**** Stromm! **** it to Hades!

[Gahid]

:x

Ok, I have a rant I need to let go of. Stromm has the WORST tradeskill economy EVER.

On day 4 of Stromm I became the first Halas 10lb. Meat Pie baker. I held a monopoly on it, and yet sold my pies for 4pp each (a reasonable price considering the server).

Some seven days later, {edit: name removed} of Stromm set up a bazaar mule selling pies for 3.7pp each. I asked him to please raise his price to 4pp like everyone else, and when he said no and I lowered my price to 3.7pp he responded by lowering his to 3.5pp. What a {edit: watch the language!}.

Now today, I was wandering around and happened upon Plane of Knowledge..where I found a new guy selling pies for 3pp each or 55pp a stack (the going rate we had established was 3.5pp each or 60pp a stack). This was after I told him to price his like everyone else when he had sent me a tell asking how to make cookie dough (which I nicely looked up for him even though I didn't remember it offhand). He said he would price the same. Now, I was sitting there stunned that he'd do that, so I sent him a tell about it. What did he say? He told me to leave the PoK. I didn't really have a response to that, so I just continued auctioning. I lowered my price (again) to meet his and informed the other bakers of this {edit: again, watch the language} price change. He then lowered his to 3pp each or 50pp a stack. I lowered mine to his *again* (mind you not undercutting him), which he retaliated by lowering his to 40pp a stack, which I met, and then he went down to 30pp a stack. This is ridiculous. I asked him wtf was up, and he told me to leave PoK or the price will continue dropping. I struck a bargain where he goes back to the 3.5pp each or 60pp a stack if I left the PoK and didn't auction there.


What in the **** should I do with this *****? If I auction in the PoK, he'll ruin the economy, but if I don't then he gets all the profits!




And for my second rant....I've combined 150 Halas 10lb. Meat Pies (think of the sub combines! My god - my fingers still hurt!), and only skilled up from 191 to 194. ****it that sucks

[Niami DenMother]

I have edited your post. Please go to the Visitor's Corner and read the rules governing behavior on these boards before posting again.

1) personal attacks are unwelcome. No matter how upset you are, naming names like that is not something we want here. There's NO way we can prove who is right, who is wrong, and naming names puts us in the middle of potentially ugly things that we don't want here.

2) WATCH THE LANGUAGE. This is a family site. While I can understanding "slipping" when speaking aloud, there's no excuse for it in a typed medium when the site rules clearly state that such is unwelcome here.

I *can* empathize with your frustration, but please empathize with mine, and follow site rules, m'kay?

[Gahid]

I'm sorry Niami, I didn't read the rules or realize 'darn' or the other stuff I said isn't allowed

I tried to keep it fairly clean

[splunge]

Give a trustworthy friend a big chunk of plat.
Get into a price war. Have your friend buy the guy out when he hits rock bottom.
Reprice yours and his pies at a 'normal price'. Split proceeds with your friend.
Lather Rinse Repeat.

[Carmaris]

Or just ignore him. Eventually he'll get tired of such minimal profits and either get out of the baking business or bring his prices up. I'm speaking from experience here.

[Sanna]

for what's it's worth, you have some sympathy from me. the only other person who was selling Halas 10 on sullon when i started as since moved on to Misty Thickets and proceeded to depress me so badly I'm thinking about not even bothering.

And then there's the guy (his name really is something very close to a censorable word, so i won't even type it, but if i did/could, you'd understand his entire personality) who has 360 Halas 10 at 5g under me. Get a life, moron.

Granted, i understand the idea behind price fixing and that it has the potential to be very unkind and uncaptialistic and therefore is a bad idea, but.... 5 gold?

I understand your stress, and I'm sorry there are such morons in this world, and that they find it fun to bring stress to a mere game.

/comfort

[Gahid]

Thanks Sanna and everyone else! It actually means a lot to hear more people are going through what I am :roll:

[Cigarskunk]

Sadly, there's always gonna be some yahoo out there who won't think twice about destroying a market in the long term for thier own personal short term benefit.

[Reflan]

Yup. Many people frankly don't care about tradeskillers other than themselves.

You are going to be hard put to compete with someone like that unless you have substantial cash. The "buy-out" strategy is very hard to do on items produced as part of skill up routes, especially when you need to do so many hundreds or even thousands to skill out of them. Even with two accounts and access to a friend's mules, I've run out of space making halas pies and misty thicket picnics -- and they stack! And I have two bazaar mules left up overnight and while I am at work. :P Even if you don't run out of money, you run out of space buying up someone's skill-up products.

And what happens next? Some other guy comes along doing the exact same thing. So you've made your own 3,000 items, bought 3,000 from someone else, and now Mr.Market_Crasher_002 comes along with 3,000 more...you're stuck.

The buy-out route isn't good for things that come in high quantities. You need to basically abandon all hope of profit and be content with selling things for cost (or less!) in order to burn out the guy on the idea of burning YOU. A lot of guys get their jollies being jerks, and if they can make a profit in the bargain, that's just gravy. They really don't need a lot of it at all; it's enough that you send them tells, especially distressed ones about their prices, and thereby become part of their lives, thereby granting them power over you.

But what happens when you turn the tables and it appears that YOU are the one who just doesn't give a ****?

Then you at least have a fighting chance.

They don't get the pleasure of controlling you OR the market. They may not need either much profit or much joy out of life, but when you eliminate both by ignoring them and pricing even less than they do, you will probably see them come around pretty quick. It almost ALWAYS works for me.

Match an undercutter for a while. Watch him lower his prices by a few gold or a few plat, and squirm while imagining him probably sniggering away at you. Feels good? Okay, now he knows that you and he have a relationship. Now don't give him the chance to take the lead anymore. In fact, make him fear your revenge. Revenge is one of the best parts of relationships, isn't it?

Put your prices below his. Let him buy YOU out, if he likes. He almost never, ever, ever will. Put less than your full stock at risk this way if you like. This will give you more room to continue the game. Baking usually gives you countless stacks of product; you can sell enough to affect the market and market expectations without using up your stock. And you have to bake so much to skill up, there will be more to come.

So if he or anyone else has bought you out, you may have just broken even or even taken a loss. Probably not a huge one; baking is hardly smithing or tailoring, after all. But your skill-ups have probably been more or less free, and you don't have to worry about inventory anymore. In fact, you have freed up space for your next run. Your enemy the market crasher? He's probably scared of you now. He's probably worried that his next baking run for skill-ups is going to be a waste of time as far as money is concerned. If he's really in it for the money alone (and very few people have long-term horizons), he may lay off baking for a while if not forever. You may suddenly check the market and find he's into brewing or whatever instead. Good for you.

At any rate, for now, go do some more baking. Watch his prices. If you hit the right level with your own undercutting him, he's probably either not selling at all or he has RAISED HIS PRICES. Probably close enough to where you wanted to be all along. He's calling a truce. From now on, we'll all behave. I can't tell you how many times I've seen this happen with undercutters.

Why? Because if he bought you out and now that he has the 6,000 pies or whatever, he sees the potential profit in charging more, and the potential hit he's going to take if he has to sell all his stock AND all your stock AND all your and his future stock at ridiculously low prices if he continues to buy you out -- if he can even afford it. Or, he sees that his behavior is crashing the market not just to your detriment, but to his. No way. You win. Let's all just calm down and sell at more reasonable prices.

This may not be the price you want. Your price may indeed be too high. Halas pies are 2.5 to 3.5pp on my server, by the way. All skill-up paths are necessarily cheaper, perhaps than they should be. But chances are, his prices will be above the level he tried to use to either get his jollies aggravating you and other competitors or to force you and anyone even THINKING about baking out of the market by making you think the return was just too small.

His logic -- a small loss or lessened income for a while can be justified if it gets rid of competitors, or if his ego is weak and he needs his jollies just aggravating people. Your counter -- I don't mind not just a small loss but a market-destroying loss if it keeps you from jerking around ... or, on the other hand, I am just vengeful and/or crazy and things will get completely out of hand if someone doesn't stop the madness immediately. There's a huge difference between someone thinking he will get minimal profit but you will get driven out of the market, and someone thinking he will get NO profit or even take a loss AND that you will still not leave the market anyway because you either just don't care about money or are just trying to screw him to the wall for either his market practices or because you just plain ole' don't like him.

Don't talk to him, beg, wheedle and whine. If you can't sell for a fair price, dump your HMP at cost if you have to, if it will keep the guy from crashing the market even worse on misty thicket picnics, which you both will be getting to soon and where the potential money loss is enormous if there's some wise arse jerk playing games and trying to crash the market. Better to establish the terms of respect early, when it's cheap. Think ahead, and unless you absolutely cannot afford it at all, do not let undercutters think that their low bid on the market is the last bid there will be. Take a stand today, and keep your eye on tomorrow.

NEVER let someone think they have the last bid until that last bid is one that suits you.

[Shabura]

The problem is that some people *really* don't care. Some time back, when I was doing Opal Encrusted Steins for pottery (and they still had a vague chance of selling) ... I encountered someone with no respect for the economy. I started my 300ish Steins at a (relatively ambitious, I'll admit) 25pp. He put up 180 for 22pp. Hmm ... I can already see where this is going to go. I match his price. He lowers to 20pp. I match his price. He lowers to 15 (my, we're getting nasty now). I send him a tell letting him know that if we agree on a price, we can both make more money. He responds that he doesn't care how *much* he makes, as long as he makes any at all ... and as long as I don't make any. I lower to 15 to match him. He lowers to 10 ... and puts up a second trader with *another* 180 steins for 10 (it soon became clear that these *were* the same person, as prices on them changed at exactly the same time).

Evidently, he had concluded that since OES have no vendor value, any amount of money that he got for them (in excess of the firing cost), was "profit" in a misguided way, even if it was far below the actual cost for the item. A day later ... his prices were now 3pp, and I could do nothing but whether the storm until he left/sold out.

[Reflan]

Rare bird. Most people aren't quite that dumb on prices. His aggression toward you is definitely par for the course, though. The fact that you talked to him probably played a big part in motivating him, because it personalized you. That made you someone to conquer; an impersonal market force is not something people get as excited or unreasonable about. There's not the sense of triumph involved, or power. The best part of socializing, for many people, is aggravating others and/or dominating others. For some it's just about the only reason they socialize at all.

I've found following most everyone down all the way into the ground if necessary, and even undercutting them back sometimes, has virtually always worked to eventually stabilize and even raise prices, from Halas Pies, silks and pelts, Grobbs liquidized meats, opal steins and golden idols and spiritstones, to Tae Ew bloods and armor. Most people are only "so" crazy or jerky -- after a while they generally figure they might as well be human beings again, for their own benefit. Either because they've failed to make you mad or make you leave the market. Losing money to make you mad or leave is one thing, but losing it just to lose it, when you won't respond or leave, is considerably dumber than even your average dumb guy wants to be.

[Railina]

This is why i stay out of the bazaar. . .

But if you find yourself saddled with an undercutter on a mass-produced item, once you've identified him as such, don't fool around! Mone of this match his price or drop by 5 junk, drop your price exactly to cost, if he wants to undercut you from there, he's taking a loss. If he buys you out, you've broken even and you can go back to make more.

There are some risks, such as short-term market crashing, by doing this, but if you can drive him out of the market quickly, you'll be able to set your prices where you want them again.


But then. i don't power trades kill, and i don't play money games in the bazaar. i'm in it for the fun (the only reason i can see to be a tradeskiller in this game) i do combines when i get them, i skill-up on dropped components, and i don't do make anything in quantity that i won't use myself or give to friends.

[Suva]

I actually have been quite annoyed the last month with someone on my server who does the method of buying out everyone else with a lower price. It's ok to an extent, but this person buys all the different acrylia's and windstones. Most the time they are the only one selling and it's rare I can get to a trader before them since I cannot sit and monitor the bazaar 24/7. This would not be so bad except they monopolize the market by charging twice what other people do if you can get them. I imagine this person has made a massive profit being the only person selling these items consistently. If the markup was not so massive, I would be more than happy to buy thier items and be happy for a constant source of them.

[Aandaie]

This would be like going around to stores in real life telling them that they can't sell items cheaper than you.

People can sell things for anything they want, it is the foundation of a free market. I get what you are saying, but I don't think the first person to price an item should assume that it is going to be locked in at that price from then on. You could get 15 other people to agree with you but someone is going to come along and sell for less, it makes good business sense.

(snipped some of that, was not the tone I meant to use really)
You simply don't have the right to fix prices since there is no trade "guild" you have to be a member of. I would not get into any arguement about it though, I'd simply not respond. Mostly I'd not even be aware of it since 9 times out of ten I'm afk with a vendor up.

On stromm this person is kind of screwing themselves, so I'd just forget it. They are not going to be in POK auctioning 24/7. Set up a vendor in the bazaar or auction elsewhere. As you said, they are not going to be doing this for long if they are selling at cost or less.

As far as buying out, I like this even more. Go ahead and buy out everything I have and try to sell it at a higher price. Make me rich and fat, wheee!!! I've seen people do this, they buy out my 250 bone chips at 2 gold each then try to sell them at 6 gold each, while my druid laughs and goes to vendors and gets 200 more bone chips to sell at 2 gold each.. ahahaha.

I think the way you kind of "attacked"(possibly as seen by them) this person and tried to control them probably is what prompted their response and actions. It reminds me a bit of the old stories you heard of people trying to tell other people that they could not kill certain mobs, while getting mad about it. The other person pays a subscription fee to SOE to pretty much do what they want, except directly disobey the rules in causing another player problems. Pricing stuff lower than you is not one of those rules, which is a good thing

[Lothay]

This topic comes up often, and people get pretty heated. Some suggest courses of action that "feel good" but don't always come out right.

It might be satisfying to crush someone out of a market, or "get someone" for under-cutting you. Don't bother. Don't get bent out of shape.

Simply set your price at what you are willing to sell for, and wait for your item to sell or not.

Getting bent or angry or anything else is a waste of your time and energy, and doesn't result in fun. And after all EQ is supposed to be something you are doing for FUN.

~Lothay