(hello all, nice to finally post here!)
I was reading Reddit’s discussion on the Broker Relations change, and this response stuck out to me:
However, for me the main problem is the relisting fee, because it puts an artificial stop to how competitive you can be, essentially forcing all trading to be the slow/passive kind, where prices take days to meaningfully change.
People hate station traders, but they don’t realize they only reason they can casually right click->sell or buy directly is station traders. They are the ones who provide liquid isk to get rid of loot fast instead of having to list it in a sell order and wait, and they are also the ones keeping stock on the market for when we want to buy something immediately instead of having to place a buy order and wait for it to fill. It’s a service and that’s what you pay for in the form of margins, the extra convenience. I mean, imagine having to put up buy orders for 15 different items and wait a few days, updating prices in the meantime, just to fit a ship.
Sure, industrialists also play a part there as well, but who holds stocks of materials that these guys buy from? Again, the station traders. Probably the only case where traders are out of the loop is when a manufacturer sets up buy orders and buys directly from a miner, or when he does his own resource collection and manufacturing for the entire production chain.
But overall, in most cases there’s a bunch of middlemen making sure there is enough money floating around for people to quickly sell stuff, and enough stuff for people to quickly buy. With the relisting fees, this will probably change quite a bit, as i have a feeling people will either switch to regional trading/importing, or just be much less competitive overall which means higher sale prices and lower buy prices, plus a part of the tax moved over to the consumer. In other words, enjoy having to play the market yourself to a certain extent even if you don’t want to, or eat the price hike/drop to keep your convenience as a consumer.
I don’t know how pronounced that effect will be and i don’t know what consequences it will have on the rest of the game, but it will be fun to watch the chaos from the sidelines.