EVE General Discussion

I just did: because it removes the mechanism that absolutely forces prices towards the mean and makes the market much less efficient in moving in that direction.

No it doesn't. Competition already does that. What you told me was "It just will. Because I said so!".

I'm on the completely opposite end of this argument. If people undercut my order I actually prefer that they do so by 0.1 ISK. When you undercut my order by any significant amount you lower the whole selling market for that item and cause every other seller to either lose ISK or to have to wait for your order to be bought out.

That, and if you undercut by a large enough margin, someone will simply buy your order and put it up for resale immediately.

So please undercut me by as small an amount as possible.

/Yargle

Don't worry, even brokers don't.

No, I said that it won't be as efficient, and it's efficiency that's the goal.

Competition will do that, to some extent, but it doesn't remove the mechanism that ensures that the highest buy/lowest sell gets the goods, which opens up for consumer stupidity and other inefficiencies. The whole system is set up to remove those inefficiencies. Competition only encourages a movement towards the right price — it doesn't absolutely force it the way this system does.


Again, you need to change perspectives. You're not Joe Q. Public looking for Brand X or Station Y fuel for your car/heater/light aircraft, paying by the litre what's posted on the pump — you're ChemCorp Global looking for 80 bajillion barrels of crude oil at a cost of 800 bajillion ISK for the lot, to fill your cracking, reselling, stockpiling, and plastics manufacturing needs. As long as you get the require amount at the required price, the exact derrick it comes from is ridiculously irrelevant to your business — going into that level of detail and micro-management will only distract you from your real business and cause you to lose money. You're not in the business of comparison-shopping — that's what the brokerage firm is for — you're just asking them to fulfil your needs so you can get on with your business.

…now, if we could only move on from having a spot market and onto having a futures and derivatives market, the real fun could begin.

I fail to see why I should care if the inevitable happens slightly more efficiently. I am not ChemCorp Global. I am John Q. Public wandering the aisles looking for an autocannon, two skill books and an afterburner. I see an afterburner I like and put it in my cart when suddenly the shopping police jump out from behind the smartbomb shelf pointing a gun at me and forcing me to buy the wrong afterburner. How isn't it like a grocery store? I can see that there are several different companies selling the product. I can see who is selling each one. They all have a price tag. Okay, so maybe I'm not physically pushing around a gun the size of a bus in my giant shopping cart, but the experience is far closer to shopping at newegg than investing in the silver market. If I want to buy the afterburner my friend is selling instead of the one the guy who podded me two days ago is selling one penny cheaper why shouldn't I be able?

Edit: And this is supposed to be a sandbox. Why can't a corp market PvP by buying products from their allies instead of their enemies, even if it's 2% more expensive.

Because it's not nearly as inevitable without the efficiency, and you end up paying more…

As pointed out above, look at the relative efficiency of the contracts market if you want to see what competition alone will do to prices.

Then maybe you should go use the contract system instead, since that's more what you're looking for. Just because your volume and price point is 1 @ 150k ISK doesn't mean you're not trading on a commodity brokerage market, using commodity brokerage market rules.

No, for the simple reason that there is nothing about the afterburner to like — it's a fungible good, indistinguishable from all the other afterburners. You're simply telling your broker to go out and find one for you and deliver it to your hangar — (s)he's the one who picks one that (s)he likes (and only because it fits your buy order), puts it in the cart, pushes it through the checkout, and dumping it in your delivery post box.

No-one is forcing you to buy the wrong afterburner. You're buying exactly the afterburner you're asking for. You're getting it for exactly the price you're asking for. You're just not getting it from the factory floor you're asking for because, being a commodity market, picking a factory floor isn't relevant to your purchase.

Because you're doing none of that. You can't see that there are different companies. You can't see who's selling each one. You can see that some may have different price tags, but no matter what, you're buying the exact same product. And above all: you are not the one performing the trade — your broker is.

Yes, at the nitty-gritty detail level, it may very well come from a grocery store, but since you're simply giving your shopping assistant a 150k ISK bill and telling him or her to go into town and come back with an afterburner, that detail level is completely opaque and ultimately irrelevant to you because you get exactly what you want in the end.

Now, if you really want them to add the second layer of a consumer market, where you personally can do what you want (and without the fiddly:ness of the contracts market), then go ahead… but you'll only end up paying a whole lot more for no good reason compared to using the wholesale spot market.

You can. You just have to use something other than the commodity market to do so.

It isn't indistinguishable from other afterburners. It's being sold by a corp I'm at war with and I would rather not pay for bigger ships for them to kill me with.


You go take a look at the contracts and (after 10 minutes of fighting with the ****** interface) tell me how many medium afterburner 2 you managed to find that weren't attached to a ship or thrown in with a bunch of other random stuff for no apparent reason. The only individual mods people sell there is stuff that can't be sold on the market.

No, it has to do with being a less efficient UI. I know this might come at a shock, but people don't like to do things the hard way unless they have to.

I like how you can steal farmers leeks right from under their noses and then sell them back to them and receive "honest pay for honest work".