While not all players have access to a wealth of crystal energy, we all tend to have access to crowns at the end of the day, though not always enough to buy more energy, which is fantastic for three rings because it encourages people to actually spend real money on energy and I understand that's kind of the only way the game can continue to exist.
But, it would be nice if it were a function available for altruistic players who want to see energy costs remain low, that they have the ability to supplement the visible market price of energy. For example, say the price has got up to 5000 crowns for 100 energy, but I would rather the market price appear to be much lower in order to bring down prices and encourage competitive pricing. Ideally, I would get all my friends together and form a seller's alliance that agrees not to sell energy over a certain value to keep the market competitive, but say my friends and I have little energy. It would be nice if I could supplement the cost of those sales by a number of crowns. In this example, if I want the price to appear to be 3500 crowns, so that the next player who tries to sell energy sees that as the market price and has to adjust his pricing accordingly to be competitive, then I would have to pay 1500 crowns to the one selling for 5000 crowns, so that the buyer pays 3500, and the seller still receives his asking price.
This sounds way more complicated than I want it to be, but it seems like a valuable tool for player-assisted market stabilization, similar to the ability to boost sales of a particular mineral in the gates. It's something that would be more useful for guilds to use, say by setting a desired price for energy, and paying the difference out of a guild's account balance, (perhaps, to be less benevolent, only for guild members' purchases).
Of course, if players become aware of a constant price adjustment on their sales, they may just take advantage of it and assume its presence and always mark their sales too high, even buying their own energy at an assisted discount and reselling it for constant profit, so there are obvious problems with this, but I'm curious if anyone thinks it could work somehow.
You could just buy up a lot of energy and re-sell it at a lower price.
But I think you'd discover that energy is in very high demand. Just to make up numbers? If you and your friends invested 500,000 crowns towards lowering the price of energy by 500 crowns per 100, then you would be able to subsidize 1,000 trades (100,000 CE ~=$250 worth of energy). However- even without the existence of people playing the market- I suspect that the cheap energy would sell out within a few hours at most. What would you do to make this sort of altruistic investment sustainable and viable?