An argument against the change of the merchant system

[ramolnar]

This has been an excellent case study in the problems with free markets. I'm sorry I missed it! No matter what the solution, it would be great to track what had happened (lack of cash depressing prices), into the boom day of Christmas Eve, and now what to do.

I had written a long post last night, but decided to wait to post. I'm glad I did!
Here are suggestions I see for a long term solution.

1) If booster pack retail prices are 10 gold, that means that booster pack wholesale prices are about 5 gold. In real life, I used to buy boxes from a wholesaler for just under $2 per pack, which would equate to roughly 5.8 to 6.0 gold. The wholesaler made a small profit, so his prices was just about 5.0. Therefore, if the average rare price goes above 6 or 7 gold, the wholesaler should just open packs and stock the store.
2) I would also assign a cap of 99.99 gold for any rare, equivalent to about US$30 in real life. This is a little artificial, but it prevents massive trickery. Also, to the best of my memory a non-promo never got above $30 in real life. In Magic, everyone worried when Jace got above $50 - I'd like to avoid that.
3) On the low side, I would implement a minimum sell price of 1 gold for any rare and a minimum buy price of 2. In real life, there are always transaction costs. I will note that big Magic retailers like Star City games will buy any mythic rare for 25 cents, about 0.6 gold in our system. A mythic rare appears once on a Magic rare sheet, making the probability roughly the same as a rare from a large set like FotR. Therefore, I think 1 gold is a reasonable floor. It makes things less worthless.

[hsiale]

I think what we have now is a good long term solution. The problem is not in the system, but in the starting point. The new merchant started extremally understocked and had no way to buy packs by himself and get the singles (which he should do as long as it is extremally profitable).

Of course even if nothing is done, users will finally drive the prices to a good level. But it should not be left for them. The reasons are:
- it will take too long. The merchant is so heavily understocked that he will demand a lot of new cards before he calms down. And the amount of money users who restock him make is ridiculous. I made 30.000 Gold today, just out of curiosity how the merchant will react.
- there is no good interface for users to do this. If there was a button "Choose an expansion, buy a box of boosters, open them all and sell all the cards" and all this took 15 seconds, I would probably already have stabilized merchant on my own (and asked Marcin to remove excess cash from my account afterwards). But with current interface I think it would take one man, using all the ways to speed up things that are available, a few days of work day and night to restock the merchant. I have neither time nor will to do it.

I think that once the merchant gets restocked by computer, opening packs until expected resale value of cards drops below let's say 11G for standard boosters and 22G for Reflections, the system will work. One problem is what to do with collections that heavily changed today. A backup from Saturday is a perfect solution, if it's unavailable, the good thing is that due to card prices being high people store what they earned in cash or packs, so I think removing everything above some value would work. Something like erasing all cash above 500G and all packs above 100 (leaving booster choices no matter how many one has, as they can't be bought from merchant so people who have lots of them could not gain them today). The only problem is if someone bought packs and already has opened them - for example if such fix is applied my RotK playset should probably be reduced to a set of one copy of each card (I did not have 120 RotK rares yesterday, but I had 3-4 copies of all the most expensive ones).

[macheteman]

ok, so the reason that i am on GEMP is because i enjoy playing the game. i could care less about imaginary cards.

i very much enjoy playing in sealed tournaments, and want to make sure that i have the coinage to continue doing so. i figure that selling back the cards i get from my winnings is a good way to offset the cost of joining.

so my question is: does this new merchant system make this a good time to sell, or should i wait and get a better price later?

[hsiale]

i very much enjoy playing in sealed tournaments, and want to make sure that i have the coinage to continue doing so. i figure that selling back the cards i get from my winnings is a good way to offset the cost of joining.

If you use cash only to join leagues, you will never be short of it. You are given 50 gold each week (provided you log in at least once during this week). A sealed league signup fee is 50 gold and will not increase*, such league starts once every 36 days, so you have 5 times more cash than you need. Even if you join all leagues, both sealed and constructed, this will not take even half of the cash you are given just for logging in.

That said, this is probably good time to sell cards if you feel you need cash for something else. Especially if you don't sell in extreme amounts. If you sell in extreme, this is risk. I very much expect most of the 30k gold I sit on now to be taken from me somehow. Such cash is not healthy for the game and I earned it only to check the merchant's reaction to being given lots of cards.

*Rules I use for league signup fees: the cost is more than amount of days a league lasts but less than 1,5 of this number. A league allows you to play on average one game a day and a bit extra (sealed leagues are 40 games over 36 days and cost 50 gold, format I'll be trying in next constructed leagues is 13 games over 11 days costing 15 gold. So playing in a league costs you approx 1,3 gold daily, and you earn 7 each day, so you'd need to earn money on prizes only when you'd want to participate in at least 6 leagues simultaneously, and there never were more than three.

[macheteman]

word.