Tree of Savior Forum

Why I think it is impossible to control RMT by regulating market prices

General Discussion
#61

That’s always risky, because someone could buy it out from under you and resell at a profit. Every time you list and buy your own stock, you lose money. And shifting the average means you need need to list a comparable amount of times to everybody else on the server combined, even if you could set the price to 0.

It’s much easier to artificially increase the price of an item, since you make at least some profit every time you buy a cheap one from someone else to relist. Although in this case you don’t have a guaranteed buyer, so you’ll run into issues with the limited slots. If you can’t sell them at your inflated price before someone lists a cheaper one again, you’ll have to keep buying, either until it works or you go broke.

But RMT botters have no such issues. They can sell at the maximum allowed price, regardless of any other listings currently on the market, and have a guaranteed purchase to instantly free up their slot(s). And that’s assuming the item in question even has a recommended price in the first place.

#62

[details=Prinny does not recommend nor take responsibility for the contents of this message.]
The ideas I presented were if someone or some group intentionally wanted to troll the market. I think in such a situation, market logic can be thrown out the window. I’m not saying the idea I presented would ever come to fruition. I’m just saying that it’s theoretically possible for an extremely wealthy individual (or maybe someone running some item collection bots) or a group of market traders who want to commit some pranks to crash the price on specific items with a coordinated selling strategy. People will always buy the cheapest item available and so that forms the basis for a possible price crash feedback loop, provided there is enough supply to sustain the loop.[/details]

#63

I think we might be looking at that right now, considering the sightings of bots with arde daggers running around. It seems like an insane move unless they were trying to manufacture scarcity to create demand for their services.

#64

It’s just you need an astronomical amount of money to do that, though it should be technically possible.

But even if the calculated maximum price is lowered by your intentional price crash driving down the average, the “real” average price would not change, it would only be slightly closer to the new maximum.

[details=I don’t know the real numbers, but say there’s been 1000 sales between 300~500k. The system detects this and calculates the average (and suggested) price of 400k, with a minimum price of 200k and a max of 800k:]Now, you and your buddies want to pull the biggest prank ever seen, so you sell the item back and forth 1000 times at 200k. This costs 62k in taxes each time if you’re a free player, or 22k if you have token status. So 22mil at best.

This means there’s been 2000 total sales, 1000 at 200k, and 1000 at ~400k. The average is now 300k, with a minimum of 150k, and a max of 600k.

So everyone else still sells it at 300~500k as if nothing even happened.

To lower the average again, you would need to sell 2000 more at 150k each (33mil total), which would bring it down to 225k, min 113k, max 450k.

Players can still sell at the original 400k price point.

Selling another 4000 yourself could bring it to 169k, min 85k, max 338k.

Finally, you pulled off the prank! Nobody can sell the item for 400k anymore, and now lose 60k on each sale. You sure showed them! It only took a single group of people making 7x the total number of transactions for the entire server combined to do it.

Again, not real values, and I don’t know when the average is calculated so the minimum could be less each time you relist the item, saving a little bit of silver. But the max could also be something crazy high, so you’d have to sell even more to reduce that below the original average. Even selling exactly as many as everyone else combined is already unfeasible, so 2x, 3x, or 10x that amount would be more than anyone is willing to go for a joke.[/details]

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#65

Is this how the market cap system actually calculates the min and max values? I was under the impression that it calculated min and max possible values by using a moving average of N number of recent trades in order to determine price limits. My intuition is that if the system used a global average based on all previous past sales as you suggest, that eventually there will be such a huge N of previous sales that new sales would not be able to significantly shift the mean price. So I feel there is the possibility that you could get a converging pricing determination function, which would be bad since there is no point to a market where the selling price is set in stone regardless of silver abundance or item supply…

But again this is just my intuition, it would be a good idea to gather some actual data on how the market limit system is actually calculating limits. Until then, we’re both just theorizing…