It would be silly for the developers to make the trading system a closed market, it would almost defeat the purpose of it in the first place as everyone basically becomes a vendor with set prices for everything they own, taking away any economical potential the system brings and destroys the concept of supply and demand, as well as inflation and deflation.

wat

^^^

Kinda wasn't implying that it should be changed at all.

As we all know players hate changes for the better (I'm looking at you, iClassic players who apparently are obsessed with sprites overlayed on your virtual character's head, and you too iEra players who hate a balanced game) and I do realize taking hold of this "trade economy" wouldn't work out.

players with no lives and thousands of dollars to waste on graal have set the prices. an umbrella is worth like 25k shells and everyone has one... it makes no sense idk

You got to be kidding me... Holy crap imma get those rare for 300 shells, and on a separate note, is the syringe getting rarer?

Nope. Price is going down.

The price depends how much of it is in era and how it look and what itmdoes etc but if i ever become pr ima host super and host like 50 if i get the chance and make sure they sell everything for 20k

Just think about it.

ATTENTION:


Supply and Demand


Say there are 2 of item X, and I own one. It's an item that many people want, and I'm willing to sell, whilst the other owner is not. Since I'd be the only one selling it, I'm gonna be like, "YA'LL BITCHES BE WANTIN DIS' ****? WELL I NAME DA PRICE, YO, SO YA'LL BETTAH BE READY!" Thus, I name my price of 500k for it, and let someone haggle with me until we both decide on a very ludicrously high price. Since I have it and demand is high, players are willing to shell out more just to brag.

It makes trash picking 50% faster plus its a dropable skate board and you can hotkey it for faster acsess skate tp is my fav item :3

Okay, let's try it this way: The fluctuation in prices for every item on the trading post is an effect of inflation and deflation, which in turn is caused by differences in supply and demand of the item, as well as other factors such as currency in the economy, but let's talk about supply and demand for now.

Supply: The amount of an item going around in any given time
Demand: The general popularity or desire for said item

There are three basic scenarios with this concept in an open market - an economy in which players set their own prices and sell their own items - such as Era's. The first is low supply and high demand; that is, when an item is very rare or not many are floating around, but everyone wants it. This shoots the relative value (or cost) of the item higher than usual - this is known as inflation. Another scenario is high supply and low demand; that is, when a lot of an item is floating around and very common, yet not many players desire it or want it. This causes an item's relative value (cost) to go lower than usual - this is known as deflation.

Now, I said earlier that inflation and deflation can be altered by other factors - currency in the economy in particular. Let's say that there's some new method that was recently released that is easy and gets a ton of income (shells, Gralats) for players. Given a majority of the players partake in the new activity, there will be an influx of Gralats and shells (our currency) thrown into the economy and thus, players will be willing to buy items for higher prices and sellers will reprice accordingly - causing inflation in the entire economy as opposed to just one item. The opposite can happen if a large amount of money is taken out of the system, which causes deflation in the same procedure.

The last paragraph in particular is important to our situation, because, if developers set their own prices and those prices were not allowed to be changed (e.g. you can only sell x item for x shells and something like an influx of currency gained by every player happen, the prices for every item would not be changed to account for the amount of currency in the system which shoots the rarity or relative pricing to be basically irrelevant.

For example: let's say a Shamrock Dagger's price is set by developers for 5k shells (I don't know the actual price, just using it for an example). Suddenly, a new event was released that allows every player to get a lot of shells and all of a sudden, players are now much richer than usual and have maybe 2x the amount of shells they had before the new event. Players now readily have much easier access to purchasing the Shamrock Dagger which is priced at 5k - since players are now much richer, it becomes relatively cheap, and the rarity and value of the dagger has now shot down far than it was supposed to be.

This can happen on a widespread amount of items, possibly even every item in the game, which would effectively destroy the economy and nothing will be of any value.

Economics 101 with Talon

I may be wrong but surely the rarity will remain constant unless more are sold to players instead of trading, if a player trades the shamrock then 1 more person has it but 1 less has it so it remains the same.

I still use the free one :(

Well, I guess it depends on how we define 'rarity'. Seeing as pretty much all of the items that are of value on the trading post are essentially used for bragging rights; the value of it goes down since it's much cheaper, because the supply remains constant while aggregate demand goes down. I guess the "rarity" doesn't change, but the desire or value factor does.

You ever thought of being an economic analyst or something?

@talon some games like runescape have a pricing guide that is constantly updated for "merchanting". While this would cause the staff to have to constantly make an update for the items, this shouldn't be too hard. They could simply make a few pr's keep it up to date. As lone as no stupid admin releases a crap load of an item, the prices should be stable.