My little experiment with Nhurgite Price Leverage

[HardworkingSlacker]

Ok, so today (actually yesterday) I actually had a very unique opportunity when it comes to economy:
I manipulated the Nhurgite Price from 3,400 up to 10,000 per Stack in the AH by buying all the cheap stock (for ~1.5 million credits).
Then, I placed several offers of said Nhurgite for the afore mentioned price and waited for a few hours to see what would happen.
I did not expect it to actually sell for that high amount of credits but what I found interesting is that after just a few hours the Price dropped down to 3,400 per Stack again. I did not actually believe it at first sight and thought that maybe people price-crept it really hard or something but no, it simply went down from 10k to 5k down to 4.Xk and eventually returned to its original price roughly 10 hours later.
I just found it really baffling to see that nobody actually tried to price-creep me. No, they simply returned to their known price range, trying to "overcharge" a little but even that did not last at all.
This makes me suspicious because I do not assume that people just throw away a (presumably golden) opportunity to make a nice profit to just put it in for the familiar price. I'd have expected the price to stay in the 4-5k range for a considerable amount of time at least.
No, there must be other mechanisms at work here.
Most obviously, I would account that to the (unfortunately) low amount of active players which leads to deflation hence why it sells for such "little" money so easily. It used to be cheaper but i attribute that to the vastly higher supply proportionally to the demand.
Second, I think that the NPC rates heavily influence the price window of ores.
The fact that you can generate only so much money by selling your ores to the station limits the amount of available credits to the amount of time you are willing to put in to mine the ores.
I don't know whether this is intentional or not but I find it interesting that credits represent the time invested by the players in the game.
So far, so good.
Let me know your thoughts on mine and have a nice day!

 

[ChaosRifle]

I set ymirium (lukium?? we did both at the same time, one was 500k the other 80k) to 500k/stack and some of our corp resold what was normally 30k/stack 200k-300k/stack, and the price finally fell back to 70k after about a week. two weeks there roughly and it returned to 36k. you can make money price fixing (we did), because the market is so slow, and the auction house gives you a view on the entire scope of the market system, much unlike real life. it doesnt take much to price-fix in any market-enabled game, you just need to cause sufficient panic for people to try and buy it before it goes higher

 

[Askannon]

I had bought a sizable chunk of Ice, because I noticed that there weren't many offers anymore and just bought what I could sell for 1500 or 1200 (and why 1500: Ice has a real cap in the form of refill terminals where 1 stack Ice is about 1500 and change).
Other ores only have a minimum (and some sell ore for less than that, most often Valkite for 544, when they could get 544,36 at the terminal without the tax)

I think those that offer for the previous price are those that you bought those ores from in the first place, i.e. they see their ore get sold and immediatly try to capitalize on it by selling more for the same price.

 

[IronGremlin]

Ok, so today (actually yesterday) I actually had a very unique opportunity when it comes to economy:
I manipulated the Nhurgite Price from 3,400 up to 10,000 per Stack in the AH by buying all the cheap stock (for ~1.5 million credits).
Then, I placed several offers of said Nhurgite for the afore mentioned price and waited for a few hours to see what would happen.
I did not expect it to actually sell for that high amount of credits but what I found interesting is that after just a few hours the Price dropped down to 3,400 per Stack again. I did not actually believe it at first sight and thought that maybe people price-crept it really hard or something but no, it simply went down from 10k to 5k down to 4.Xk and eventually returned to its original price roughly 10 hours later.
I just found it really baffling to see that nobody actually tried to price-creep me. No, they simply returned to their known price range, trying to "overcharge" a little but even that did not last at all.
This makes me suspicious because I do not assume that people just throw away a (presumably golden) opportunity to make a nice profit to just put it in for the familiar price. I'd have expected the price to stay in the 4-5k range for a considerable amount of time at least.
No, there must be other mechanisms at work here.
Most obviously, I would account that to the (unfortunately) low amount of active players which leads to deflation hence why it sells for such "little" money so easily. It used to be cheaper but i attribute that to the vastly higher supply proportionally to the demand.
Second, I think that the NPC rates heavily influence the price window of ores.
The fact that you can generate only so much money by selling your ores to the station limits the amount of available credits to the amount of time you are willing to put in to mine the ores.
I don't know whether this is intentional or not but I find it interesting that credits represent the time invested by the players in the game.
So far, so good.
Let me know your thoughts on mine and have a nice day!

MMO economics.

Players (especially newer players, because they have less capital) are willing to spend time -doing something- to make money, but rarely are willing to spend time -waiting- for said money.


This creates a severe downward pull on prices for any easily available materials.

An abundance of players with disposable capital or larger capital actors like guilds / corps can and do override this phenomenon with a concentrated effort, but there are just too many impatient sellers to keep it up indefinitely for lower tier materials.

Once you start getting into rarer stuff that moves slower and/or is less generally available, and significantly, only available to players that are already somewhat established, people start caring more about margins and it gets easier to do shit like this - Ymrium, for example, is both sufficiently difficult to get AND desirable enough that you can set it's price pretty easily.

It's essentially supply and demand with the added twist that a certain minimum subset of sellers can be counted on to act counter to their rational best interests fairly reliably, unlike the actual market place, where people will just randomly act counter to their best interests because economics in the real world is a fucking social science and not a math problem.

 

[HardworkingSlacker]

MMO economics.

Players (especially newer players, because they have less capital) are willing to spend time -doing something- to make money, but rarely are willing to spend time -waiting- for said money.


This creates a severe downward pull on prices for any easily available materials.

An abundance of players with disposable capital or larger capital actors like guilds / corps can and do override this phenomenon with a concentrated effort, but there are just too many impatient sellers to keep it up indefinitely for lower tier materials.

Once you start getting into rarer stuff that moves slower and/or is less generally available, and significantly, only available to players that are already somewhat established, people start caring more about margins and it gets easier to do shit like this - Ymrium, for example, is both sufficiently difficult to get AND desirable enough that you can set it's price pretty easily.

Well, that makes sense. I did not account for desirability/availability which you explained to me really well, thank you.