Now, on to the ceiling. What this actually does, is accelerate the devaluation of money, and in this case, creates irritation as a result of the interface – something no sane game developer should ever deliberately introduce into their product.
The short explanation for the devaluation effect is this: because we are talking about a true post scarcity market, people do not have a consistent money sink such as their rent or property taxes, survival oriented purchases, et cetera. Therefore, yes, the value of commodities, goods people will want for whatever reason (especially the saving of time mentioned above) suffers inflation. But if you cap the value of goods artificially, you are setting the value of money in stone, but people will continue to gather ever increasing amounts of money. They can’t help it, so long as they continue to play the game at all.
Eventually, people have more money than they have things they want to spend it on. Money loses value compared to which items you already have, and the velocity of money takes a nose dive: which in laymans terms, means that people are trading less. And of course they are, consider the market they have to work with in this scenario. You get, Item X of Awesomeness, and have no use for it personally, so you go to list it on the Trading Post. It joins Y amount of Item X’s that have accumulated there, sitting at the max price. It has nothing to separate it from all of the others just like it, so they all just sit there until somebody wants one, and then that somebody has no reason to buy yours over any other one.
This is the point of irritation: In order to move my goods, I have to list them for less then the artificially determined price – just like I would in a free market, except that the price ceiling is determined by what people are willing to pay, and automatically as a result, increases to accommodate the growing amount of money available in the game. But let’s go back to our fictional, “communist market” for a moment and examine this further.
What do you think happens as time goes on? I already know: As people start to hit that moment when they have nothing else to buy, since everything is easy to acquire, they start putting forth less effort to sell in order to have money, because it has no value. It no longer saves them time, much less anything else. Money has no function any more. So, people slowly stop selling. Some people do continue, of course, providing goods for newer players, but eventually the majority of these fall by the wayside as well, for a simple reason.
They already have too much money. They can’t gain anything from continuing to participate in the market, and they aren’t losing money faster than they gain it. There is no longer a challenge or competition in the marketplace, so there is really no gameplay – no fun to be had.
Either my goods end up sitting just under the artificial cap, or they end up just over the vendor value, or more likely, I just start vendoring everything and a few people continue listing things way up at the artificial ceiling. We no longer have a market, at this point. We have an item shop, with mostly fixed values, from which everybody will buy the things they need in order to not be behind the gear ceiling, and then largely not participate in further.
So I ask you, CdrRogdan, how is this item shop an improvement over the market we currently have?
It certainly doesn’t look like fun, and I don’t know about you, but I prefer to do things in games based upon how fun they are. >.>;