yawn...
My haters have been throwing that derogatory term in my face for years now... Yet I'm still here, playing the game I love, growing, expanding and most importantly: making money.
Entropia is the only game where some bad actors in the game have managed to get the whole community to use this derogatory term "reseller" instead of 'trader' which has this derisive connotation toward the player that is being accused of it; at this point, calling another Entropia player a "reseller" is akin to calling them a scumbag. So this is what you are resorting to Evey? Name-calling? Geez, what a waste of time this is ... Nevertheless, for the few people that are reading this and waiting to see how I respond, allow me to take apart this last post of yours line by line:
"You are a reseller, you buy cheap from AH and sell expensive in your shop."
Truth is, you are generalizing here; you are taking just 1 thing that I do and implying that's
ALL I do. This is misleading, misinforms (intentionally) readers to thinking that all I do is grab cheap stuff from auction and mark it up in my shops which is far from being the whole picture. First of all, if you'd bothered to go do your homework before making hurtful accusations like that, you would have noticed that more than half the stuff in my shops is crafted Armors and plates. A short list, as a way of illustration would be for example: Perseus, Mk. 5B and Mk. 6B, Aquila, Lich, Firewall, Infiltrator, Pegasus, Cetus, all of the AP plates from AP-24 to AP-66, Pulsar plates, etc ... I acquired all of these blueprints at great cost and spent the time and money to skill to the point where I could use them. The fact of the matter is that my Armor business relies more on Crafted items now then it does on looted items. Yes I do offer a number of highly sought-after looted armors, like for example Angel, Shadow, Supremacy and Sentinel, but it's not the majority, it's an ever diminishing percentage of the whole business.
So, as I said before, it's pretty clear here you are trying to cherry-pick the one small part of my business that forwards your view and your narrative and are willfully omitting the rest. Very unfair of you to do that.
Secondly, not all of the looted items come from auction, actually some of the more desirable items have come from high level hunters who sold it to me
at a price we both agreed to, just like you and I did when the Serpent Scales first came out and I bought a set from you directly. And I do try to pay as much as I feel safe to pay when I do that, I think the fact that you sold those plates to me is proof of that, if there had been a higher bidder at the time, I'm sure you would have sold to them instead of me. Do you remember the price I paid? I do. I gave you +50 per plate, now was that a fair deal or not? I think it was very generous.
"There's nothing wrong there, but because to you it's fine to keep the price up as a reseller is not quite the same as keeping and driving the price up as a crafter I think."
I prefer the term 'Trader', I think it's more accurate and there's really no need to shame people that have shops and try to build a theme around them and have
some looted stuff on offer there to match the theme of their shops, no need to shame those people. There is no way I could possibly loot all of this stuff by myself, even with all of my soc helping me, that's just impossible, so I don't really have a choice here (there's probably only 3-5 Vain harness drops per year, as a way of example). And like I said, I try to be fair and pay hunters as much as I feel it's safe to do; I give them more then half of the final retail markup, sometimes like in the case of Mayhem armor parts, the majority of the final retail markup.
"If to you it's ok to buy, because no BO, something at 102% then ask 145% for it, it's quite different in crafting."
Exaggeration... There is no scenario where that's even remotely possible. The stuff that I might be able to win for 102% would be Polaris, female Martial, maybe some Jag and Tiger, but that's about it. Polaris barely fetches me 2% profit, which is a total waste of my item points, Jag, Tiger and female Martial sells around 110%, not more. Please stop implying that I'm screwing people, that's not at all what I'm doing. I provide convenience for a small fee, usually between 2 and 10% premium for my time. I spend anywhere from 5-15 hours a week browsing the auction and looking for this stuff in trade channels or asking hunters so that professional hunters don't have to, god forbid I should ask for anything in exchange for my time and efforts.
"Soem big crafters call it community service, others just do it because they can. But slowly you're getting to a point where you dictate the price and can even ask 200% just because you've bought everything from AH and people have you as the only option.. At that point, you're no different than community's favorite opal reseller even if for you it's entrepreneurship ... it's a a matter of perspective in the end."
Is that what I'm doing? Is that what
@duncis is doing? I merely jumped in because I thought Sokolade was being dragged in the streets and painted as one of those horrible, nasty (god forbid) RESELLER!!!!
Nah, fine, so OP was talking about someone else, I have no idea who, and frankly, I don't care, I think the whole thing is ridiculous. Except Opals and Redulite, I feel that's a legitimate issue but I'm pretty sure that has been addressed by MA, for the time being.
Final thoughts:
I feel that this whole name calling thing (calling players resellers) that goes on towards people in Entropia that chose to Trade is one that needs to be pointed out for what it is: a blatant attempt to shame successful traders in Entropia, which is a totally legit activity. And shaming successful players is nothing new and is not isolated to traders. I recall a thread some time ago that was aggressively attempting to publicly shame
@Hijacker27 for hosting Hussk events. The OP was making all kinds of claims that hijacker was screwing participants and doing it only for his own profit. Just call it out for what it is (I did) and move on.
Before that, there was another thread that was claiming that
@Konvicted was 'cheating' and kill-stealing in the Cave on CP and the OP even implied that his Hive tutorial thread was just a front to hide supposed 'real' intentions to scam others...
All of this is really wrongheaded and counter-productive because the truth is every single participant in Entropia is important, without other participants, your loot is worth nothing, your assets (deeds, shares, shops, LAs, etc..) won't generate any more revenue, and your precious gear, will be worth nothing. When people come on here and shame other players for trying to help or for being successful in Entropia, they just put a bad taste in people's mouth and people leave or play less.
It needs to be called out for what it is, it's just haters hating. In my mind the only appropriate response is to defend the one being attacked if you feel you can, short of that, go post something positive in another thread or create your own positive thread to counter the negative one.
And still, after all this, if you insist on calling me a reseller, fine, it's your right and I'll respect it, but at least have the decency to DEFINE what the term means to you, because just about any person you ask has a slightly different take on what a reseller is. Some even go so far as to claim that a reseller is anyone who buys something with the intent to resell it at a higher price. If that's the case, then we are ALL resellers since pretty much everyone who ever buys anything is also hoping the item will appreciate in value while they own it. Even way back when I bought my first shop I was already a reseller because
@morey sold me a bunch of inventory at a very nice bulk discount, which of course I sold in the shop for more then I paid. So define your terms. I'll tell you what I think is meant when someone says the word reseller:
Someone that
abuses the inherent rarity of items for which there is a demand as a mechanism for personal profit, example, price manipulation.
Do I do that? No. Never. I never hoard anything, I never buy all of the available supply of something in order to drive prices higher, I don't do that, never have. So when you come on here Evey and call me a reseller, some of the readers assume that this is what you mean, that I manipulate prices or abuse existing scarcities for my own profit. So if you are going to insist on calling me that, at least have the decency to define what the term means to you.
I'm going to stop here cause that's quite the wall of text at this point, but I believe it's all on topic.
Legends