cornering a market?

Mazumii - Dreamweaver
Mazumii - Dreamweaver Posts: 270 Arc User
edited April 2014 in Cash Shop Huddle
is there any rule in the ToS that would prevent a few people from cornering a market? example: lets say 10 people got together on a server and agreed that none of them would undercut the other in tokens, so they all set the sell price to 50k, now obviously more people may beneeded but was just wondering if someone has tried this with their friends? doesn't have to be the token market either can be anything even gold or apo/herbs.
Post edited by Mazumii - Dreamweaver on

Comments

  • WannaBM - Archosaur
    WannaBM - Archosaur Posts: 1,984 Arc User
    edited April 2014
    Rules are not needed.

    Suppose those 10 people would do that, then the price of tokens has increased so more people will feel compelled to open packs. They would have lots of tokens to sell. Meanwhile more people would stop using crabs, noone would make a pan gu anymore with tokens and thus demand would drop.

    If those 10 people want to keep up their game, they would have to buy all those extra tokens from the added supply and decreased demand. They would have to keep doing this or someone else (like me) is gonna buy the surplus and undercut their prizes. If they ever stop buying all those extra tokens, the prize would plummet and they would be left with inventories full of tokens that they bought for a prize much higher than they can now sell them for.

    And all that for what ? so they can buy at 49 and sell at 50k ? They could raise the prize, but not the margins cuz if they are going to buy for 40 and sell for 50, i will be there to buy for 41 and sell for 49.

    Same holds true for any market unless a select few can controll the supply pretty much completely like for example the 2 or 3 lucky **** who got a crown of madness.

    You can however try to influence markets for a short time. For example i think there are gold sellers who make a bunch of small buy orders quite a bit above the highest buy hoping that new bigger orders will be placed on top of them thus artificially pushing up the prize. (all those buyers offering 100 coins more than the last are no good for the sellers ofc) I think even such practice is very limited in effectiveness as it would only work in a market that is already going up. (and in an upgoing market, you should place and take buy orders anyway, not sell orders)

    With apo herbs i think illicit price agreements could be more effective as the majority of those are produced by a small number of botters and the price would have to rise quite a bit to make many people go farm them manually. Also the important apoths can only be made by the faction controlling a city. The fact that they designed it like that would make me think they arent opposed to prize agreements in such faction.
    Everything i write is from PvE perspective unless mentioned otherwise.
  • Mazumii - Dreamweaver
    Mazumii - Dreamweaver Posts: 270 Arc User
    edited April 2014
    so if i understand it right, if some people decided to crash the economy and i mean make it next to impossible to buy anything then pwi couldn't do much about it, as long as no rules were broken...interesting
  • Fissile - Archosaur
    Fissile - Archosaur Posts: 607 Arc User
    edited April 2014
    No you don't understand at all. tl;dr version is:

    "Economics doesn't work that way."

    The only way to control the price of something is to control a significant majority of the *supply*. In the case of tokens and anything else from the boutique, there is an absolute ceiling on the price of those items. That ceiling is the cost of buying those same items from the boutique.

    There are only a few places this is possible and WannaBM gave the best example (apothecary items tied to land ownership). But even this would require steadfast cooperation from all members of the faction as any individual member could undercut the agreed-upon price and capture a much higher proportion of the market than if he used the same price as everyone else.
    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
  • Kaugummii - Morai
    Kaugummii - Morai Posts: 113 Arc User
    edited April 2014
    I know that delamari on RT owned most of the high grade herb shops on there and they were able to push the price from herbs up to 2k. Tho atm at morai materials are already expensive so crashing the market makes no sense and I doubt pw will like it to see people crashing the market because then you hurt the game in an indirect way
    Please call me Ben.. that is who I am
    Morai - Kaugummi - BM
    Ragin tide - Mastersworde - BM 101
  • LostPoet - Dreamweaver
    LostPoet - Dreamweaver Posts: 396 Arc User
    edited April 2014
    People will probably try and work around things like this, either by setting up cheaper / undercutting catshops, or just do deals with faction members so that people can have reasonable prices among friends.

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  • Kaugummii - Morai
    Kaugummii - Morai Posts: 113 Arc User
    edited April 2014
    come try that here everything is expensive but that makes making money easy too
    Please call me Ben.. that is who I am
    Morai - Kaugummi - BM
    Ragin tide - Mastersworde - BM 101