Despite being often vilified speculators do provide a useful service to the market. They provide much needed liquidity and hasten price discovery that make the market function better for everyone. I mean, you can trade in every NPC station but it’s only actually useful to do so in a handful of places, exactly where the market traders/speculators are.
You are not a “victim” for trading your time or ISK for some good, or vice versa: you are a consenting participant of a voluntary trade. That is much different than being a victim of space violence or space crime where you are not happy with the outcome of that interaction.
No…it is more than that. When I need a module for a ship to go on a roam, I don’t have time to wait for a buy order to be filled. So I open the market find the item and buy the cheapest one. That way I can go on the roam/fleet and have fun. This, benefits me. And it benefits the seller. There is no loss here.
When you go to the grocery store are you a stupid sucker? According to you, yes you are. You gave them money with a profit margin. Dumbass. You could have grown the food yourself. Or put an add on Craigslist or the local newspaper for people to deliver food to you for your stated price. But no, like an idiot you went to the grocery store; paid their inflated prices…and walked out with bags of food and other stuff. Dope.
[/sarcasm]
Market transactions are mutually beneficial. Trades take place because the buyer values the commodity/service more than the seller does and the seller would prefer the money than the commodity/service. Without this difference in valuations trade simply would not take place. We’d all live in a state of total autarky and be very, very, very poor. There’d be no MMO’s, no internet, not much other than what you can produce yourself. And you’d also have to worry about mankinds tendency…rape, pillage and plunder. Instead, we can all benefit from mankinds other tendency to truck, barter and exchange.
The only thing clear is your ignorance of why trades take place.
Market PvP is not between the buyer and the seller. Everyone who buys an item off the market is basically saying via his/her actions, “I want this item more than the ISK.” The seller is saying, “I want the ISK more than the item.” This is a voluntary and mutually beneficial process.
The PvP is between sellers on one hand. I want to sell my stuff, you want to sell the same stuff. So we compete on price since we cannot compete on quality. There is also possibly competition between buyers. I want that stuff and you want it too. So which ever of us gets there first and buys it gets it and the other has to go without or buy at a higher price.
Seriously there is a ton of economic ignorance in this thread.
But in one case you lose isk and get nothing in return, contrary to the other where you lose isk and gain some module you want, completely other situation. Thats why emotions are in one case, not the other.
Exactly this! This is why Donald Trump’s every utterance on international trade is utterly wrong. He says something boneheaded like, “The US loses $50 billion every year to Mexico.”
NO!
Yeah, we pay $50 billion more in buying stuff than Mexicans buy from the US, but we get stuff that we value more than $50 billion otherwise we wouldn’t buy it.
I run a perpetual and on-going “trade deficit” with my local grocery stores. I always buy stuff from them and give them my money in return. They never buy stuff from me. But I also get bags of groceries. They win…I win.
Precisely! I want an ishtar. I want to do something with it. I can either wait and buy the BPO, research it, copy it, buy datacores…uh-oh now I’m being victimized. And moon goo (OMG more victimization), etc. and try to invent my own ishtar after say 4 weeks. That time waiting has value. If I were going to be ratting in that ishtar by waiting I have to give u p 4 weeks of ratting income. So now if some person who has already invented ishtars sells me an ishtar for cost plus 2 weeks of ratting income…guess what we both win. He gets his profit and I get 2 weeks of ratting income I would not have had if I had to invent it myself.
The minerals I mine are free, so when I sell them on the market it is literally printing money. I’ve hacked the system. The rest of you are so stupid not to realize this source of free ISK. Instead you are being ripped off by all those greedy mineral sellers on the market.
Recently I got caught out twice, one was buying stuff in Amarr which was a lot cheaper in Jita, The other was buying one of the meta Trig large guns at well above the real price in Jita. Both times I was annoyed with myself. But the first time was about 8m difference on each of the items and the second one was buying something at 35m which was worth 1.5m. So I looked at the person who sold the gun and I was like well played.
What did it cost me, well time making the ISK, the time I saved was going to Jita rather than Amarr for those plates, so in effect I did not really lose on that, I just gave some of my time to that player in terms of those over priced items who likely had to ship them through Niarja to sell in Amarr, they were faction plates by the way.
The one in Jita was different, I actually was annoyed, but more of myself at clicking the buy button without thinking it through, but I was in what I would call a mad buying spree on two Leshaks so…
But here is the rub, the person who sold me that trig gun was someone who will never leave that station, and as such even if I wanted to get the blighter I can’t, to get back at him I would have to target and play station trading games against him. I can never find out his main for retribution unless he makes a slip. And it is not worth my time, in the end I slapped myself around the head twice for being stupid and said only 33.5m…
The market is however a service in that you need items, and even at times when you over pay it is still that, though the second example was just market manipulation to gouge, I can’t say the same about being ganked for example, though I have not actually been ganked yet.
But I would say to the OP an interesting thought in any case.
When I buy something off the market I don’t “lose the ISK”. I am exchanging the ISK for something I want more than the ISK. There is no loss. See, I don’t have to make the exchange. I could put up a buy order, or just go without. There is basically an implicit assumption in your reasoning that everyone buying things off sell orders is a clueless moron. And why is it the case that if you but a buy order you are being a brilliant genius? You are “losing your ISK” after all, right? Yes, yes, I know you are going to sell those items for more ISK. Why is that better than someone who buys something to actually use it?
Things get a bit more complicated if we move into the realm of speculation, but then we have to talk about expectations both ex ante and also ex post realizations. Still even here the basics still hold. Ex ante, when I buy something for speculation purposes it is a trade I want to make. Later on it might turn out my initial assessment is wrong and I end up losing ISK, but that doesn’t mean the person selling me the stuff victimized me.
The only time there is a victim is if we talk about fraud or various market scams. But to be quite honest those are not that hard to spot. If you use the rule: if it looks to good to be true…it probably isn’t true you’ll generally be fine.
No, we were talking about emotional response attached to losses, that losing 1 bil from a gank was harder to swallow than losing 1 bil due to an error or to market manipulation. Try again.
Buying low and selling high implies no loss of ISK. Even if you try and use some scheme to drive prices up, people have different reservation prices. Some people might not be willing to buy at your inflated price, others are. To call these sorts of transactions losses is really stretching it.
Now, if you are running a scam then yes those can be considered actual losses. Other than that…no, not really.
The important part is “emotional roller coaster” here, but i see where you want to go. While most are legit, some market manipulations are borderline scams and the buyers loses money when he pays twice the normal price for a commodity on a given period. The word “tweak” was not strong enough to make it clear i was talking about screwing people, not standard market operations.
@Teckos_Pech some great points. Ethically only examples I can think of that may break your main point (which I would summarize as “market transactions are inherently a positive sum game, assuming autonomous rational actors”), would be situations of price gauging, price fixing, or monopolies. Such could still be argued to be mutually beneficial, but it’s at least more gray.
Since this is a discussion of ethics, I’ll add that your tone and insults are not helpful. I suspect this is just your internet persona, but if you talk to people this way in real life you are a real asshole. At least maybe give them a chance to change their mind and agree before you call them an idiot? You seem to be intelligent, but I highly doubt that you have never initially held an incorrect view of something. We all grow, learn, and change our minds… just how it works. But being an asshole… that is a choice.
When they get ganked there’s someone there. He’s tangible. On the market, first and foremost, most people just pay the price. OP is making some serious mistakes in his post. He assumes people aren’t willingly paying too much (the cost of saving travel-time) or he assumes they actually know they’re getting ripped off.
OP’s question is too broad, not defined enough and thus can not be answered properly.
In any case, though, are these two not comparable anyway. When you shoot someone down, who tends to then rage about it, you basically shot down his ego. Most people nowadays seem to live in their characters, identifying them and believing that they’re doing great things. They’re heros or whatever.
When a player comes popping this kind of person’s ship, he also pops his reality bubble. Suddenly the ganked person has to deal with the fact that he’s not invincible (compared to shooting stupid NPCs a child can learn to kill after a week of playing), not powerful and definitely not a good player.
They’re losers in real life, and they’re losers in a video game.
Most often it is those who feel powerless in real life who will rage the most about someone in a video game who has more power than them, because suddenly they have to deal with the fact that they’re actually not as powerful as the game makes them believe. You can see these types of people on the forums as well … they’re a cancer, potentially mentally ill and definitely sad existences.
