What is considered "ebil" anymore?
By
Adeon Hawkwood,
Posted on: 2011-01-14 17:27 in The Market and Inventions
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No, because:|
Originally Posted by eryq2
Was this country out of gas in the 90s when i was using 93 octane?
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1. Dollars were worth a lot more to begin with.
2. Cost of obtaining oil was much lower.
The costs of creating gasoline were lower, so supply was higher.
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| And people overseas are still filling up their cars for 39 cents per tank in 2011. 39 cent sounds pretty good compared to 38 dollars or more.... |
Anyway, I think at this point I give up. You're asking questions, then ignoring the answers and pretending they weren't answered. You appear militantly opposed to ever comprehending basic economics. I don't know what your objection to it is, but... I give. This is pointless. You are ineducable. You will live in a world full of mysterious conspiracies and malicious events, all of which are entirely in your own head.
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Funny how this part of my post was ignored by those who would point out 'how screwed up the market is.' More good news for you: another KC triple at level 30 came up and I again got it for about 45 mill, not "the crazy going rate". |
Originally Posted by Clave_Dark_5
Edit: had to add this too. Last week I put down some low bids on the Kinetic Combat triple, level 30, for my stalker. All previous sales were at something like 110,000,000 and there were currently none available. I got one for about 45 mill yesterday.
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You should try bid creep sometimes too.
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I was wondering when you'd come to this. Every now and then I actually try and see if eryq has changed, but every single time I come back to the conclusion that he has already decided that he is right and no amount of logic or reason will convince him that his view of the economy might be wrong. Yes, I'm not even talking about opinions, it's flatout wrong to ignore the changes in the world around you while claiming nothing should change because you don't.
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Originally Posted by seebs
Anyway, I think at this point I give up. You're asking questions, then ignoring the answers and pretending they weren't answered. You appear militantly opposed to ever comprehending basic economics. I don't know what your objection to it is, but... I give. This is pointless. You are ineducable. You will live in a world full of mysterious conspiracies and malicious events, all of which are entirely in your own head. |
- @DSorrow - alts on Union and Freedom mostly -
Currently playing as Castigation on Freedom
My Katana/Inv Guide
Anyone who doesn't take truth seriously in small matters cannot be trusted in large ones either. -Einstein
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This. I've been hearing for years about how much more expensive gas is in Europe, at least. |
Originally Posted by seebs
This sounds... odd. Everywhere I've ever been outside the US, except maybe China, gas was much more expensive.
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Originally Posted by Wikipedia
Most European countries have high fuel taxes. The prices have traditionally been three to four times the price in the United States, with prices during 2000-2005 of 1,50/litre (about US$2.14/l or $8.10/gal) while the US had prices around $1.50/gal or $0.40/l. After a large increase until the summer of 2008, the end of 2008 experienced a strong decline linked with a sharp economic downturn, with the average price of gas in the U.S. at $1.87/gal (December 2, 2008). However, the price of gas in Europe is still more than triple the US price at 1.45/litre.[10]
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| A number of countries subsidize the cost of gasoline and other petroleum products. Subsidies make transport of people and goods cheaper, but discourage fuel efficiency. In some countries, the soaring cost of crude oil since 2003 has led to these subsidies being cut, moving inflation from the government debt to the general populace, sometimes resulting in political unrest. |
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| United States gas and heating oil subsidies are not so visible and are generally in the free or reduced rate lease of government land, tax incentives, grants, and other compensation from the federal and the state governments. Also, pricing is a federal concern to ensure supply and demand within limits to the consumer. In the absence of subsidies in the United States, per gallon prices are expected to reach or exceed European levels. |
If we are to die, let us die like men. -- Patrick Cleburne
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The rule is that they must be loved. --Jayne Fynes-Clinton, Death of an Abandoned Dog
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Immunity to logic and reason is the cornerstone of all anti-market posters.|
Originally Posted by DSorrow
I was wondering when you'd come to this. Every now and then I actually try and see if eryq has changed, but every single time I come back to the conclusion that he has already decided that he is right and no amount of logic or reason will convince him that his view of the economy might be wrong. Yes, I'm not even talking about opinions, it's flatout wrong to ignore the changes in the world around you while claiming nothing should change because you don't.
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Now excuse me while I list another level 15 common IO at 25k and get 500k or more for it.
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
Economics is the science of studying the allocation of scarce resources.
CoX has no scarce resources, because I can always farm more Inf or salvage or recipes. In fact, bajillions of all of those things enter the game every hour. Arguably, the closest thing to scarce resources in CoX are:
1) Inventory space. I may generate infinite salvage or recipes, but I cannot carry them all.
2) Auction slots. I may have infinite Inf or salvage or recipes, but I cannot actually insert said resources into the market as quickly as I produce them. The game puts brakes on natural velocity, impeding the free market.
3) Consumption. How many LotG enhancements have actually left the game, as opposed to the ever increasing numbers of those being endlessly circulated. While the demand for LotGs exceeds supply at present, the same does not apply to inanimate carbon rods.
An argument can be made that CoX's auction house is not a market, and also that economics do not apply to a system in which all resources are infinite within the time constraints one has to acquire them.
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Different resources are still generated at different rates, which makes for supply and demand. Inf is created for every enemy defeat, mission complete, and item sold to an NPC vendor. LotG +7.5% recipes are only generated when they randomly drop or are bought with merits. If the game code was changed so that every enemy defeated dropped a LotG +7.5% recipe, their value relative to Inf would plummet, just like the economic model predicts.
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Originally Posted by Emgro
An argument can be made that CoX's auction house is not a market, and also that economics do not apply to a system in which all resources are infinite within the time constraints one has to acquire them.
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Character index
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I am not saying that the law of supply and demand does not loosely apply to CoX market function. However, in the CoX world, it would be theoretically possible for every player to farm as many LotGs as they needed. There is no magic limit of LotGs that the game spits out.
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Originally Posted by Silver Gale
Different resources are still generated at different rates, which makes for supply and demand. Inf is created for every enemy defeat, mission complete, and item sold to an NPC vendor. LotG +7.5% recipes are only generated when they randomly drop or are bought with merits. If the game code was changed so that every enemy defeated dropped a LotG +7.5% recipe, their value relative to Inf would plummet, just like the economic model predicts.
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There's no magic limit to how much corn can be grown, either, but it's still possible to have a corn shortage because there's not enough of it to meet demand right now. The relative differentials between time expended and goods created produces inequalities in supply and demand, which drives the market's prices.|
Originally Posted by Emgro
I am not saying that the law of supply and demand does not loosely apply to CoX market function. However, in the CoX world, it would be theoretically possible for every player to farm as many LotGs as they needed. There is no magic limit of LotGs that the game spits out.
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If I were looking for a good example of how the CoX economy differs from the real world, it wouldn't be the items that take player time to produce. It would be the NPC stores, which with their fixed prices and infinite supplies create the entirely wrong idea that all items have a fixed inf value.
@SPTrashcan
Avatar by Toxic_Shia
Why MA ratings should be changed from stars to "like" or "dislike"
A better algorithm for ordering MA arcs
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You're missing a few important bits from natural resource economics.|
Originally Posted by SpittingTrashcan
There's no magic limit to how much corn can be grown, either, but it's still possible to have a corn shortage because there's not enough of it to meet demand right now. The relative differentials between time expended and goods created produces inequalities in supply and demand, which drives the market's prices.
If I were looking for a good example of how the CoX economy differs from the real world, it wouldn't be the items that take player time to produce. It would be the NPC stores, which with their fixed prices and infinite supplies create the entirely wrong idea that all items have a fixed inf value. |
First off, there is a limit on how much corn can be grown. It is limited based on availability of land, farm equipment, skilled farmers, water, and so forth. There is also a time issue; there is a specific amount of corn in existence right now, and I cannot produce more instantly. Then there are issues of corn as a perishable, the fact it needs to be transported despite being heavy and bulky, and finally the tradeoffs implicit in that any resources used to produce corn are not being used elsewhere.
If I want a LotG, I can take my lvl 50 and go produce one, starting now. Then I can produce another. The only limited resource is my time, which is a real-world limitation, not one created in the game.
Since the limit on how much corn could be grown exceeds the amount needed by at least an order of magnitude (indeed, last I heard, we were still paying people NOT to grow corn!), in practice it is as if it were scarce.
The scarce resources in CoH are largely player time, player time, and player time. Anything that takes time to create is thus effectively limited. Alignment merits are valuable because, though there's no theoretical limit to how many you can generate given infinite time, there is a very definite limit to how many of them you can generate between now and an hour from now when you want to be fully enhanced and ready to go faceroll an ITF.
So it still acts like a scarce resource, because even though you could in theory go make more, it may matter when you want it. If you want a LotG today, then what matters is not how many there might be a week or two from now, but how many are available right now.
Since people want these things in order to have them available while playing, again, they're functionally scarce even though in theory they could be created.
So there's a big difference between the effective scarcity of, say, level 50 damage SOs, which can be bought by the tens of thousands if you can figure out where to put them, and level 35 Kinetic Combat triples, where there are only so many in the game right now, and there are sharp chronological limits on how fast you can make more.
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Yeah, i'd already started to get that impression when i responded in this thread earlier. i somehow thought that highlighting and responding to one of the irrational assertions in isolation might make it's absurdity more apparent. The response made it clear why that wasn't true when he went off into a bizarre tangent only marginally related to the actual issue.|
Originally Posted by seebs
Anyway, I think at this point I give up. You're asking questions, then ignoring the answers and pretending they weren't answered. You appear militantly opposed to ever comprehending basic economics. I don't know what your objection to it is, but... I give. This is pointless. You are ineducable. You will live in a world full of mysterious conspiracies and malicious events, all of which are entirely in your own head.
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*sighs*
i blame innate neural structures. Most humans will tend to believe whatever they were taught when young even when it contradicts observable facts. Some people can never look past ingrained beliefs no matter how much the evidence says otherwise, and even those who have learned to reason past conditioned attitudes still find themselves falling for them if they don't pay attention. It seems to be pretty much an innate cognitive shortcut that doesn't serve modern humans as well as it did earlier.
Also, there's some fascinating experiments that have been done regarding markets and rewards using primates that suggest that it's inherent in all primates (at the least) and explains why markets cannot be based on the assumption that all participants are rational actors.
Dr. Todt's theme.
i make stuff...
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Yeah, that's the concise and pragmatic solution.
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Originally Posted by Quasadu
I think at this point the only reasonable course of action is to throw my hands up and stop arguing and just enjoy the delicious tears.
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Dr. Todt's theme.
i make stuff...
There needs to be a ban on using real-world analogies to describe CoX's economy. They tend to fit poorly due to fundamental differences between MMO's and the real world, and they sidetrack the discussions. Really, I thought Eryq made a fairly interesting point in the post to which I responded earlier, before folks started talking about gasoline.
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Indeed. One of my relatives was visiting England and was traveling with a native. My relative saw a gas price, converted it to dollars, and commented, "I thought gas was more expensive over here. That price isn't too much higher than ours."|
Originally Posted by Sailboat
This. I've been hearing for years about how much more expensive gas is in Europe, at least.
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The native advised, "In the U.S. gas is priced per gallon. That price is PER LITER."
Gas is much cheaper than the U.S. in a handful of oil-producing nations because they subsidize it - and really screw up their market in the process.
Paragon City Search And Rescue
The Mentor Project
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The only reason it isn't possible in RL is because so many people are manipulating the market it becomes efficient. (And, people don't have quite the same attitude of entitlement/instant gratification in real life, although it's close.)
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Originally Posted by Humility
A game economy that is exceedingly limited and subject to manipulations that would never work IRL is not exactly a strong ground for you to be basing moral judgments on.
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Originally Posted by Ironblade
Indeed. One of my relatives was visiting England and was traveling with a native. My relative saw a gas price, converted it to dollars, and commented, "I thought gas was more expensive over here. That price isn't too much higher than ours."
The native advised, "In the U.S. gas is priced per gallon. That price is PER LITER." Gas is much cheaper than the U.S. in a handful of oil-producing nations because they subsidize it - and really screw up their market in the process. |
Actually you have that reversed. Its expensive in Europe because its taxed to discourage use.
Edit: Don't let me discourage this thread though. So far its been about as funny as Columbus thinking he found india.
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While it is true that some of the specifics don't necessarily apply, the fundamentals of economics (particularly supply and demand) certainly apply. If that weren't the case, we wouldn't be able to predict what might happen to prices on certain items when certain events occur (i.e. the merger, double XP weekend, holiday events).
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Originally Posted by Intrinsic
There needs to be a ban on using real-world analogies to describe CoX's economy. They tend to fit poorly due to fundamental differences between MMO's and the real world, and they sidetrack the discussions. Really, I thought Eryq made a fairly interesting point in the post to which I responded earlier, before folks started talking about gasoline.
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@macskull, @Not Mac | XBL: macskull | Steam: macskull | Skype: macskull
"One day we all may see each other elsewhere. In Tyria, in Azeroth. We may pass each other and never know it. And that's sad. But if nothing else, we'll still have Rhode Island."
"One day we all may see each other elsewhere. In Tyria, in Azeroth. We may pass each other and never know it. And that's sad. But if nothing else, we'll still have Rhode Island."
Supply and demand affect the market too, there's just some weird special cases, like things you can make an infinite number of. Oh, like, software downloads. Surely, there is no way in the real world to study the way supply and demand work with digital copies of things.
But mostly, the key is that in reality supply is finite at any given time. That you could make something, if you spent time, doesn't necessarily mean that it's worthless to you to have someone else provide it already made.
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Did you have an old clunker that needed the extra octane? I hope you got that traded in.
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Originally Posted by eryq2
Was this country out of gas in the 90s when i was using 93 octane?
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I don't think that particular statement is factually accurate. I have heard tell of other methods of obtention. I think that they were true tales, because I have personally tested some of the methods.|
Originally Posted by eryq2
BUT, in order to get certain things then they HAVE to rely on the market and whatever is going on in it.
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For a small fee I'd be happy to provide you with a pamphlet of information about how to obtain in game items outside of the market.
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I have noticed that when the prices go up that I happen to be MORE tempted to sell. There must be something wrong with my economic wiring that higher prices encourage me to sell things more than lower prices.|
Originally Posted by eryq2
It's getting to the point to where i dont even want to sell good recipes on the market just in case i need one later. Unless its stuff i dont use on toons. I can get 400mil for one now to just turn around and have to pay 700-1 bill in a couple months from now the way things are going. Dont make sense. And if other people think that way, its killing the availability in the market only hurting the rates more.
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I had always thought that sellers preferred to receive higher prices than lower prices. I guess that's not a universal case.
Of course, I know how to obtain things outside of the market. [I have an informational pamphlet that I would be glad to share for a nominal fee]. And, I know how to invest the inf I get from sales by giving it to other players in exchange for their goods. If one uses the proceeds from one's sales to create more wealth, then one can out pace inflation with one's earnings
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Technically, there is a magic limit on how much corn can be grown in a given time frame. Countries with smaller amounts of arable farm land per person usually have to import food. You can only fit so many corn stalks on an acre. |
Originally Posted by SpittingTrashcan
There's no magic limit to how much corn can be grown, either, but it's still possible to have a corn shortage because there's not enough of it to meet demand right now. The relative differentials between time expended and goods created produces inequalities in supply and demand, which drives the market's prices.
If I were looking for a good example of how the CoX economy differs from the real world, it wouldn't be the items that take player time to produce. It would be the NPC stores, which with their fixed prices and infinite supplies create the entirely wrong idea that all items have a fixed inf value. |
In Cox, the limit on possible wealth generation is the number of active players, and the number of hours they spend playing. Supply would be infinite if the number of subscribers were infinite. (And so would demand....... which creates that "which infinite quantity is bigger?" paradox)
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I think though we need to exclude insane people. If someone wants less for their IOs they could just go give them away.|
Originally Posted by all_hell
I have noticed that when the prices go up that I happen to be MORE tempted to sell. There must be something wrong with my economic wiring that higher prices encourage me to sell things more than lower prices.
I had always thought that sellers preferred to receive higher prices than lower prices. I guess that's not a universal case. |
As I just posted in another thread, I am not selling my good stuff because the current prices don't entice me to do so.
total kick to the gut
This is like having Ra's Al Ghul show up at your birthday party.
Consider Iran. They do that - they also have gas shortages.
And, in fact, they intend to cut the government subsidies, which will raise the price.