Bazaar ***** Cry BabiesFollow

Yes. Its classic economics. I most cases this is precisely the right action to take to curb inflation.

However even in RL it does not always work out as planned, short money supply has the nasty side effect of bankrupting marginal businesses and causing high unemployment.

You know I think there may actually be a corollary to this in EQ!




Yes, this is the other half of the classic equation. Restrict supply of high demand goods.


Hehe, being flamed by Smash, or chewed out by Thundra, I could just shrug off. Even have a laugh about.

But being called obnoxious by Tehom would be like getting a smack across the ear from mom.

(And I can tell you that at 54 years of age that hurts!)



Edited, Mon Feb 9 19:28:30 2004 by Iluien

Hmmm... I probably wasn't really clear. There's no money going out of circulation. It's just being refunneled differently.

Let's say you have 1000 players. Each player has 5k cash. If each one wants to buy something, then no one can buy anything that costs more then 5k simply because no one has that much cash. Thus, you'll see lots of things selling in the <5k range. In fact, prices on items that might sell for more will have to drop simply because they wont sell otherwise. Now. Let's say that 900 of them sell their 5k to IGE. The remaining 100 buy that plat from IGE in even chunks. That means you've got 100 players who each have 45k. Thus, the cost on the higher end items will tend to reflect that. Even though the amount of money floating around is the same, the mere fact that it's being concentrated in a small number of hands means that costs will rise on the desired top end goods (especially if there's less then 100 for sale at the moment). Call this principle the "burning pocket" theory of economics if you want. People will spend the money they have. The more they have, the bigger the purchase they will make and the more they're willing to spend on any one thing. Certainly, supply ties into it, but no matter how few Ornate molds there are out there in relation to the number of people who want them, they wont sell for more then what someone has in their hands at any given moment.

Ok. That's extremely simplistic. People don't just "have" money. They make it. However, the "burning pocket" factor still really applies. If the average person is making 1k a day playing on EQ, how long will it take him to earn enough to buy an Ornate mold? More importantly, will he decide to spend that money on something else cheaper but that fills an immediate need first? While some will hold out, most people will blow their cash earlier rather then later. It's just the nature of the consumer to do so.

This idea holds true no matter what the rate of plat gain is, or how many people there are. When you're looking at a large population and their spending habits, you're going to see certain trends. Thus, while supply may have something to do with the end prices, demand is goning to be determined not just by how much total money is out there, but by how many people at any given moment are able to save up the amount of plat you are asking for any given item.

I think it's pretty easy to see that whether supply changes or not, the mere presense of IGE increases the demand for items like Ornate. I think it's reasonably safe to say that most people (if not all!) who buy plat online are those who would have a very hard time earning/saving up large amounts of plat in game. Thefore, we can with reasonable certainty state that the ability to buy large amounts of platinum online would generate an increased number of players who *could* shell out a higher price for an Ornate mold. That means a higher demand and thus, we can state that the price for Ornate molds will go up.


It's not that there's more or less money floating around, but that the money is more likely to be concentrated in large chunks at any given time. Thus, "high ticket" items can be priced up higher since there's more people who can afford that price. There's other factors at work here, but this is specifically what I was talking about when I posted earlier.


Hope that makes a bit more sense now.

Eh? I don't know. Sure. I agree with you in a "That makes mathmatical sense" way. However, LDoN has been out for how many months now (6? 8? I'm horrible with time...). The flags were removed from planes a couple months before LDoN came out IIRC. Thus, the conditions that would have caused short supply and increased plat flow into the economy have existed for a good period of time.

If we're going to look at anectdotal "coincidences" I'd think the fact that within a month of IGE buying out the other plat sellers the prices on higher end purchasable goods like Ornate skyrocketed is telling. Prices had been steadily droping on those items before, during and after the two events you mention. However, they went up by as much as 1000% on some servers within a very short time of the IGE consolidation.


Coincidence? Could be. I confess that I've not really been looking deeply into the matter (I don't play the bazaar that much really). However, if the anectdotal evidence is to be believed, I'd say that there's a pretty strong case for IGE having *something* to do with the increase in those prices.

Vaguely saying something is wrong? Back it up, got proof to the contrary?
EXACTLY what is wrong with the reasoning? POINT by POINT, paragraph by paragraph?
By the way, I do know about plat duping BUGS (not scams), like when you could zone in 3rd person view on a boat with your inv open and put plat on your cursor and zone thru and the plat would be in inv AND on your cursor or something similar, been 3 or 4 years, forgot precisely how it worked. With or without this problem, the reasoning for inflationary pressures in the bazaar pricing of the hi end TRADEABLES (some fool mistook when I said Hi end I was meaning the time no drop stuff, so let me clarify, its Hi end TRADEABLES I refer to, how he could think no drop items would enter into a discussion of buying and selling items is beyond me) is still valid, basic econonimcs. The game is producing (printing) money everytime a mob dies and it drops some cash or an item that can be sold to a vendor. This money rarely leaves (destroyed) the game economy.
To refresh your memory, here it is to reread it.




Oooooo a /duel, luv them.
Ahh heck I confess, I am only level 2 with 1 cloth shirt. well, I would be level 2, but tonights raid deleveled me and I cant find my corpse. And I don't have a guild, not anymore anyway, the patch tomorrow is going to erase it, less than 10 members wouldn't you know!
O well.
I won't cry.
Of course the fact that you are an officer in a PoT guild weighs heavily for how much you know about economics. Soon as I wake up tomorrow I will go out and get a computer game player to take over running my Accounting department.



Yes, he was mean, see above reference to deleveling.

Be sure to send a copy of the economic model and its flaws and corrections you have figured out to Sony, I am sure they will be happy to reimburse you for your time spent solving the problem for them.

O, name calling. I am sooo sad. You hurt my feelings. Bet my daddy can beat your daddy up!

I see. You don't have any proof to back up your feeble claim to knowing what is what, unable to provide some proof or deliver any debate, you make personal attacks in a roundabout way. You could at least have the guts to just call me names straight up if you can't provide any debate or proof.

It's not even high end gear that I'm arguing about. The inflation in EQ is across the board. Take SCHW for example a piece of gear that is easily in my level range and impossible to get and hold the camp for. So I spend my time raising the PP to buy them instead, sure if I could hold the camp for 24 hours solid I might get a chance at the drop. But its easier for me to farm a couple hundred PP in short bursts every day, and I don't have to ruin the day of the guy who is already camping them by starting an argument. I bought my very first pair for 2.5k. As of last week you couldn't even find them for less than 5k.

Sure, why not?

I've made approx 10 million since PoP came out, probably closer to 15 or so, and for what I deal in I'm one trader in 10 or so. During all of luclin, much the same wares sold for about 500k gross, tops. The amount of money available out of the economy increased, seemily, by about 2000% to 3000%. Other guilds I know have done substantially better than that, making upwards of 50 to 60 million or more, and some breaking the hundred million mark. Where's this money coming from? If raid guilds were removing -billions- of platinum from circulation, why hasn't price come down since platinum would be more scarce? It isn't, and is only going up. If we can make hundreds of millions of platinum without even hardly trying, when it was hard to make a million during Luclin, where in the hell is the money coming from? I don't mind making a lot more money, but I don't have any explaination for why the economy is bursting with platinum versus me barely being able to move more demanded items during luclin.

oh and on the subject of economies if you got the cash too waste on buying items or plat on EQ why bother wasting your time playing it in the first place?

I will even offer my services if you want just send me your money and i'll play EQ for you, think of the time you will save grping xping and collecting items? and all for the cost of a standard account ? no additional payments!!

what is the point EQ isnt a game you can win there is no best gear id rather have a good player in poor gear anyday.

Notice I said raids, not highend raids. If none of the mobs on our primary target list are up, we often raid lower targets.



So are you saying your guild rolls for such drops, when you have someone who should be given the item?
If we have someone who is in need of a certain item we go and get it for them.

By Status gear, I mean items you can obtain in away other than killing the mob that drops it, wich is considerably more expensive than gear of a compairable quality. I think most peeps will agree that the North Ro Armor is of compairabel quality to ornate. As i recall this armor sells for abut 1440 AP's. If you get 53 points per win and if you can avg one win per hour then this is equil to about 27 hours of play time per item.
Now if the ornate cost 120,000 pp and you can farm 2,000 plat per hours it takes over twice as much play time to get the ornate compaird to the LDoN. Now you could also say that the EF LDoN armor is compareable to Ornate and can be had for 1/4 the play time or less.
This being the case, why do peeps buy Ornate instead of doing LDoN adv and obtaining equilevent armor? Because they can buy the status of owning higher end gear with out haveing to earn it in game.



1. It is not the only set of gear that allows you to move into elemental raids.
2. If your guild is ready to move into the elemental planes they should have no problem equipment their key characters with ornate armor.

Zappa, while I agree this should be the case, I myself was not allowed into a group b/c I had low AC according to the group.

As for the economy issues, alot of you have beliefs as to what caused this inflation, I can see your points, MOST of them aren't too outlandish. I however tend to believe that the most likely cause of inflation in EQ, as well as RL, is due to an increase in floating money, or plat. When there is much plat running around it makes it worth less and less. For example gold, a rare metal is worth more than aluminum simply b/c of its supply. Same goes with diamonds, platinum(real) etc.etc.

Now to elaborate more on this, where did the plat come from? It can't just appear out of no where, back when you could pay like 5 silver to make something worth 18plat to vendors people were making bots that would do this combine over and over. I read somewhere(don't remember where) a post about this. The posting person said that she caught her friend in virtually empty city zones, like erudin, Ak'Anon, and he was next to a lvl 1 toon that was in the forge. The bot would just sit there and do these combines, while the actual player would get supplies to it and take the product back out, sell it an d make his money.
At one point SOE caught on to this exploit and began banning accounts. Now this is a long shot, I read this somewhere, again I forgot where, but it may be true. SOE was handing out tiral accounts for a time apparently, people were getting these 14 day accounts and doing the tradeskill exploit mentioned above. Then they would let the tial expire, when SOE went around canceling accounts they were not cancelling the trial accounts. So they dupers waited until the bannings were done and then started re-activating these accounts, dump the plat to a single account and proceed to sell it on yantis, or IGE websites.
So let's recap more money=less worth, and we have all heard about toons having 1million plat and the tradeskill exploit.
Now for the solution,
Long term, do not skip cancelled accounts in the exploit bannings from now on.
Short term, Not a freaking clue.


link=http://www.magelo.com/eq_view_profile.html?num=758107
Have no clue how to link things, but here goes.


Edited, Tue Feb 10 13:01:02 2004 by Hosein