Cornering the market out of control.

The currency used is irrelevant. People are mad because monopolies on configurations of pixels can and do exist in EverQuest. No matter what you regulate, scheming is going to occur.

Maybe we can get some totally challenging to navigate and understand regulations in the new expansion. Ohhhh..and...and agencies that manage and enforce them run by player elected bureaucrats! Trader licenses! The Faydark Reserve Bank as a zone in the new expansion! Scratch that, an additional module in the game, EconomicsQuest! My nipples are hard thinking how much fun this could be!

No, I am not "sitting on 1000+ krono". In fact, I am not playing the market at all. I don't even have a seller toon. Anything I buy is for my own use. I am a return player after about 8 years absense, and after dumping $430+ on two annuals plus two deluxe EoK packages, and a heroic boost, spending an extra $17 on a krono to get myself a chunk of plat was a no-brainer. That got me 2.5mil, and by careful bazaar monitoring, and getting a lot of stuff I needed myself, I got two characters by lvl 92 into full Boreal plus RoF-level nonvisibles, got 5 tradeskills to 300, the rest being close, and still got over a mil left. Without a single bazaar sale.
You know, you can do a couple baz checks during primetime, see some guy being only one selling an item you need for 100k and run here complaining how this bad seller is cornering the market. Or you can run those checks for several days at various times of day, you are guaranteed to get some deals. I snagged a fear touched tunic for 9k when typical prime time price is closer to 100k. I scored stacks of high end ores/pelts/silks for 20-30p each where they typically go for 200+. Recently found lvl 105 tank merc shoulders for 5k. (50k being norm). People get stuff all the time, and price it to move. You put in a little perseverance, you totally can hit these items before resellers do.

Are all these complains not more like: If I can do it, then its ok, if other people do it against me, then its unfair ?

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Some of this reminds be a bit about when a friend of mine played on ZEK server, had 2 characters of varous levels.

He then got killed by a person, who were reputed to be a bit of a bully, happened twice in a row. Decided he was a bit tired of it, since the person was waiting close by ready to do a third kill.

Swapped to his high level char, and went and kicked some butt, and did that twice, just to even things out.

The other person then started to complain in some channel about it being unfair, and went on for a bit of time,
my friend then asked in same channel, if you find this unfair, how fair was it then that you did the same to his other char.

And then went a bit further and said, in the channel: If person X kills you twice, then send me game mail, and I will look at the problem.

He however never got any game mail.

What if...they had to take a no exp rez? We still want their subscription monies. Marketing is telling us they require a bigger budget to sell people subscriptions with a perma dead character.

Indeed, rechecking baz over a couple of weeks is a great way to get good deals. However the "typical" prices you listed are completely nuts(not saying you are lying), and I can't believe they actually sell it at those prices...

Leveling up in RoF will not earn you anything close to 100k...well, maybe the total after completing RoF will, but still...

During ROF era, 100k was easy. Today, you can earn money on some spell dreadmote, due to people leveling up, and some lines were not continued at TDS/TBM/EoK.

And during EoK, you could easy earn something huge amount of money, because people were buying everything new. This not included the rare drops. There if you were smart, you waited equipping yourself with those stuff mentioned below, but sold items for:

Spells = 250-500k
Extra planar potential shard = 350k

And same Things will happend during next expansion.

So if you have patience and is smart, and willing to wait 1-2 months getting your rank 2spells, and other such stuff, you will be able to roll in the Money. If not, then you will see the Money train pass you by.

Im currently doing partisan/mercenary in rof, a "zone-playthrough" earns my around 10-20k in vendor trash. I admit I don't use the bazaar to sell gear/spell-drops as I don't have a dedicated /baz account.

Still 100k for a chest piece is cracy imo...

For an up-and-coming lvl 92 with no additional means.. maybe. For a long time player who has tons if plat, thats chump change. And looking at it from krono perspective: the WTBs I see in General on Xegony, going price is about 2.7mp.
At $17 for a krono, a 100kp chest piece is about 63 cents.

But then consider, if you have 100k to buy a piece of item, you then likely have 2 mil+, and then 100k

What else shall you then spend money on ? Will that item allow you to kill something easier than b4, then its worth the Money.

And basically, can you earn more Money in the time it takes to farm it, and what the item costs, then buy it.
If you can earn less, then you should farm it.

But dont forget to calculate how long you would estimate it will take to farm it, and what is the max Price you think the item is worth.
And maybe it is worth waiting to see if it is cheaper tomorrow!

I think another issue people haven't touched on is simply there aren't any major plat sinks in the game.

No more tradeskill items for combining armor
No more cultural boxes to create
No more type 3 augs (although, the previous sets are still purchased)
No more expensive mounts
No need to buy spells when you can get the rank II from named / chests relatively easily
No need to buy armor from merchants when you can use alternate currency

We're just trading plat between each other, while simultaneously getting more and more from the vendors / rewards. It's not surprising the prices of everything has gone up.

A lot of the complainers seem very ignorant of how the world works, and sound like they are simply jealous of people with more wealth (in-game or real world) or more business savvy. If you don't regularly spend time working the /baz or the EC tunnel, then you haven't even tried and you ARE ignorant of this aspect of the game. Keep your head in the sand and shut up.

I do not "farm" anything with the intent to sell items for kronos but, if you have enough time to play, you WILL end up with lots of loot and excess plat. I have no life and my in-game revenue has allowed me to play "for free" since last November (on multiple accounts, never less than 2). When I am on the other side of that, and my available play time falls off, I will gladly spend real money and buy kronos to help offset my loss of in-game time.

If you want to be F2P and complain about everybody else's success, that's fine. And if you want to pay for 20 accounts and bogart loot camps, that's fine, too. Quit worrying about what everybody else is doing and play the game however you want. Hell, I'm here responding to wacky, ignorant complaints about "high prices" because THIS is more fun than actually being in the game. Do what makes you happy, but let other people do what makes them happy too.

And most of all: recognize that nobody is doing anything that DBG isn't actively encouraging them to do.

I don't get this.
How does making a level 1 character and buying/selling in the bazaar constitute "grinding out thousands of hours playing the game"?

...playing the game their way. I don't get much enjoyment playing the baz. I have enough plat to last me for quite a while without having to grind or farm it. However, I know there are plenty of folks out there who do enjoy it. I had a good relationship with someone who was in the bazaar daily. I got decent rates whenever I would sell stuff because I sold to them almost exclusively. If I needed something they were selling, I could often get it at a discount rate. I knew this person's main and knew the amount of time they spent out filling orders for folks for collectibles / gear / ts junk. Or just went out to do progression / xp. To say someone just plays the game to stay at level 1 and grind it out in the bazaar is false - these people do have mains. They just enjoy an aspect of the game that others don't. And they can be fairly active - adjusting prices often, working out trades, taking orders, etc. It's not just a set-and-forget. Grinding is accurate, thousands of hours is accurate, and playing the game their way is accurate.

I play a monk. That doesn't mean a wizard can come up to me and say I'm not playing the game because I'm not using mana.

There is a difference between playing the game your way, and using the game as secondary source of income that more likely isn't being properly reported to the IRS. The market is out of control and DB needs to add restrictions to make it not worth the effort to try control large pockets.

Do you have anything to say that isn't daydreaming, speculation, or baseless fear mongering? Turn off Fox Nooz and play your game.

EDIT: Sorry to be so rude. I think you might change your opinion on some of the (perfectly legal) aspects of the game that you rail against, if you would just try them for yourself.

Hell yes! Hopefully we can get the IRS to appoint a special investigator to look into this...very serious problem?

Maybe we can get Congress to require game companies to report on players' in game earnings so the IRS can cross reference that with their tax filing. My only hope is there is already a petition started that I can sign!

https://www.irs.gov/businesses/smal...ax-consequences-of-virtual-world-transactions

ROFL...
That IRS was a mean wrestler...
But then there were Diesel and of course the Undertaker - noone heard of IRS anymore!

Cannot file losses from virtual worlds? tsk...
What's IRS thinking...

@MyShadower, your IRS joke got me thinking about perspective, and maybe a little exploration might help expose the true scale of "RMTs" and their possible effect on the game. Everywhere I say "I", I am using myself in a hypothetical sense. I do not buy or sell from 3rd-party sites.

Side note: 3rd-party kronos are selling for about $13 (according to google). That is a sharp increase from the last time I looked (they were selling for less than the best monthly subscription rate, $9.99). Could their supply actually be diminishing (or at least diminishing in the RMT market)?

The minimum income requirement for filing a tax return in 2016 was $10,350. At $13, a person would need to sell about 67 kronos per month, or ~2.2/day before they would even need to file a tax return. Of course, they would also get to deduct all of their expenses (like computers, game subscriptions, internet, utilities, rent), so the actual minimum taxable revenue is even higher. It is worth noting that the poverty level in 2015 was $11,770.

Right now, Agnarr is probably the most popular server with the most active trading economy. At the least, it is probably in the top 3. According to http://agnprice.com, there were about 49 players offering to sell kronos in the last 22 hours. Rounding that up to 24 hours gives us about 54 unique (different toons) offers to sell krono in a 24 hour period (on a Tues/Wed).

During the last 5 hours, there were 40 players offering to buy kronos. At that rate, 24 hours gives about 200 offers to buy kronos.

That leaves us with about 54 sellers trying to sell to 200 potential buyers. We still need to toss out high-ball and low-ball offers that everybody ignores outright, and then figure out what percentage actually result in a sale. And then, we would need to guess at how many of those 54 offers are of kronos that were bought using RMTs, because those are the only ones we're concerned with. Let's say that all 54 krono offers miraculously resulted in a sale (even though I suspect the real number is less than 25% of that). That is pretty much an absolute best-case scenario and is not realistic.

That would mean that my 2.2 RMT kronos per day make up more than 4% of all in-game Krono sales.

In addition, in order to buy 2.2 kronos per day at the current plat price on Agnarr, I would need to be able to farm 11,000 plat per day.

But all those kronos that get sold on 3rd-party markets are used for either a), as a slightly cheaper, more risky subscription or b) to buy in-game items/plat. Every krono used for b) stays in the game and continue to rise in price. This essentially means that every time I sell a krono to somebody for real $, it becomes more difficult for me to make enough plat to buy my next krono.

But I also have to replenish my supply if I were trying to make a living by farming kronos and selling them on 3rd party sites. That means I would ALSO be competing with 200 other buyers for what might be a supply of only 54 kronos per day (at least 4% of which are my own product, that I'm buying back at a higher plat cost than the ones I just sold).

NOTE: Of course a more accurate model would need to include all EQ servers, and indeed all DBG game servers that trade kronos. And tue/wed isn't exactly representative. Still, I think this helps to give perspective on the scale of kronos and their impact on the game.

Now here's an interesting number: $256,230. That's how much a single person would stand to make in a year if they managed to sell 54 kronos every day at $13 each (of course, that person would also need to be able to farm 270,000 plat each day, on Agnarr). DBG would stand to make $354,780 per year (at $18/krono). I don't think anywhere near that many Kronos are bought/sold for real $ across all the EQ servers from DBG and RMT servers combined. Instead, I think most of the in-game trades are done with kronos that are already in-game.

I know that some people have a ton of kronos and that some people spend a lot of time "playing the market" and are quite successful. I know people have multi-server operations going. But I would be very surprised if anybody is making "good" money on their venture, and they are certainly working (scavenging?) for their living if they do. But more likely, they are having a fun time with their version of a model railroad.

My conclusion is this: there isn't a huge RMT problem or bot-farming problem, simply because the EQ economy (across all servers) isn't big enough to support it. Instead, there is a growing class of players that have accumulated so much wealth in-game that, to the average or newer player, it appears as though they MUST be doing something fishy.

Applauded for effort.