mr tennas

i come and go from EQ all the time as some of you know, im in for a few months, out for a few... but this most recent comeback of mine has opened my eyes to inflating prices that are out of this world in the bazaar... personally i have never liked the bazaar, i miss the days of EC tunnel, when you had to work for stuff, and bargaining/haggeling was an option... but you have to accept change i guess, but the huge price jumps in bazaar as of recently are something i dont want to welcome open hearted... so please, read this, and pass it on... i found it very informative... i had contemplated buying some plat myself, but forget it, im just going back to the old school methods...
taken from Allakhazam's msg boards at
everquest.allakhazam.com/...1677&num=0

I saw this on the safehouse. It says what I was trying to say earlier, but far better than I put it. I'll post it below, but here's the link as well:

pub146.ezboard.com/fthesa...9404.topic

Here's the post by Jinex22:

You might someone's post awhile back explaining that there were dupes inflating bazaar prices in the game.

You might remember that shortly after this, SOE patched and posted they were working actively on fixing the problems.

You might remember that after this, things seemed to stabilize for awhile. Prices in the bazaar started to become more reasonable so that players could actually begin to buy some toys without being forced to buy duplicated or exploited platinum from @#%$ or exploiting it themselves. I mean, let's be serious here. 150,000 platinum or more for ornate armors? A normal player will never be able to afford that. 500,000 Platinum or more for a white dragon helm? Same problem.


Now, you may have noticed that again, prices are increasing in the bazaar to insane levels. Ornate is again up there at 150,000 + for the pieces that anyone wants. The cool items are again running way too high on the pricing end.


Enter in two new issues. I will not explain details of where or how to get anything in this post. I will explain the problem, though.


Number one, as most know that have read other various posts on the issue and online news sites. IGE and My supersales have merged. Each side used to combat eachother on platinum prices for real world money. Each side's main opponent was the other. Now, they have no competition, and thus the only hurdle is how to control the platinum market.


Platinum for real life sales is controlled by supply and demand like any other market. Supply here is simple. IGE and My supersales has a dedicated team of professionals specifically employed to hack, crack, cheat, dupe and macro. Basically their job is to find any and all ways to get excessive amounts of platinum easily or for free using loopholes or bugs in the game. These are paid individuals hired specifically to, in essence, cheat YOU.

Look at My supersales offering level 1 to 65 and 300 AA in 24 hours some time ago. They yanked this when customer accounts were getting banned and people were issuing complaints when their $1500 purchase was deleted overnight, and sometimes their main characters as well if registered on the same credit card. Remember the post by SOE and the patch that fixed this?

Look at My supersales listing up billions of platinum on every server while simultaneously refusing to buy platinum from anyone. Remember the post by SOE and the patch that fixed this?

It has reached that point again. The prices IGE and My supersales pay for platinum is extremely low, and they say they are "full" when you try to sell to them in quantity.


They have an unlimited supply line. Dupe or macro or exploit or whatever, that platinum they have is "free."

There was rumor posted by another individual here, saying that my supersales had received thousands of free EQ accounts through Ubisoft. They give out free trial accounts to any email address. Yahoo, hotmail, etc. When the last dupe was in they banked millions on every account and let them expire. When SOE banned off the exploited platinum, these expired accounts were not checked, and now when platinum is needed they are renewed for $15 and the plat is pulled from them for use or sale.

Because whatever plat they get, and how they get it is free, they can price it extremely low. Low enough to push out remaining competition for them, unless that competition has access to the same exploits.

But there's a problem. People only need so much platinum. Now, it does no good for IGE or My supersales if their plat is priced extremely low so people can buy alot cheaply, because that just means the customer will be able to buy all the stuff they want faster.

So they need:

More customers.

or

In game inflation on items.


More customers is way too hard to control. But in game inflation, for an entity with access to ulimited free currency, is very very EASY to control.

So, number two,

There is a program out there currently that does the following:


You set up a character in the bazaar and set price points for items you want to buy. So... I want to buy all white dragon helms that are up for 300k or less.

I set this program to white dragon helms for 300k or less and when someone puts one up for sale for, say, 275k, it warps right to the vendor, buys the item, and continues searching. The program runs 100% free of human interaction, so all that is needed is one person to restock the plat on the characters when it becomes low (it will even make the PC beep when it is low).


You can set it to search for anything. You can make a list of 5,000 things and it will search for them.

What happens is any item they put in this program fixes the price at whatever they put it at. Since within SECONDS it will buy anything put up for less than their fixed price.

---HERE YOU HAVE INFLATION 100% CONTROLLED BY THE PEOPLE WITH ACESS TO THIS PROGRAM AND ACESS TO THE UNLIMITED PLATINUM---

The program exists. EQecon.com uses a similar one to find all server prices for their site. You can't get the program from them. I merely list it here for an example of a legit site that uses the basicsof the program for non detrimental means to prove it exists. And I know IGE and My supersales will have people come here and post up that all this inflation is due to Lost Dungeons of Norrath. Please, the playerbase is far more intelligent than that.


If they have unlimited plat, and this program, why don't they just buy ALL high level items that show up in the bazaar? Items are a hard sell and platinum is an easy sell. Price fixing causes people to NEED more platinum, increasing their sales. If they bought up all high level items there would be no need for people to buy platinum from them, as people would have nothing to spend it on. It would also make it glaringly obvious, and they get enough bad attention, and likely do not want more or do not want this thing getting nerfed.

Why do they only control the high end prices? Simple, that is what people buy plat from them to buy in game. People don't buy 500,000 platinum from them to go in and buy a bunch of 2,000 plat value items. They want the things that are 100,000 +. They are, to put it bluntly, screwing people who do not buy plat from them, but ALSO screwing people who do buy plat from them, forcing them to buy more and more.

The end result here, is total control by IGE and My supersales on the in game economy. TOTAL. And it will continue until it is stopped. The prices on in game items will keep going up a little bit at a time as they artificially raise. In the last couple of weeks ornate and other high end prices have gone up 80% or so. Expect more of the same as long as this is allowed to go on.

Your game, your enjoyment, your fun, is being controlled by these individuals. At the moment the in game economy is controlled more by them than by all the players and SOE combined.

It is possible SOE does not even know about this. Or if they do they are not doing anything about it because the players do not know and are not complaining.

Now you know. If you do not care, that's fine. If you do care, tell a friend and tell the makers of Everquest you want this stuff fixed.

Dartaignon

Would someone mind summarizing that into a few sentences that I don't have to hit my little scrolly wheel 12 times to clear?

mr tennas

Lemme try Dart... @#%$ (My Super Sales) and IGE are buying up all the expensive items in the bazaar, and then upping the prices, which makes the rest of us need their services more so we can afford in game items... they have basically taken over the entire EQ economy to bend it to their liking... if you dont buy plat from them you are fucked, if you do buy plat from them, you are fucked, cause you have to buy more to afford anything in game.

Karmon Shadowstalker

Thats such a dumb theory.

There are WAY too many variables to make something like that successful. Lets use White Dragon Helms as an example.

1) Macro programs cannot send a tell to someone auctioning an item in bazaar chat channel. Considering that most high end items are sold in bazaar chat channel or on server boards, you cannot totally dictate an item's price via buying everything under a certain cut off.

2) That's fucking risky too. Suppose something were to happen that doesnt let helms be resold after being cycled once. Now you have 3 mules full of White Dragon Helms, that half as many people want to buy because you can't turn them in for FT 2 boots.

Personally, I think this macroing problem is being overblown. No one noticed the effect LDON had on the economy. Pre-LDON, you had a steady amount of rare items, from BoT, elemental tradeskills, ornate, and from high level groups doing single group cash targets (ex Zlandicar, Ring of Slime, SolRo for ornate. I could name more). Then, LDON created this "points" phenomena, and SolRo and elementals cleared out quickly. The last few months have seen people return to these zones, partly due to AOR, but also because they're sick of LDON and the 40 hp augs that take 30 wins.

I do think there is macroing going on. I'm not blind to that. I just think that you're blaming it for way too much. Prices HAVE been dropping the last month or so - because they banned macroers? Doubtful. No, because people are going back to those farm zones.

Macroing for plat is no good for Everquest; I personally see no problems with macros, but that's another story for another time. The fix is pretty fucking simple in my mind. Just go through all the tradeskill recipes (iirc, it was an ore-transformation that was making all that macro money), and make the difference between the final sale price and component cost 1-2pp.

@#%$ and co. have fucked the economy, but so did LDON. If anything, the biggest problem is the vacant loot zones. When was the last time BOT had over 30 people? As such, the supply of 30-50k items has decreased, creating scarcities (Ornate is by far the best example; 6 months ago, I fully equipped a druid in ornate for roughly 250k).

If more people hunted BoT or SolRo, or even the lower tier POP zones or CT, the economy wouldn't be anywhere near this inflated.

Nydia Ywalmoriel

It's not that I don't have any sympathy for folks who use the bazaar's plight (and believe me, there's no love lost for the bottomfeeding scum you've referenced in your tirade), but folks *do* have another option - Don't buy platinum. If you want something badly enough, camp it, find some friends to help you camp it, or deal directly with folks who have the capacity to gain those items. As far as the 'artificial inflation' taking place in the bazaar goes...

No-one is forcing anyone to buy (or sell) gear in the bazaar. It does suck that there are folks out there whose desire to make a real buck from a vitual one extends to writing and using programs to automate 'rigging the markets', but if folks refuse to support those prices, they *will* drop.

Regards,
Nydia Ywalmoriel
Autonomous Collective

mr tennas

I definitly agree with all points being said, but I just thought this was a point that deserved some light on our server forum, in hopes of deturring (spelling) people from buying plat from these online sites... it would be nice to have a clean economy... and I do agree with the LDoN point, and hopefully people will start cmping more of the PoP and other items again, and prices will drop...

Buyza

yah! dont buy from them! buy from other suppliers!

Silentcerri

I hear buyza's plat smells of pine and is considered a delacasy in france !

Grumblin

its also not as if LDoN hasnt introduced items into the market.. Golden wraps of the compact, geomancers slippers, LSoY, Ykeshan bow.. and tons more per theme

Karmon Shadowstalker

The problem is, most of the hard LDON stuff started appearing within the last few months - that's partly the reason prices are stabilizing.

Before that, all it was was ID IV belts and the sorry-ass proc orbs. That won't do shit for plat inflation.