7-14 day lock out on relisting GTN items

Then don't BUY the mats, but aquire them yourself. Effectively, lowering your productioncosts. It's not that difficult really. Simply PLAY THE GAME. You're complaining about CRAFTERS actually PLAYING THE GAME and aquiring those mats for FREE, who then undercut you simply because they can, since it doesn't cost them anything to produce them in the first place. These crafters earned back their investment into skilling up their craft several times over within a week. But go ahead, keep buying those stabs. Just don't complain about those who get them for free. Don't complain about guilds setting up complete productionlines to gear up their members free of charge either. Those guilds UNDERSTAND how things work, and manage to make the game very managable. Greedy GTN-flippers don't, and never will understand that. They only think about themselves.

In fact I know exactly what price fixing is. Before you try to win your argument purely on pedantic discourse, you should think a little more in-depth about what is being described here. I don't have much of a problem with people now and then snatching up a stack of a resource and immediately reselling it, when they've found it at the far lower price. The problem arrives when Flippers are also permanent sellers; when these regular sellers of an item choose a permanent (very inflated) price point for something, and then routinely and indefinitely suffocate any competitive pricing by vulturing the market every day and removing all lower-priced same items. The larger portion of their supply that they're selling will obviously originate from OTHER sellers. For something like resources it's probably particularly easy to carry out this scheme, since resources stack in the inventory and thus can be stored in very large quantities quite easily. This results in the following dynamic:

• consistent vulturing sellers choose their price point (let's say 1000 credits/unit) and always have some resources posted at that price
• other sellers regularly place items for sale at a lower sale price (let's say 500 credits/unit, still quite profitable)
• vulturing sellers continually buy up any competitive supply of the resource that is lower than 1000 credits/unit
• all buyers end up paying TWICE what they should be, because of these vulture practices
• other casual sellers arrive on the GTN and choose whatever seems like the "going rate" for their resource, they price very close to 1000 credits/unit

This scheme turns immediately into a very obvious form of Price Fixing, and it would have perfect success for any resource for which supply does not significantly outstrip demand. Casual sellers, who believe they should price close to whatever the current listed price is on the GTN to maximize their profits, end up the unwitting participants in a vulturistic monopolistic price fixing scheme. The scheme is designed to prevent any form of price-point competition, and you are shamelessly and directly advocating that there's no problem with such a scheme. In the real world such people are fined extremly large amounts of money and placed in jail cells. In SWToR there aren't goverment bodies solely dedicated to prosecuting anti-competitive practices, so it goes unchecked, and the consumer ends up paying way too much for much of what they purchase. The wealth-building Empire gluttons and their avid and shameless supporters continue to avoid any ethical constraints and reap the profits of market vulturing.

Keep in mind that the GTN market dynamic that occurs, that can keep prices at grossly inflated levels, is not particularly possible in the real world. In the real world, suppliers of goods have practically inexhaustible supplies because of their supply chain. In SWToR and with the way the GTN functions as a central funneling point for all sales & purchases, a very sick dynamic of anti-competition and unethical egregious price inflation can be induced more or less immediately, all that's needed is seed credits to make it happen, and credit reserves to keep it going.

The scheme could also be called an engineered form of Price Gouging, involving an intentionally induced Supply Shock. In the real world, anything that is anti-competitive is considered illegal; and anything anti-competitive in SWToR is obviously unethical and should have consequences. How about anyone caught being anti-competitive on the GTN is given a 1-week GTN suspension? And at the point of suspension, all pending sales are immediately timed-out and given a 2-week hold time to prevent near-term re-listing. Obviously they would also need to look into whether groups of people or guilds are carrying out unethical GTN practices, and take the appropriate steps to prevent this sort of predation against GTN buyers.

The strategy of GTN vultures is not to protect their market, it's to prevent competition. Lazy, cowardly, and lacking ethical standards. I know these people... they're the How-Much-You-Got guy. Honestly, if you could hear the ethical standards you're echoing, instead with an objective (and ethical) point of view, you would understand exactly why people like the Original Poster and I would like there to be re-listing constraints in the first place.

Say yes to resources becoming Bound To Legacy upon purchase or trade. It would solve this problem without requiring monitoring effort.

No, not difficult at all, but very-very time consuming. It will eat up ALL your play time. Do you know how many mats I burned through just to Reverse Engineer one mid-level purple blaster to the final tier of a specific variant? Something like 5 full stacks. Now, I may be willing to do that (gather my own mats) for the odd item I intend to use on my own character, but for broad-based crafting? No way!

Have we wandered far enough off-topic now?

Do you know how many tfb runs you have to do to win rolls on enough molecular stabilizers to make just 1 hilt?

No thank you. You are now talking out of an orifice other than your mouth because you do not grasp what I am telling you and clearly have no knowledge of the ingame economy!

FYI: I am the GM of one of "those" guilds you seem to think you know something about. Gathering stabs is neither easy nor quick in any number of materials that matters...so how about you quit talking like you know about something that you're oblivious about and let the KNOWLEDGEABLE people have a PRODUCTIVE conversation?

-EDIT- Based only on your argument for undercutters...from your perspective...you have no right to complain about flippers if you are telling me I have no right to complain about gatherers underselling items. So which is it? Are you against market manipulation or for it? If it's ok to undercut crafters then it's completely ok to buy up undercutters items and relist. If it's not ok to buy up undercutters and relist...then it's not ok to undercut crafters. Be consistent! PRICES WILL NEVER GO DOWN LOWER THAN THEY ARE...there is no deflation...and if that's what you want nothing will change that.

I love these "ethical" arguments. Listen, I can kill you in game. I can find you in the game on some world and put a lightsaber through your face. In fact, it's encouraged for me to do such a thing. It's encouraged for me to run around killing all sorts of things. So, tell me again how its unethical to buy things and resell them for fake money...

Obviously killing someone isn't something I would ever consider doing in real life, the point is that trying to draw parallels between the real world and SWTOR will result in a pretty spectacular failure.

I'm not pretending I'm anything. I'm out to make money in the game. And, sure, people can dump their goods on the market. I can thereafter, buy them and relist them for a profit. You're the one with the problem.

It's your incredibly faulty understanding of buyer behavior that leads you to that. As Grand Moff Kilran would say, "Lying or incompetent...no matter."

Please describe the mechanism by which prices raise indefinitely. Some prices have been stable for six months or more. I have leveled alts sure in the knowledge that they can make a certain income on a particular good.

No you really don't. Go read Section 1 of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

You can't be an 'unwitting' participant in a price fixing scheme. There is no definition of that term that any court has found that says you can. You can always scan what prices your competitors charge and decide to match them or sell at a discount or even a premium. This happens all the time in any developed economy.

Because it isn't designed to "prevent any form of price-point competition" nor can it. MMORPG goods are infinite. In the normal case, suppliers can freely enter the market with very low barriers to entry. For example, if you're selling Polyplast a Scavenging component. You can get a character able to harvest and send out missions for that inside of an hour or two. So if someone tries to strangle competition in Polyplast and say sell it for 1500 a unit, there will be seller who will undercut him. But the smart competition will undercut him just enough to get the sale, but not by so much that it is profitable to buy up your stock and relist it.

No they wouldn't. Again, you simply do not understand what price-fixing and other restraints on trade look like.

And the game is designed that way purposefully. No MMORPG economy has ever been designed to encourage a perfectly efficient market. Nor should they be.

It's the opposite in fact. In real life, goods are finite, although in some markets there are enough participants to make it effectively impossible for one participant to control all supply. An example would be milk. In a MMORPG, there are next to no barriers to entry and resources are limited only by the effort of players.

lol. Good luck with that. That idea is so absurd it doesn't warrant retort.

who says it's not "legal" it happens all the time in the real world, we just call them gas and oil companies, and insurance companies. Even in the retail sector you may not know there is something called MAP pricing (minimum advertised pricing) which is designed to allow everyone involved to make a living. Sometimes it's used to "protect" the integrity of a brand name but it's a part of the real world

The fact of the matter is that like in art the value of something is in the eye of the beholder. Just like if i think that product x is being sold for less than i think it's worth. ie a crafting matt that may cost you 6 or seven crafting missions at 2000 creds a pop to get a 4 stack is selling for 1000 creds you better believe i'm going to buy it and try to resell it at a price i feel its worth. And if i'm succesful at reselling it at that price then i was right, but i also take the risk of it sitting on the GTN forever and not selling. Why is that wrong? if they will not or cannot take the responsibility to research the price of an item why should i be 'punished' for seizing an opportunity?

you get 2 orange moddable chest peice items from 2 seperate boxes, with the same stats, but one sells on gtn for 3x more than the other one just because it's more sought after because of the colour scheme or shape. should those 2 items have to sell for exactly the same price?

Didn't you do just that?

There are no ethics in regards to a pure capatialism system ( such as you have in MMORPGs). It's anything goes by it's very nature. That line of pejoritive ad homenims is nothing more than a strawman. To be quite honest, if it's too much for you then don't play the market. This is effectively the ONLY mini-game ( other than datacrons) within SWTOR. Learn to play the mini-game. Markets in games have been this way since there have been MMORPGs .... it works fine in other games it will work fine here. If you don't like the market in SWTOR, do yourself a favor and never play EVE.

Again, the unethical dynamic that can result on the GTN is specific to the GTN. Because the seller is more or less anonymous (can you list the last 10 people you purchased items from?), all that exists as far as supply is whatever sales are currently offered on the GTN. If vulturistic sellers are constantly snatching up items sold at less than their inflated price point, then the price is going to remain unnaturally high (and the sinister grin on the faces of those people using and/or supporting this unethical scheme is quite noticed, believe me). There's no such thing as permanently advertising on the GTN an item at a certain price (as it is in the real world), there are only short-term 2-day sales that disappear if not sold and remain off-market even though they're technically still for sale. So GTN dynamics have very little resemblance to the real world of advertising, selling, and order-fulfillment. The GTN dynamics make it easy for price-competitive sellers to be continually bought out of their supply, as part of the scheme of preventing any noticeable price competition.

If you're uncomfortable calling it a 1-person price-fixing scheme with subsequent unwitting participants, then go with the other terminology I offered to you (which you obviously ignored or would have proper perspective on what I've described to you)... an engineered form of Price Gouging, in which there exists an intentionally induced Supply Shock... and the subsequent permanent price-point expectation of many other sellers who can't know what wrongful scheme is being implemented.

Here, for your consideration:
(1) Price Fixing: the establishing of prices at a determined level, either by a government or by mutual consent among producers or sellers of a commodity

(2) Profiteering: the act of making a profit by methods considered unethical

(3) Price Gouging: a situation in which a seller prices goods or commodities much higher than is considered reasonable or fair. This rapid increase in prices occurs after a demand or supply shock.

You've failed to echo even a single ethical concern. At this point you appear to consider all 3 of the activities listed above to be perfectly fine on the GTN. Focus yourself on (2): Profiteering. And reread all previous posts in this thread, then respond and tell me if you think there are any sellers on the GTN on any SWToR servers that are up to anything unethical...

Not sure what else I can tell you, to convince you that I already know of what I speak. Your fruitless attempts to be technical and correct have only resulted in you seeming like you want to avoid speaking directly to the ethical concerns that are being presented.

And I'll just remind you one last time, so you don't remain confused... the main thing that needs to be thwarted on the GTN, so that buyers won't be eternally abused in this game with unnatural and unethical egregiously-inflated prices, is the scheme in which sellers or guilds of sellers choose an inflated price point for an item, sell consistently at that price point, and then daily or semi-daily choke off all market competition by buying and reselling all lower-priced items that are posted by other sellers. Anyone already using this scheme, are perfectly aware that they are this group of profiteering people. This group of people are not savvy, and they are not clever. They're just willing to be unethical. They are not establishing a market, and they are not setting fair prices. I'm sure all of them can think back to the early days of their MMO trade activities... and when the frustration of price competition became more than they wanted to deal with, they hatched their scheme to stifle price competition in order to sequester a permanently inflated price that got them the level of profit they think they deserve. Once it reaches a formal level of collusion or scheming to force price points to be exclusively at their inflated levels, it's become something that should be given GTN suspensions and whatever other corrective measures needed to ensure that the unethical GTN activity is prevented.

It really is amazing to me, how many people are willing to advocate that they should be allowed to do anything they want, to prevent competitive pricing from driving down prices on the items they also sell on the market. It almost makes me laugh, alas I cannot because I know how serious the lack of ethics is and what it suggests about what other sorts of activities such people would be willing to become involved in. Has anyone heard of antitrust law?

Say yes to resources becoming Bound To Legacy upon sale or trade. Re-sale timers for non-resource items are also a fantastic idea, since they would likely reduce the amount of price fixing being perpetrated for non-resource items on the GTN.