Jump to content

something needs to be done to prevent people from artificially inflating prices on the ah


JarodDempsey

Recommended Posts

This was a known problem in beta but was put on the back burner due to all the other work required but now as the population has also shrunk again it has become glaringly apparent once more. Yesterday i noticed skycatcher green was inflated by like double from 2 days before and i talked to the person who had inflated it and he said to use inferior affinity instead, now today he has inflated that card too and currently has 13/17 listings and the blue one is inflated almost 3 times what it was a day or two ago. 

You can even see on smj how all the cards will be bought out and then immediately listed for like double the previous price which over time is artificially increasing the price and forcing players to buy higher than what the card is actually worth because certain people have so much bfp they literally control the market. 

image.thumb.png.6f27552f2610665430c6fd347fa56243.png

Dallarian likes this
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Not related to inflating prices, SMJ graphs stopped updating on March 6th, along with median, mean... Only current price is displayed correctly, looks like nobody reported this.

Back on topic, limiting auction amount per card might help.

Edited by Sylar
Link to comment
Share on other sites

But.... isn't exactly that graph you posted showing that even on such rare cards, the price always comes down again within a few days?

Nobody is forcing anybody to buy anything that high - just wait 3-4 days and this "nuisance" goes away right by itself.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I was once told that cards get more expensive over week, and cheaper over weekend, when people have time to put them on AH. From what I see on given graph, this trend approximately holds.

But seeing card's price going up long-term is always not nice to watch.

Little_Ducky likes this
Link to comment
Share on other sites

There are peaks and troughs over course of a week for card prices however the past few weeks the rare and UR card prices have steadily risen back to almost pre-reforging levels if not more. As much as it saddens me to say, I doubt that the team can do anything about toxic traders who insist on hoarding cards and manipulating the market for their own gains. It's a free market, people can do whatever they like unfortunately.

 

Edited by Little_Ducky
Kapo likes this
Link to comment
Share on other sites

4 hours ago, Kapo said:

But.... isn't exactly that graph you posted showing that even on such rare cards, the price always comes down again within a few days?

Nobody is forcing anybody to buy anything that high - just wait 3-4 days and this "nuisance" goes away right by itself.

it is showing that people buy out the entire stock and immediately inflate the price sometimes double or more and even when it does come back down it has spent half the time above where it should be not to mention the slow but steady inflation the false pricing is causing since unknowing players see the price regularly inflated and dont know any better and even smj will be showing the average price rise as we can c in the graphs it is slowly increasing over time even tho theres no new interest in this card. This shows 100% artificial manipulation and this isnt the only card it happens to, not by a longshot.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, JarodDempsey said:

This shows 100% artificial manipulation and this isnt the only card it happens to, not by a longshot.

Nobody denies that manipulations. And yes, basically all interesting cards show this pattern - either cards that get bought up by somebody, or supply runs out and the next Skylord who sees this puts the first new card rather high into the market and not low.

While you seem to be outraged by this, I find this pretty normal in a free market dynamics.

What I can tell you from my experience, almost all Skylords are pretty smart about their buying decisions, and not sheep that constantly fall into price traps like you are describing. Just pick any card and try to buy it up and set a new price yourself. You will be VERY surprised how resilient the market is to those manipulations. You will be sitting there with hundreds or thousands of your BFP sunk into a pile of cards that don't sell (at the price you imagined) and the market price returning to normal much faster than you'd expect.

Also, while I agree we always see some immoral behavior, I can assure you that not just some select Skylords who try to make gains off the market. Almost everybody is trying to "buy low, sell high" - most likely including you.

 

3 hours ago, Little_Ducky said:

I doubt that the team can do anything about toxic traders who insist on hoarding cards and manipulating the market for their own gains. It's a free market, people can do whatever they like unfortunately.

While we both agree, I see it the other way around. The team shouldn't do anything to interfere in this, and _fortunately_ people can do whatever they want. The amount of rules and regulations we would need to define and enforce  "appropriate behavior on the market" would suck every bit of fun out of the market system.

The SR team did the right thing, leave it alone and think about the bigger problems, which resulted in the introduction Reforge - something that changed the market enormously, in my view for the better.

Lans and Dutchy like this
Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, Kapo said:

Nobody denies that manipulations

Sorry my friend - but I do indeed. At least I deny what you all here mean by "manipulation"

6 hours ago, JarodDempsey said:

it is showing that people buy out the entire stock and immediately inflate the price sometimes double or more

Nah this is not what you see here.  Perfect example, cause this card only follows (BF) markets behaviour and shows no signs for manipulation at all.

First: The value of cards in BF never really followed the rules of demand and supply, therefore our market is way too small. Card have a certain "gut price" and thats it. And the last months show that even if cards get a stronger nerf or buff this usually only has a very slight impact on the price in longer terms. This is sad, it drives me crazy - but I have accepted a long time ago.

So what happens here? Whenever the support of a card runs out in the market, it is going into the market with a far higher price. Always. This is almost a good sign to me, that common market rules aply here at least a bit. When a common or uncommon runs out it usually starts again even with 5 to 50 time of its value.

And be true to yourself - if you want to sell a shiny rare or ultra rare and you see there is no supply at all, will you look it up in SMJ and put it in back for the exact value that it had when it ran out? For sure not. None of you does so.
You think in this moment: "Ah there is no other supply for this card - let me raise the price a bit and see if I can get rid of it until the next card hits the market cheaper". You all do so, every time. And I do so. This is normal human and market behaviour.

What I see on the still very high price of the Skycatcher (g) (which is not superior to the blue one btw and which is alltime heavily overrated) is 6 cards by 5 different people undercutting each other slightly - where do you see a manipulation here 🤔

And by the way, I do not deny that some single cards are flipped sometimes - this is normal and happens on every market around the world. If you see someone selling desperatly low you buy and flip it, also human and normal. But this does not hurt market prices much usually. Still this is not driving our whole prices. Because:

Last thing: Did you ever try to control the price of a single card alone? I mean really manipulation and raising (and keeping) the price on a certain level you wish, to make profit from it?
Do so once! You will learn very fast that even on our small market this is not half as easy as many people think and say so often. Just try it! You will be surprised how much BF you will prolly loose in the end by not reaching your goal at all. And if you do it successfuly you will be surprised how much time and work this will take. Guess the only case I have seen this working - even on our small market - is for the promo cards and those promo traders invest WAY more time than many of you may think.
And by the way they are still not able to control the whole market at all, what you know when you are buying some cheaper Promos (with patience) for your collection yourself.

 

 

 

Lans likes this
Link to comment
Share on other sites

21 minutes ago, Volin said:

Sorry my friend - but I do indeed. At least I deny what you all here mean by "manipulation"

What I mean by this is sometimes, sharks going to buy up solely for the purpose of making gains.

This happens frequently, not just by one, but several Skylords - if you follow the market you can clearly see them buying up a card that's quite low and re-posting ALL of them at a higher price. If they were smart and just re-posted one or two, you really couldn't tell if it's just maybe short-supply. But they are buying 10 and re-posting all 10 at once for a ludicrous price.

I define "manipulation" in that context as buying up several cards (and re-posting) not for a personal need, but really just for the purpose of making profit.

But: I do not see this as a problem. That's a normal side effect of free market dynamics. And, there is serious risk involved with such methods, like sitting on a pile of cards (therefore bound BFP) and not selling at all like you have hoped for, in worst cases even making losses. People who have never tried something like that think that you buy up, and sell them back within some days and have a near-instant profit.

It's not like that AT ALL.

If you know a trader, simply ask them about their stock. You might be amazed how much bound BFP they have.

Edited by Kapo
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Of course single flips happen all the time. But this is not what the TO was pointing at and this is not what we see in the chart.

He was speaking (and I thought you all refer to it) about this jumps, that happen for every card:

grafik.png.b99d1ba5f19d20afbc3fb010215e14d3.png

And those have nothing to do with manipulation at all, at least not in the way that he wrote. Of course it is a kind of manipulation too, if there is no shaman in the markent and you, me or anyone in this game puts it in the market for a high price in the hope to make some BF. But as said I feel this is not what hurts a market - even more the opposite - it shows our broken market is working at least a tiny bit 😄

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It is very possible for group(s) of Skylords/Skyladies/other Sky beings to coordinate and try to "manipulate the market" but even then so what? Where in real life you might have true monopolies on production of certain things, can you claim that here? There probably number of players, outside of these "market manipulating group(s)", opening booster packs (or codes for events etc) independently who can easily benefit from artificially inflated prices.

 

If the player base is static, I would assume card prices would have a general downward trend (the actual in game usefulness of additional copies of cards would go down as everyone eventually have all the copies of each card in game that actually matters: 5th... Nth copy of non-promo cards don't provide any in game utility other than reforging and 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc copy of promo cards provide no utility at all since they can't even be reforged). Then the general upward trend could well be "market manipulation" or new Sky beings (more actual demand) coming along... or maybe just reforging even? I don't know how much of each we are talking about here but you need a lot more data than this.

 

It is a little sad that some usual common cards (like Windwavers) is rather expensive typically for new players but I think if they exercised a little patience, the daily BFP and achievements goes a long way. I been back playing SR for a little over 2 months by now and I definitely remember charges on XL units were (and still somewhat is) my biggest problem (most of the time the default charges on non-XL units were enough or I didn't have to wait too long since usually I needed only a few more recharges) but I solved that either by sticking to cheaper cards or, where I can, use Offering (often times both affinity) and Furnace of Flesh (yeah not all decks I/anyone want to play could always fit a single :shadoworb:).

 

I flip cards myself but I also wait (sometimes weeks) for cards I really want (to keep/play) to come back down to median or lower price before I buy... Time is not on side of "market manipulators" for reasons I already stated.

Kapo likes this
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I'm unsure if it is possible development wise but is there a possibility to introduce price caps on cards? Currently the minimum possible price is 3BFP, if we introduce a maximum price that can be listed for each card the likelihood of people mass buying and reselling will be reduced significantly as profit margins are governed by the difference in the cap and buyout price.

Edited by Little_Ducky
Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 hours ago, Little_Ducky said:

I'm unsure if it is possible development wise but is there a possibility to introduce price caps on cards? Currently the minimum possible price is 3BFP, if we introduce a maximum price that can be listed for each card the likelihood of people mass buying and reselling will be reduced significantly as profit margins are governed by the difference in the cap and buyout price.

So you would want commons to cost no more than 4 :bf:? and promos to be not more than 1000 :bf:? so you can buy any card within two days?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think it is clear she is not suggesting that Kubik. I don't think I agree with hard price caps, but it is functionally no different from what we have been trying to do with features like Reforging, ie. creating a minimum and maximum range for cards of different rarities.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Kubik, I am not suggesting anything of the sort. We have SMJ which has an extensive history of card prices pre and post reforging, this would be considered a reliable source if that was to be implemented. I understand that a free market is fluid, but how much fluidity should there be if new players are having to pay 50+BFP for an equilibrium or 4000+BFP for infect? It took me nearly 8 months of continuous playing, doing my quests religiously and selling my boosters before I could get all the high ticket cards and promos. This was me lucky enough to have started when cards were a reasonable price. I believe the purpose of reforging was to improve the card economy and somewhat set price ranges for commons UC, rares and URs as stated by windhunter. I however have noticed that within a span of 4 months cards prices have climbed back to almost pre reforging levels and shows no signs of plateauing. 

Edited by Little_Ducky
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I never understood the problem about Infect. So you have to save up like 8-10 days to get one of the most powerful and most desired cards in the whole game. Is that really that harsh? 🙂

But yeah, Kubik comming with those weird numbers was the first great pleasure of the day

Edited by Volin
Little_Ducky likes this
Link to comment
Share on other sites

We have to establish a Central Bank of Battleforge to take care of the currency, inflation etc. 🤣

Jokes aside... If you play every day for at least 45 mins - you get at least 250 bfp. So you're getting richer and richer everyday and it drives prices up. Im not sure how to calculate everything from economic side of it but it is how this 'stuff' work.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Took me 4months before I could justify pay 3.5kBFP for my first infect, still remember biting the bullet and buying it 😂. Unfortunately the high priced cards such as harvester, disenchant, nether all go in hand which adds up the bill pretty quickly, this is not accounting for charges.  It's understandable that they are considered end game cards and 'luxury' items but how many players will stick around long enough to actually accumulate enough BFP to buy it? Having so many unattainables plus the rising costs of commons/uncommons add up for beginners.

Edited by Little_Ducky
Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, Little_Ducky said:

We have SMJ which has an extensive history of card prices pre and post reforging,

🤔 really? As far as I know SMJ does not have any of the basic metric as for how much card was sold, and how many cards was sold for that price.

1 hour ago, Volin said:

But yeah, Kubik comming with those weird numbers was the first great pleasure of the day

It is April first here so I put a bit too much extreme numbers 😛 but the points stands the same, for at least someone it will be too low number, no matter how high it will be, and it does not account for any further changes to the cards, or to the economy.

19 minutes ago, Little_Ducky said:

Took me 4months before I could justify pay 3.5kBFP

 

3 hours ago, Little_Ducky said:

It took me nearly 8 months of continuous playing, doing my quests religiously and selling my boosters before I could get all the high ticket cards and promos.

🤔 so 4 moths for first 3500 :bf:, but in less than 8 moths you get everything? So how did you managed to earn so much more in the other 4 moths?

3 hours ago, Little_Ducky said:

I however have noticed that within a span of 4 months cards prices have climbed back to almost pre reforging levels

Have you considered that they was lower because of booster discount, and not reforging?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

32 minutes ago, Volin said:

 

Man really, you were a cool guy... what happened

Well after paying for disenchant, bata, enlightenment and charges infect was low on my priority list 😁

35 minutes ago, Kubik said:

so 4 moths for first 3500 :bf:, but in less than 8 moths you get everything? So how did you managed to earn so much more in the other 4 moths?

Because after paying for my batas, enlightenments (3k), disenchants (2k), nethers (2k) I didn't have much BFP left for infect. Like other beginners I also played LSS (500each at the time) and overlords (900each).

 

35 minutes ago, Kubik said:

ave you considered that they was lower because of booster discount, and not reforging?

Could be entirely wrong but if I recall correctly windhunter did write a whole document on reforging and how it impacted the economy. I could be mistaken but I thought that was the point of reforging. 

Edited by Little_Ducky
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 days ago I was helping a beginner with a deck, he was over the moon that he got 1000BFP from his achievements and asked me to put a basic deck with splashes of shadow. He already had embalmer so I said great let's buy a splicer and a phoenix then you've got a awesome T1/T2, much to my chargrin splicer has been consistently high at 300BFP (this used to cost me 100bfp to buy). So i said you'll need equilibrium green, he paid 85BFP for a common (btw this card has been sitting at 50+BFP all week) and a thunderstorm which on the day was ridiculously high too. So after just buying a few cards he blew his 1000bfp, they were by no means luxury cards or URs. My suggestion means more work for developers and I know you have lots of work and not enough hands on deck. It was simply a suggestion and probably too difficult to imlplement as for the reasons you stated above with regards to card and economy changes.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

On 3/31/2022 at 11:56 PM, WindHunter said:

I think it is clear she is not suggesting that Kubik. I don't think I agree with hard price caps, but it is functionally no different from what we have been trying to do with features like Reforging, ie. creating a minimum and maximum range for cards of different rarities.

my problem with these indirect methods are that they dont really prevent people from willfully manipulating the system. Like why not just prevent owning more than a certain number of cards. Like if u have 1 with full upgrades then maybe prevent being able to buy any or maybe only 1 so if you have 1 extra copy then you cant buy any. Theres no reason for people to be able to buy tons and tons of cards at once to allow for manipulating prices. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue. Terms of Use