Market Discussions

I was reading this thread about inflation and the idea came to me that trillionaires could completely troll the market by buying up very basic items -- like, say, all the Afterburner I and MWD I, on the market.

This may or may not be for a near or long-term profit motive somehow, but in the short term I can imagine it really causing some problems in the market and chaos in the game as people have trouble fitting their ships.

They could buy up everything in the major hubs (even for more than it was worth) so that nobody could afford some basic items at a reasonable price, and then, when a rush to produce these items brought a flash flood of these items into to the market, they could sell what they bought at a loss just to troll all the manufacturers. First they create chaos because the average player can't get basic equipment for a few days (or so) and then they can completely undermine the efforts of manufacturers who won't be able to sell their new products at a reasonable price.

I'm not exactly sure why anyone would want to do something like this, and most likely the effects would only be felt for a week or so at most, but people do things in this game for crazy reasons -- or just for the lulz.

To what extent has this already happened?

I'm not even close to being a trillionaire and I have trolled markets, sometimes for profit, sometimes in unsuccessful pursuit of profit, sometimes to drive a competitor out of a market, and other times just for a laugh.

I think the most effective way to really, really mess with a market, however, would be for someone with ~10T behind them to buy up most commonly traded items in a minor hub (like Hek) and pay people to do systematic extermination of anyone trying to bring a freighter, JF or Iteron in. (IIRC Hek has about 1.5 T traded per day, I'm not sure what sort of stockpiles of goods people have there but someone with 10T could probably ruin it as a hub for some time).

I doubt it would help said person acquire their 11th trillion, but it would be hilarious.

You're thinking rather exceptionally small with your examples, but yes.

It would never do something like ...

Plot twist - If i had $10k sitting around I wouldn't be spending it on a video game.

You dont get enough tears doing this. You cant really experiance the drama so its kinda pointless. Fun a little bit, eventualy too muck clicking to get rid of all the stuff.

Personaly i prefer character reselling in combo with awaoxing at the same time. Small fun time but the tears are triple worth it!

double plot twist - if you had 10k sitting around, why *wouldn't* you waste it on a video game? it is, after all, sitting around, implying you have literally nothing better to do with it. if you had so much cash that you could afford to leave dumb amounts of cash doing nothing, wasting it on a game might be entertaining to you.

this was also a pretty good one: https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1472468