Hippo you are wrong players do control the market we vote on it and then the prices magically change its perfect

I'm actually supportive of a similar notion - that is, 10 buy offers at a time, 10 sell offers at a time, per knight. The market is scary and hopeless when there's walls of energy up at x100 or x1000 per level, on both buy and sell, because one person with too much time and money is attempting to squeeze a small profit out of the market.

While the same outcome is still doable with alts, if you're willing to make that many accounts and send them crowns/energy to make your walls, and do that frequently enough to keep walls up when people do break through them, then you really do deserve to make those walls. As it is it's too easy for one person to have an outright heavy influence on the market (despite complete control being difficult).

It's bad to limit energy purchasing per day, but limiting the number of offers you can make at a time is okay. If you're online and watching the market, you can put up 10 buy and sell offers and actually make the same wall as of right now, however you can't just do the whole "create and forget" thing that you can currently do right now - you have to actively participate in the market. Market becomes a small metagame in itself, and therefore is more fun for everyone involved.

Your maths are wrong, you're not taking account of the market fee of 2%. You're not even considering the time it takes to for an offer to be bought on the market, nor the fact that the market is competitive by nature and so you will likely have the offers you posted there bested within 5 minutes by another player. The standard gap is not 10%, it's much closer to 2-5%. You're not right and you don't know better. You failed to take in consideration the basic mechanics of the market. You see this as some sort of magic linear guaranteed profit. The higher the gap between buy and sell offers is, the more reluctant players will be to sell their CE using the "buy CR" option.
I'm gonna write you the same maths I've written to the last conspiracy theorist I've seen on forums.
Let's assume your ideal scenario with a net profit (taxes deduced) per 100ce of 500cr, and a player active for 10 hours a day. Let's assume also that he has no competition throughout the day and that he will make a sale every minute. This will land him in these conditions 10*60*300cr in profit which amounts to 180k cr, with an initial investment of 60k CE.
Now let's do the same maths for profit made on a vanaduke run. The average time and payout for a run is 9000cr/15 minutes. Let's assume a player can fit 3 runs an hour because he's got some extra loading times and whatnots. In 10 hours he will gain 9000cr*3*10 which is 270k cr, with an initial investment of 0cr and 0ce. In this case scenario I am not accounting for the extra profits made via Almirian tokens.

In your dream scenario I've deliberately given conditions that cannot even be reproduced, which are:
- No other player will compete on your offers
- The value of CE remains constant through the day
Additionally, for every 60k CE you would hypothetically profit on this way, you would have to spend an equal but likely higher amount of time earning it back by having players buy the crowns you've previously earnt selling your CE. In reality you won't be limited by the amount of CE you have, you will be limited by the amount of CE you can sell AND the amount of CE you can buy back, and these things take patience and attention.

Now let's look at how this all really works. You post your "profitable" offers on market. Depending on the time of the day and activity of players, you will either not find any buyer, be bested by another seller or sell your CE until bested by another seller. This applies similarly when selling your CR. You would not only need to be on constant watch of the market, you'd also have to ensure that by competing with other players you're not reducing the gap between CR and CE offers, since that would result in reducing your profit on each transaction.

There are genuine ways to profit well on market but they're only achievable during times of great instability, and they're not executed over a day's time as you seem to be assuming. A good recent example is with the introduction of Slime keys, that caused the prices to drop over the first weekend as low as 8.5k cr. I've bought around 100k ce at 8.5k cr per 100ce during that weekend, which effectively means if I sold that energy back now that I would have profited 25% on my investment, over the course of around 2 weeks. It seems like a great scenario for an easy event based profit but I didn't sell that energy on the market and here's why: I can use it better. Items have and will always be the absolute best way to profit in this game. You can head over to my bazaar thread and make yourself an idea of how I operate my investments, as I have a long history of doing that. I'd recommend you check other long running merchant threads there (such as Darkarkangel who actually keeps an accurate record of his sales, it's a great read), perhaps you'll realise then that profit on market is in fact puny compared to what a knowledgeable player can do with the right investments.

Of course you can also just ignore all of that and join the club of players that complain quarterly about the market and get promptly ignored by staff who knows that the market is in fact fully functional and in no need of any changes to its mechanics. Everyone likes a good conspiracy theory when it's well written.

Limiting energy per-day is a bad idea, but limiting how many offers at once is still an idea I'm a fan of.

When people complain about the energy market, there's really two parts to it - the prices are too high, or there's no variation in the market.

If the offers are something like x100 on one spot, sure, that can be bought up, but it's gonna make people disgusted with it. If the market is changing even a little bit it feels more like a market, less like a shop... Therefore people are more likely to throw money into it.

Limiting per-day would prevent people who need energy/crowns quick and fast from using the market for what it's intended for. Limiting per-knight simply discourages market manipulation by making it harder to do. I do not think it should be impossible to make +100 walls, I simply think it should be annoying to do, take a long time to set up, etc. Making things you don't want inconvenient instead of impossible is the best solution, because most people will do what's convenient.

See the high prices are what people complain about, but personally, it's the walls of offers I'm against.

Potentially you could have players only able to list offers, oh I don't know, 30 offers in total at a time. Once an offer is completed, they can list another one.

Then limit it so that you cannot have more than 5 or 10 of the same priced offer at once, and add a small fee of like, 25 crowns onto every offer listed that is refunded upon offer completion like the AH. Additionally (or alternatively), make listings expire after a week or so.

Biggest problem with the market is when it stop moving. It can move up, or down, and I'll still be okay with it. It's when I see buy and sell walls at x1000 each, then another wall at x100 under it that I get discouraged. Making it difficult to make the walls is what I want - it also makes you more personally involved with the market.

I want the market to be moving and fluid. If I wanted to purchase energy I would go to a store - which we have, in the purchase tab. If I want energy, I want to see a moving market where prices can shift. It might be 100 crowns less now - oh I'll buy some because it's low! Oh it's 300 crowns more now? Oh I can sell some for more right now!

When a wall exists it makes energy prices exactly the same. You talk about "competitiveness", but when you say that all I hear are "the walls are being moved". If you make a wall at 9000 crowns per 100 energy, me making a wall at 9100 crowns per 100 energy isn't a "moving and fluid market", it's a personal shop.

I guess what I'm saying is when we have, say, 800 players online, that's 800 players who can potentially use the market. If the prices are moving, more players will be likely to use the market since it can change in the morning and the evening. When there's no movement (ie, a wall) then what's the point of buying or selling energy? It's going to be like that tomorrow... Or the next day... Or heck, get more expensive than that and then another wall will show up at a more expensive value.

The people who want lower prices will always want lower prices. However, walls prevent prices from lowering - they will only rise. An absence of walls does not mean prices won't rise or fall, simply that they will be more fluid. The lack of hope prevents people from using the market - nothing is changing, why should I bother? Same mentality that players have been using to leave the game forever.

Let's say we limit how many offers at one price one knight can set, and add a second high limit on the total number of listing they can make. For example, let's say 10 offers per price, 100 offers total. When the price is incremental, the market still moves, even if one player is doing all the listing. It feels more like something you can jump into and be a part of instead of "player X owns the energy market, i guess i'll wait for someone to buy through their wall".

I didn't mean for offers to ever be a one-way train. When I mentioned limiting buy offers, I thought I mentioned sell would be the same. My initial intentions were 10 buy and 10 sell per knight at a time. This method only really hurts creation of walls.

But I do agree that if we put harsh limits like only 20 offers at a time (10 buy, 10 sell), then the people who have massive amounts of energy won't be able to sell them at a reasonable pace. Hence, limiting the overall amount to about 100 (to prevent 1000's of offers) but making prices be limited to 10 per makes the market, by nature, affected. Even if it's just 1 crown increments it feels more alive this way, rather than a single person in control, regardless of what's actually going on behind the scenes.

How I view it is the people who need energy most are players who don't have much money and want to buy orbs. These people will see walls of buy offers and feel discouraged from continuing the game. Energy prices that change, however, gives them hope that one day the prices will lower in their favor, so it doesn't feel as evil.

I know it's basic supply/demand, however human psyche is very easily altered so by making it appeal to the psyche you're making players want to stick around longer, get invested in the market, etc.

Yes, there is a clear flaw with energy, and I agree that there's probably not a single best way to fix it.
Most players are pretty convinced that energy prices are completely dependent on players.
Personally, I agree to this case. Energy doesn't go above 11k most of the time because players refuse to buy it from market at that point
At the same time, it almost never drops to 7 or 8k because it is a vital part of the game economy.

However, we do need a limit to how much people can affect currency prices.
When a player has too much money to care about, that's dangerous.
There's a lot of people out there who would lose small amounts of money just to have power.
In this game, it's probably the energy prices. There's clear walls on both sides of the buying and selling, and it's absolutely clear that it's done by a person who has lots of money with nothing to do with it.
There might even be motives behind their actions to act as support to bash on GH, the playerbase, or even the energy mechanics.

I think Fangel has the best idea at this point right now, where the amount a player can list is limited.
Will it cause a hassle to people who legitimately want to sell energy? Yes. Then again, people can do that manually via trade and advertisement.
Can it still be exploited by making lots of alts? Yes. Who the heck would do that, though? Probably some people, but it'd definitely cause less inconvenience.

Gif, 100k ce a couple weeks ago didn't cost 850m cr, it cost 8.5m. Take the time to do the maths right. The worse part in all that is you're worried I'm using to resell it which I've already said I don't, and you're suggesting it should be used for crafting which is exactly what I do. ( and been doing since the introduction of orbs).
As far as how I got 100k ce from the market over the weekend, it was pretty simple. A bunch of players were doing mass slime box openings and needed a lot of crowns for that. Because they didn't have the patience to sell their CE using the "sell CE" option of the market, they instead bought cr there. Just had to leave a few hundred offers there and that's ixt. Someone had already taken a huge stab at the "buy cr" offers likely due to a mass unboxing. At that time the drop in price was completely justified since there was an extraordinary demand for crowns from the playerbase, and there's absolutely nothing wrong in me or anyone else selling crowns to those in need.
I've always done things transparently and market fiddling has never been my thing for all the reasons above. It's puny, it doesn't have the impact people make it out to have. Walls can always be circumvented. Is there a wall on the "buy CR" offers? Does it impede prices going down? Not if the actual shift in values between cr and ce is such that ce holders will resort instead to sell their CE via "sell CE" offers. In which case competition there will drop the prices lower than under "buy cr" offers causing whoever walls that side of things to make a neat loss on his money. Perhaps the reason why we don't witness this often is simply because the walls are smaller nowadays and there's no real reason for prices to shift, as I explained above.

I think it will make trading between players more difficult. Truth is most of the energy circulating is used in trades from player to player; obviously lots of it is getting sinked on Supply Depot/Unbinding Fees so making big ass trades will be very constraining. Additionally by making energy bound to players you're basically locking part of the pool of energy available across players which in effect reduces supply, and with lower supply come higher prices. Part of what makes the market work I guess is that a lot of the energy circulating isn't getting destroyed, it just moves from player to player. Let's put it that way:
If I buy item A for 25k ce from Player A, those 25k ce will still potentially be available to be listed on market or to be traded with players. But then if Player A spends all 25k CE on Supply Depot items, 25k ce have been destroyed and therefore cannot be put back on market, which creates a reduction of supply of 25k ce. Binding the energy to the player is essentially like destroying it, because it then means the only way to spend it is via the Energy sinks available in the game (Supply Depot, Vyse, etc).

You're making a good point here. I don't think it's the solution but the thinking behind it is good.

you're gonna make a lot of rich peeps mad. xD