Prices on the Broker totally out of control!

Mail was locked up because players who were duping were using to hide their cash from a cash wipe. Gold sellers were also using it to hide/transfer funds.

TC, it boils down to supply and demand basically.

Lol capping the broker does nothing but make life harder on the have nots… Those expensive items just won’t see the broker and the items you wanted that were capped down will only move around via trades.

It just creates an unnecessary hassle for everybody.

The market decides and anyone can join. I have recently been listing Anniv event items before they go belly up on prices in a week. I've listed some of the loading screen posters for 90 or more million. Many have sold...some have not. Sometimes I see them for 30million a few days after I listed mine (and sold it) for 100 million, and the 30mil one is on short or very short....meaning no one wants it for 1/3 of what I sold mine for.....2 or 3 days earlier. It's fickle and nothing is 'set'....it's a 5% gamble to list something that might or might not sell. Savvy sellers know what to list things at....savvy buyers know when something is listed too high.

As far as rarity, many collections (from TCs mainly) are color coded to tell you which are the 'rare' ones. Other than that it's just drop rate. Chances are that if you pick up 5 collections in OW...you may get 5 different ones... by 25, you'll likely have 9 or 10 of the 12(assuming 12 total) you need....by 50 you'll probably be down to 1 missing piece.....THAT'S the rare one.

All in all I've made over 3 billion in just anniv stuff in the last month...no TC items...no OG stuff....probably 500 Crown marks worth of vendor items and 40-60 drop collections I had. Working as designed as far as I can see.

And the devs did have a time where they could tell a LOT of people what to do with the money....they were the people who flooded the economy with fake money....and were NOT banned. Those people they told 'keep it'. So there's that.

Thanks for the tips guys, I will try but it feels really impossible to make any money at the moment. I have been selling to the vendor but I'm at the point where I need to salvage my items now so I can't really sell to them as well.

I also want to add that I bought an incredible sweater and bunny slippers before the winter event was removed as I saw someone mention selling them later for cash. Is this the right thing to do? Should I do the same for the anniversary event?

Everyone points to it being a free market but unnatural market manipulation (whether purposeful or incidental) is a real thing and it has certainly taken place on the US PS/PC server many times and in many ways. It’s the primary reason the prices are 1000% give or take when compared to the Xbox and EU servers.

"you can't tell people how much they can sell something for in the market."

Black Desert Online - Hold my beer....

One reason the market inflation has been so rampant is the common practice of "if there are none in the broker when you check the price, just list it for a crazy high amount because some multi-billionaire might buy it". Tons of players do this and advise others to as well. If I had a nickel for every time I've heard a player advise another to do this... The sad thing is it works because somebody with 30 billion in digital play money WILL pay 30M for an item that's typically 5M if it's the only one rather than wait for more.

Before anyone says "that's normal as scarcity drives up prices", in real life we're currently in a supply chain crises that has left countless commonly stocked items out of stock for weeks or longer. Sure prices have gone up 10%-50%, sometimes even 100%-150% in extreme cases. THAT is normal. But in DCUO when something temporarily becomes scarce, it commonly goes up 500%-1000% hoping to take advantage of a DGAFing multi-billionaire. Then the next person to get the drop looks it up, sees that as the price, assumes it's normal and undercuts 5%-10%. The next player to get the drop does the same and so on and so on.

Sure, plenty of times the broker gets flooded enough to get the price back down close to the normal price, but often times it doesn't. That $5M collection piece that somebody listed for $40M got undercut to $38M, then $36M, then $35M and on down to $20M, but never got back to $5M. At that point, a new inflated market price is established. And for some reason way too many people who play this game have goldfish memories and they just accept the new price range as a new normal.

As someone who watched the broker A LOT (too much), has a superhuman memory and understands economics, I saw this happening ALL THE TIME.

The worst is the going rate for raid resets. It dramatically increases every time there's double or triple marks. That's expected since the demand raises and the supply stays roughly the same, so prices will naturally increase. But then the bonus marks week comes and goes and the price NEVER goes back. The entire community just forgets what they were paying/charging for resets just weeks earlier. D*** goldfish.

Trillions

From Mepps:

I think it might be worth a little insight: prices rose quickly across the board because of the enormous amount of cash some folks had, used, and then spread out into the whole economy.

Is someone having 22 billion dollars excessive? Sure, but our goal here again was to address this influx of fake cash and impact as few people as possible, and this is pretty close to resetting things back to where they were prior to this exploit.

Also, while 22 billion dollars seems like a lot, is a lot, we removed double digit TRILLIONS of cash from the game. What happens next should feel pretty different, and we will be monitoring to see if that is the case.

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Also, many of the stronger suggestions for caps and the like sound good on paper, but we don't think will actually have the results most are imagining. Regardless, all of the options need more time to be considered, so that's why that kind of change is not happening now.

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Economy Actions

As most of you likely know by now, we recently disabled the trading of cash, mailing of cash, and use of the broker while we addressed an issue impacting the game's economy.

An exploit allowed a small number of players to inject trillions of fake cash into the game, substantially ballooning broker prices and item values, as well as allowing these bad actors to accumulate unfair wealth in both cash and items.

This is not a simple problem to solve. This fake cash has thoroughly scattered throughout the entire player base, even to those completely unaware and trading legitimately. Having this much fake cash presents numerous long term problems for all players.

To address this, we have taken three actions.

• We fixed the exploit.
• We took action on the offenders' accounts.
• We performed a one-time "progressive tax" to remove most of the fake cash.

Exploit

We fixed the exploit as soon as the steps became available to us. If you become aware of an exploit in the future, report it in the Task Force X subforum, where only developers can see your threads. Include as much information and steps as possible.

Do not continue to do the exploit. If you have done it in a good-faith attempt to find the steps, let us know the details so we can take that into account.


Account Actions

We cannot and will not directly comment on what actions have been taken on player accounts. We do want to be clear that appropriate actions have been taken. We also want to be clear that these actions in the future can range from removal of items, cash, or characters, to temporary suspensions, to permanent bans.

Exploiting has a significant impact on everyone in the game and we take it very seriously.


Progressive Tax

As mentioned, virtually everyone in the game has now accumulated fake cash, even if completely unaware of the issue and trading or brokering legitimately. Our goal with this action is to remove as much of the fake cash as possible, impact as few people as possible, and be as fair as possible.

Our goal is NOT to fix all of the economy's issues in one go. We are specifically focused on removing this recent influx of fake cash.

We also want to maintain some of the scale of wealth legitimately present in the game. You may have less cash after this tax, but for the most part you will still have more than the people you had more than before, and less than the people you had less than before.

What are Progressive Tax Brackets?

Here's how that works (and, look, this is basically how the US and other tax systems work, so if you're confused at all about how progressive tax brackets work in real-life, this could be doubly helpful for you! If you don't care how it works, you can skip ahead.)

In progressive tax brackets, you pay a specific percentage of tax on each chunk or bracket of money.

• You might pay 0% on your first $10, then 10% on your next $20, then 20% on your next $30.
• In this example, you would owe $0 from the first bracket, $2 from the second, and $6 from the third, for a total tax of $8 on that $60 you started with.

NOTE: Being "in" the highest "20%" tax bracket does NOT mean you pay 20% of your total (that would be $12, not $8). You only pay the higher bracket's percentage on the money in that bracket. The lower percentages still apply to the money in the lower brackets.

Our Brackets

We have settled on six tax brackets for this one-time event, totaled at the ACCOUNT level, which are as follows:

• Cash below $500,000,000 is not taxed at all.
• Cash between 500,000,001 and 10,000,000,000 is taxed at 5%
• Cash between 10,000,000,001 and 15,000,000,000 is taxed at 10%.
• Cash between 15,000,000,001 and 20,000,000,000 is taxed at 20%.
• Cash between 20,000,000,001 and 25,000,000,000 is taxed at 25%.
• Cash above 25,000,000,001 is taxed at 100%.

This means that most players fall into the first 0% tax bracket entirely, and that the wealthiest people will have about 22 billion cash after taxes.


Final Note

We recognize this type of action sucks for everyone, and that many will feel unfairly or innocently impacted. We strongly believe that taking no action is worse for everyone, and that this is the least-bad and most-fair way to address the situation.

We are here to answer your questions and field any concerns.

The collective community:

Lol

The on thing i hate is when players buy up items to simply inflate the price of it. Proxystar purchased a Pulsating Aura (one of my favorite items now, ty Proxy!). Its 20 million more now because people wanted to scalp it.

One thing which has helped lower prices are the Omnibus boxes with rare collections in them. I always snag those and put them on the broker. And it's funny when you see the top price at $200m only for the second and third price to be $15-$20m.

This shows that some people do know the true value of these pieces and are willing to price them accordingly.

storing up event / seasonal stuff to flog off when out of circulation is always a good idea. I don't have gazzilions. usually, I'm sitting around the 3 1/2 - 400 million-ish mark. collections. all collections will sell, some for a lot more than others. not for a lot, most of them. but, you know, punt out five collections at 20 grand each, that's a 100 grand. do that 10 times, you got a million. cats always sell. auras & chromas will always sell. when a latest episode bonus week comes up, snap up a couple of the new shineys on the vendor, punt them out on the broker. as a general rule of thumb, I work to: if it can be tossed on the broker, toss it on the broker.

it takes a little bit of patience, but making money in this game is easy. if you're looking to sell everything you get at maximum price, you're probably gonna come unstuck, but if you play the broker ( someone selling that collection for a million? you sell it for 750,000 ), the money will come to you. keep at it.

another way to reset prices would be to just add a second currency to use keep the old money, add new money new broker tab that has old money market and new money market. Hard part would be finding a way to get people to want to trade to get the new money without making all the cash people worked to get before irrelevant.

A cash reset or something is dumb anyways to get the prices down right now we have something on the market for 500m after a reset itll be like 5 to 10m and since everyone has less money now 5-10m is about as expensive as 500m

were saying the prices are too crazy on the market but if it was changed by a cash reset or new currency the prices would be the same money in rotation = price of item

that just shows people don't know how to use the market... so what the second price person did was essentially cut himself out of 180m more in profit. It's cool its priced where we think it should be but really, he doesn't know how to use the market lol. he lost himself 180m by picking a price.

the real issue here is that more money comes into the economy then going out. What do we really use our money for? Paying monthly or weekly main frame, gear, and maybe soder cola, other than that, money is useless in this game. Only other thing money is good for is the broker.

I do agree the prices are out of control. It's pretty sad sitting on 25 million and feeling broke. I can't even affored to play the broker. At one time it was supply and demand. Now everything seems to be 100 million plus.

Devs should do, is the higher the price, the higher percentage you pay in fees to put on the broker.

If I buy the 15-20 million ones, sell them for $150 million...what is the "true" value then? (Hint: It's what someone is willing to pay for it).

I mean, if someone WANTS to just leave that extra 100+ million on the table, they're free to do so, but...then they'll be on the forums complaining about how they can't make money in game.

Well,

25 million is a good place to start. You dont have to price your items at or even near the highest broker prices in order to make money quickly. For example, if you sell 10 items at 10 million each, that will only cost you 500 thousand in broker fees for each item (5 million in total). You would make 100 million (provided that you sell everything) and only pay 5 million to do so. Even if you only sell half of that, you still would make 50 million and only pay 2.5 million in fees.

While undercutting others at cheaper prices may seem like a mean thing to do, it will help in building up your money quickly, especially if you have items that are highly coveted and others are charging above and beyond prices. I think selling auras from content drops and collection pieces are great cash builders when you dont have a lot of cash to start with.

To make money from the Broker.... you have to play the loooong game.

Early on.... yes you will have to build up your cash.... and early on that means selling hundreds of items on the Broker.

Sell anything you can on the Broker.

You mention the Anniversary Event.
That is a great example.
Last year I bough a bunch of Flash styles and Accessory.... and sold them in the Spring and Summer.

That is one way to make $$$.

The Flash style is highly requested and pretty popular.
So buy a bunch of it while you can... then sell it 6 months later on the Broker for lots of $$$.

Playing the Broker is a game all of it's own.
It takes time to learn and master.
But most people do not want to take the time to learn to play the Broker game.... they want to get $100B in 5 minutes.
It does not work like that.

Take the time to learn how to play the Broker.... and play the long game.
It takes time not only to build your $$$.... but also to learn how to do so.

And sadly.... you learn to use the Broker by using the Broker.
There is some trial and error involved in the process.
But it is a process.... and you have to take the time to learn it.