Please, devs, add a new flag to items purchased from the broker. Any item purchased from a broker cannot be resold again by the broker. Speculation on some items is hurting the economy of the servers.
Krono reselling is not the problem. The problem is that there is too much plat in the economy due to plat exploits. We need bigger, better plat sinks to remove plat from the server economies. As a seller, I'm perfectly happy for someone to buy all of whatever I have on the broker and then price it higher. I got the price I asked for, after all.
The issue I see with bigger plat sinks is new/returning players and those of us that spend plat as fast as we get it. Doesn't really hurt the people sitting on hundreds of billions or with 10k kronos.
That doesnt make any sense on a brokering system. If it can be initially sold on the broker it should be able to be resold.
While I sympathize with the OP about people buying and reselling stuff at a higher price we do have the option of using the auction function to sell items at a reasonable price. Even then, there is no guarantee the person won't resell it at a higher price. I think that one answer would be to flag an item, once sold on the broker, that would keep the item from going up on the broker again for 30 days. Some people will wait out the time but at least it will make it harder for them to buy and resell items.
But what exactly do you hope to accomplish by this reselling delay? It has to be something that will justify the programming man-hours. What, precisely, is this going to help?
Why would you shoot yourself in a foot? You yourself can do the same thing. Buy and sell. Or sell at the price you want to get paid. Quaranteening items bought from broker solves nothing. I can't even imagine flagging everything once sold on broker, it would create a bloat in a database of double items - those flagged and those not flagged.
I don't see this being a problem as is. Like someone mentioned, if you get the price you ask for on the broker, who's being hurt? A common example I see and do myself would be listing 10-20 of a harvestable rare for a certain price point. There might be one or two people selling the same at a much lower price point. I will buy theirs and add the item to my broker at my price. Is the ask of the OP to keep this from happening?
It really doesn't matter, because you can always go out and harvest more and undercut someone selling for a higher price,and in fact, that is exactly what happens with harvestables. I mostly sell collectible items (shinies) and stuff my toons craft. Obviously, If I can craft it, someone else can, too, and that puts downwards pressure on pricing. Shinies are mostly the same, since they're out there in the world waiting to be picked up and sold on the broker. If it's a very rare shiny, from a heroic instance somewhere that's a pain in the neck to go harvest, then you might be able to sustainably buy lower-priced shinies and sell them at a higher price, but even there, once that starts happening others will go out and deliberately seek that shiny, or someone will get it from the Guildhall Gardener, the Fathomlurker Seeker, or the Burynai Seeker. The key to broker success with shinies is to not resist downwards pricing pressure, sell in volume instead. There's just not much that's truly rare enough to allow cornering the market. And when people do sell those items they're initially listed very high, so it doesn't make much sense to buy and resell.
If I see someone undercutting everyone else on shinies or harvestables, be assured that I will buy them and relist them.
The ones that get me are the folks that think they can run 1g or 1p or 1c under the lowest price.. they don't get my business...ever. If its a fast moving item I will match the lowest reasonable price so we both stand a chance at selling product. I will buy and resell at whatever I can get for stuff and players have been most generous to be honest, so to me the market is working as it was intended.
If you are talking about Kronos, the prices are absurd, but the fact that they sell at those prices means there is too much plat in the economy. The issue with the amount of plat should be fixed. Problematic possibilties: Making OP items/power purchasable by huge plat = Plat poor/new/returning players get disadvantaged Fluff items for huge plat numbers = only some people would buy Tracing dupes and removing all plat from them = duped plat transfers many hands once in the economy, the unwitting recipients get the raw end of the stick (some of these exploits take months to trace) Zeroing all plat = watch everyone leave An Idea: The only thing that comes to mind is maybe a server wide event where players pay an NPC plat and it makes some sort of structure / recipe / item / ability to become available to everyone on the server. Ratios can be decided by devs based on active server pop and plat controlled by those characters or whatever floats their boat.
As long as there is a marketplace open on the server there will always be hyper inflation, plat dupes do happen, but its the ability of people to spend money for something they can sell for plat that drives it. Then you also have to think about there are WAY less people playing the game now than there was so the amount of available plat went up per person, it doesn't ever really go away just because people leave. Ever wonder what happens to the broker fee money, or the extra money the game skims off each goblin gambling roll? and yea, they do.. I tested it on a server that I was the only one on at the time to see if the pot went up the same amount I was spending..it doesn't. There are just too many things going on in the background to really get a full picture of why the economy is in the shape its in, we all have theory's with limited information. I do like the idea of a server wide event to help, but at the same time I dont see myself spending my plat on something I consider part of the game such as building the dragon statues.. was a fun event with a lasting memorial, but it didn't cost me anything but time. There are things that have been removed from game that I would like returned and would be willing to give a great deal of plat to make it happen, but they wont even talk about it to us. So, they can open another server with a marketplace and let me earn another billion
If the broker has >=25% tax, then there's no return from buying low / selling high. If the broker has <25% tax, then there is a return from buying low / selling high, and a risk for economic inflation. Aided by how there's only 1-2 sets of items worth monopolizing, such as the Kronos, people find it easy to determine what product to use as a capital. There's also not enough sinks in the game. I'm not saying that anyone can just jump into the market and get rich by buying low / selling high, though. You need to have the highest capital from the start. Whoever sits with several billion platinum right no on Thurgadin, buying low / selling high, will continue to be the wealthiest person on Thurgadin until the developers rob that person of their wealth. You cannot compete with that person until they decide to retire.
If I want to move stuff quickly, I'll undercut everyone knowing full well that someone will buy and resell. It's a win for both of us. I consider myself selling at wholesale.
EQ2 allows us to circumvent broker fees entirely by going to the seller's home and purchasing stuff directly from their sales containers. There is a price point at which buying someone else's stuff for resale does not result in profit, but it varies based on the demand for that given item. Generally, a seller has to have undercut me by a lot before I will buy them out and resell their stuff when we're talking about collectibles. But if you are flipping Kronos, there are always people who want to sell Right Now This Very Second at prices much lower than the prevailing broker rate, and there is very high demand to purchase Kronos, so you can buy Kronos cheap and flip them for a profit. At first you might just be making a few thousand plat, but if you take all the proceeds and continue buying cheap Krono and flipping them, the profits grow as you move volume. If you get a few players who have the plat to purchase lots of Krono on the broker, combined with too much plat in the economy, then people will continue to purchase Krono even at much higher prices measured in plat, which is what we have been seeing of late. You can't actually corner the Krono market... we can always pony up the real world money to buy Krono from DBG, and if the plat price becomes too onerous, that's what normally happens, and that forms a natural control.Watching Krono prices is very diagnostic of the amount of inflation and the amount of plat in a server's economy. I have heard vague rumors that nowadays people are selling Krono for real world money, which I guess would have to be priced below the DBG price. Given the consequences of getting caught doing this and being banned, losing your toon and account, etc., I'm always surprised that people would take such risks. Functionally, DBG should be able to track places where one toon hands Krono to another but no in-game exchange of much value is actually made, especially when the selling toon has a pattern of such activity. This is the descendant of the old gold-selling that used to go on.
