The Ethics of Bazaar Selling and other System Interactions

I know this is just a standard "I don't care about this and I want you to know that" response, but what good is a set of ethics if it's never questioned?

Or alternatively, by deleting things or selling everything to a vendor for copper on the platinum, you may be depriving another player of the enjoyment from those items. Another ethical perspective, with the same importance (little) as most things discussed on this forum. You can either think about it in fun or dismiss it also.

It does not matter what you do - someone can/will find a way to be upset (find not "fun"), about something and anything you may do or not do - there is nothing you can do about that, in fact I would argue to only thing you may be doing by overly considering this is ruining you own fun 8P

Hi! I am a professor of philosophy and ethics is my main area of focus, welcome to my ted talk. You brought up a lot of questions in your post but I want to deal with this specific one because I think it has broader implications that just here in EQ. Unfortunately, the answer is actually: It depends. It depends entirely upon which ethical system you are using to judge your actions.

A Kantian would ask "Do I have a duty to care about others and more specifically about their enjoyment?" which is just another way of saying does the care of others fall within the categorical imperative? The first formulation of the categorical imperative says: act only with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law without contradiction. Could we will that care for others become universal law without contradiction? Simply put can you imagine a world where everyone had to care for others without exception? Maybe? The first formulation is perhaps not the relevant one, lets try the second which says: never act in such a way that we treat humanity, whether in ourselves or in others, as merely a means but always as an end in itself. To be clear, Kant is not saying that we can not ever use people as a means to an end, the key part here is the word "merely." He is saying that it is always wrong, without exception, to treat other people as merely a means to an end only... or in other words as things not people. This is where we get to your self evaluation because only you can answer this: Do you treat the other players of this game as things or are they all real people, valuable in their own right, to you? When answer this you will know how Kant feels about your actions.

By contrast, Utilitarian ethics tells us that the only way to just the rightness or wrongness of an action is by looking at the outcomes/consequences of that action. Mill said "actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain and the privation of pleasure." So, the utilitarian answer to your question is we absolutely should care about others and their happiness, even sometimes at the cost of our own. Consider this example: It is your birthday and your family wants to take you out to dinner. You really want Thai food but you know that most of your family hates Thai food. The utilitarian would sacrifice the pleasure that they would get from a Thai food dinner for their family and choose something that everyone could enjoy. This is because for utilitarians all happiness (and by extension all harm) is equal, one unit of my happiness is equal to one unit of your happiness. So say you forced your family to go to the Thai restaurant with you then you would have to weigh all the harm to each family member against just your happiness, after the moral calculus you would end up with more harm than happiness which would make that choice wrong according to utilitarianism. Did your happiness at selling something on bazaar outweigh the unhappiness you caused others by undercutting them? Does the happiness someone gains by boxing all the content outweigh the harms done to others who are unable to enjoy the game because they can not find a group? If you are working within a system that says the good of the many outweighs the good of the few (or the one) then these are the things you should consider.

These are just two ethical systems, there are many more but for simplicity sake I just chose two contrasting ones. Be careful though because this is a very simple explanation, there are other things to consider like whether or not you believe in an objective morality, meaning if you think there are things that are always wrong without exception like lying for example... if you do, you might be a Kantian. If you don't then you maybe leaning more consequentialist like utilitarianism.

FawnTemplar's superb post reminds me of Good Place TV show and How to be Perfect book which discusses many of the same ethical topics.
Were you one of the consultants on that show?

Now on the topic of bazaar selling pricing.
From a game theory perspective the settling on the same pricing makes sense for a few sellers that plan to stick around for a while. Basically an oligopoly.

Luckily for buyers it does not work in Everquest for most items. Since most items are easily replenishable and can enter the world faster than the cartel can buy them up. So there is constant downwards pricing pressure on most items.

This brings it to my personal pet peeve - sellers of old expansion collectibles for 2Million platinum each.

This seems like an incredibly stupid / useless activity.

Why? If I really need this item I am not going to pay 2M because I can trivially use Overseer to obtain the item.
I could also go farm them at 120 but let's ignore that fact because Overseer guarantees the collectible.

Again I am talking about someone putting 30 items of some CoTF collectible for 2M each.
They might only have 4 or 5 of the same set for sale. So it is not even the full set.

Now these sellers will have tons of collectibles for sale and many of them will be reasonably priced. 1k-100k or so.
In fact sometimes the sellers will drop price of this 2M item to semi-reasonable 50k-100k range when competition appears.

Over the last few months I have been slowly finishing my collections
I see that these sellers are active at moving the normally priced items,
Their 2M items keep sitting on the shelves.
It is like a Graphic Card from 2017 sitting on store shelves for 2x the retail price.

Why not drop the price to something like 200-500k and see if anyone bites?

What would be the rationale for someone to pay 2M for a single collectible? Does it really happen?

I was told a long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away...

DBG keeps track of all transactions between players. And if a transaction looks fishy, it can be flagged and then they can do an investigation on it.

So if I want to buy something that is fishy (you can fill in the blanks), what stands out more- giving someone 100 million plat? Or buying 50 collectibles?

Back in the day, water flasks were priced at 1 million each. I never understood that. I asked in game, and then understood. Hint- they are not buying the water flask/collectible because they need it. It is to hide what they are actually buying.

You definitely sound like an ethics lecturer. Thank you for the well written post. I kept from using any terms I vaguely remember from a long ago class mostly because I was afraid I would misuse them (I most definitely would have), so it was great that you picked up that slack.

Most people playing live EQ I think would relate to the two ethical systems you bring up, utilitarianism and Kantian. There are some that may instead embrace unrestrained hedonism (pleasure for self above anything), but not as many here as somewhere like a Call of Duty or even p99's Blue server era (is that still going on? been a while since I've been there). Live EQ still seems to have at least some level of care for their fellows.

Some people (including me, obviously) consider thinking about it fun. But yes, you should definitely stop if thinking about it if it does ruin your fun.