The reason why everything starts at equal price is to let the community decide which will be the expensive cards and we are doing so by buying them.
There is expensive, and then there is
absurd. Especially when it comes to
fixed cards from starter decks or the Ages End collection.
Again, why can't Hunters starter decks be purchased?
Why can't the Ages End collection be purchased?
We all dictate the market.
More accurately, the first few people to buy the popular cards dictate the market, because after that the rest of us are powerless to do anything about it. More accurately the algorithm dictates the market, by skyrocketing prices far beyond what they should be.
Why would we want random website to dictate the prices of the cards we are using?
Dude, that's what you've got. The Merchant dictates prices, and it does so according to its algorithm. We the players are not dictating the market in any kind of meaningful knowing way, because we have no conscious means of doing that. We are at the mercy of the algorithm.
This is the natural way of doing it,
It is anything
but natural.
We are closed community, which dictates our OWN market values.
We aren't a closed community, anyone can join Gemp, or create a duplicate account just for the purposes of messing with prices.
I don't find anything absurd, and I am saving for few days to get my set of Small Hopes and constantly checking their price, in case someone sold some. I'm finding this exciting and intriguing.
I don't. I didn't come to Gemp to play some kind of marketing game. I came to play cards.
And again, the purpose of having algorithm that calculates the prices is to leave the pricing to US the players.
We the players do not dictate prices, we the players simply buy the cards. The algorithm dictates prices. It dictates prices based on what we buy, but that's NOT the same as we the players dictating the prices. The algorithm could say that if I buy five copies of a card, it then costs 200g, or it could say if I buy five copies of a card, it then costs 2,000,000g. That's not "leaving the pricing to us," that's leaving the pricing to
the algorithm.
And the large spread between buy and sell price is to avoid situations like before the reset, where you open some expensive card (especially in a small set), sell it for very high (80-90% of the buy price), buy boosters, open another of said card, sell it, buy even more boosters, etc. It was close to infinite loop.
It does no such thing, it only dampens the effectiveness. The exploit, by my understanding, was to use dummy accounts to buy a bunch of copies of a single card that your normal account already has, to drive up the price to an insane level. You then sell the card back from your regular account and make a heap of gold. The large spread now makes it so you can't make as much gold
at a time as you previously could, but it does nothing to "close the loop." For those who want to exploit the system, it just takes a little longer. The only way to truly fix the problem, is to either cap prices, or have the merchant stop selling singles. So far, neither of these measures have been implemented. Consequently, we have absurd prices, and we have this thread.
I think after the reset the system is working fine too. If the Grond's thicket idea or something like it is implemented, so multiple accounts shenanigans are not an issue too, everything will be perfect.
I don't see how Grond's ticket idea would stop the multiple account shenanigans.
P.S. I dont care for post Shadows cards,
Man, I do get tired of the bitching I hear from people about post-Shadows. It ain't that bad. Which is probably why Expanded is the second-most-played format on Gemp.
but yeah, if the starter's content is known, those starters could be added to the merchant, if MarcinS has time to do it.
There's always time.
But what we
really need are price caps, or no more singles. And if we go the no singles route, all collections need to be reset again.