flea market suggestion : Limit purchases per day / hour?

[Prof_Works]

see below.

 

https://clips.twitch.tv/CoyVastSoymilkRitzMitz

[kebman]

Big guys buying up and then re-selling marked-up items (also called price manipulation) is one of the oldest trading tricks in the book. (Other notable scams are the the escrow margin scam and the arbitrage scam known from both your local brand store, stock markets and not least EVE Online...) It's essentially creating a type of false scarcity, because big monopoly players (or in this case a cartel) are artificially hiking up the price of certain products. (I'm interested in this kind of stuff, because I used to do a little trading on the side myself).

Punishing everyone because it happens is not the answer, though. 

By far the easiets solution would be to implement some kind of bot that detects monopoly buy-outs, and who then simply increases the spawn rate of over-priced items. There! Problem solved! It would solve the scarcity problem within just a raid or two, and then the guys posting over-priced items would have to sell their stuff at a huge loss. No other punishment needed.  And AFAIK Nikita is indeed working on such a dynamic system for spawning items.

Another way to do just about the same thing, is to have an in-game vendor, such as Prapor, essentially control the price by having a stock of the item, and running whatever price he likes regardless of actual scarcity, as is the case for many in-game items.

And about that... You have to remember that the guys who do buy-outs like this, run a huge risk of taking on loss as they increase their prices, since people stop buying when the price gets too high. 

Also there is already a great mechanism in place that ensures that the price has to be marked up to a certain point in order to be profitable: Sales tax. If you plan on marking up an item, you have to factor in sales tax, or else you will run a loss. This means that you have to be sure—beforehand—that an item can even be sold at a certain marked-up price. That would be taking on a pretty huge risk, when you know that there are bots in place that just increase the spawn rate of items that are overpriced. (To a point sales tax also mitigate other trading tactics such as wash trades, but that's not really a big problem in Tarkov.)

Edit: As a side note, in EVE Online this type of "emergent gameplay" is called "Market PVP". It's even considered a legit play style by CCP (the EVE devs), so it has their blessing lol. And when you look at this video, you clearly hear a lot of guys having a ton of fun doing what they're doing. I mean, don't you think it's more cruel to stop these guys having fun? I mean, eventually they'll have to sell their stuff at a loss anyway lul! But yeah, I can relate to it not being fun for the guys who are being subjected to these kinds of shenanigangs, but then neither is getting shot in the face by a DVL from 300 metres away.

Edited December 17, 2019 by kebman

[GhostZ69]

@kebman Have you ever done any research on Debeers and the diamond business?  Just look at the old "dookie brown" diamonds that were sold as industrial diamonds for cutting, drilling etc, that a few years ago became the prized "Chocolate" diamonds.

[kebman]

3 minutes ago, GhostZ69 said:

@kebman Have you ever done any research on Debeers and the diamond business?  Just look at the old "dookie brown" diamonds that were sold as industrial diamonds for cutting, drilling etc, that a few years ago became the prized "Chocolate" diamonds.

Hehe, I feel this is kiiiind of off topic lul! I know they've been up to no good, but I haven't really dug into it no. I did however visit a DeBeers shop in London. I got in because I dress well. They had a bloody air lock and a scary guy eyeing me when I came in. But they liked me, so one second later they put a diamond ring priced at £200,000 into my hand. I nearly fainted lol. So I found an excuse and got the hell out of there.

Edited December 17, 2019 by kebman
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