This is the kind of answer that I was looking for.
Admittedly my understanding of economics, and other topics too, is lacking. But the suggestion of how ego plays a part seems to make sense.
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Hatemails, sweet hatemails.
One thing I noticed that really made people rage is when CCP made poor balance decisions that made people utterly helpless and unable to compete.
As you might note elite PvP players will often sneer at N+1, and this is where it gets interesting, take for example the position of mining barges and exhumers after destroyers had a DPS buff for other good reasons. All mining ships had the tank of a wet paper bag, so what did they do, well they tried, they faction fitted them etc., used remote reppers and so on, but they were defeated by the gankers just going N+1 with cheap catalysts. So they raged because they were impotent, they could not win against that. So the rage came in thick and fast.
So when people say ego simplistically it is not just that. And this is not just perceived injustice or the concept of unfairness though of course both also play a part.
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One needs not be a content area expert to participate in these forums. Your question was well stated, and you have been open-minded and rational in considering the responses (so far as I can tell). It wasn’t just a way to start a discussion that you already held a firm belief in, which is the norm. Actually, kind of refreshing …
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Having a firm belief doesn’t prevent you to hear different or opposing arguments, as long as they are not limited to “because it’s 2019”.
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Like others have said what you’re thinking of is not being taken for a ride. If they didn’t think the goods were worth the isk they wouldn’t buy them.
The exception to this is scamming. And yes you do hear about scammers being vilified.
So normal trading is a completely voluntary interaction with mutual benefits. It’s involuntary interaction like getting blown up, scammed or stolen from that get peoples panties in a bunch.
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i hardly see station trading as evil except in the cases of buyint a 1m mod for .01 isk and reselling it for 100m isk
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It’s not people that you’re taking advantage of, it’s their desire for convenience.
I trade in a similar way, buying up missions drops in bulk, at a price and location where I can make a sizeable profit. Some items I buy are worth more in minerals than their market value, others are worth buying and relisting, either locally or in a trade hub.
My buy orders provide convenience for people looking to offload quickly and make some quick isk, my sell orders provide convenience to those looking to purchase something immediately. The added value/profit comes about because I’m prepared to wait for results.
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I think the OP’s talking about the market dirty tricks for fixing prices and screwing competition, not the standard buy low sell high thing.
Is that not normal trading?
If I can fix prices and screw the competition I will, short term anyway.
Like scamming, it’s all part of the fun. Not that I scam, I don’t like to get my hands that dirty.
This is not working good when you have a lot of traders and you cant monopolize anything. Maybe in some backwater 
hole.
BTW I tried to corner the market on ECM modules few years ago, but suddenly everyone started selling their ECM modules, when initially there were few on market. People must have hoarded it before.
Starts out sounding like another ganker tear post. Then turns into capitalism is evil. Very interesting.
Biggest difference between market traders (who have little control in a hub) and a ganker is pretty simple.
You choose to use a market. And more importantly, it doesn’t disrupt my gaming plans.
Getting ganked, the player doesn’t choose it and it disrupts their game play entirely.
For a casual player who can’t devote hours a day, every day of a week, getting ganked is a huge disruption. Getting to a hub, refitting, and getting back to what you were doing can not only take an entire play session, but use an entire week’s worth of wealth. Essentially wiping out a week of their perceived “progress” for something they didn’t choose to do.
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One difference is, they are freely engaging in one thing (to sell or buy something) but not freely engaging in the other thing (to get blown up and lose a lot of stuff).
I’m just explaining and answering your question, I’m not taking sides on anything.
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What exactly is “screwing people”? Was the days of OTEC (Organization of Technetium Exporting ‘Countries/Coalitions’–the name was basically a play on OPEC) screwing people? You could make a case, but not necessarily those whom you might think. The players who were ultimately screwed or at least the larger group were end use buyers. That is, those players who say run missions, rat, etc. and buy modules off the market. Because of OTEC the prices are higher than they otherwise would have been…alot higher. IIRC, the price was something like 150,000/ISK/unit.
But even here…the points I made are still valid. When a player buys a T2 item that has technetium in it they are still buying something they see as having more value than the ISK they are parting with. So trade is still, by-and-large, a positive sum game.
Now, what does happen is that things like OTEC (a cartel that tries to implement monopoly pricing) drives a wedge between some buyers and sellers. As a result of this wedge certain trades simply do not happen. These trades are “lost” in fact, the name of this effect is “deadweight loss”. These are the people who are really getting screwed over. Who are they? I don’t know, you don’t know…and on top of it those players may not realize their status either.
Are there other market manipulations? Sure. But generally, the really effective ones are rare and often are the result of weird aspects of dev changes. There was a guy who noted some quirk relating, IIRC, to citadels and he managed to manipulate PLEX prices and make a pretty nice pile of ISK (a few minutes of googling has yet to turn up anything hopefully somebody recalls more details and link something). This manipulation was rather short lived. Other manipulations are harder to do in game though.
See this is where speculators come in. They can foil an attempt at manipulation. Suppose you want to try and raise the price so you engage in some churning. That is you start setting up buy and sell orders that cancel each other out. Thus, you start driving up the number of transactions on that item. You are hoping other station traders see this increase in activity and also jump in and drive up the price. Problem is they could also jump in and drive the price down.
And even still if you are (temporarily) successful you increase the price, those transactions still taking place are mutually beneficial…even after your manipulation. Are some buyers pushed out of the market? Or into less desirable modules? Sure. But this is how markets work. People substitute away from the item in question, they also effectively have less income/wealth (ISK in their wallet) so they buy less. These things will undermine your efforts to drive up prices. Higher prices may also bring in more sellers. People who might have sold directly to sell orders decide the extra ISK justifies putting up a buy order.
The people losing out are not those who are still buying. They still value the item more than the ISK. These trades are still positive sum. The people losing out are those you do not see. Those who left the market and are buying something else with their ISK.
And even in cases where say the market is thin and a player puts items on sell orders for 2x, 3x, or more than say in Jita or Amarr that’s fine too. That high price is signalling that more items should be put on sell orders (assuming they move). That is what price movements are, they are signals. Prices contain information. When a price goes up the relative scarcity of the good in question has increased. This says to people who buy that good, economize. Use less, look for substitutes, both use less and look for substitutes, and for those who supply the good to procure/produce more. This is why sustained higher prices via manipulation often fail. You have to have a very deep pocket and even then that is no assurance of higher profits.
This leaves scams like setting the price really high hoping someone is simply not paying attention and buys the item for the ridiculously inflated price. Or maybe the margin trading scam. The first is down to the player’s own inattentiveness. Yes they might be frustrated and upset…but here it is pretty obvious that they screwed up.
[see Dracvlad’s post above, of course if Dracvlad messed up while piloting a ship his reaction would likely be the same, “Dammit, but well played guys.” That is the attitude of the long time players. If in this case you want to bring up your emotional roller coaster, fine. For many vets that roller coaster has become a feature not a bug, and for players who get angry (vet or otherwise) they really don’t quite get the game, not entirely.]
Oh and,
Learn to communicate more effectively.
You’re fired.
Price fixing and monopoly are generally due to some external factor. For example, IP Law grants a temporary (hahahaha) monopoly to the holder of said IP (via things like patents, copyright, etc.). Another example were Kings who granted certain privileges to a group (e.g. the Bank of England started out this way). You can also see it today with various licensing laws. Adding a licensing requirement will raise the cost of entry and limit competition and create price setting power.
But overall these things do reduce the efficacy of the market process.
As for price gouging that is a more interesting case. Suppose you live in an area stricken by a disaster, say a hurricane and you live along the SE coast of the US. What is one thing many people need, but cannot produce themselves or no longer buy from local suppliers? Ice. If you have certain medications (e.g. insulin, amoxicillin, etc.) you need to keep it refrigerated. If you have a infant still consuming mostly formula you may need to keep excess refrigerated. But your refrigerator is down because power lines are down and the local stores no longer have any ice.
What is the price of ice in this situation?
It is priceless. Even if you had a $1 billion in your car trunk you couldn’t buy ice.
So, along come some yahoos from a town further inland. They have bought a refrigerated truck. Dozens if not hundreds of bags of ice. And they’ve brought their chainsaws. So they head to your stricken town/city and as they get closer they basically clear a route into the inner part of the city. There they set up business and start selling bags of ice for $10/bag (say a 400% mark up over the non-disaster price). Now suddenly lots of people can buy that ice. Yeah, it is more expensive than when there is no disaster, but hey if you need to keep medication or baby formula cold, over-priced ice is better than no ice, right?
Well…no. When the cops show up and arrest the yahoos, seize the truck and ice (and turn of the engine in the impound lot so that the ice all melts) and everyone still waiting to buy ice cheers. Because they’d rather have no ice at any price than ice at 4x the normal price. Go figure.
Now, is that high price immoral? I would say, not so fast. Suppose a guy is standing in line and he wants ice to keep his beer cold. He finds out the price rants and rages but storms of with no ice. That high price has helped ensure that the guy behind Mr. Budweiser has at least a bag of ice to buy for $10 to keep his kids insulin cool.
Now you can say, “Well, it is immoral to take advantage of people in this situation.” Okay, but people don’t do nice things for strangers out of the kindness of their hearts, by and large. Not on a grand scale. Sure periodic expressions of altruism, or reliance on churches, etc. But doing things simply because it helps out someone you do not know…usually doesn’t happen. We live in a world that is predominantly reliant on “anonymous exchange”. Most of our trades are anonymous.
When you buy a product there might be dozens, hundreds, even thousands of people involved in getting that commodity or service to you. The vast majority of which you’ll never see or even really know about. By paying money for that commodity or service you are helping to support all of those people. And they are getting you something you want (more than the money). So yeah, giving the guy a bag of ice with a kid who is insulin dependent is a good thing. But if you also do not support the person who is bringing that bag of ice…you will almost surely have less ice.
Yes, and at the same time you also probably spend some time moving stuff around (or you get “ripped off” by paying others to move it /s). So in effect, you are providing a kind of service.
Exactly. Our most precious commodity is time. We all have a finite amount of it (and we don’t know when we’ll run out). So much of what we do is trading on the opportunity cost of time. And that opportunity cost can be influenced by other factors. For example, an employee who has specialized knowledge about his employers operations will likely paid more and one of the last to be let go when times are tough. Why? Because that employee has specialized knowledge that makes him more productive/valuable than the guy recently hired who is at the bottom of that learning curve.
Thus the slogan, “equal pay for equal work” is really completely wrong. A better restatement would be “equal pay for equal value added”…doesn’t have the same ring though.
Not empty quoting.
And even setting a high price in a backwater is not that bad. If those modules start to sell, and I’m earning a nice profit, that profit when noticed by others will result in entry into the market and a reduction in prices due to increased competition.
It isn’t perfect, but if you are going to focus on the perfect and complain we don’t have that you are actually part of the problem and not the solution.
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