't think anyone wants to be the off-market PvP IO broker. It'd be alot of work and if you're working that hard selling stuff get real-life commisions for it at least, right? Ultra common items are hard to corner because you have to live on the game to keep up with the volume of items you'd need to be acquiring. Often supply here greatly outstrips demand as well. Sometimes even when you do "corner" the market on an item like for example red fortune:endurance IOs.....its not really all that profitable because people have alternate defense sets they could slot which might be better for them. Some items can be "cornered" to the degree that one player might have 65% market share on sales in the finished IO. The only way to maintain that is to provide the IO at a fair price however. There are no sustainable competitive advantages in production of set IOs so if the spread gets too wide you'll attract competitors.

b) Flip the recipe & craft and sell the IO -- this is where a marketeer doubles up on recipe acquisition of a specific recipe with the intention of selling the recipes and the finished IOs at the same time, while also attempting to hold a competitive advantage on new entrants to that niche by having (at least at first) a lower cost of crafting. This strategy leads to predictable profits for the marketeer once put in place and because the marketeer has to keep the spread reasonable to prevent new entrants into his/her niche also usually leads to lower prices on finished IOs. In some cases such as limited availability IOs (level restricted like Kin Combats/Miracles/etc) marketeers can abuse their "owned" niche. Otherwise this generally works towards the common good. Players who are looking to slot an IO if they don't like the crafted price can use patience and still slide a bid through the flipping spread and craft below the marketeers price and those who value their time more than the inf spread can pay the premium.

Will add more later on perhaps. Feel free to add strategies you know of as well and analyze them if you wish.

E.E.

You say if you stop doing it for a week prices rise, but do you mean crafted IO prices rise? What happens to the recipe prices? I ask, because in your first post you mention this activity causes recipe prices to rise and crafted IO prices to fall. You conclude that higher recipe prices + lower crafted prices = common good, but I think an argument could be made that this is not the case. What percentage of the population would prefer to buy a recipe and craft it themselves over buying a crafted IO? I prefer buying recipes, so this activity is not to my benefit. That being said, I've done this a lot in the past as well, I'm just playing devil's advocate here. I just think assuming that higher recipe prices + lower crafted prices = common good bears further examination.

So wait. Deleting stuff people want is not as bad as buying up the supply and forcing prices up? I uhh... think you mixed something up here.

You have stuff. I do not have stuff (or at least not as much stuff as you). I deserve stuff. Therefore you are wrong because you have stuff and I don't. You will continue to be wrong unless you give me the stuff I deserve.

I think one of the myths about the 'ebil marketeers' is that somehow the flippers are reducing and/or changing the supply of resources. Flippers can't change the supply, only the stock available via the market. It may not be as convenient, but players can get anything they want using other avenues (merits, A-merits, AE tickets, random drops, etc) which is where the supply truly originates.

I don't think I have ever seen so much effort to rationalise a morally ambiguous act. By their own admission marketers end up stinking rich. Which means people are paying more than they need to without you. That 600 million per day doesn' come out of thin air it comes from the virtual pockets of other players.

Okay so you add a little stability to the price ranges. This stability obviously comes at a great cost to the rest of us or else how could you make so much money doing it?

You guys have fun playing the market and this is a game so go for it. But for crying out loud stop trying to sell us on the fact you're the good guys. The cold hard facts are for every hundred million you make out of the markets is a hundred million the rest of us had to pay more than we really had to.

If you can't imagine how ONE flipper lowers prices... what do you think happens when you have TWO flippers working the same niche?

The Sell It Nao price goes up, the Buy It Nao price comes down, and people get stompy mad.