Fake EC tunnel prices
 

So I wanted to take it easy and play my hand at this whole EC tunnel trading.

I figured I take my 2k plat and see what I can do with it over a few days by finding deals and flipping items.

Well lately I've notice that some people will spam for example a Polished Steel Dirk that is roughly valued in the 800-1200 range, but the spam it for 10p or 20p and if you PM them they never reply just keep spaming the item/price.

Is this some type of tactic to force the market down? The other thing I could think of was the tracking sites like say Wiki been hit with these prices and confusing people what the value is.

Maybe since I'm new to playing the market there's something I don't know and out of the loop when it comes to price manipulation in the game.

The prices on the wiki are simply from chat logs submitted by players, so it only shows what the items' asking prices are, what people actually pay for them is another matter entirely.

So its possible that people are trying to skew the prices on the wiki this way. I'm not much of a tunnel rat so more detailed reasons and tactics could be in play I guess.

It's worth noting that wiki god Ravhin recently added a way to correct auction logs in the wiki. If you see an item that has clearly false entries in the wiki, PM me and I'll try to fix them.

I've already fixed the Polished Steel Dirk, but the changes aren't showing up in the wiki. I'm guessing Ravhin caches them every night, so check back tomorrow and I'm guessing it will be fixed then.

Hopefully once people learn about this, and that such fake entries don't work, they'll stop wasting everyone's time and give the practice up (I have better things to do in life than clean up some asshole's fake auctions).

Its a very basic way to try and make people auction items under their value.

It is far beter to OOC in zone 1: WTS SMR 15k, while having your friend OOC in another zone: "WTT Djarns ring + GEBS for SMR", sell the SMR over its value, and have your friend with the fictional deal log off.

Greed is the best thing to exploit when it comes to tunnelcats.

The "tunnel cats" are all well aware of these practices, and set their prices according to what makes them plat, not what's in the wiki. It's naive non-tunnel people who don't know better, and get suckered into selling things below cost or buying them above.

But again ... there's a new sheriff in town:

https://i.imgur.com/RmanwSd.gif

Going forward the wiki is not going to be a place where people can upload fake entries (or rather they can, but when someone notices they'll get deleted). And if they keep doing it anyway and wasting my time, I will start naming and shaming, and maybe even talk to Ravhin about adding a way to block the troublemakers from the system entirely :)

Sounds like we need to make some more rules to combat these lowlifes.

How do you prove what a fake entry is? Sure if someone is saying WTS at 10pp for an item that's worth several hundred, that's obvious.

But I've seen people legitimately sell items for 40 - 60% of their listed wiki value. Are significant decreases like that just going to get deleted from the log because you think they're fake? If so, that defeats the point of the log.

The line between fake and a good deal is a blurry one, that's for true. Anyway, someone please trade me a ghoulbane for my 150pp+Langseax of the wolves and 2x langsesx combo :p on teal

:D

The "naive non-tunnel people" aren't obsessed over a fake currency in a fake video game, though. So who's really winning here? The greedy people obsessing over money in an emulator of a 21-year-old video game or the reasonable people who have more important things to care about?

Yeah at the end of the day all this technically does is help the greedy tunnel questers control the market