Quote:
Originally Posted by Quidello
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Can anyone show some evidence or a case of people manipulating prices on the site?
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Let me explain how easy it was to manipulate P99 auction site. If an item had not been sold for a month alone, if I took that item and priced it at 50k, let's say, a cloth cap... That cloth cap's average price for the last month would read as 50k.
If that doesn't show you the ease to which P99's prices could be manipulated, then I can attest to my personal experience in learning how it worked.
I was stubborn about not dropping price on one particular item. What I noticed was over a course of a few weeks, as soon as I changed the item to another alt to try to sell in EC, the price for monthly average raised slightly everytime I moved the item to an alt to try to sell it.
I then understood that if I could alter the monthly price just by selling the same item on different toons over a multiple weeks time, imagine if I sold the item across many alts and sat in EC all day long, every day? I could easily alter the price by a lot, either up or down simply by changing toons I sold the item on. In essence EC tunnelquesters do this, they also have different alts they sell on. Don't be naieve and think they do not.
Once I understood that, I then started to notice people auctioning items by typing out the name, no link of the item provided. Innocently selling an item on an alt, and didn't have time to get it's link or the actual item, right? No.
When I went to P99 auction site, and looked for an item I wanted to check a price on, I found that in the history of that item being sold were this item being auctioned using the same writing style but being sold by many different toon names.
The price was extremely high, and many times just typed into the /auc. That's because P99 auction gleaned price average from the item's name, whether it was typed, linked, abbreviated, it didn't matter. So this one guy was typing the name in, at a stupid high price on many toons to manipulate the average price. It was clear to me.
Once I understood this was being done rampantly, I then understood that there was a P99 auction site problem, and that prices were being pushed up by people who had known what took me many months to learn and understand.
How long has it been going on? I have no idea, I was off game for 2-3 years, and P99 auction site did not exist when I had left. I do know since I been back, this has been going on well before I realized it about a month ago.
Anyway, P99 auction site was a wonderful idea, but it was just way too easy to manipulate.
Anyone that thinks the manipulation of P99 auction site is grossly exaggerated by it's detractors are naive, or don't want to believe the truth because anyone that has tunnelquested for any extended periods of time would learn this on their own as I did.