MA's manipulation of market value - overview and discussion

Stutoman

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Dan Richard Baker
I've been playing this game for almost four years now and have always been a close watcher of market values.

I've come to learn that the difference between items in the real world and ingame is that in the real world the price of an item will always be based around the cost to produce it (includes costs of wages and running a company etc). The value of an item in Entropia Universe is based totally on demand and supply, and nothing to do with cost to manufacture at all. And this is what is wrong with the economy ingame.

What I find disturbing is how if MindArk want the price of an item to fall, all they have to do is increase the amount of that item ingame. Now people who bought this item for use, hoping that it would at least retain its value, lose money > and not just a small amount.

This kind of thing would not be so problematic if it were all pretends money, but the matter of fact is that this is playing with people's money at a level which it shouldn't be.

MA has the ability to make an item worthless almost overnight and it's just wrong in my opinion.

Another big big big problem with the way market value works in the game are the market value graphs and ofcourse the auction system. The market value display shows the daily market value, which is the value with which the majority of people use to price their items. This daily value can go up and down all the time and multiplies the depreciation rate of items 30 times the amount of the monthly value. If the daily market value of an item were delayed by a couple of days or only the monthly value were shown it would make for a much more stable market.

Auction - a shop owner's nightmare. This makes everything available in one location, and you don't even need to go to the location in which the auction was created to pick up your item. This discourages people from needing to travel at all and makes the prices ever lower because of it being global. One person selling out and leaving the game can completely crash the market prices of an item, and once the price has been at a low point many people will not accept paying anything higher than that price for a good while.

After i've started to realise all this and how MA controls my money like child's play i'm seriously considering packing up and leaving.

Many of you will say that real life markets work in a similar way. Well they don't. If a new product is introduced in the real world it has cost someone to research it. If more of a product is sold in the real world it has cost someone to manufacture it. A blueprint ingame costs MA nothing to disperse and can end up having devastating effects on the economy.

So you're looking for an equivalent to real life - money printing. When a country prints more money then its currency's value falls. Because the PED has a fixed exchange rate something else has to give, which is the value of items.

My view on the situation, I would be happy to know yours. Constructive conversation only please.
 
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Yep, they control the supply and demand, and the randomly do stuff that massively screws up value of items or assets in game. Real Estate market still has not recovered from all the changes at vu 10... and it's only going to get worse now that there is more supply on other planets.
 
If prices for items are too high someone complains,if getting too low someone complains... I think there is nothing MA can do to satisfy us all. Sure i would like to loot 10 mod faps, but other mod fap owners would be pissed as hell.
The gungnirs..i see prices falling from few k to 700 now,with a week, just cause lots of bps started dropping, the current owners feel pissed,but other players can now finally buy a chopper also.
So if you are pissed, then someone is dancing from happiness.
 
(...)
I've come to learn that the difference between items in the real world and ingame is that in the real world the price of an item will always be based around the cost to produce it (includes costs of wages and running a company etc). The value of an item in Entropia Universe is based totally on demand and supply, and nothing to do with cost to manufacture at all. And this is what is wrong with the economy ingame.
(...)

With most items in rl it is true. Few exceptions though:
- there are still manipulations of some prices (if you have 80% of extracting on some resources you are nearly getting an monopoly so basicly in your interest it would be to keep price high even though costs are much lower).
- there are still demand rigts: if too many start to produce grain for example then soon the price falls. Some will quit and start doing something else. Some will sell for lower price sometimes even if it has costed more to produce it that the price is. Of ourse there are laws to regulate this but in a totally free market country there woudl be a lot of undercut on the prices.
- if soemthign is new - sometimes it is way overpriced (similar like gunginr prices. For me one of a choper ingame is not worth more than 100peds and still at start they went for few k of peds). Call it fashion/trend/stuipdity/will of having something - but it happens in rl very often.

What I find disturbing is how if MindArk want a price of an item to fall all they have to do is increase the amount of that item ingame. Now people who bought this item for use, hoping that it would at least retain its value lose money and not just a small amount.

Thats true - MA has the power to do that. But again if someone buyes an item hopeing to get profit on selling it - then he is very wrong. ROI should include using the item in meantime.


(...)
Another big big big problem with the way market value works in the game are the market value graphs and ofcourse the auction system. The market value display shows the daily market value, which is the value with which the majority of people use to price their items. This daily value can go up and down all the time and multiplies the depreciation rate of items 30 times the amount of the monthly value. If the daily market value of an item were delayed by a couple of days or only the monthly value were shown it would make for a much more stable market.(...)

Who is stupid enough to watch daily? Of course most people look at weekly/monthly already (i watch weekly and trend that seems to be happening). Daily is just for stats mayby.

Auction - a shop owner's nightmare. This makes everything available in one location, and you don't even need to go to the location in which the auction was created to pick up your item. This discourages people from needing to travel at all and makes the prices ever lower because of it being global. One person selling out and leaving the game can completely crash the market prices of an item, and once the price has been at a low point many people will not accept paying anything higher than that price for a good while.

First of all - there are fees on auction. In shop if the item does not sell - you do not pay anything. You can remove and edit prices in shop without any costs. So basicly prices in theory shoudl look like this:
AF - auction fee,
AP - autcion price,
SP - shop price,
TAX - tax on the shop,
AP - AF = SP - TAX + AF/2
So basicly it will be cheaper than on auction and will meet in the middle. Of course it is only theory because prices change quite often and thats why shop owners should adjust prices every day! :)


Many of you will say that real life markets work in a similar way. Well they don't. If a new product is introduced in the real world it has cost someone to research it. If more of a product is sold in the real world it has cost someone to manufacture it. A blueprint ingame costs MA nothing to disperse and can end up having devastating effects on the economy.

So you're looking for an equivalent to real life - money printing. When a country prints more money then its currencie's value falls. Because the PED has a fixed exchange rate something else has to give, which is the value of items.

You are right - MA could easily drop everything very often and soon all prices would be TT (notice that MA takes 10% of TT spent). So this would mean that only few players would stay. Does MA want that? No - so they "stimulate" the market in a way they want it. For example imagine that tomorow there will be new very large resource of oil found. Or new cheap energy source discovered. This would mean that prices on fuel would drop in few weeks.
Of course it is exploitable - but why MA would want to exploit if they can turn the loot bar to 85% instead of taking money on artificailly made markup?

If i understand you correctly - you would like to do so that MA has no possibility to controll loot drop. So there would have to be an random algorithm of generating different kind of loots that noone can change in the future. Seems like a bit nonsense dont you think? :) It could be done in two ways:
1) static - each item has a percentage of chance to drop, for example Mod fap could drop with a 0.0000...0001% chance from Aranea + Old and all Daspletors.
2) dynamic - it changes in time. Today Aranea drops Mod fap, tomorow its Snable Young ;). In addition there could be an option (somethign like leaver) to manually controll the loot.

Guess what option MA likes better ;).

Falagor
:bandit:
 
One person selling out and leaving the game can completely crash the market prices of an item, and once the price has been at a low point many people will not accept paying anything higher than that price for a good while.

My biggest gripe with the market has actually been that once an item has sold for a certain price, other owners would never ever accept a lower price than that last sale for their own, creating an absurd, unjustifiable inflation (how do you think mod fap reached 300k markup?).

I, for one, am glad the market is slowly becoming a buyer's market again as markets should be and dropping items again (not like that scanner madness, but maybe one rare item a month or so) helps the economy more than it hurts it, eventhough some high-end gear owners might throw a fit for MA bursting their little inflation bubble.
 
When you say you pay more for "fashion" or because you have it first then this is another example of the difference between the real world and MA.

Fashion - an ipod will remain the same price when sold by Apple until a new one is released the next year, and they will stop selling the old one then.

Getting it first - Ingame you don't buy it for more just because you're getting it first, infact it doesn't work that way at all. Those who got the very first ones paid a relatively small amount in comparison. In the real world if you plan on paying more deliberately because you're getting it first you know what you're buying - like early entry tickets to a gaming expo cost £2 more than the normal tickets.

Falagor your point over auction fees is nothing to do with what i'm talking about. The auction removes all divides between trading locations which means the market values are manipulated at a very very fast rate in comparison to if there were only shops or p2p trading.

Most people do not look only at the monthly values when setting prices. The colorator tool was at a steady +70 market value and then one person sold their for +50. Since then every single one sold hasn't been higher.

My biggest gripe with the market has actually been that once an item has sold for a certain price, other owners would never ever accept a lower price than that last sale for their own, creating an absurd, unjustifiable inflation (how do you think mod fap reached 300k markup?).

I, for one, am glad the market is slowly becoming a buyer's market again as markets should be and dropping items again (not like that scanner madness, but maybe one rare item a month or so) helps the economy more than it hurts it, eventhough some high-end gear owners might throw a fit for MA bursting their little inflation bubble.

I personally accept that market values change and don't mind much that some of my stuff would lose value in the long run etc. What I don't like though is how it happens and how quickly it happens. For example buying a Vigilante set back at the old price and then seeing its value halve within the SGA event is not nice. Or buying a gungnir to use for a while and even if it lost 10% of it's value by the time you sold it within the same month wouldn't matter so much. But when something like a gungnir loses 40% of its value within a 12 hour period it is absurd, and the only reason this happened is because MA flooded the game with blueprints that completely outweighed the demand.
 
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I personally accept that market values change and don't mind much that some of my stuff would lose value in the long run etc. What I don't like though is how it happens and how quickly it happens. For example buying a Vigilante set back at the old price and then seeing its value halve within the SGA event is not nice. Or buying a gungnir to use for a while and even if it lost 10% of it's value by the time you sold it within the same month wouldn't matter so much. But when something like a gungnir loses 40% of its value within a 12 hour period it is absurd, and the only reason this happened is because MA flooded the game with blueprints that completely outweighed the demand.

I agree, violent price deviations over a few hours due to an insane influx of some sort of item is only bad for the economy adding uncertainty to investments. Like I said, item drops should exist but be well distributed over time.

Btw, I never said anything in my post about auction fees, I believe you're referring to Falagor?
 
I agree, violent price deviations over a few hours due to an insane influx of some sort of item is only bad for the economy adding uncertainty to investments. Like I said, item drops should exist but be well distributed over time.

Btw, I never said anything in my post about auction fees, I believe you're referring to Falagor?

Yes sorry about that, the post view at the bottom of my reply page was messed up

------------

Adding on to someone's point about oil prices:
If there were a new energy source discovered in the real world then the oil prices would not drop. This is because the entire population still relies on oil and would not immediately switch over. New technologies that would affect an entire infrastructure would take many many years to impliment. Therefore this point about oil prices is invalid.
 
Another big big big problem with the way market value works in the game are the market value graphs and ofcourse the auction system. The market value display shows the daily market value, which is the value with which the majority of people use to price their items. This daily value can go up and down all the time and multiplies the depreciation rate of items 30 times the amount of the monthly value. If the daily market value of an item were delayed by a couple of days or only the monthly value were shown it would make for a much more stable market.

huh? care to explain more? :scratch2:
 
huh? care to explain more? :scratch2:

Here's an example:

Decade value: +300 < Average value for every single sale of that item
Year value: +200 < Average value of past 12 months
Month value: + 180 < Average value of past 30 days
(E.g. of daily sales before: +175)
Day value: +120 < Average value of past 24 hours. << This value has less impact on the monthly value, now to bring this down to +120 it could have been only one sale. But any more sales that day will not tend to bring the market value back up to the monthly value or yesterday's values.

Now you see in this example the market value of this example item was stable around the 170 to 200 mark for a long period of time, but one person selling up and leaving crashed the item's value because their interests are to sell the item easily and leave with a bit of money to withdraw rather than wait a bit longer and get a fair price.

The daily value is easy to manipulate by all players, and unless it's obvious like a 5000% increase on oil etc then the market value tends to follow it.
 
(...)
Fashion - an ipod will remain the same price when sold by Apple until a new one is released the next year, and they will stop selling the old one then.

Unless competition releases somthing better ;). I am not sure what is exact cost of manufacturing an ipod but i can bet it is no more than actual 10% of value of this item. Of course there is marketing + wages for many people and many other costs. As for devaluation of the items. I disagree that Aple will keep the price that high that much. Electronics tend to lower in price dramatically, For example my laptop was 10% less worth only 3 weeks later than i bought it.

Getting it first - Ingame you don't buy it for more just because you're getting it first, infact it doesn't work that way at all. Those who got the very first ones paid a relatively small amount in comparison. In the real world if you plan on paying more deliberately because you're getting it first you know what you're buying - like early entry tickets to a gaming expo cost £2 more than the normal tickets.

The tickets that are bought upfront sometimes are much cheaper (exampel fly tickets). Reason is that owner want to get some cash much earlier so he can be sure they will at least cover the costs.
As for items that it pays to get them first. Take for exampel Blizzard games. Many people buy them overpriced even before they are released. Why - because this is a product that company knows it will sell so they can set it a bit overpriced. What i get buying it first - i can play it way sooner than others. I am aware that in about 1-2 years the price will be halved at least but still i buy it fast (some of my firends wait till the price is at least halfed). For me ROI is pleasure ;).



(...)
I personally accept that market values change and don't mind much that some of my stuff would lose value in the long run etc. What I don't like though is how it happens and how quickly it happens. For example buying a Vigilante set back at the old price and then seeing its value halve within the SGA event is not nice. Or buying a gungnir to use for a while and even if it lost 10% of it's value by the time you sold it within the same month wouldn't matter so much. But when something like a gungnir loses 40% of its value within a 12 hour period it is absurd, and the only reason this happened is because MA flooded the game with blueprints that completely outweighed the demand.

Well $hit happens ;). Actually i will not buy ANY flying vehcily unless its under 100peds ;). Gunginr i prefer but unless its 100peds or less - i will not buy it ;). I am aware that there are resselers that may try not to let the price go down below 500 for exampel but i really hope the bps will keep droping so they will give up ;).
For you - the moment you bought it - you should accept it that its only value is the TT that it has.

Falagor
:bandit:
 
Here's an example:

Decade value: +300 < Average value for every single sale of that item
Year value: +200 < Average value of past 12 months
Month value: + 180 < Average value of past 30 days
(E.g. of daily sales before: +175)
Day value: +120 < Average value of past 24 hours. << This value has less impact on the monthly value, now to bring this down to +120 it could have been only one sale. But any more sales that day will not tend to bring the market value back up to the monthly value or yesterday's values.

Now you see in this example the market value of this example item was stable around the 170 to 200 mark for a long period of time, but one person selling up and leaving crashed the item's value because their interests are to sell the item easily and leave with a bit of money to withdraw rather than wait a bit longer and get a fair price.

The daily value is easy to manipulate by all players, and unless it's obvious like a 5000% increase on oil etc then the market value tends to follow it.

If disagree, i don`t think it is that easy to manipulate the prices and even if the item in question gets too cheap, it eventually stays at one level or rises back up again. Ofc it can continue to decrease but that could also mean that less people are interested in buying which means its not worth as much as it was a month ago. Older information can also be outdated.
 
Unless competition releases somthing better ;). I am not sure what is exact cost of manufacturing an ipod but i can bet it is no more than actual 10% of value of this item. Of course there is marketing + wages for many people and many other costs. As for devaluation of the items. I disagree that Aple will keep the price that high that much. Electronics tend to lower in price dramatically, For example my laptop was 10% less worth only 3 weeks later than i bought it.



The tickets that are bought upfront sometimes are much cheaper (exampel fly tickets). Reason is that owner want to get some cash much earlier so he can be sure they will at least cover the costs.
As for items that it pays to get them first. Take for exampel Blizzard games. Many people buy them overpriced even before they are released. Why - because this is a product that company knows it will sell so they can set it a bit overpriced. What i get buying it first - i can play it way sooner than others. I am aware that in about 1-2 years the price will be halved at least but still i buy it fast (some of my firends wait till the price is at least halfed). For me ROI is pleasure ;).





Well $hit happens ;). Actually i will not buy ANY flying vehcily unless its under 100peds ;). Gunginr i prefer but unless its 100peds or less - i will not buy it ;). I am aware that there are resselers that may try not to let the price go down below 500 for exampel but i really hope the bps will keep droping so they will give up ;).
For you - the moment you bought it - you should accept it that its only value is the TT that it has.

Falagor
:bandit:

So you're suggesting a £245 ipod costs £24.50 for them to make? Your example is rediculous.
And no, an ipod will cost the same for the entire year until a new one is released.

You can not compare this to the games industry either. A game often costs millions of pounds to produce, a virtual item in this game costs nothing.

To be honest I think you're just taking a side here because you haven't had any major losses. Lets say gungnirs did fall to a hundred ped and you bought one. Wouldn't you be pissed if you logged in the next day to find them worth 26ped? You would have lost less in comparison but nontheless it's a loss, and one that is controlled 100% by MA.
 
So you're suggesting a £245 ipod costs £24.50 for them to make? Your example is rediculous.
And no, an ipod will cost the same for the entire year until a new one is released.

http://www.neowin.net/news/latest-ipod-shuffle-only-costs-22-to-manufacture
http://www.geek.com/articles/gadgets/6th-gen-ipod-nano-only-costs-45-10-to-manufacture-20100928/
http://www.ipodobserver.com/ipo/article/iphone_3gs_manufacturing_cost_at_179_per_unit/

3 examples. 10%-30% costs ;). I am not sure the info is reliable but there are many more sites with similar calcualtions ;).


To be honest I think you're just taking a side here because you haven't had any major losses. Lets say gungnirs did fall to a hundred ped and you bought one. Wouldn't you be pissed if you logged in the next day to find them worth 26ped? You would have lost less in comparison but nontheless it's a loss, and one that is controlled 100% by MA.

If i would buy a gungir at 100ped i would definetly not fly it in pvp (so it would not get damaged) i would try to colour it (mayby use a service) and use it mostly for:
- getting over harrasing mobs
- getting to a claims that i cannot reach

Even if the TT was 0.01ped then and the prce fall to 100% i would not mind - because my ROI is the purpose i use it for. Whats more - even if the price would go up i would not sell it (unless i have a reason to do so - like quting the game, getting better vehicle, etc).

Falagor
:bandit:
 
If i would buy a gungir at 100ped i would definetly not fly it in pvp (so it would not get damaged) i would try to colour it (mayby use a service) and use it mostly for:
- getting over harrasing mobs
- getting to a claims that i cannot reach

Even if the TT was 0.01ped then and the prce fall to 100% i would not mind - because my ROI is the purpose i use it for. Whats more - even if the price would go up i would not sell it (unless i have a reason to do so - like quting the game, getting better vehicle, etc).

Falagor
:bandit:

I think you need to have unlimited bp's for the vehicles to create market stability. Only way it hold the same value over long term. I also think they should be cheap and available to everyone.:smoke:
 
I think you need to have unlimited bp's for the vehicles to create market stability. Only way it hold the same value over long term. I also think they should be cheap and available to everyone.:smoke:

Well changing it now would be just another step in the direction it's been going that has lost people money.

This wouldn't have been a problem whatsoever if they had made vehicles more expensive to produce and only one or two unlimited bp's from the start.
 
Well changing it now would be just another step in the direction it's been going that has lost people money.

This wouldn't have been a problem whatsoever if they had made vehicles more expensive to produce and only one or two unlimited bp's from the start.

Bold part- some people lost and some people gain money ;). Nothing is lost - they did not dissapear or vanished. Nothign was destroyed that could actually cost everyone. MA took 10% of TT cycled. Some people lost few hundred (thousands mayby) and others earned. Balance is met ;).

Remember - the only way you can earn money in this game is from other players. This means mostly markup is the source of profit. And of course services too.

Imagine how much LA owners or uber equipement risk ;). MA states clear- they only guarantee the TT value of the item - nothing more (and i doubt that too in case of bancrupcy ;)).

Simple is that - dont buy somethign with high markup if you really do not want/need it or be ready to lose.

I understand that you are pissed that you loose on an item that you bought and it looses in value in no time but like MA state - its dynamic ;). I think you know that from the start.

Falagor
:bandit:
 
Bold part- some people lost and some people gain money ;). Nothing is lost - they did not dissapear or vanished. Nothign was destroyed that could actually cost everyone. MA took 10% of TT cycled. Some people lost few hundred (thousands mayby) and others earned. Balance is met ;).

Remember - the only way you can earn money in this game is from other players. This means mostly markup is the source of profit. And of course services too.

Imagine how much LA owners or uber equipement risk ;). MA states clear- they only guarantee the TT value of the item - nothing more (and i doubt that too in case of bancrupcy ;)).

Simple is that - dont buy somethign with high markup if you really do not want/need it or be ready to lose.

I understand that you are pissed that you loose on an item that you bought and it looses in value in no time but like MA state - its dynamic ;). I think you know that from the start.

Falagor
:bandit:

MA's use of the word dynamic is just to cover their arses when stuff like this happens. Their "dedicated balancing team" don't seem to even know how an economy works from what i've seen. I don't think it's very well balanced if the price of something halves overnight - do you?
 
MA's use of the word dynamic is just to cover their arses when stuff like this happens. Their "dedicated balancing team" don't seem to even know how an economy works from what i've seen. I don't think it's very well balanced if the price of something halves overnight - do you?

well MA didnt decide to halve the price.. players did.. easy as that.. so pls stop whining about MA beeing the evil one here.. you know when you log in that stuff can change in EU.. and mostly its players who change them because of panic or whatever. if you have been playing for 4 years you should know this by now..
 
well MA didnt decide to halve the price.. players did.. easy as that.. so pls stop whining about MA beeing the evil one here.. you know when you log in that stuff can change in EU.. and mostly its players who change them because of panic or whatever. if you have been playing for 4 years you should know this by now..

No. The price was stable until new blueprints were released. It is totally MA's fault.
If there were a million mod faps don't you think they'd be worthless?

If mindark didn't have a part to play in this then why on earth would they even need a "dedicated balancing team".
 
MA's use of the word dynamic is just to cover their arses when stuff like this happens. Their "dedicated balancing team" don't seem to even know how an economy works from what i've seen. I don't think it's very well balanced if the price of something halves overnight - do you?

Well balanced - no it is not ;). Good or bad? Depends. In this case for you it is bad for me it is good :). It is similar to the stock market. And i know you will say that there is no "stock market god" in real life who will one day say that this goes up and this goes down - agree. But many good or bad events influence the stock market. MA tries to "stimulate" wierd real life events. I agree that in a bad manner - without any notification and mostly without any reason. But hey - do earthquake have a reason or warns us first?
But if nothing like this woudl happen - then prices would stabilise at some level and in long term (in ithe infinity) that level would mean TT value unfortunetly.

Randomly giving huge influence on items (like droping them intensively or not dropign them at all) makes the prices not so stable but this way items at least have markup.

I agree that this behavior makes people not want to invest in high markup items. But also this gives oprotunities both to earn and loose.

Falagor
:bandit:
 
No. The price was stable until new blueprints were released. It is totally MA's fault.
If there were a million mod faps don't you think they'd be worthless?

If mindark didn't have a part to play in this then why on earth would they even need a "dedicated balancing team".

theres a HUGE differance between a chopper and a mod fap.. a mod fap wont earn MA anything.. everything else do.. so use another example.. the mod fap is so eco and unbalanced that we will never ever se one drop again.. well maybe in a event or something.. and how can you say that the market is stable when the frikking chopper just got introduced to the game a few months ago.. they could be as common as pixie faceguards tomorrow.. but its still the crafters who decides the price.. not MA

"if you've been playing for 5/6 years you should know perfectly well that the price decreases when there's more of an item." and thanks for the neg rep lol.. you seem to have a very hard time understanding how a sellers market works..

understand.. MA want everyone to own a vehicle.. didnt you understand that when you bought one? same with tp chips.. did you think the chopper is special and will be rare for the rest of EU existence? lol only super eco gear that doesnt decay alot will be super rare
 
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The value of an item in Entropia Universe is based totally on demand and supply, and nothing to do with cost to manufacture at all. And this is what is wrong with the economy ingame..


Zombie armor, slightly less protection than Ghost armor, both crafted, tho Zombie require Maganite if I remember the name right and it costs 1 maganite per armor part, 2 for harness to craft.


I wonder how the price of Zombie can be higher than Ghost by then....


Costs are set with the cost to manufacture, otherwise I would not mind selling my manufactured Zombie parts at tt+10-20 like ghost sells.... Again, keep in mind ghost has more protection than zombie :D


If you think that NOTHING in here has its price because of the cost to craft it, something is seriously wrong with you.... just take a look on the different crafted weapons out there, their stats and compare to other weapons...

Weapons with a high craft cost gets a huge MU, even if it isn't that many who wants to buy it... It might not get sold, people will stop crafting it because it is too expensive to craft, which is the exact reason why there is many more "ISIS HL18" than "Geotrek blablabal" w/e the same, but crafted, gun is called. Materials is too expensive to sell it at the same, or slightly lower, than the lootable HL18...



Not sure how to get this out of my head, but yeah.... Cost to craft an item DOES affect its sell price...
 
You know that Nike makes shoes in indonesia for about 5 dollar each and sells them at 100-150 back home?

Almost everything you buy will atleast double more often quadriple or even increase a tenfold before it reaches the end consumer.

If you wouldve cared to look at how is usually goes in EU is that people pay for the novelty of a item while its gets more and more common.

My Minor tp chip i bought for +700 ped when it got introduced. Same for my lesser which was 150 orso. Now its tt fodder do I care? No.. I used it happily thats what i bought it for afterall.

If U buy a limited item as a long invesment i do have to question your sanity considering you seem to claim to know something about how markets work..

Ah well, get over it imo ><
 
I skimmed a good chunk of this thread after the first page but.

Every comment i saw that said the EU economy doesnt work like the real world economy is flat out wrong. Examples to follow....

We would like to believe that real world economics are: cost+fair markup = fair sale price. That's the ideal, that's the way it should be, but that is NOT reality.

At one end of the spectrum we have game counsels. xbox 360 and ps3 for example. Both systems were sold at a loss. In some cases a substantial loss. I think when the ps3 first came out they were sold about 200 under costs to manufacture, not counting distribution, marketing, research etc.

At the other end of the spectrum. Take the clothing industry. Most of the T-shirts or shoes people wear cost pennies to make. A t-shirt will pay the person making it 1 or 2 pennies, and maybe a couple more to distribute it. Yet it sells for $10 or more. A pair of shoes might cost $1-2 for materials and labor(they might get 25 cents) etc, and is sold for $100. Mark up on clothing is usually insane.

The same could be said of the jewelry industry. You think it really costs 2000 for a diamond ring? That stuff is usually marked up several thousand percent. Beyond that the main diamond companies warehouse TONS of diamonds to artificially keep the price high. Diamonds are not rare, they are artificially kept just rare enough to keep the price high.

Back to the counsels. They sold for like $500 but on day one people were paying 1200, 1500 on ebay just because they couldn't wait. Sound familiar? IE the gungir. Same thing happened with <insert random ithing here>. Some people will pay insane markups to be the first to get something. This is a great parallel to EU because if someone buys a ps3 for 1500 and sonly is selling them for 800 and loosing 200 on each one. Sony doesnt make 500 profit, someone else made 700 and sony still lost. Apply the same to MA and a mod fap, ma just looses the tt value, they dont get the markup, someone else does. What happens when supply increase. Well that person can no longer resell the ps3 for 700 profit, now they cant sell them except at 0 profit or a loss to get rid of them. Which is what would happen if they flooded the market with mod faps.

On the topic of virtual items. Take for instance the blueprint example. Sure ma can just drop more blueprints and alter the economy. But how is this any different from any piece of software being sold digitally. They are cloning a virtual item over and over and 'manipulating the market'. And you can draw the same parallel with the blueprint example to the music industry. Digital distribution of singles has killed a lot of cd sales. Or steam and the game industry, digital distribution of games has killed a lot of game stores. Welcome to shifting markets!

EUs market falls directly inline with real life markets.
 
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Well changing it now would be just another step in the direction it's been going that has lost people money.

This wouldn't have been a problem whatsoever if they had made vehicles more expensive to produce and only one or two unlimited bp's from the start.


At this point your probably right, but i think it should have been common bp from the start unlimited.
 
A company selling digital copies of something is not the same. They set a price and stick to it.

A games console is not a good comparison to this topic. Sony sold their console at a lower price knowing they'd make all of the lost money back in game licensing.

My example to mod faps would be the price would drop if there were more. I wasn't using this to comment on if MA profits from it. But since you went there, yes MA profits from there being more vehicles because there will undoubtedly be more decay cost etc.

Can't really comment on "counsels" because afaik that is the act of exchanging an opinion and not a physical item.

For things like game releases etc, the people who pay more to get the object early know full well what they're paying for and exactly how the price will change in the future. In the game prices are not guaranteed to go down or up; they are guaranteed to change I agree, but it shouldn't be by more than 60% within a 24 hour period, that is what I call an extremely unstable market.

I've seen prices change dramatically in entropia before, but over weeks months and years. Not days, not hours. For this reason i'll never be buying any high ticket items again that is for certain. Whether i'll cash out of the game for good and move to somewhere that doesn't gamble your fun gaming with an uncertain large loss of money involved is still a decision I haven't made.

I wouldn't be so pissed off if it were a bad hunting return - everybody knows those are all too common and these days you should go out expecting to make a loss if you don't want to be dissapointed. But items, they're just something you own and use to get by. You buy it to use and then sell later on when you don't need it anymore.

When personal revival terminals were removed people were offered compensation. This was because of a decision made by an employee at MindArk. The overpopulation of gungnirs in the game which completely outweighs the demand is also the consequence of a decision being made by an employee at MindArk. The only difference here is the loss is seen as less significant or "in the players control" when it's obvious MindArk has a very big role to play in this.

Lets take sweat prices as another example - they've gone down and down. It was going down approximately by 1ped a year back in 2007. But with the combination of synthetic mind essence and vehicles being introduced it reached an all time low of under 2ped. This is an example of an item price being influenced by MindArk's decisions.

You're trying to tell me that i've got it wrong and then use irrelevant examples to back up your points.

Now i'll say this once again - I agree that markets change, they go up and they go down, but this change has been accelerated far beyond the normal rate of change for any item i've seen.

Governments in the real world will do everything to avoid an economic breakdown. In effect MA is the government of Entropia Universe. They control the amounts, prices, costs, charges etc. MindArk are the bank. They are the ones printing the virtual money. But the ingame money is tied to real life money so they can't change the amount of this unless the exchange rate wasn't tied to the USD, so instead the amount of items has to change. By flooding the game with more vehicles they are effectively printing money and it deliberately devalues it. That is not in the control of the player.
 
Yep, they control the supply and demand, and the randomly do stuff that massively screws up value of items or assets in game. Real Estate market still has not recovered from all the changes at vu 10... and it's only going to get worse now that there is more supply on other planets.

lol u know , planet partners bring own players too? i saw lots poping up on RT . dont u panik to much ! guys like u make it worst than it is , drama drama panic anywhere :eyecrazy:
and MU´s of stuff always goes up and down , and always change with new VU´s ...
clever ppl dont complain about it , u can use it to earn ped even :wise:
 
Well thing is why it happend so fast is that the players who looted the bp's tried to sell them at high prices without gettin them crafted, Then some more dropped and they realised fuck it, i got to sell now else it wont be worth holding on to, Thus all of a sudden there where a couple 100 clicks of gungnir out there since people been hoggin the bps for weeks and hesitant to buy them..
 
lol u know , planet partners bring own players too? i saw lots poping up on RT . dont u panik to much ! guys like u make it worst than it is , drama drama panic anywhere :eyecrazy:
and MU´s of stuff always goes up and down , and always change with new VU´s ...
clever ppl dont complain about it , u can use it to earn ped even :wise:

mastermesh is still right at the moment. It's becoming very common to see rocktropia and next island items around Calypso. Maybe when they have more players it will be less of a problem, but at the moment 1 more item on any planet equals a reduction in value for any other similar item within entropia unless they're travel limited items (which most aren't afaik).
 
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