Quote:
Originally Posted by paulgiamatti
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I'd hardly call that rampant manipulation. There's a good chance the people doing that - if they even were, I've yet to see an actual example - are the same people RMTing and flooding the site with data because their tunnelquest game is suffering.
People saying the AH is a net harm versus a net good has got to be one of the dumbest things I've ever heard.
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Lance explained it perfectly, Paul^^ The thing is, once someone pushed a price to where they wanted, the community kept it there (until pushed/pulled again) because they would just price around the mean, what they perceived as a "fair" price. And pushing prices didn't take much of a time investment. You onky needed to auction once to get an entry on the site. 15 minutes or so a day with a set of macros and you could be pushing/pulling prices on dozens of items however you liked. I wouldn't feel bad for not noticing. Most people didn't.
I don't really care how much money people make. I pay what I want and sell for what I want. I just think it is an awful outcome when someone establishes these phony price points that nobody is willing to pay, forcing unassuming players to waste their time hoping for some purple relief to the green sea of EC, or the opposite: establishing lower price points to suck up all of a particular item for later resale (following a push) when other players could be using the item.
There's nothing wrong with reselling, but p99auctions severely retarded the process making resellers sit on wares for longer periods of time because they had to spend a bit more time manipulating prices rather than just serving as an intermediary to minimize players' time in EC. Meanwhile you have other players largely unaccustomed to the market being forced to spend more time in EC to move their wares, getting annoyed and growing belligerent because they find themselves unable to transact at the published "fair" prices for their items.
EC is full of assholes because of p99auctions.