WAYS YOU CAN RAISE AND LOWER CE PRICES: BID BLOCKS AND YOU
A player tutorial
By huhbum

DISCLAIMER: I am not an economics major. I don't claim that my math or theories are perfect, but I would like to share some advice based on my observations of the CE market.

Keynote: CE market is a player-driven economy. There are certainly things OOO can do to affect it, but the day-to-day trading is greatly affected by player behavior.

A big part of market behavior is the use of large bid blocks to inflate the price of CE.

If you buy and/or sell CE and care about how much the price of CE is, please read on.

TL:DR at bottom.

WHY INCREASED PRICES ARE USEFUL TO YOU

If you have a lot of CE(either by playing a lot or buying a lot of CE from OOO), increasing the price of CE makes you richer.

Suppose you are really rich, and you have 100k CE and 200k crowns.

If you use your 200k crowns to inflate the price of CE from 6200 to 6400 crowns per 100 CE, you just made 200x(100,000/100)= 200k crowns back.

(you may not always use 200k crowns, it depends on how quick you are with bidding and removing bids, how smart the other players are at watching the market, and how much time you spend watching the market yourself, and how many other people are also trying to inflate the market)

For example, suppose you and your 5 rich buddies all worked together to get richer. All of you have 100k CE and 200k crowns, but since you only need to use about 200k crowns to inflate the price, all of you make 200k crowns in value for less cost to yourself.

This is how rich people inflate the price of CE using large bid blocks to promote inflation and get richer.

So, if you are rich, you want to inflate CE prices to get richer.

TO RAISE CE PRICES:

For this you should have a decent stock of crowns(probably at least 100k crowns). You probably should also have a lot of CE. The more CE you have, the better, since the higher the price of CE is, the more your CE is worth.

Put up a large stock of bids(40+ bids of 100) at an inflated CE price, around 10 crowns higher than the current top bid. This is a bid block. You want to pressure other players who have less time and/or money to bid above you.

If someone starts buying out your crowns, immediately remove your bids. You do not actually want to BUY CE at this price, you simply want to make people put up higher bids than you.

You are waiting for a specific kind of player: the ones that are impatient enough to put up their own crowns for a higher bid than you. But not so impatient that they will be clicking the "buy CE" button.

Once enough people bid higher than you, remove your old bids and repeat the process, putting up a large stack of bids at 10 crowns inflated from the previous price. This way, you slowly inflate the price of CE.

WHY DECREASED PRICES ARE USEFUL TO YOU

If you don't have a lot of CE(either by playing less or spending less money buying CE from OOO), reducing the price of CE lets you buy more CE for less crowns.

Also, when you play Spiral Knights and use the elevators in the Clockworks, the price of CE matters.

If the price of CE is higher, you might not make enough crowns to pay for your elevator costs(you play at a loss)

If the price of CE is lower, you might make enough crowns to pay for your elevator costs and make a profit(you play at a gain)

NOTE: You ALWAYS play at a gain when you use Mist Energy(because it is free). You may not always play at a gain when you use Crystal Energy(because it is not free).

TO LOWER CE PRICES:

Lowering CE prices is much more difficult to do alone. Yes, you could just be disciplined yourself and not buy CE until the price is good for you.

But this does not work by yourself, because other people will still bid high and you will be stuck with no CE.

So, you must convince enough people to not buy CE with you in order to lower the price.

People who inflate the price of CE with large bid blocks, do not actually want to buy CE with those bids 99% of the time. They just want to make it so you bid higher to avoid 'waiting for all those crowns to get bought up'.

What is the reality, though, is that if you let those bid blocks get bought up instead, one of two things will happen:

a) they will care/notice and remove it so they don't lose money

b) they won't care/notice and those bid blocks will get bought up for a loss to them

The most effective, but also most difficult, way of reducing CE prices is with collective market discipline. If you get a large majority of players in all the Havens to avoid outbidding large bid blocks(which are almost always designed to inflate prices), then you will almost always manage to lower the price of CE.

This does not happen very often, because it is much easier for an individual to contribute to price inflation than price decrease. It takes a much more collective effort to lower the price of CE than it does to raise it. But, if you are a very convincing person and can get a large collective of players to agree with you, then it is very possible.

TL:DR

Players who have lots of CE want the price of CE to go up so they are richer.

You can use the market for this by making bid blocks and trying to force other players to bid above you.

Players who want more CE want the price of CE to go down so they can get more for less.

You can use the market for this if you get enough players to agree not to overbid on bid blocks.

AUTHOR NOTE:

Bid blocks are only one factor in the CE market. There are many factors that affect CE price. If you want to know more, there are two very informative guides on the forums regarding CE markets, by Senshi and Leviathan (et al.):

Senshi's "The Crystal Energy Market and You"
Leviathan's "Crystal Economics: Pressures up and down."

Also, remember that even if you are successful at raising and lowering the price of CE by a fair amount on one day, your changes might not still be there by the next day. This is because there are always forces working for and against your cause at any given time, and your economic work might be helped or undone by others.

However, in using and knowing about bid blocks, this is one factor of the market that you, the individual player, can affect.

I hope you have found this informative, good luck, and happy gaming.