Plays with extra crown profits made from selling CE*

Hmm*

I'm rather fine with that.

Man, wouldn't it be whacky if energy was somewhere around 20k? As if that could ever happen.

Oh, wait...

@ Tenlki

OOO does NOT influence the energy market in any way. It is strickly controled by what players are willing to buy energy for and what other players are willing to sell them for. They have never on any of their games Y!PP or BH did anything to influence the actual price. If it is too much for you then don't buy them and wait until it is lower and stock up.

I would go into more but there are already some good guides to Crystal Energy and you, that describe how the system works and why OOO will never do anything to cap and/or lower prices for any reason let alone just because free loaders are feeling the pinch. If you want to influence the price down then get out a credit card, buy a ton of CE and then offer it for sell at the price you think it should be yourself. That is how the price will come down. It is all basic economics. When suppy is larger than demand the price comes down.

The Crystal Energy Market and You

@Tenlki : Anyone can manipulate prices down too, there are just fewer people interested in doing so right now. Just build up a line of undercut bids until people in a hurry for crowns start undercutting you, then remove your bids that have scrolled off the screen, rinse repeat.
Recommend not to push the offer to sell price of CE below 10% more than the offer to buy price though, or you may end up paying a lot of crowns to move the market. OTOH, if you maintain that gap, you can actually profit as you reclaim your CE on the other side of the market with a slight margin.

@ninjakbat: This is not correct; crowns are not infinitely growing and CE is not infinitely shrink, or the game would have a time when the market would truly crash (moving drastically up and down by ... oh... 10% ... is not a crash, that's normal market movement. Honest.)
Anyway, the price of CE depends on many things, but one of those is how many crowns are in circulation. Roughly speaking, crowns fountain from running the clockworks and sink into AH fees. The price of CE is probably rising as much from the drop in material and recipe prices as anything.

Lower prices yields lower fees, less crowns being taken out of circulation - crowns become worth less. Of course, there are dozens of other factors including people deliberately trying to pump up the price of CE, but that's a temporary effect.

OOO may not influence the energy market at the moment, but at some point they're going to have to get involved if they want their game to survive. There are wealthy players who enjoy putting up walls of 100+ bids to buy energy at a time, ensuring that the market won't go below certain prices. I think it's stupid they're allowed to get away with this, but it doesn't particularly bother me because I'm well into t3 and can continue to profit with these increased energy prices. What this does do, however, is discourage new players from entering the game. Only so much profit can be made from 100 energy in t1. When new players are forced to pay so much for energy and not even be able to profit they're going to get frustrated with the game and quit. A constant influx of new players is what keeps games like this alive. Are energy prices at this point yet? Probably not, but if players are allowed to continue to manipulate the energy market like they are then the day will probably come.

I think the simplest fix is to place some sort of penalty on retracting bids after they've been left up for a certain amount of time. This wouldn't effect players who are simply trying to acquire energy at the best possible price but the players who put in hundreds of bids at a time to increase prices, only to retract them later and put a hundred more bids at even higher prices would be losing money in the process. Another potential solution is to simply place a cap on how many bids to buy energy one character/account/PC can have on the market at a time.. something like 5-10 bids at maximum that again, wouldn't handicap a player legitimately trying to play the game but would discourage these "trolls" from artificially increasing the price of energy.

On the contrary, a penalty for retracting a bid will -severely- penalize players who are just trying to acquire energy. If I only have 14k crowns and want to buy a couple hundred energy, I put up a bid... and I get outbid and see the market is moving up. Now what? The player in this position now has to pay a penalty to relist and possibly get outbid again. A few crowns makes little difference to a market manipulator but a big difference to a player with little to spare trying to scrape together enough CE for some runs or for a crafting.

Now as for market walls, there are both high and low market walls up. There are 100+ offer market walls to stop the energy price from going to high. If there were -only- low market walls and not high, there'd be a problem, but that's not the case. Also, every player with crowns or CE to spare should consider contributing to the market walls. If you put bids in at 5-10% below today's energy cost and offers in at 5-10% above today's energy cost... if those offers are filled, you have a very good chance that the market will normalize again and let you cash in. If both your offers and bids are filled in a volatile market, you can make money while you sleep. Of course, it's not without some risk that the market will go up and -stay- up or go down and -stay- down, and you should place your walls further out to minimize risk but also minimize chances of actually filling your orders.

@senshi. Reread my post. I suggested the penalty would be for retracting bids ONLY after they've been left up for a certain amount of time. If you place a bid and the price goes up you should be able to retract and try again penalty free. I agree completely and have no desire for that to be changed. This is designed to penalize the select few players who leave mass amounts of bids up for hours, even days, at a time, not the average player just trying to buy a couple hundred energy to make an item or run through a gate.

You're correct in that there are 2 types of walls, one, however, is both far more abundant and far easier to create.

Neither you or TiV addressed more favorable solution of simply capping how many bids you can have on the market at a given time. Is having a 10 bid cap going to inhibit you, me, or the average player from enjoying the game? I can't imagine it would.

@keenmachlne
"Neither you or TiV addressed more favorable solution of simply capping how many bids you can have on the market at a given time. Is having a 10 bid cap going to inhibit you, me, or the average player from enjoying the game? I can't imagine it would."

you suggest that the price should infinitely rise or fall in temporary demand spikes? herp derp
And the buy button would be a deadly tool with that change.

"You're correct in that there are 2 types of walls, one, however, is both far more abundant and far easier to create. " You mean CE can be purchased in reallife while crowns have to be farmed ingame? or you suggest crowns are still comperatively more abundant, hence undervalued?
Well either way, these walls are usually formed as responses to fluctuations within the day. (low CE demand in morning of my timezone, so I see the bottom walls at that time, high demand on evening, so I see the top walls at that time; because people anticipate to be able to sell at these points at different times of the day)

@Drunkefox
"since OOO rised the CE prices on crafting now we need more energy rather than needing crowns "
that's unlikely.
On average 7-10k+300ce were spent per 4->5* upgrade by the sheer amount of reselling. Now it's 30k+800ce. OOO should have the numbers prepatch and I also suspect they actually had to inject CE into the market in the past (market behaved rather insane for a couple of minutes at at least 2 times), so the whole binding change was made to strengthen the crown sink aspect of crafting.

There are people out there with CE measured in the 100's of thousands, but you only need CE in the tens of thousands to have a significant impact on the market, and there's -plenty- of profit to be made on it. Buy lots of CE when it's 4700 crowns per 100, drive the market up with moving bids, being careful not to acquire too much more CE when it's getting close to the maximum sustainable price, say 5300 crowns per 100 CE. Then sell off your accumulated CE while the market is still artificially high. For bonus points, use your last few thousand CE to drive the market -down- again so you can repurchase your CE to your original levels and have piles of crowns left in profit.

Of course you have to watch your margins and sell off a ton of CE at the inflated prices compared to CE bought and sold in moving-the-market tactics (although if you are careful you can make a few crowns even as you move the market).

The more people that realize you can do this, the less easy it will become to do.

There are two ways to make money on the CE market:
a) Buy lots of a currency (gently) when the market is favorable (CE or crowns, whichever), then use 5-10% of your capital to force the market in the direction you want to go.

b) Assume other people are going to do (a) and divide your capital into speculative bids above and below the market, and let the 'type A' players do the tedious work of pushing the market while you take profits.

I encourage everyone to try making money in the market. The market is fragile now because there are not -enough- speculators and those speculators that are there have overwhelmingly large reserves compared to the average player. I'd love to see many more people making money on the market, and incidentally stabilizing it as they do.

(There's also c) ... when the gap between buy and sell is more than 2%, just buy ... and sell... at current trading values. This is tedious however, and doesn't make much money, and almost isn't worth mentioning.)

You have to look at the prices people are working with when they are crafting with mist energy and considering it zero-value and buying only the mats. There will always be a substantial number of people with alt accounts crafting that way (though with many items not enough to keep the price down, I guess the 75 cent option was taken away early enough to not -totally- undercut the crafting market.)

Still, not all crafters are tied to energy prices, and that will have an effect. Because of the way equipment binds, though, you can't -play- on that Mist Energy with your regular gear so everyone is tied to energy prices for exploring the clockworks and crafting high-* items.

make it so u cant post more than 10 offers....

i.e
you post 10 offers of 4900 CR, while this offers are still up you cannot make any more offers
if you get out bid u have the option to retreat ur offers and only then you can offer again
if your crowns gets sold you can post another 10 offers and so on and so forth.

this way there wont be massive 100-200 offers walls so the market can fluctuate properly
even if your the richest player there is, 1k CE should be enough for you to craft an item and go lvl it up in the clockworks, and if its not enough then you can post another 10 offers once those are sold.

It is absolutely that easy to manipulate the market price of CE... -provided- that you do so within a 20% or so margin of its natural price. Of course, if you go too far, natural market forces will kick in and push you back as other players see an opportunity for buying or selling.

And market walls mostly keep prices stable, but moving market walls can be used to push the price up and down. A block of 100 bids is much more likely to get other players to overbid or undercut to get a shot at their order being filled. Once you've got 'real' bids just past your wall, you put up another wall and when the first wall is out of the visible window you can take it down - it has done it's job which is to scare the market higher or lower.

Naturally a low enough market makes people more likely to run the clockworks for crowns than to sell off CE, and a high enough market pushes people into buying CE for cash or playing only on Mist Energy ... or just spending more time in the auction house raising funds with materials, but in any case, takes pressure off of CE prices until they return to more acceptable values. Those real market forces do strictly limit the price of CE. Which is why the sky isn't falling - yes you can easily push the price of CE around by 10% or 20% ... but it's hard to push it by 50% or more.

At first, I thought he was just saying things, hence my first pseudo-request to "manipulate it" back to normal.

Kept reading on, and it makes sense.

But for a brief glimpse, I saw energy prices go from 5.1k down to 5k, and this is what I saw:

http://i.imgur.com/WkO3U.jpg

>__>

People.
During the preview, 100 CE cost as much as 20,000 crowns.
Things can only get better now that there are more people playing and buying, adding more CE to be sold.

This spike you're seeing is probably people who want to fight Snarbolax or need to craft equipment associated with Snarbolax. Give it a few days and it should die down again. Note that there are a lot of people who want to buy at around the 5k level----that's how much energy is worth to them. Sell lower if you honestly think it's not worth that much.

Remember that in games, as in life, energy and energy prices are always both essential and volatile. You guys really shouldn't be surprised by this anymore.

It's not an artificial wall.

But it is. Its effectiveness and longevity doesn't change the fact it's a wall deliberately made to keep prices from dropping. Even if it was useless, it would still be an artificial market wall - just an ineffective one.

@tenlki
> But for a brief glimpse, I saw energy prices go from 5.1k down to 5k, and this is what I saw: http://i.imgur.com/WkO3U.jpg

There is really nothing trollish about that. I think that what people don't understand is that the right column (supply) is controlling the price on the left column. If you can sell 100CE for 5283 crowns, you end up with 5177 crowns after the 2% transaction fee. At this point you would be very dumb NOT to buy more CE @ 5k since you could make 177 crown profit on each transaction cycle assuming you could get orders through. Because of this it is really rare that you'll see the left prices fall more than 2% under the right column.

This is also the reason why a player with a large sum of money can push the prices way up. If you go on the trade tab you can basically buy as much energy as you can afford with the left button. This is eating orders off the top from the right column on the market tab which will raise the hard exchange rate. From here "fake" orders can be buffered in on the left side to meet the hard exchange. what you saw in the morning was most likely someone trying to be a hero and throwing their CE at the problem. Unfortunately it works both ways. If you want to push the price up you have to buffer orders on the left side and hope it holds. If you want to push the price down then you have to eat into the orders on the left and put a bunch of cheap offers on the right side. In the case of your screen shot, someone needed to make a "wall" of 5100 offers on the right side and hope that it stuck.

I think the issue here is that anyone with enough CE to both push the orders on the left down (buy selling on the market tab) and buffer 200+ orders on the right column (on the trade tab) has nothing to gain from doing so. It is unlikely that we'll ever see the exchange drop down outside of it happening naturally IMO.

BTW I think limiting the number of offers to buy on the left side could help a little but someone could still burn through the buy energy button on the trade tab to push it up and if offers are limited to sell on the market tab then nothing will be able to stop it from rising. I don't know if you guys have noticed, but people have been putting in huge "walls" at 5300 on the sell tab and that has been the only thing stopping the crown exchange from going over 5200

People have all their wealth tied up in CE and when prices start to drop their wealth's value goes down. It becomes less effort to put up walls and force an artificially high value to their wealth than the effort it would take to simply sell high and buy low.

For everyone that believes this game runs on true economics, does it not seem a little strange to you that the wealthiest people in CE who don't need energy as badly choose to "buy high"? Of course, they aren't buying at all, they are simply increasing the value of what they already have by stating that they would pay this much for it.

It's really a bunch of B.S. The devs should step in and fix it somehow.

Also, with the starter pack coming out, CE prices should have dropped. In fact, they went down for about exactly 45 minutes to an hour and a half. Then artificial price walls were slammed into place and the climb marched on.

UNLESS SOMETHING IS DONE ABOUT THIS, CE PRICES WILL NEVER GO DOWN TO A NATURAL LEVEL OF EQUILIBRIUM.
AND MAY SIMPLY NEVER GO DOWN AGAIN AT ALL (UNTIL THIS IS FIXED).

p.s. To those who say this is not a real problem...if this many people think it is a problem of this magnitude then it IS a real problem.

lol

@Providence : When gates cost 5 CE or -less-, the earnings per CE was totally different from post-beta, and when recipes cost 1/3rd what they do now and there was no auction house - there was virtually no crown sink at all. Beta prices are -completely- irrelevant, you might as well be talking about a different game. The CE market in the released game's economy has never been much higher than today.

@ the last half-dozen-posts - It's a completely open and uncontrolled market, anyone can influence it buy buying or not buying CE and selling or not selling CE at any given price. Posting large blocks of bids is natural market activity, not artificial. This is the nature of an open market system.

http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lg66ggT6ph1qcbctro1_400.gif
Makes me giggle every time.

@Senshi so the goal of this game is to have a open market simulator and sacrifice everything else for it?

I have nothing against people excited with speculation games but there are sites you can make that and even gain some skills for the real world:

http://vse.marketwatch.com/Game/Homepage.aspx

Why is this otherwise fun action game being stretched out for the sake of people who want to play little speculation games and by that affecting the ordinary player who wants to kill some monsters and craft some equips?

Is this the objective of the game? Cause if you have to sacrifice everything else for the holy untouchable real world market simulator then I think it is.

"It is strickly controled by what players are willing to buy energy for and what other players are willing to sell them for."

Yes elsewhere have not stop to hear that the English people want up voluntarily the price , and it's up.

I do not know if this is the real reason, but the game is in the process of dying, and very very high speed...

No, that's not the goal of the game. You can buy CE for cash, collect crowns in the clockworks, and ignore the market entirely.
Or you can just buy your CE at the current price and treat it as a random price that is just there.
Nobody is forcing anyone to play the market game.

However, if you're interested in the market and watching it anyway, then go ahead and play on it and make some crowns. Market manipulation only works as well as it does because playing the market is -not- part of the game for more than a handful of players. When more people are speculating, the market will be less manipulable because market forces will be more strongly and immediately felt.

@wrs1864 ... I'm not sure market clearing price is all that relevant to why the price is manipulable. People have a very soft idea of what CE is worth... somewhere between 2000 crowns and 10,000 crowns. Manipulation works because people will still buy and sell roughly the same amount of CE anywhere in a 4500 - 5500 crown range. Only when it approaches one of those ends has it been correcting back towards the middle. It remains to be seen whether it's going to correct back towards the middle now or if the equilibrium price has actually risen. It's not a real commodity so its value is largely psychological anyway, inherently so, being based essentially on how much people are willing to grind for crowns (to buy CE, or instead of selling CE) before they choose an alternative.

I spent more on this game than I spent on Guild Wars Trilogy. Except in Guild Wars I can play whenever I want, and there is more content than I can cover. It's becoming a repetitive, grind race. Game was worthy money but not so much. Living and learning.