Topic

Ah, the free market in action ...

I suppose it's fair that the people who bought bog houses and realized that herbs were useless now have their revenge for a while, but goodness me, those auction prices for herbs are ridiculous. I'm sure they're finding suckers willing to pay that, and more power to them while they can get it, but I can't help hoping that some people will flood the market with cheap herbs and put an end to their party soon. (Anybody want to go in shares on a bog house cartel to break these people?)

Meanwhile, I wait it out, because if you think I'm paying nearly 6000 currants just to make one purple tincture, you're nuts. (And if you paid nearly 6000 currants just to make one purple tincture, you're nuts too.)

Posted 12 months ago by Columbina Subscriber! | Permalink

Replies

  • P.S. I have auctioned off all my spare herbs for the tinctures I was already able to make at the auction's default starting prices, so that hopefully some other poor person can grab them and actually have a chance to make a couple of tinctures without hocking their house.
    Posted 12 months ago by Columbina Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Well, I have bought some herbs at outrageous prices in the auctions. I have plenty of currants and was willing to sacrifice about 50K to feed my curosity about the potions. I'll just go make some awesome stew and earthshakers and make it back in one day. There is really no point in hoarding currants - I save them to spend when something new and awesome comes along. Like rainbow jumping potion.
    Posted 12 months ago by Kookaburra Subscriber! | Permalink
  • It will balance out... eventually. EVERYONE is making potions now. Already the price for a lot of potions are dropping like rocks.

    And I bet some careful investigation would reveal a bunch of great deals on other items.
    (In other news, there is a reason I am stockpiling items that currently appear to have little use. Crystals for example. One day, everyone will be strip mining barnies and depleting firefly swarms, and I will have my bigger bags stuffed with plain crystals.)
    Posted 12 months ago by Lord Bacon-o Subscriber! | Permalink
  • As to your "cartel" postulate, may I suggest doing a little experimentation of your own?

    I have.

    In my trials, I flooded the market with cheap herbs. Most of the buyers were Northerners, like yourself, who wanted to complete the quest.

    However, one of your fellow northerners also bought my 'cheap' herbs and repackaged it for sale at 5 times my price.

    So, before you go pointing fingers, and making accusations about 'cartels' and such, you might want to research the subject a bit more.

    Personally, I wish this wasn't such a factor in the game right now. I'd love to see a cooperative effort to lower the prices.

    If you'd like to make the same experience as I did, by all means, go ahead. I highly recommend it. But don't be surprised if your fellow 'victims' aren't the first to take advantage of you.
    Posted 12 months ago by Mablem Tiipot Subscriber! | Permalink
  • The weird thing is that for some of the potions and tinctures the cost of the final product is less than the cost of the raw ingredients.

    is. Essence of Purple is selling for 1159 and it takes (i think) 23 purple flowers which are selling at the cheapest for 220 each so if a person sold the flowers they would make 5060 currents or (or almost 4000 more) than selling the essence.

    Its quite bizarre. Also with guano selling for 74 cents a err lump for the cheaper herbs a glitch could make much easier money selling guano than guanoing herbs and then selling them.
    Posted 12 months ago by ThursdayNext Subscriber! | Permalink
  • It's not bizarre at all Thursday, when you consider that in order to make the quest you need the flowers. Once they've made the Essence, then they're done. The market is flooded with Essence sellers and few buyers, just like Hootch.
    Posted 12 months ago by Mablem Tiipot Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Alas, Dr. Hackenbush, it wouldn't be the first time I've seen that behavior, and short of wandering the streets crying, "Cheap herbs for the needy and desperate!" there's no way to prevent it. Some folks WILL do anything they can to get their hands on meaningless virtual currency.

    (I play a lot of MMOs and it hasn't done wonders for my outlook on humanity.)

    Eh. I can wait it out. I only wanted to make one of each tincture for the quest anyway.
    Posted 12 months ago by Columbina Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I wonder if setting a timer, if you buy one thing, you cant sell that one thing for 24 hours. That would stop the purchase low sell high issue we have. Just one of the issues that is.
    Posted 12 months ago by jiva Subscriber! | Permalink
  • No, that would be a cure worse than the disease, I think. For example, it would prevent what I'm about to do, which is sell back the spare silvertongue (I had to buy a stack of 5, but needed 4) at low cost now that I've made the tincture.
    Posted 12 months ago by Columbina Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Yes I know its not bizarre if you take into account doing the quest as a benefit. Its just a little weird from a purely monetary perspective. 

    Its also not really bizarre if you take into account that currents are really easy come easy go in this game. I know I've reached the point where there isn't that much left to buy.
    Posted 12 months ago by ThursdayNext Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I've reached the point where there isn't much left to buy, but I also don't relentlessly sell off stacks and stacks of everything at auction, so I don't have any "income" per se. I tend therefore to be pretty careful how I spend the currants - I don't want to be without them if some new expensive equipment comes along I actually need urgently (e.g. a Tincturing Kit).
    Posted 12 months ago by Columbina Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Another perspective:

    I am someone who has been taking advantage of the high demand for the herbs I grow in my swamp home.  For those of you who don't own a swamp home, making money off of them is quite difficult, compared to the other crop-based houses where you can grow a huge quantity of crops and own a lot of animals.  This is the first time that my home has been able to turn a decent profit based on the unique (and limited!) resources I have access to there.  
    Posted 12 months ago by Rosque Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I mainly sell things to support my cubimal addiction.

    If you want some purple flowers Columbina I have some extra you an have for free taking the essence is interesting.
    Posted 12 months ago by ThursdayNext Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Hmmm, maybe it's time to liquidate this mountain of herbs I've been amassing down in a basement pile?  If only to quiet down my set of icons for a little while, anyways.
    Posted 12 months ago by Warrender Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Like I said, Rosque, I don't begrudge that your herbs finally have a use. Not at all.

    I do think I have a problem with the basic idea that one's home/private resources should "turn a profit" at all ... but that may just be a matter of play style. To each their own.

    Me, I have a home so I can take care of my own needs as much as possible so that I have to go to the vendors or auction house as little as possible. My Glitch dream is to be absolutely self-sufficient and be able to gather, grow, or make everything.
    Posted 12 months ago by Columbina Subscriber! | Permalink
  • have you guys been following the "swamp houses: unprofitable" threads?

    here's the précis:

    nyah, nyah, i have a crop house.
    my swamp house is more awesome than your crop house, because i can grow herbs.
    yeah, good luck with that. i'm making money and all you have are herbs. big deal.


    and somewhere in the middle of the thread someone like me pipes up and says:

    what should really happen is that herbs should be strengthened in the game, because they're weak and ought to be more useful/desirable/profitable.

    what has happened is that herbs are now more useful, more desirable and more profitable thereby creating more equity in the game, and people are complaining because they've lost their advantage over the swamp people.

    there's enough for everybody! swamp people take your long-awaited profits! everybody rejoice for your swamp-dweling brethren whose homes are now just as profitable as yours!

    hooray!

    (full disclosure: i do not own a swamp home. i live in groddle meadow.)
    Posted 12 months ago by flask Subscriber! | Permalink
  • The title says it all.. free market in action... it's really just a matter of supply & demand. High prices for herbs make business-minded Glitchen focus on producing high-quality herbs for sale. Increased supply makes prices drop after a while, you see that happening already... On the demand side there is the initial peak-demand driven by curiousity, when the curiousity factor wears off demand drops as well and prices follow for that reason alone.

    Is there an app somewhere that monitors auction prices and plots them over time? Will be fun to watch, especially a week from now after the herb-boom is last-weeks news.
    Posted 12 months ago by Zogje Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Dr Zogje wrote: Is there an app somewhere that monitors auction prices and plots them over time?

    zoggish.appspot.com/auction...
    Posted 12 months ago by Warrender Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Watching the free market in action is pretty cool actually! I thought, soon after i started playing, how much fun a sociologist would have with observing the things that happen in this game. I'm not a sociologist nor do I play one on TV, though.

    It is nice that herbers have an advantage and use of herbs/income source right now. I don't see that croppers (like me) ever had that kind of advantage since crops were always available for real cheap at vendors. Anyone without the ability to grow them could get them for a stable price. Therefore it wasn't an easy thing to make a profit with crops. If any croppers wanted to get herbs for any reason, there wasn't an easy way to get them at a stable price. So people with herb gardens always had more of an advantage it seems to me.
    Posted 12 months ago by Flowerry Pott Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I'm borrowing a friend's herb garden and I have to say even this weekend I didn't really make more currants than I would have from my own meat collectors and a bit of mining or pig-petting up north.  But try it; there's so much available housing now, anyone can move to the bogs for a few days and then get a new 50K house back up north afterward.  Or just make a friend in the bogs and borrow their garden, or make a private trade with them.  

    I had the same experience as Dr Hackenbush, initially seeing my herb and essence auction sales instantly repackaged on the AH for 10x my list price.  Since then I've priced with the market, figuring that if there are players who "need" to do the quests in the very first days and want to pay, that's fine.  And prices have dropped pretty steadily since Friday night and I'm sure will continue to do so until they're all back around 100c.  I mentioned in another thread that herb yields are so low and slow - especially as you have to destroy the harvest to get more seeds - that I've ended up buying guano, and if you're doing that you're already investing a couple of hundred currants for a single sprig, so that's certainly part of what you're seeing this week; when there's no rush, guano won't be necessary, or people will go get their own which sure doesn't 'cost' the current auction prices either.  
      
    Posted 12 months ago by oscarette Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I'm sure they're finding suckers willing to pay that

    For 'suckers', I prefer to think 'players who mine sparkly for eight hours a day and are rolling in currants.' When you have a group of players with large supplies of cash who now have something other than cubimal boxes to buy, then you'll get that kind of market distortion.

    I decided to go with a bog house on reset because a) bog regions weren't getting any love when everyone wanted a 50k in Alakol and environs; b) fireflies and barnacles FTW; c) the egg quest becomes very very simple. The herb bubble will burst eventually, but it'll leave a group of bog house owners with a bunch of spare currants that can presumably be spent on things to benefit residents of other regions as the game grows.

    Dr Hackenbush is right about the relative pricing right now. Seeds make herbs, herbs make seeds, but some seeds produce more herbs and some herbs produce more seeds, so it makes sense for the pricing to be higher on those items that most efficiently allow players to build up their supply independently, and not be reliant upon the AH in future.

    I do think I have a problem with the basic idea that one's home/private resources should "turn a profit" at all ... but that may just be a matter of play style. To each their own.

    Perhaps a better way to think about it is that there are elements of gameplay that are less appealing to some players than others, but those elements can be bypassed or offset with cash. If you enjoy mining, then you can buy high-value food instead of cooking it; if you like cooking, then you can buy shrine powder for donations instead of mining, etc. One's choice of house can contribute to this, but I like the idea of it requiring some compromises -- one reason why I don't want custom homes enabling every in-home capability.
    Posted 12 months ago by Holgate Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Great conversation!  I love the free market and it is something that can be entertaining to watch.  You ultimately have to keep a long perspective on this instead of a short one.  Short = OMG, the herbs are awesome!  Crops suck!  Long = houses are going to eventually be redesigned and I would bet you will be able to choose what you want to grow.  As Cosma teaches, "there is balance in all things even pigs."  Or, uh, something like that!
    Posted 12 months ago by Rusty McDusty Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Free market, indeed.  I agree that the high prices will not last.  While more glitchs see it as a money-making venture and grow more herbs, more complete their quests and no longer need/want them.  Soon purple flowers will be like hooch on the auctions.  Many players are awash in currants and resources, and so the prices aren't that big of deal.

    @Lord Bacon-o:  You just keep rooting for those plain crystals!  And like the Beanie Baby hoarders, one day you can say "I told you so!" </sarcasm>
    Posted 12 months ago by Shootsin Latters Subscriber! | Permalink
  • If anybody is interested, I recently started a group called the Home Sharing Association, with the goal of helping people with bog houses connect with those with crop gardens and set up some sort of arrangement for garden sharing (or sharing of other resources). If you're interested, please join!
    Posted 12 months ago by WarrenPeace Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Nice thought WarrenPeace, however I not very trusting with unknown players... group or not... to just let into my place. I share no keys with anyone due to the fear of having things I worked hard for missing.
    Posted 12 months ago by Casombra Amberrose Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I still contend that people who thought herbs were useless before the new skills simply didn't use them frequently enough to see how useful they could be. I ran everywhere with hairballs, gandlevery was fantastic for mining in AB/NN, rubeweed DID increase drops, despite what many naysayers said.

    Anyway, this bubble WILL burst, and herbs will just become one more slightly-more-expensive-than-other-collectibles item. Bog houses were not the insane profit-generators that houses like the 50K modern homes were, and now that the advantage has temporarily shifted, people are upset.

    ETA: I forgot to supply an anecdote: I've tried to undercut the other herb sellers by a bit to try and ease the insanity on the price gouging, because even as much as I would like to turn a profit on these, some of the prices are just way too much. What happened when I did this? The same people I undercut purchased my herbs, then put them right back on auction for the same prices.
    Posted 12 months ago by Zinfidel Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I'm one of those suckers who spent +6000 on Rubeweed. I wanted to finish the make all the tinctures quest. And, honestly, currants are not hard to come by at all. I live in Rasana and didn't feel like waiting around in the community herb gardens and dealing with the bullshit drama that's been going on there lately. So, I hit the auction house made my tinctures and now I'm on my merry way. 
    Posted 12 months ago by Papa Legba Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Zinfidel: That's a "market correction", but it only works if the market truly supports the higher price, if it doesn't then the person buying your herbs ends up with a bunch of expensive herbs that will eventually sell at a loss.

    As of an hour ago Gandlevery could still be sold for $500.. so with current offerings for $360 I think there is easy currants to be made here for the trade-oriented Glitch ;-)

    Dr. Z.
    Posted 12 months ago by Zogje Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Thanks for the snippet of info, Dr. Z. :)
    Posted 12 months ago by Zinfidel Subscriber! | Permalink
  • zinfidel, if you want to collapse a market on an item you think is overpriced, you have to lower the price at small increments and steadily, over time.

    you sell at a SLIGHTLY lower price than the overpriced goods and you let the overseller (hereinafter referred to as "the mark") buy your cheaper product and try to resell higher.

    then you lower your price a little and the mark buys again. it has to be at a high enough price that the mark is making a significant investment for the return, and you have to have a large supply of the item and a lot of time on your hands.

    you go through a lot of rounds of this, and then you start cushioning your lower price with one or two items priced below THAT, which only serves to guarantee that the mark NEVER gets to sell the overpriced goods s/he's been collecting.  you do this around the clock until the mark's auctions all expire and s/he is forced to put up huge lots for sake at the newer, much cheaper prices, flooding the market with items that now are price corrected.

    in many cases this correction will be permanent.

    i hope i have helped you.
    Posted 12 months ago by flask Subscriber! | Permalink
  • It's weird because in every MMO I play that has this feature, I usually like playing the auction game.  However, in this one with its tool vendors that will pay 80% of an item's value and competing prices way under item value, it's not really worth the effort and I find myself vendoring instead of auctioning to make currants.

    But this sudden surge in herb popularity has been great and I've been raking it in the past few days turning my mountain of stockpiled herbs into a mountain of currants.
    Posted 12 months ago by Warrender Subscriber! | Permalink
  • There should be many, many more items with limited supply.

    Suddenly the game is fun, and gives you real choices: Do the planting, harvesting and tincturing yourself, or just buy the herbs/tinctures? Great. I want more of that.

    It was absolutely depressing how market prices were falling ridiculously low in almost all other categories. Wherever you look, there's been somebody who was so desperate to get rid of their stuff, that they threw items on the market for less than what vendors would pay. Not realizing that there are quite a lot of people in this game who would be very happy and willing to pay a bit more, just so that they can get the stuff NOW instead of finding the next appropriate vendor.

    Money is very, very easy to generate in this game. You don't even need the market. You just need a pick, some sparkly rock or a meat collector. Or musicblocks, or, or, or. And I am very, very happy to spend that money on things that I need.

    So why are there always people who seem to be on some kind of self imposed crusade to "break the cartell" or "lower the prices" and thereby destroying the fun for vendors and buyers alike?
    Posted 12 months ago by Louis Louisson Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I'm not sure that would work because people who use those scripts to buy stuff automatically off auctions would profit and resell at a higher cost.

    Possible solutions:
    Posting in forums about herb sales at a lower cost may work out better if you want to force lower prices...no sales on auctions = dropped prices.
    Maybe form a group people can join to find out about lower prices and sales ?

    Personally I've been planting herbs on a very small scale for myself and I'm waiting for this craze to be over.
    Posted 12 months ago by ◘ ▪ Leï.Leï ▪ ◘ Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Perhaps "breaking the cartel" is their way to have fun. Which might be better to think of as having fun, not something unpleasant that is self imposed.  Seems like it could be fun to me.  Don't we all heve the freedom to determine our own goals?
    Posted 12 months ago by Parrow Gnolle Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I, for one, welcome our new bog overlords.  Muahahaha

    Just kidding, mostly.  For a very long time I wondered what the point of having a bog house was because herbs seemed to be almost valueless on Auction.  It seemed imbalanced - the amount of work a crop-house owning Glitch would need to do to buy some herbs vs. the amount of work a herb-house owning Glitch would need to do to buy some vegetables.  It's nice to see the scales tip a little, even if it means a wonky adjustment period.

    For what it's worth, when I checked last night, Tinctures and Potions were generally (with a few notable exceptions where people were taking advantage of a small market) selling for far less than it costs to buy the ingredients to make said Tincture or Potion.  So, if you're not trying to finish the quest for MAKING the potions, I'd just skip the raw herbs and go for the final product at the moment.

    The prices are coming down, though.  Last weekend when I logged in, a single sprig of Rookswort was going for 1800c, and today it's only 500ish.  If you're after the Essence of Rookswort, rather than spending 2500c on the herbs to make it, you can just buy it for 1400ish, which is much more reasonable and closer to the street value.
    Posted 12 months ago by Wintera Woodswitch Subscriber! | Permalink
  • I second "Try growing some herbs for a while". I've made quite a handsome profit as is. :)
    Posted 12 months ago by Jigsaw Forte Subscriber! | Permalink