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Market manipulation is eBil!!!

Yes, I’m posting a lot about City of Heroes/Villains lately, and not pointing out much in the way of coming games I want to play/see. I’ve not really put much time in to anything but my heroic/villainous self gamewise recently.

In the City of * forums, there is a long thread going about how market manipulation is très eBil, immoral, demoralizing, and a few other negatives I can’t quite recall just now. In that thread, I just felt a need to respond to this one wrong point that one poster made:

I think the players that many other people perceive as market villains are the ones who consistently & systematically manipulate things in order do their absolute best to make sure sell items WAY THE FRAK ABOVE anything that an impartial/unbiased 3rd party would consider a fair price.

Why do I say that is wrong? Because, well:

I purchased these Deific Weapons for deific-bids-01.jpg (for the record – I normally like to purchase them for less – 3,177,233 to be precise – but some other ebil market manipulator has been muscling in on my space, so I had to push my bidding up significantly).  After I won a stack of 10 of them, I put them back up for sale deific-listing-01.jpg (and again, this is higher than my normal 3,517,233, but since I bid 120,000 more than normal, I don’t feel bad selling for 80,000 more than normal).  At the end of one good night of sleep, I logged in to find all 10 sold: deific-sales-01.jpg.

So let’s review – I listed at a price point where after sales, I would earn 3,246,509 after the 10% market fee if someone bought for exactly what I listed.  By my math, that means I listed my items for sale at a point where I would take a 53,504 loss per item sold if someone got my exact selling price.  Yet after my full stack of 10 salvage sold, they went for an average of 3,940,000, and my final profit after market fees is 4,263,480 instead of the potential 535,040 loss I could have suffered.  I am unwilling to take credit for any market price increase beyond 3,650,000, which is what my actual minimum sales target was.  The other 290,000 is clearly due to people willing to spend that much, not my forcing prices up.

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