Admission of Wealth

I gotta agree with the availability point.

Last night I bid and completed 3 touch of death sets , An oblit set, Sirrocco set, 2 Mako's, 3 red fortune, Steadfast KN & +def, all this in the 29-32 range. (I missed one or two here and there but he can't slot all that stuff yet anyway)

I also crafted everything I bought. (Buying salvage at the hurry price. 500,000+ for alchemical gold)

True, I spent about 600 million, but I wanted to slot it NAO.

Yes, I paid a lot more for somethings than I needed to, but the point is that I was able to do so.

Yes, I know I made someone happy when I overpaid 40 million for a recipe, but this is after all the reason that I am marketing.

So flippers and crafters, I would rather not pay you if I don't have to, but I am glad that there was something for me to buy!

I've changed my mind. I've almost finished reading the thread and suddenly it dawned on me what would fix this problem. I'm not going to tip my cap yet, but the market might benefit from something that would stop this rampant price escalation. I'll report back later on my idea. I'm certain most folks here have never, ever, *EVER* considered my idea and all the goodness it would bring.

I just need to finish reading a few more posts and make sure my idea is good...

RagManX

If they implement a market cap, I call dibs on the Apoc set

Mine would plummet.

I don't think I'd be alone. I believe people underestimate how bothersome and timeconsuming it is to have to arrange person to person trades. Even if you made 300% markups compared to now, if you're already making a billion or so per day in the current market it'd take a ridiculous amount of time to match that off the grid, compared to the time it takes on the market.

This might just be my perspective as an EU based player (timezones) with little connections speaking, and maybe things would get more organized if the market cap forced a significant amount of trades off it. Maybe. I have my doubts.

I understood that people don't really want that, RagMan has been posting that joke for a while now, but I still don't necessarily agree with the idea that hardcore sellers would benefit from it - even purely looking at a "how much money I'm making" perspective rather than also "is stuff available for me to buy". Finding a buyer is a hassle, and can end up time consuming enough that it lowers benefits, same reason we go with brokers in RL, to a point.

I could see a few well-connected individuals who would enjoy the bartering / human aspect making more money than they used to, but I believe at the "high" end of marketeering it'd hard to match the inf-per-active-time ratio the market can allow.

I totally agree. It wouldn't make everyone who's active now incredibly rich. It would make a few people who are willing to devote plenty of time to ask probably a whole lot more per item sold.

To make amends for my ebil ways, I purchased a lot of Unquenchable Flame salvage. I noticed that someone was buying a lot at about 15K, and lots of other people were buying at 100K. I played around with the numbers and found very few for sale between 16K and 99K. So I bought a lot of them for 17K, then relisted them for 17K. End result was nearly 400% profit margin. Every single one I sold went for 100K, except for 4 that sold for 50K. So to make things better, I'm buying a much larger number of them, and will do so over more than a 2 hour play session. Then I'll flood the market with bunches of them for 1 inf each. After doing this, I'll see how much I lost. I expect to still see a profit, but maybe I'm wrong and everyone who complains about us marketeers will get to sneer at me for how much wrongness I exhibit.

If I'm right, I may try the same thing on some orange salvage, although those prices are crashing so much that it might not be worth the effort either. Le *sigh*.

RagManX

I have two arguments with that last post:

1. Every onmarket sale destroys 10% of the inf involved. This is functionally the way that 90%, if not 99%, of inf leaves this game.

Every offmarket sale destroys ZERO inf. There's a danger of causing real inflation with the supposed fix. And then more and more items get above cap and get sold offmarket... we've seen how the redside market failed. If you were in a big SG you might be able to get stuff; if not you were SOL.


2. "I'd hate it, but the best way of discouraging people from selling off market is to make the amount of influence you can trade (or email to anybody other than yourself) a lot smaller again so it takes ages to transfer large sums. " If your game has something in it people hate, most people will not do that thing. Some people will play the game without doing it; some people will find a less irritating game.

And some people will find a workaround: maybe the LoTG 7.5% will become the new currency, because it's worth about 200 million inf and you can trade eight of them at a time.

Hyper, I still think it would be more like the old school redside market: You couldn't reliably buy ANYTHING so people didn't sell anything valuable (in case they ever needed it again) and the market failed.

If some widget sells for X amount of inf on a regular basis, then almost by definition, that's a sustainable price for the item. There are enough people out there both willing and able to buy the item for that price, and willing to do so instead of other ways of obtaining it, that the sales continue without people starting to undercut that price and make it fall.

Now, there are probably people out there who would like these widgets, but who can't or won't afford to pay X for them. These folks "lose out" to the people who have (and will pay) X regularly. The folks willing to pay more soak up the supply.

Once you say that no one can sell the widget for X any more, but only some number smaller than X, if your new price is low enough, you make the people who were losing out happy. They all jump in line and start buying widgets at the new, lower price. You make the people who were paying X unhappy, because now they're in line with a lot more people, and their willingness to pay X now doesn't afford them any priority on obtaining widgets. Moreover, if there aren't any more widgets being supplied on the market you get a queue - at any given time more people are now in line with the expectation of getting a widget, but widgets aren't coming in any faster.

This paradigm isn't "more fair" than the current one - it just prioritizes sales differently. Today they're prioritized by willingness and ability to pay inf, where after a cap it's prioritized by when you get in line.

Someone is always going to dislike either solution. People who prefer priority by ability to pay seem to often view it as a system where the people who work most or longest get priority on rewards. People who prefer price caps, if they've given the real market results of price caps much thought at all, seem to view it as a "better" form of equal opportunity access to goods. (Note that I am referring to actual ceilings on allowed sale prices, not competition from things like NPC stores, which some people refer to as setting price caps. That is a different thing, because an NPC store also provides additional supply.)

*Shoves Uber to the back of the line*

Hey! I was here first!

Here's the thing: the market is not broken. Players get multiple alternatives: you can pay influence, reward merits, alignment merits or incarnate merits of various types; or you can farm drops. There are multiple paths here, the problem is lazy people not wanting to use them and then complaining that the influence path is too 'rich' for their lazy ****.

In short: if you are too lazy to work down one of the multiple paths to getting shiny stuff, sorry but that is your problem.