So I’ve been reading through the topics in BLTC and seeing a lot of people complaining about people controlling and altering the market for their own benefit… I think ANet wants this to be a game for the players, not the economists (I know half the people on this forum claim to study economics but what do you know I actually am half way through my BSc in Economics) and I propose implementing a trade limit per 24 hours.
What does this mean? Either a quantity or value based method, so if we treat each item as an independent market and limit it to maybe 5g worth of trading per server day for t1-4 materials whether it’s buying or selling (pre tax and charges) which means that no one trader can make a massive change to any market as cheaper markets have tonnes of supply and demand so even if 5g would buy thousands of that product the net effect would be negligible. Now you might say this isn’t fair but is it? Why would the regular player require 1000000 soft wood logs unless it was for market manipulation? This might inconvenience the few players that spend their gametime logging in, going on BLTC, and making money for their legendary that way, but I guarantee the amount of people inconvenienced by a method by this will be greatly less than those who will benefit from a more stable market.
This is just a concept, I also think maybe a physical quantity trade limit including both buying and selling every server day might also work so limiting t1-5 mats to 500, t6 250, lodestones to 25, cores to 50 etc this would give the market of normal players an opportunity to easily buy up any cheap mats being dumped on market to push down price/adjust sell options and vice versa. Basically the idea behind these is to limit the power the rich have on the market so that the majority of the players can enjoy using the BLTC with more stable prices and not worry about when to buy their mats for what they’re making in fear that they’ll be 30-40% cheaper the next day. (True story happened with me and my Corrupted Lodestones that I’ve been buying for Gift of Ice)
Another concept is something that comes from real life economics (progressive tax) and also the current game mechanics in gw2, everything we do is made so that there’s a disincentive to repetitively do it i.e. do all paths of a dungeon then token reward drops for the day, farm a certain area over and over again and you’ll hit DR after 30-60 minutes, do your daily fractals and after that fractal rewards decrease… everything apart from trading. So again on the whole either value or quantity scheme of things but maybe instead of just limiting altogether increasing the gold sink during that server day once they’ve hit that “limit” and adding +5% listing fee and +5% sale charge and doing this again when they hit the next tier of trade “limits” until a server day reset… which I’d also be tempted to say should only remove only 1 scale of +% listing and sale charges so if in 1 day you hit 3 tiers of trade limit it will take 3 server day resets for this to go back down completely… This will help the gold sink and combat inflation whilst stabilising markets and limiting the power of the rich and making any market shifts to be from the power of the majority not the minority essentially making many “poor” people totalling to a net worth of 1000g more influential to the economy than 1 person with 1000g which is currently how the BLTC works.
In my personal opinion I think the final idea could work really well, and would shut people up about market manipulators because any real market manipulation would have to be a collective effort from essentially the entire market if the right limits are set.
Whether you’re an economist or not let me know what you think, if you’re a Dev even better… I won’t charge for the idea… but if you want to increase the drop chance of Tooth of Frostfang from Jormag’s chest until I get 1 I won’t say no
haha
(edited by Ed Guardian.4825)