Quote:
Originally Posted by maestrom
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Speculators do not add value. Markets are, in almost every case, liquid enough with outthem.
I have, I'm the past, argued for a license system, where in order to purchase commodities, you would have to be either a commodities producer or someone who would turn that commodity into something else before reselling it.
This isn't real life though. Getting around this bro is easy. Don't sell or buy from EC mules.
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Agreed, that is a simple solution for players with excess time ^^ However, resellers provide a valuable service for many others.
Game economies without brokers suffer from significant liquidity issues in the absence of resellers, because of competing preferences for time as a leisure activity. Value is realized in he form of less time investment to transact. Rather than play the market meta game , players can simply play the game itself to advance their characters and many prefer to do so, spending as little time as possible in EC. Resellers make the market more efficient by normalizing prices, making it easier to buy and sell items on demand.
I've always preferred player run shops as implemented in many Asian run mmos ^^ It is a nice middle ground between brokers which drain all the fun from game markets and EQ style active player only trades, which necessitate either additional time investment for transactions or the use of a middleman reseller. It also makes shopping much more entertaining passing from shop to shop rather than reading a scrolling wall of text, or searching a catalogue ^^