@Vhaeyne valve is definitely trying to go the better route for what they are.
They all seem to have some horrible ideas of how to screw over their consumers for money. You're right, may not even be bread, could just have bread written on the card-board with shit sandwiched in the middle so every time consumers bite into it it just slops out the side. Pretty much sums up the gaming industry. Activision/Blizzard, Bethesda, EA, just serving shit sandwiches and getting away with it.
MMORPGs face such problems (inflation) for a couple of reasons:
1. You have resource gathering for a crafting system and the gathered-to-expended ratio is too high.
2. Second reason might be in combination with 1 but where there is no need to expend the extra resources - for repairs, crafting extra stuff etc. If you only need gold/credits to repair, you will just end up selling your extra materials to try to make a profit.
3. There are probably a lot more, these are just the 2 main ones.
My point being - if the systems in the game are not in sync, there will always be issues. You can't have an endless supply of materials without a proper sink for them and not ruin the game economy.
Now.. The OP suggestion is interesting, but it wouldn't really work - just putting a timer on the item would either have 0 effect on the market or will be too long and just irritate people who like trading (and I mean trading trading, negotiations and such, not just clicking in an Auction House) and ultimately make them leave.
On the other hand, you COULD have some sort of a tax on items above certain value - which can also be decided by the mayor for example.
Say you want to sell some UBER-steel. It costs 50 gold a pop on the market, but you want to buy it and then sell it outside of the auction for 75 a pop. Ding-ding, it's above the 60 gold/piece set by the mayor on that tier of materials (there's also UBER-wood, UBER-stone etc) and when you perform a transaction you pay 10% tax (example value) on the amount you receive. So you ultimately receive 67.5 gold/piece.
I think being able to implement such taxes would be more beneficial to a player driver economy than having some artificial blocker telling you you need to wait for 3 days before you can sell your shit.
Should there be a wait time on re-selling to fight inflation?
No. Price inflates when demand isn't met by supply. It doesn't fight inflation making a recently bought specific item unavailable to sell for an hour, it just delays one person selling it (whilst the price climbs). Someone else would be able to sell the same type of item at the higher price in the meantime, bringing the demand vs. supply driven price back down.
Delaying the re-sell just means it's more difficult to turn a profit as a sole trader, you would need to swap to an alt or work with other players (no! never! MMO - LOL). I don't want that barrier to entry for traders. There's a good possibility we will see groups of guilds co-operating and acting as a cartel to control markets and fix prices, or try to (I hope to play a part in that). Cartels won't be penalized by the re-sell delay because they will have many traders and stock of same/similar items. If a sole trader can squeeze a small slice out of the (hypothetical) Cartel profit margins then I think that's a good thing.
None of the systems are designed yet. It will be interesting to see what impact the Economy consultant that Intrepid used will have on the game.
@overfitneuralnet
I like that you are trying to find a solution.
Taxes are a partial money sink as a percentage will disappear on the node running costs (those NPC guards don't come for free!)
Gear maintenance is both a resource and gold sink. You need a wide range of gatherables to be processed into something that can be used by an appropriate crafter to repair your gear, depending on exactly what the gear is. As you can't master all Artisan areas you will need also gold to pay for someone's services. The gold sink occurs when the artisans pay their accommodation costs and any other node related taxes.
Mayors should have a high degree of control over taxes with tax brackets and a wide range of schemes aimed at preventing a simple assessment of which node is best for trades to occur in (like in real life!).
Transactions will move to a node where they are taxed less, unless there is another benefit to trading in that location (security, that's where your storage is _currently_ based, harbor, etc.) which needs to be taken into account.
If the tax burden discourages high value trades from operating in a particular node then the node will suffer from the loss of the taxes associated with those trades.
This doesn't mean that your ideas can't work, I'm just observing that a mayors job is complex when trying to attract trade and generate tax from it.
The other factor is, if you are going to store resources in a node, how safe is that node from being sieged and sacked. Do your taxes in any way relate to the degree of security that node offers?
I, personally, build a case. My first course of action if someone else is price fixing will be to try and sell to them directly. If it's a person, I got no problem.
So, long as they are not buying at a superhuman speed. Which is a major red flag.
If they are wanted to fix the price at 25 and sit on the AH and buy all of an item below that. That is fair. I have done that myself. It can work. I would just contact the seller and try to sell to them directly to save the listing fee. Try to get them to buy at like 24.5 or something.
If they don't respond and keep buying at superhuman speeds I have my case. If they are not buying at superhuman speeds, but are botting at least real humans have a chance.
I don't think I am the only one who pays close attention to the market when they are dealing with a good that makes them money consistently. Close enough to notice things selling instantly.
There may be the odd time I report a human because they did not respond to my PMs or responded in a way that made me think it was a bot. That is for the GMs to investigate, though.
We can all hope they are not as bad as Blizzard and, from what I have heard, New World. Where they auto-ban after mass report.
I've never come across a player botting that auto buys at an unreasonable speed. I've known a few people that have used purchase bots in various games, but none of them have been dumb enough to set them to auto-buy at that speed.
I have seen some players buying items at unrealistic speed using shortcuts and disabling curser movement (among a few other things). While people doing this would never be as fast as a bot could be, they are faster than I have ever seen a bot set (that I knew was a bot).
With bots, it is all too easy to bankrupt the player using them.
Using your 25 price as an example - and making the assumption that the normal price for the item fluctuates between 20 and 30, all you need to do is buy up everything for sale above 25 and list it at 24.9.
While you may lose a few coin per item, your botting player is spending 24.9 per. This means that assuming you are moderately well off in game, you should be able to run their cash reserves out well before yours do - on the assumption that there are enough of that item up for sale to do this.
Then, once that botter has run out of coin, all you need to do is ensure that the item in question stays at the lower end of it's normal range for a few weeks, and all of a sudden you have a botter that is shit scared of using their bot.
I've done this (or similar to this) in almost every game I play. While I am absolutely sure some of the players in question would have been b9otting and some would not have been, I honestly would not be able to point to one instance of this and say if it was a bot or not.
The only people I know of for sure were botting were people I knew that told me they were.
@overfitneuralnet
I like that you are trying to find a solution.
Taxes are a partial money sink as a percentage will disappear on the node running costs (those NPC guards don't come for free!)
Gear maintenance is both a resource and a gold sink. You need a wide range of gatherables to be processed into something that can be used by an appropriate crafter to repair your gear, depending on exactly what the gear is. As you can't master all Artisan areas you will need also gold to pay for someone's services. The gold sink occurs when the artisans pay their accommodation costs and any other node related taxes.
Mayors should have a high degree of control over taxes with tax brackets and a wide range of schemes aimed at preventing a simple assessment of which node is best for trades to occur in (like in real life!).
Transactions will move to a node where they are taxed less, unless there is another benefit to trading in that location (security, that's where your storage is _currently_ based, harbor, etc.) which needs to be taken into account.
If the tax burden discourages high value trades from operating in a particular node then the node will suffer from the loss of the taxes associated with those trades.
This doesn't mean that your ideas can't work, I'm just observing that a mayors job is complex when trying to attract trade and generate tax from it.
The other factor is, if you are going to store resources in a node, how safe is that node from being sieged and sacked. Do your taxes in any way relate to the degree of security that node offers?
Yeap, correct. The tax thing on higher-value trades would only work if there is a benefit... And if there aren't people will just go to another node. The problem is that almost no solution would work against scalping and artificially boosting prices.
Even though if it's done on a small enough scale it doesn't really matter - like if 2 people are in a node with thousands. Unless they are just buying and selling obscene amounts or are the only people selling there, I don't really see how it would become a problem. If the price of the material ranged from 20-25 and you suddenly start selling it at 26 to even 25.01, you are at the upper bound of the range. People will naturally gravitate towards the lower end unless they don't have a choice
The tax would only work if you didn't have a choice of where to trade or if all nodes have such a high-value trade tax by default, but I don't think that's a good solution.
it's common in many video games with trade markets/auction houses to have a listing fee and a sales tax/cut upon successful transaction. Just more gold sinks to reduce over-saturation of currency.
The fixed price ranges especially for unit pricing is relatively what I was getting at in another thread to prevent and deter certain issues in relation to the economy. imagine if price of materials were affected by region due to a rarity spectrum?
One could buy ore and ship it from a biome rich in it, flip it in another biome where it's less prevalent to make a profit at the risk of transportation via caravans.
I have seen the superhuman buy speed. They do it because in large populations they have to, or they don't get any sales. If they know other people are doing it in a global AH then it's like an arms race.
Amusingly, though. I am pretty confident this is how people trade crypto and stocks IRL.
I have seen the superhuman buy speed. They do it because in large populations they have to, or they don't get any sales. If they know other people are doing it in a global AH then it's like an arms race.
Amusingly, though. I am pretty confident this is how people trade crypto and stocks IRL.
It absolutely is.
In the trading world, a thousandth of a second can be measured in millions of dollars.
I'm still skeptical about the speed of the bots - not whether or not they exist, as I know they do.
No matter which way you look at it, a bot that is operating at that kind of speed needs to have the thumbs up from the developer.
If it is actual superhuman speed, then the bot is using a hook in the games API to buy without performing a search. If so, the developers put that hook there for exactly this purpose.
If the bot is actually performing a search and buying, the developers are looking at a character searching multiple times a second, and have decided that is ok. Since bandwidth is usually the highest cost of running a live MMO, they would be looking at things like this.
So, if a bot is operating at super human speeds, the developer of that game is ok with market botting. None of the games I have played have had this stance (not while I played them, at least), which is why in my experience I have not seen anyone set a bot to that speed, even though they can be.
In most games that are against botting like this, there is a limit to how quickly you can search the market anyway.
I do love coming to these threads and getting to see immediately that a user has never participated in an economy focused guild in a decentralized market system. I’ve never had the time nor motivation to spend hours upon hours scouring every trader in reach to make a few extra bits of currency that eventually build up into something significant. I’m happy to gather and craft and make my millions in easier, less tedious ways. However, I’ve played with players who love the economy game. They spend 90% of their time hopping from trader to trader getting gold here and there and sometimes striking gold when they find a gem significantly underpriced. The other 10% is usually housing.
I’ve found some deals just by wandering by a trader in the town I was questing it at the time. 2% of the typical market price so of course I bought them (and used them immediately). I’m sure someone blamed “bots” when they got there and saw the listing already purchased. Every game has those players who’ve never tried to engage with the economy besides being annoyed that the items they buy got more expensive or the listing they saw got bought. My best advice, go take part in a trading guild. Learn how the economy of a game works. They’re not run by cartels of players, prices aren’t dictated by bots, it’s not the fault of others that the item you want is worth more than you wish to pay.
I do love coming to these threads and getting to see immediately that a user has never participated in an economy focused guild in a decentralized market system. I’ve never had the time nor motivation to spend hours upon hours scouring every trader in reach to make a few extra bits of currency that eventually build up into something significant. I’m happy to gather and craft and make my millions in easier, less tedious ways. However, I’ve played with players who love the economy game. They spend 90% of their time hopping from trader to trader getting gold here and there and sometimes striking gold when they find a gem significantly underpriced. The other 10% is usually housing.
I’ve found some deals just by wandering by a trader in the town I was questing it at the time. 2% of the typical market price so of course I bought them (and used them immediately). I’m sure someone blamed “bots” when they got there and saw the listing already purchased. Every game has those players who’ve never tried to engage with the economy besides being annoyed that the items they buy got more expensive or the listing they saw got bought. My best advice, go take part in a trading guild. Learn how the economy of a game works. They’re not run by cartels of players, prices aren’t dictated by bots, it’s not the fault of others that the item you want is worth more than you wish to pay.
I got through that schpiel without any comment on the suggestion. Well, on topic, a delay won’t actually help anything. What I have seen work is flat price-based listing fees. The upfront cost keeps people pricing within reasonable levels they think others can afford and would be willing to purchase at. It also makes listing and relisting inexpensive raw materials low risk so gatherers can keep up with current market trends without bankrupting themselves. What also helps is expiration dates on listings.
So if you price an item at a 200% markup, you’d paying double the original seller’s listing fee. If another player deems that price reasonable, it sells, and you make profit. If no one finds that price reasonable, it eventually expires and you’ll pay another listing fee.
Extremely rare items with equally low supply are truly the only ones that could be “cornered” by a single player, but likely those will be staying within a guild (or going directly to.a crafter) and won’t even hit a trader stall.
Yours truly realized that I was part of the problem, in SWTOR - which in this past year has seen *HORRIBLE* inflation: In "flipping" items on the market, we artificially drive up the prices of items on the player-markets.
Flipping items doesn't cause inflation-- it has a deflationary effect since the market fees are being paid a second time for the same item. If prices are rising then it's due to some other factor in the game.
I played SWTOR at launch and if I remember correctly you could send out NPC followers to gather raw materials. That was a terrible system that caused inflation and made the market in that game a joke. Same thing with WoW's mission tables during Draenor and Legion: any system that lets the player afk farm gold or raw resources will make prices skyrocket.
This one is hard to say tbh. One of the main concepts i like in Ashes is that there will be localized markets. A savvy player can find out that Zone A has a market place flooded with iron and Zone B has a severe lack, so he buys from Zone A, gets a caravan and transports it to Zone B for a profit. That should be left in the game and have no way to check the prices in other cities without going there (looking at you NW).
Now, flipping items, not exactly sure, but my guess is that you buy all of item X and then put it all back for 2x the price. I am not sure that is a problem. Because when you do it, you take a massive risk.
Let's say that item X is a raw material. Well, sure, you can buy it and try to resell it, but then someone else come along with 3 stacks of item X and undercuts you. Then you invested god knows how much into it and are left with metric ton of item X.
Inflation should be countered by having an in-game gold sink. Something in the game that takes money out on a regular basis. Housing is an example. Maybe we could rent mounts that are fast from travel from city to city only. Ways for playing to throw coin into the void. Balancing that and the generation of gold should keep inflation low.
@George Black The process you are describing (overproduction) causes deflation of prices - not inflation.
@Caeryl Aye, non-refundable listing fees seem more-practical than a delay, in de-centralized economy. No sense in punishing those of us who play the AH game with a pointless wait - because *if* AoC remains with a localized set of economies (again, I predict this won't last - especially when talking about low-population servers), then inflation seems less of a concern. I just don't believe that localized economies will prove stable nor serviceable; Either the Economic Nodes will link economies enough to serve as an artifically-created centralized economy, or the game itself will change, in order to better serve low-population servers. The whole process of dispersing goods from larger centers of population and markets to lesser ones in-and-of-itself is conceptually a mini-game.
@Overthrow flipping low-end items doesn't necessarily cause wide-spread inflation. Even in SWTOR, most of the more-basic crafting materials are very affordable. But that's not typically what people are trading for/seeking; They're in there for the higher-end items. You figure your basics out pretty quickly, and THEN you're in the market for better-looking stuff. Those of us playing the AH typically identify those items early - and to the point of my OP - are the reasons that you're paying 50mil for an item, instead of the 10mil we found it for; It's not over-supply that causes higher prices.
@Schmuky This is the best-case scenario. At best, playing the AH and dispersing goods you bought cheap in a large or flooded market into the markets where these goods are less-available will turn a healthy profit. Nothing wrong with this.
My concern is upon the over-casualization of higher prices, due to over-abundance of flipping high-end items. Once enough money gets tossed around, the crafters decide the prices they've been charging aren't getting them ANYWHERE, in their goal of buying the higher-end items - and that's when things that crafters used to charge 5k for are now being found at 215k - such as with SWTOR.
Hopefully we'll see stabilization of de-centralized markets in AoC quickly, so that the economic model becomes sustainable. I hate to sound negative-minded, but I just don't see it staying this way, however.
One thing to keep in mind is that many players actually enjoy playing the economic game in MMOs. Rather than grinding mats, they play the AH to make the cash they need to gear up. Flipping mats is an economic and game play driver since as prices for things like harvesting goods go up, more people go out to grind them, and then conflict over harvesting spots ensues.
This was my initial thought as well. I always enjoy playing the market in MMOs and it seems integral to the process. On one face of the coin you have crafting and gathering and on the other, market rate and those who play the market
Comments
Well, it would increase the shit-to-bread ratio...
I doubt its even real bread. Could be cardboard with "bread-like" artificial flavorings...
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
You are not getting that one!
Having a market that would screw you twice if you had two assholes is about as realistic and immersive as it gets.
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
Bah! If only I'd had "screwing assholes" on today's bingo card
They all seem to have some horrible ideas of how to screw over their consumers for money. You're right, may not even be bread, could just have bread written on the card-board with shit sandwiched in the middle so every time consumers bite into it it just slops out the side. Pretty much sums up the gaming industry. Activision/Blizzard, Bethesda, EA, just serving shit sandwiches and getting away with it.
1. You have resource gathering for a crafting system and the gathered-to-expended ratio is too high.
2. Second reason might be in combination with 1 but where there is no need to expend the extra resources - for repairs, crafting extra stuff etc. If you only need gold/credits to repair, you will just end up selling your extra materials to try to make a profit.
3. There are probably a lot more, these are just the 2 main ones.
My point being - if the systems in the game are not in sync, there will always be issues. You can't have an endless supply of materials without a proper sink for them and not ruin the game economy.
Now.. The OP suggestion is interesting, but it wouldn't really work - just putting a timer on the item would either have 0 effect on the market or will be too long and just irritate people who like trading (and I mean trading trading, negotiations and such, not just clicking in an Auction House) and ultimately make them leave.
On the other hand, you COULD have some sort of a tax on items above certain value - which can also be decided by the mayor for example.
Say you want to sell some UBER-steel. It costs 50 gold a pop on the market, but you want to buy it and then sell it outside of the auction for 75 a pop. Ding-ding, it's above the 60 gold/piece set by the mayor on that tier of materials (there's also UBER-wood, UBER-stone etc) and when you perform a transaction you pay 10% tax (example value) on the amount you receive. So you ultimately receive 67.5 gold/piece.
I think being able to implement such taxes would be more beneficial to a player driver economy than having some artificial blocker telling you you need to wait for 3 days before you can sell your shit.
You said wood...
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
No, no... "UBER-wood"!
No. Price inflates when demand isn't met by supply. It doesn't fight inflation making a recently bought specific item unavailable to sell for an hour, it just delays one person selling it (whilst the price climbs). Someone else would be able to sell the same type of item at the higher price in the meantime, bringing the demand vs. supply driven price back down.
Delaying the re-sell just means it's more difficult to turn a profit as a sole trader, you would need to swap to an alt or work with other players (no! never! MMO - LOL). I don't want that barrier to entry for traders. There's a good possibility we will see groups of guilds co-operating and acting as a cartel to control markets and fix prices, or try to (I hope to play a part in that). Cartels won't be penalized by the re-sell delay because they will have many traders and stock of same/similar items. If a sole trader can squeeze a small slice out of the (hypothetical) Cartel profit margins then I think that's a good thing.
None of the systems are designed yet. It will be interesting to see what impact the Economy consultant that Intrepid used will have on the game.
Glad you enjoy my.. UBER ideas.
https://i.imgur.com/89Ii4kN.jpg
I like that you are trying to find a solution.
Taxes are a partial money sink as a percentage will disappear on the node running costs (those NPC guards don't come for free!)
Gear maintenance is both a resource and gold sink. You need a wide range of gatherables to be processed into something that can be used by an appropriate crafter to repair your gear, depending on exactly what the gear is. As you can't master all Artisan areas you will need also gold to pay for someone's services. The gold sink occurs when the artisans pay their accommodation costs and any other node related taxes.
Mayors should have a high degree of control over taxes with tax brackets and a wide range of schemes aimed at preventing a simple assessment of which node is best for trades to occur in (like in real life!).
Transactions will move to a node where they are taxed less, unless there is another benefit to trading in that location (security, that's where your storage is _currently_ based, harbor, etc.) which needs to be taken into account.
If the tax burden discourages high value trades from operating in a particular node then the node will suffer from the loss of the taxes associated with those trades.
This doesn't mean that your ideas can't work, I'm just observing that a mayors job is complex when trying to attract trade and generate tax from it.
The other factor is, if you are going to store resources in a node, how safe is that node from being sieged and sacked. Do your taxes in any way relate to the degree of security that node offers?
Is that an online wood ordering service? (coz I'd need that as a crafter)
Or a piece of magical wood that'll take me to anywhere per my request?
I've never come across a player botting that auto buys at an unreasonable speed. I've known a few people that have used purchase bots in various games, but none of them have been dumb enough to set them to auto-buy at that speed.
I have seen some players buying items at unrealistic speed using shortcuts and disabling curser movement (among a few other things). While people doing this would never be as fast as a bot could be, they are faster than I have ever seen a bot set (that I knew was a bot).
With bots, it is all too easy to bankrupt the player using them.
Using your 25 price as an example - and making the assumption that the normal price for the item fluctuates between 20 and 30, all you need to do is buy up everything for sale above 25 and list it at 24.9.
While you may lose a few coin per item, your botting player is spending 24.9 per. This means that assuming you are moderately well off in game, you should be able to run their cash reserves out well before yours do - on the assumption that there are enough of that item up for sale to do this.
Then, once that botter has run out of coin, all you need to do is ensure that the item in question stays at the lower end of it's normal range for a few weeks, and all of a sudden you have a botter that is shit scared of using their bot.
I've done this (or similar to this) in almost every game I play. While I am absolutely sure some of the players in question would have been b9otting and some would not have been, I honestly would not be able to point to one instance of this and say if it was a bot or not.
The only people I know of for sure were botting were people I knew that told me they were.
Yeap, correct. The tax thing on higher-value trades would only work if there is a benefit... And if there aren't people will just go to another node. The problem is that almost no solution would work against scalping and artificially boosting prices.
Even though if it's done on a small enough scale it doesn't really matter - like if 2 people are in a node with thousands. Unless they are just buying and selling obscene amounts or are the only people selling there, I don't really see how it would become a problem. If the price of the material ranged from 20-25 and you suddenly start selling it at 26 to even 25.01, you are at the upper bound of the range. People will naturally gravitate towards the lower end unless they don't have a choice
The tax would only work if you didn't have a choice of where to trade or if all nodes have such a high-value trade tax by default, but I don't think that's a good solution.
The fixed price ranges especially for unit pricing is relatively what I was getting at in another thread to prevent and deter certain issues in relation to the economy. imagine if price of materials were affected by region due to a rarity spectrum?
One could buy ore and ship it from a biome rich in it, flip it in another biome where it's less prevalent to make a profit at the risk of transportation via caravans.
I have seen the superhuman buy speed. They do it because in large populations they have to, or they don't get any sales. If they know other people are doing it in a global AH then it's like an arms race.
Amusingly, though. I am pretty confident this is how people trade crypto and stocks IRL.
If I had more time, I would write a shorter post.
It absolutely is.
In the trading world, a thousandth of a second can be measured in millions of dollars.
I'm still skeptical about the speed of the bots - not whether or not they exist, as I know they do.
No matter which way you look at it, a bot that is operating at that kind of speed needs to have the thumbs up from the developer.
If it is actual superhuman speed, then the bot is using a hook in the games API to buy without performing a search. If so, the developers put that hook there for exactly this purpose.
If the bot is actually performing a search and buying, the developers are looking at a character searching multiple times a second, and have decided that is ok. Since bandwidth is usually the highest cost of running a live MMO, they would be looking at things like this.
So, if a bot is operating at super human speeds, the developer of that game is ok with market botting. None of the games I have played have had this stance (not while I played them, at least), which is why in my experience I have not seen anyone set a bot to that speed, even though they can be.
In most games that are against botting like this, there is a limit to how quickly you can search the market anyway.
I’ve found some deals just by wandering by a trader in the town I was questing it at the time. 2% of the typical market price so of course I bought them (and used them immediately). I’m sure someone blamed “bots” when they got there and saw the listing already purchased. Every game has those players who’ve never tried to engage with the economy besides being annoyed that the items they buy got more expensive or the listing they saw got bought. My best advice, go take part in a trading guild. Learn how the economy of a game works. They’re not run by cartels of players, prices aren’t dictated by bots, it’s not the fault of others that the item you want is worth more than you wish to pay.
Me too!
So if you price an item at a 200% markup, you’d paying double the original seller’s listing fee. If another player deems that price reasonable, it sells, and you make profit. If no one finds that price reasonable, it eventually expires and you’ll pay another listing fee.
Extremely rare items with equally low supply are truly the only ones that could be “cornered” by a single player, but likely those will be staying within a guild (or going directly to.a crafter) and won’t even hit a trader stall.
Flipping items doesn't cause inflation-- it has a deflationary effect since the market fees are being paid a second time for the same item. If prices are rising then it's due to some other factor in the game.
I played SWTOR at launch and if I remember correctly you could send out NPC followers to gather raw materials. That was a terrible system that caused inflation and made the market in that game a joke. Same thing with WoW's mission tables during Draenor and Legion: any system that lets the player afk farm gold or raw resources will make prices skyrocket.
Now, flipping items, not exactly sure, but my guess is that you buy all of item X and then put it all back for 2x the price. I am not sure that is a problem. Because when you do it, you take a massive risk.
Let's say that item X is a raw material. Well, sure, you can buy it and try to resell it, but then someone else come along with 3 stacks of item X and undercuts you. Then you invested god knows how much into it and are left with metric ton of item X.
Inflation should be countered by having an in-game gold sink. Something in the game that takes money out on a regular basis. Housing is an example. Maybe we could rent mounts that are fast from travel from city to city only. Ways for playing to throw coin into the void. Balancing that and the generation of gold should keep inflation low.
@Caeryl Aye, non-refundable listing fees seem more-practical than a delay, in de-centralized economy. No sense in punishing those of us who play the AH game with a pointless wait - because *if* AoC remains with a localized set of economies (again, I predict this won't last - especially when talking about low-population servers), then inflation seems less of a concern. I just don't believe that localized economies will prove stable nor serviceable; Either the Economic Nodes will link economies enough to serve as an artifically-created centralized economy, or the game itself will change, in order to better serve low-population servers. The whole process of dispersing goods from larger centers of population and markets to lesser ones in-and-of-itself is conceptually a mini-game.
@Overthrow flipping low-end items doesn't necessarily cause wide-spread inflation. Even in SWTOR, most of the more-basic crafting materials are very affordable. But that's not typically what people are trading for/seeking; They're in there for the higher-end items. You figure your basics out pretty quickly, and THEN you're in the market for better-looking stuff. Those of us playing the AH typically identify those items early - and to the point of my OP - are the reasons that you're paying 50mil for an item, instead of the 10mil we found it for; It's not over-supply that causes higher prices.
@Schmuky This is the best-case scenario. At best, playing the AH and dispersing goods you bought cheap in a large or flooded market into the markets where these goods are less-available will turn a healthy profit. Nothing wrong with this.
My concern is upon the over-casualization of higher prices, due to over-abundance of flipping high-end items. Once enough money gets tossed around, the crafters decide the prices they've been charging aren't getting them ANYWHERE, in their goal of buying the higher-end items - and that's when things that crafters used to charge 5k for are now being found at 215k - such as with SWTOR.
Hopefully we'll see stabilization of de-centralized markets in AoC quickly, so that the economic model becomes sustainable. I hate to sound negative-minded, but I just don't see it staying this way, however.
This was my initial thought as well. I always enjoy playing the market in MMOs and it seems integral to the process. On one face of the coin you have crafting and gathering and on the other, market rate and those who play the market