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The AH is STILL bugged and it is WRECKING the RP economy
maugrym
Member Posts: 24 Arc User
I'm not sure if the AH is "working as intended," but when you attempt to purchase more than 3 or 4 of anything (e.g., Rank 8 enchants) it makes you wait 22 seconds before allowing you to purchase more. What this effectively does it prevent anyone without endless time on their hands from correcting the price of RP by buying up all the scraps to a level where the market stabilizes. This did not used to happen, and is a new "feature" since the Ravenloft patch. This is not when you run a new search, this occurs when you attempt to buy multiple items resulting from a single search.
"Why do I care?" - asks the average player. Here's why. When you spend 42,500 - 50,000 AD on a single key to open a lockbox, you would like to be able to resell what you get out of the box. When those of us who play this game as merchants act to stabilize the economy, you then can sell your R8's for around 4-5k (currently the stabil-ish price), your R7s for 2-2.5k and your R9s for 16-18k. But people keep adding to the market, so if we can't clean out all the 1-off sales to maintain a reasonable price, the price will plummet.
So this means that when you open the new companion box, on a 2x RP weekend, and get 2R8s and 2R9s, you can currently sell those for a total of about 25k. If we could stabilize the market, you could sell those for about 40-45k. This drives down the price of the packs you get from boxes, and generally renders the extra RP loot you get from dungeons even more worthless.
"But doesn't that mean I can buy RP cheaper?" Yes. It also means that if you want to buy enough RP to get from rank 13 to 14, in the form of R8s, you need to spend approximately 5 minutes buying individual R8s. Before you could do it in about 30 seconds. It ALSO means that once you have your max level of enchants (or wherever you are happy), you are not going to be able to EARN virtually any AD by selling the RP you don't need.
RP is already dropping in price because of the enchant changes, and maybe the intent was to bring everyone to the same level, so this is an "intentional" bug (read - change), but it renders the AH virtually useless for selling anything but items. Because unless the R8 you list sells within the first few minutes, someone is going to undercut it, and no one is going to spend hours cleaning up all the under-priced RP.
"Why should you merchants be allowed to drive up the price of RP?" We can't drive the price beyond a sustainable level, first of all. There is too much influx to the AH, so a level around 4-5k AD per R8 is currently sustainable. But bear in mind, that when we reset the price to that level, it benefits everyone who wants to sell off their extra RP, in order to buy other things they care about. So by keeping the market at stable levels, we make the price of lock-boxes reasonable (in exchange for what you get) and we allow you to amass enough AD to buy the Swarm you never got.
If you are ok spending 50k AD on a key to open a box that produces a pack that should be worth 40k, but is now only worth 25k, then that is your decision. I will tell you that this is going to break the RP system in short order, and that in about 3 weeks you can expect to get about 1k per R8. I can also prove to you that this is a problem, by simply listing about 800 single R8s at 1k or less, just to demonstrate that since no one can clean it out, the new price will be below 1k (because people will still try to undercut my listings, thus establishing a new floor for the price).
I hope this explanation provides the necessary impetus to fix this problem, because right now the auction house RP market is nothing more than an extra set of bank/bag slots for most players.
(I also spent 80Mil over the last few days trying to keep the market level, assuming this would be fixed with the weekly maint, but since it wasn't, I have no interest in spending that kind of time again, so unless someone else steps in, the prices will continue to fall).
Please, PLEASE, fix this.
Sincerely,
Maugrym
"Why do I care?" - asks the average player. Here's why. When you spend 42,500 - 50,000 AD on a single key to open a lockbox, you would like to be able to resell what you get out of the box. When those of us who play this game as merchants act to stabilize the economy, you then can sell your R8's for around 4-5k (currently the stabil-ish price), your R7s for 2-2.5k and your R9s for 16-18k. But people keep adding to the market, so if we can't clean out all the 1-off sales to maintain a reasonable price, the price will plummet.
So this means that when you open the new companion box, on a 2x RP weekend, and get 2R8s and 2R9s, you can currently sell those for a total of about 25k. If we could stabilize the market, you could sell those for about 40-45k. This drives down the price of the packs you get from boxes, and generally renders the extra RP loot you get from dungeons even more worthless.
"But doesn't that mean I can buy RP cheaper?" Yes. It also means that if you want to buy enough RP to get from rank 13 to 14, in the form of R8s, you need to spend approximately 5 minutes buying individual R8s. Before you could do it in about 30 seconds. It ALSO means that once you have your max level of enchants (or wherever you are happy), you are not going to be able to EARN virtually any AD by selling the RP you don't need.
RP is already dropping in price because of the enchant changes, and maybe the intent was to bring everyone to the same level, so this is an "intentional" bug (read - change), but it renders the AH virtually useless for selling anything but items. Because unless the R8 you list sells within the first few minutes, someone is going to undercut it, and no one is going to spend hours cleaning up all the under-priced RP.
"Why should you merchants be allowed to drive up the price of RP?" We can't drive the price beyond a sustainable level, first of all. There is too much influx to the AH, so a level around 4-5k AD per R8 is currently sustainable. But bear in mind, that when we reset the price to that level, it benefits everyone who wants to sell off their extra RP, in order to buy other things they care about. So by keeping the market at stable levels, we make the price of lock-boxes reasonable (in exchange for what you get) and we allow you to amass enough AD to buy the Swarm you never got.
If you are ok spending 50k AD on a key to open a box that produces a pack that should be worth 40k, but is now only worth 25k, then that is your decision. I will tell you that this is going to break the RP system in short order, and that in about 3 weeks you can expect to get about 1k per R8. I can also prove to you that this is a problem, by simply listing about 800 single R8s at 1k or less, just to demonstrate that since no one can clean it out, the new price will be below 1k (because people will still try to undercut my listings, thus establishing a new floor for the price).
I hope this explanation provides the necessary impetus to fix this problem, because right now the auction house RP market is nothing more than an extra set of bank/bag slots for most players.
(I also spent 80Mil over the last few days trying to keep the market level, assuming this would be fixed with the weekly maint, but since it wasn't, I have no interest in spending that kind of time again, so unless someone else steps in, the prices will continue to fall).
Please, PLEASE, fix this.
Sincerely,
Maugrym
1
Comments
Again, this is not a post requesting some change to get the price of RP to rise. It is a post requesting a fix to get the AH to unlock, i.e., get fixed back to the way it functioned for years. It used to work one way, now it doesn't, the change is not in patch notes, therefore, bug. If RP prices rise, it is because RP is currently undervalued. RP will still cap out at a fair price (see below).
There is probably some broken-middle-ground (between no-effect and total-calamity) where this is all leveling out, but the economy will take months to adapt, and there will be plenty of problems along the way. If the AH had worked this way from the beginning, the economy would have developed accommodating this, and money and commerce would have always been distributed accordingly. This is exactly why you cannot take a fully functioning economy, built around one set of principles, and massively change something that effects the core of that economy without expecting dramatic and unintended consequences (e.g., if the Zen price is a component of the effect, I'm sure that was not an intended consequence).
An AH that doesn't require 22 seconds between purchases allows people who are so inclined to buy up cheaply listed commodities and sell them back at prices that are reasonable based on what people are willing to pay. Whether we realize it or not, there is actually a defined reasonable price for rank 8s, between 4-7k (depending on current need to upgrade enchants and gear). This is based on the RP that drops from lockbox packs, which cost a fixed amount (relative to the current prices of Zen), and have a fixed percentage chance of dropping RP. So, if you did the math, you could roughly estimate the chances of getting an R7, R8 or R9, and those chances, plus the unlimited supply and fixed pricing, have an invisible effect on capping the price. This is because if r8s were suddenly worth 20k AD, for example, everyone would be ripping open lockboxes to get Comp and Ench packs, and ripping those packs open to get the r7s, r8s, etc. to resell, which would bring the prices back to "normal." At the same time, when RP prices are so low, there is NO reason to open those packs.
Need and variety are the other caps on RP. If someone bought up all the available RP and relisted it as excessive prices, no one would buy it because the need is not high right now. So the prices would fall back towards a level. This also requires people to buy all the corresponding gems, because (although people still do not seem to get this), there is literally no difference between an Opal and an R7 Radiant in terms of RP, except that the R7 Radiant seems to sell for about 80% of the price of the Opal. Anyhow, without digressing further, the point is that there are plenty of market forces already keeping RP at a relatively fixed price when the AH is working as it always used to work.
The "floor" on RP has always been maintained by need and by people who buy up perceived undervalued over-supply. With present low-need and the broken AH preventing the latter, we are seeing a relatively unconstrained fall in price. (Need is a cap on both ends, when need is low, it is a high-price cap, when need is high, it is a low-price cap).
We currently have monthly 2X RP events, apparently, so the increased supply will drive down pricing as well. But having no way of clearing off the extra RP resulting from these events in any expedited manner will continue to have a brutal impact on pricing. Just wait a few weeks and see what happens to prices, again, after the next 2X RP event, if this is not fixed.
So, again, please fix this. I will not post any more on the matter, I just hope this does not fall on deaf ears.