Market Discussions

Actually they are not automatically against EvE's sandbox model. Just make it so expensive (and perhaps slow), it's easy for players to compete with it.

For someone who's been playing since 2008, I would think you would know more about how to play this game.

1. Regional price visibility vs. Universal Price visibility--there are at least 2 websites where you can see all the prices in EVE at a glance. You can easily do it ingame with price check alts (even TRIAL alts can be used) and an office in each region (or using basic alts who are still in their noob corp) by moving your med clone and self destructing. If you'd actually look at a map, you'd see its possible to use this tactic in combination with a few gate jumps and check every hisec price in EVE in less than 10 minutes. You don't fly your goods around looking for a place to sell them. You locate a market first and then go find goods. The game/mechanic isn't rigged, you just don't understand the fundamentals of logistics and trade.

2. A bigger market does not mean a better market. Case in point: U.S. manufacturing circa 1960. As the market expanded and the number of buyers/sellers/producers increased, price pressures, labor issues, and related forces combined to crush and kill the U.S. manufacturing base. A single market that can be seen from anywhere will only lead to more efficient market manipulation. If you thought being a small time trader, hauler, producer was hard before, imagine what it will be like to compete directly with the largest, richest, and most successful businessmen and alliances in EVE. To be fair, you already are competing with them if you're in the mineral business. If you want to see a case study of how to work regional price differences, large scale trade, large scale logistics, and long term planning, check out BSAC.

3. Who are the "arbitrage folks"? You speak of them as though they were a world apart. If you've ever bought low, sold high, you're one too. Instead of leaving the profit on the table, why don't you figure out a way to sell for more? See #1 above.

4. Why don't you do what everyone else does? Save up a pile of junk to sell and transport it all at once. Do you check refine values? Have you investigated using meta items in invention? Have you considered opening up your wallet and buying a variety of items at rock bottom prices to increase your stack of junk to sell when you go to a hub? Have you investigated items that could be picked up at your destination and brought back for sale in your home region/constellation/system?

5. 8 jumps isn't a reasonable range? There's your problem right there. You're a lazy f*ck.

You have an incredible knack for missing the point and the obvious.

It’s a symptom of your laziness that you haven’t learned the uses of offices, med clones, market apps, or the many, many tools available to you.

Here you go lazy guy, I’ll lay it all out for you:

1. Download one of the 3 market/production management programs for EVE.
2. Find EVE pricing sites. Read up on how they work.
3. Educate yourself on the market export function (ever wonder what those buttons at the bottom of the market UI are for?).
4. Educate yourself on the EVE API.
5. Learn how to use a spreadsheet, preferably one that was already created for this purpose (there are some on this page of the MD and many more elsewhere in the forums).
6. Learn how to pull market data in from either your own export sources or one of the pricing sites.
7. Select a solution or combination of solutions that works best for you.
8. Automate.
9. Profit.

I know a guy who has automated his pricing info for more than 250 different items that he buys and sells while moving his goods around in a freighter. It is current (within the rules laid out by CCP for pulling data) and dynamic. It took him a week or two of puttering around to get it just right

I am curt, dismissive, and sarcastic when I speak to anyone who refuses to get off his ass and solve a problem that everyone else figured out how to handle years ago. Your original post is so different from your last post that it only seems fair to question your original intent. The issue was never hauling; it was you looking for a way to sell low volume items in hubs without paying a legitimate market rate for hauling services or waiting in line with everyone else for that service. Nothing you’ve said in this thread supports your original suggestion for NPC hauling services. Your posts have devolved into complaining about what is undoubtedly your real issue: your competitors are better at this than you are.

Game mechanic is fine.

Based on helpful input from several posters, there are some interesting marketing tools that can manage the challenge of inherent market visibility limitations.

In my view (and I acknowledge that many posters disagree with me on this), solutions that need to be implemented outside of the game are actually indications of inherent shortcomings within the game itself. An analogy to this might be that one could learn to run very well with a prosthetic leg, but that still doesn’t mean that the leg is actually all there.

Continuing the analogy, let’s say that somebody figured out a way to graft a new leg onto a stump.
It’s entirely reasonable to presume that a lot of (most?) folks would actually refuse the graft, because they had gotten used to their prosthetic limb and saw absolutely no reason to go to the trouble to get an operation. “A prosthetic limb”, they might argue, “has a lot of advantages. You don’t have to worry about athlete’s foot infections, and there is nothing I need to do that I already can’t do with a prosthetic leg. I actually enjoy the challenge of figuring out how to get the most out of life with my artificial limb, and, in fact, I am a better, stronger, person because of it.”

You know what? How could anyone argue with this?

I’ve enjoyed the discussion, and I feel that I am a better person because of it.
Thanks again to all of those who posted.

Best,

TZ

Using your analogy really does not correlate to what I was trying to say. Let me give some examples to show what I mean.

No, you wouldn't go into Walmart and expect to see prices from other stores. But, in fact, you're not buying from Walmart, you're buying from a street vendor who has set up a store inside of a big warehouse. Inside the warehouse are price boards that show all the vendors that have a particular type of item for sale and how much they are willing to sell the item for. There are also price boards that state how much vendors are willing to pay for items that they would be willing to purchase.
the price boards also cover vendors in the region, but anybody who happens to be outside of the region -- even if they are only a few jumps away -- can't see the price boards, and they can't offer items for sale on the price boards. In fact, the people outside of the region might as well not even exist.
Now, if you happen to have some buddies that live in the other regions, you can give them a call and ask them what items are selling for in their region. Or, you may even have a subscription to a fancy newspaper that provides listings of items for sale in the other regions.


The internet has brought a whole new dimension to marketing because it creates a global market for goods and services.
You can sell your goods at the highest price on the market, because you can easily determine what the highest price is by just looking at what is currently available for sale. In fact, you don't have to just look at what is for sale in your neighborhood or city, but you can look at everybody that is selling a particular product anywhere in the world.
Since freight costs factor into the cost (from the buyer's perspective), sellers who wish to sell into more geographically distributed markets also need to take freight charges into account.

Similarly, buyers can also shop for products they wish to purchase in a global market, and consider price, shipping costs, and delivery time in the process.

There are re-sellers who are in effect speculating on commodities, but the volume they move is very high and their margins are low because of influence of the global market. The market advantage they have is that they have a reliable inventory, competitive prices, and they usually have bulk freight deals so that they can ship items cheaper.
There are also brick-and-mortar stores where people can go and pick from a wide variety of items, purchase what they want on the spot and walk out of the store without paying any freight charges. However, again the internet has some impact. Buyers can shop within different stores for the item they want without actually having to go to the store first. They can also use their smart phones to check prices (on the Internet) on an item that they have acquired an interest in while browsing in the store.

Now, let's take away the internet and watch what happens.

Markets become "farmers markets" or "flea markets" where sellers cluster together, and buyers come because the sellers are clustered together. Individual sellers also come because they can find a ready market for one-off goods (at a significant discount, of course).

Re-sellers set up stands and pretty much run the markets because people that want to buy really don't have an easy way to shop otherwise. Individual sellers (who could run ads in the newspaper or set up their own stands) usually just sell their stuff to the re-sellers because they don't have the time or interest in setting up flea market stands.

Right now, there are four "flea markets" in Eve.

What I'm talking about is actually setting up the equivalent of an Internet-based marketing system and using the rough equivalent of a freight forwarder to set up contracts for private haulers who can carry pre-packaged containers for delivery to freight offices anywhere in the universe.

It would be ludicrous for a future culture with cool tech found in Eve not to have an equally sophisticated marketing system, and instead rely on flea markets.

@Tao Zazen

Unfair this, unfair that, will the guy GET it?

You enter EvE almost naked.
You live EvE how YOU want to live it.
You win or lose based on your actions.

You are given the same - actually newer players get better - tools and opportunities than everybody else had.

In a neutral sandbox setup, if you armchair decide that a certain thing is wrong, that other is unfair and that else is bad, it talks about your inability to adapt and live the breathing EvE economy-verse, not about what's really wrong .

Examples:



CCP wisely put in challenges to overcome. Sorry this is not your craptastic "achievements" canned piece of garbage where you get a majestic fanfare when you learn to lace your shoes.
One of these challenges is to smarten up and go beyond competition.

You CAN EASILY make billions in a single market, in a single station, by trading < 30 items. I have been there, done that. My "unfair" advantages were: I previously mined 50M in a Osprey, I had the basic 900k SP. Very, very unfair indeed!

But like many others I embraced EvE and CCP's challenge. I wanted to go beyond and thus I spent some days of my life getting some free software / websites available to everybody. Very unfair, eh?

So now by using stuff everybody can have I may know that something at Rens sells better than at Jita. UNFAIR. Plus if only someone could create a mysterious entity called "alt" and place it at Rens... oh wait, you can.




The rich guys in EvE are not "son of famous banker XYZ" or "blue blood XYZ" or whatever stuff.
We have BUILT it from zero.

Some built their riches by playing harder, others by playing better but the end result is the same:

- we all entered this world naked and with 5000 ISK.

- we accepted CCP CEO Hillmar's challenge:

"Welcome to EVE, here's a Rubik's Cube. Now go f**k yourself"

Now, it's your and only your choice to sit there, suck your thumb and cry or to embrace the challenge and deal with it.




Unfair unfair unfair...
Arbitragers are traders who happen to wanto to actually de-centralize the market, many will take stuff off Jita to relist it far away. And you call them out?

Bots? Bots are forbidden and are certainly not unique to arbitragers and they don't leverage anything but their knowledge of one of the most important factors in a market: location, location and location.

Artificially centralized? Jita was not even the first trade hub we got. Certain locations are just placed very well, very like in RL where many historic and modern capitals were founded near rivers (for water), near mineral reserves and so on.
Good places happen.

But the workers don't complain about how unfair is to have water there, they go there and build their home to USE the opportunity.


"A universal market would serve to level the playing field because buyers and sellers would be able to deal with each other directly instead of having to work though middle men that camp the market hubs."

Guess what, if whoever prefers dealing thru middle men, it's because those middle men are useful for something.
Do they save time? Yes they do. Do they give their liquidity to the system? Yes they do. Do they end up optimizing the market, sometimes to the point they kick themselves out? Yes they do.

Markets are fair.
Markets are just.
Markets know WTF they are doing.
Markets are sentient beings made by the sum of many people. Markets even have their feelings.

So, love the markets and embrace the challenge.

As far as the system being "unfair" to newer or less wealthy players, one the the main draws of EvE (for me anyway) is the concept that I can leverage my wealth into more wealth. In EvE, as is often the case IRL, wealth + experience = power. I WANT my wealth and experience (such as they are) to give me an advantage over less wealthy and less experienced players/characters.

And I agree. If the cost of shipping your goods to market is destroying your profit margins, then you need to find another item to deal in. It costs 750k + 500k per jump (I think, some Red Frog can correct me if I'm wrong) to move up to a billion isk in goods. I pay around 5 million per trip, or around 10 million per round trip to get my materials from market and my finished goods back to market. I usually have an initial profit of well over 100 million isk for each of these round trips.

Edit: to respond to the player above me about insurance for courier contracts. Unless you are talking about insurance for the courier, we already have a PvP version of this. This is your collateral. The collateral allows you to offload all of the risk of loss onto the courier. If your collateral is less than the value of your goods, then you are only partially insured, and IMHO are asking for the courier to steal it themselves.