@John-Paul-RAGE said in Price fixing?:
Hoarding items to resale after their limited period is over is the only reason that so much AC gets bought.
If you mean hoarding from the market, I disagree.
Take an item that would sell for 100k if it has an uncertain future. Presently when it reaches a critical mass of availability, someone with infinite money from their headstart is going to pick them all up and jack the price up to 20 million. If it was known that it would reappear in a future or re-run AC scratch (as many sets are in JP by the way) but no sooner than, say, within 12 months(1) of its last appearance, those 100k listings would still go but to players who actually want them instead because the upsellers would consider them less exploitable. The reasonably-priced supply will still be taken up, you just eliminate the phenomenon of forcing poor players to become even poorer to make the rich players richer.
(1) By the way I say 12 months because that's apparently the upper bound of time for consoles (or more recently PC storefronts) to get all the benefit they feel they need from exclusivity deals for games and content packs, and typically the time that pre-order or crowdfunding-reward exclusivity lasts too. But some of them do less (Borderlands 3 on the Epic store for instance being 6 months).
If you mean fewer people would buy AC tickets because the items they get from them sell for less meseta, again, no? AC scratch tickets don't insert meseta into the economy, so the amount of disposable income players have remains the same. All delayed re-releases would do is shift where that money goes, i.e. less of it going directly into the pockets of greedy upsellers and more of it circulating in a generally more healthy way. And considering the whole Star Gem accumulation mechanic for outerwear and outfits, there is definitely a natural cause of prices of all AC content to rise after the set concludes. Just not to unreasonable extents with the benefit going to upsellers rather than people who bought the AC in the first place.
(Also, I think players being priced out of items they want by greedy upsellers will make them dissatisfied and contribute to some of them quitting the game, which means the present situation sees less meseta being generated and the average AC pull selling for less, although I expect this will be quite a minor effect).
@Ship04 said in Price fixing?:
You can't fix the op's issue damage is already done.
Its not items needing to be recycled.
Its the surplus of gold that just bought up all the cosmetics day 1.
It's both, really. To answer the OP's unanswered question: The cheapest 110: Dance 20 on Ship 3 is 52,500,000 meseta.
There are only four on sale in the entire ship, primarily owing to it coming from the Recruit Line AC scratch which was the first scratch set, and at the time of its introduction Ship 3 had only just been added, so not only were there the fewest players of the three ships but they were all new (the Xbox fresh start) so their cash spend was likely still prioritising the founders packs and starter upgrades like character and inventory space.
Ship 3 surely has the highest proportion of new PC players who couldn't even play the first four AC scratch sets and the first seven? FUN scratch sets. This means a greater portion of the players today couldn't generate the items in those sets, and in turn Ship 3 has the greatest exposure to an epidemic of price gouging by the pre-PC players. If everyone had been allowed to naturally do those scratch sets, the value of their items within them would be remotely natural. Which is why I believe they should be allowed to in the near future.
