Let's say I amass a huge amount of plat, and a guild devoted to this idea, and we head off to the bazaar. We go there and choose a necessary item needed to increase a trade skill, we'll use acrylia for an example. Now, we analyze the rate of acrylia coming in and going out of the bazar, and buy every piece of all types of acrylia on sale. We then set standard prices designed to give us a slight profit. (So if the standard rate of small blocks of acrylia was 30PP, we'd charge 40.) Then, breaking off into shifts, we'd sell these to the consumer. Then, when more acrylia comes in from the fields, these workers will want to sell their stuff for lower prices, so our merchants snatch the acrylia up at the lower price, and continue to sell at the standard rate. If the workers sell at a higher price, we won't buy it. As the rate of acrylia rises and falls, we'll alter our prices accordingly.
In short: I propose that I (and anyone here who's with me) monopolize Everquest! 
And there's no economic body, either to protect players from your evil scheme or to help it along. Normal economic and financial controls don't work if everyone is potentially a producer of rare materials.
sigpic courtesy of This Guy, original modified by me
You'd just have to keep the place dry.
Ferrel!
It could work. It wouldn't be all that profitable since you'd need 10-15 people that could with the time they would invest in this make far more on their own, but it could work.
Go typos. [ 10-20-2002: Message edited by: »Giantt« ]
1) People would match your price. They get all the profit, and you get nothing.
2) You would piss people off with your price fixing. They would avoid doing business with you, just because they hate you.
3) You would piss people off, and get shafted for your crappy rep in other parts of the game as well.
4) People will remember that there IS a way to buy/sell without using the Bazaar. They would bypass you.
5) You would miss out on whatever else you could have been doing during that time.
Rather than buy acrylia from you at the inflated price, people would begin farming thier own acrylia for thier trade skill projects.
Eventually, people would begin farming for cash, undercutting your prices at the source. They have no overhead expenses, thier sales are 100% profit, you have to compensate for the expense of buying out all the acrylia in bazaar.
People would start going to Acrylia and/or Dawnshroud to buy acrylia instead of going to bazaar.
I farm my own acrylia for tradeskills, I don't feel like paying the inflated bazaar prices to save time normally.
I also have no convictions against selling velium and acrylia when I have extra and take advantage of those in a hurry.
Also you would make everyone with lower prices very happy as they would sell theirs anyway and make a quick profit, only ones to suffer would be tradeskillers and some tradeskilled items would gain inflated prices. [ 10-20-2002: Message edited by: Taylen ]
"Normal economic and financial controls don't work if everyone is potentially a producer of rare materials."
sigpic courtesy of This Guy, original modified by me
quote:
Verily, Majox doth proclaim:
The problem with trying to corner the acrylia market is that more keeps coming in, fairly quickly. You need to corner the market on something rare, Manastones for example.
Why bother? They'd be the ultimate niche market. Only clerics really use them, and even then only to exploit CH, and even then they don't work in most zones.
quote:
Maradon XP wrote, obviously thinking too hard:
Why bother? They'd be the ultimate niche market. Only clerics really use them, and even then only to exploit CH, and even then they don't work in most zones.
I've seen Druids that go through the hassle of porting to Old World to manastone up, then gating back to their hunting spot to regen the HP.
Crazy fuckers.
