We all know how items will be kept at unreasonable unbuyable high prices once the scratch rotation is over, and how this ruins the whole game economy.

So I suggest a simple yet effective fix:

-Trade period timer of 3 months.

Once 3 months pass, the item can no longer be sold. This way, people will be forced to get rid of them before they can no longer be sold, keeping the prices at reasonable levels.

I know I know, you'll say "But then we won't be able to acquire it after 3 months if there's not a scratch revival". It's not like you'll be able to buy it anyways at a cost of 140000000 meseta. Or at least most people won't. So it's pretty much the very same scenario regarding avaibility.

Nah, just have cosmetics bind to you on purchase. This effectively prevents multi billionaires from artificially inflating cosmetic prices. Has some problems but it would be the lesser evil.

The suggested solution if you want something old is to get something new and wait for it to reach similarly beyond-money value, then try to make a direct trade.

I'm not sure how well that solution will really work, because odds are anyone who was able to get the item you want was also able to get anything you could get that they want. So how are you supposed to be able to appeal to them?

It is probably worth mentioning that market hoarding of anything post-PC will be less effective, because PC players were at least able to get it themselves. Some early items they might not have been able to afford to get in on the subsequent rising so I expect desired items like the Umbrella Dance, Hylow Circle, Wagging Tail and so on will still be largely controlled by Xbox One players, but over time PC players will be able to play that game too.

Market hoarding of pre-PC content has just been made astronomically more profitable by denying PC players the chance to either generate or own them, basically giving Xbox One players a free captive market to exploit. As always I don't blame them for taking the opportunity - and boy have they - but I do blame Sega for being unfair enough to give it to them in the first place.

Overall I don't really oppose the model. I just object to gating the first 2-3 months of content that uses it. I think in the coming months it won't look as bad as it does right now.

Market hoarding is a business strategy, why restrict it. Please stop complaining about things that happen when it's fair game.

We could have BDOs system:)

Eh... why? Making things completely unobtainable.

What's wrong with things getting priced high due to low supply. If it is priced prohibitory high, it wont sell and just waste the seller's sell item slot anyways - no need to make it untradeable

@Novaline said in Solution to market hoarding:

Market hoarding is a business strategy, why restrict it. Please stop complaining about things that happen when it's fair game.

I never mentioned a restriction. It's a feature to make free market more free. In real life, you can just hoard something and let it's price inflate indefinitely, because that THING will:

• Expire
• Become obsolete
• Be replaced Right now, the market is more like a communist utopia in which only a certain group may play it.

Market is fine, been functioning perfectly fine as is. If it's not broke, don't fix it. You're going to anger more players with a change like this than "fix" anything. If it was really a problem, this would of been solved 8 years ago.

@Novaline said in Solution to market hoarding:

Market is fine, been functioning perfectly fine as is. If it's not broke, don't fix it. You're going to anger more players with a change like this than "fix" anything. If it was really a problem, this would of been solved 8 years ago.

It's a problem in NA, not in JP.

NA is currently being played globally, yet there's no legal or safe way to obtain AC outside NA. Whole world demands AC items and the supply is only NA. In JP, it's not the case.

@HarmlessSyan said in Solution to market hoarding:

What's wrong with things getting priced high due to low supply. If it is priced prohibitory high, it wont sell

Anyone reading this might first mentally react "Oh yes it will!" If so, that should allow you to reflect on two points:

1. If it really does, the price was appropriate after all.

2. HarmlessSyan is actually right. I've been monitoring the market for various items of various ages and can share a few stories already. Read on...

About a week ago, someone on Ship 3 tried to hoard the Chinese Theme room remodeling since it was a regular seller. They bought up a few dozen of them and put them all up in a block for 4 million. The trouble was a bunch of other people had them, and seeing it valued that much, they decided to start undercutting. Between then and now, the price has returned to what it was before that attempt and Ship 3 is the only ship where its price is lower as of this post than it was this time 3 days ago.

To add a touch of comedy, it's also still available from FUN scratches. So because it was at one point worth that much it probably encouraged more people to use FUN scratches and increase the supply further. Ultimately that would-be upseller will be out of pocket for some time, and it'll probably take months beyond the supply drying up before the price rises substantially.

This touches on why I don't think it'll look so bad in the future. Thanks to the profiteering we've seen so far, PC players have been given the 101 very early on: If you want something that's available, get it now. We'll be seeing some limited content cease distribution tomorrow. I expect many players both Xbox and PC will be trying to either avoid or get in on the profiteering chance this presents since they've seen how effective it's been up to this point. What this means is:

1. There are going to be more players who tried to hoard various supplies, meaning supply is high.

2. There are going to be fewer players who need them because they got them while they could, knowing profiteering would happen. Note this is going to happen way more because this time around PC players can get the items from their original distribution too.

This combination of higher supply and lower demand will likely mean sellers might end up a little disappointed they can't jack up prices as much as they've seen others do in the past. It'll still be profitable, but not disgustingly so anymore. To the would-be profiteers, the opportunity to exploit others' inability to receive certain items naturally may become a lost utopia.

@Novaline said in Solution to market hoarding:

If it was really a problem, this would of been solved 8 years ago.

8 years ago they didn't let Tokyo play the game for 3-4 months before everyone else. I agree with you that it's not really a problem overall, so I am saying this to explain why there is a damaging impact on the NA/Global situation exclusively owing to how our servers launched, and since some players have only seen that impact they worry this is how things will always be.

@Miraglyth Making the comparison with FUN isn't accurate at all. FUN is an almost unlimited resource. AC is not.

@Shirokami07 said in Solution to market hoarding:

@Miraglyth Making the comparison with FUN isn't accurate at all. FUN is an almost unlimited resource. AC is not.

Nobody else mentioned AC and it really doesn't matter. As soon as their original distribution ends, it doesn't make any difference whether an item came from FUN, AC or even a campaign for free.

What matters is how many of an item is on the market (and how many are being kept for future market purpose) and how much people want them. Some of the oldest AC scratches' unwanted items are still way cheaper than the 7-15 million valued emote you got for the high price of joining an alliance in April.

This topic's complaint is based on items getting prohibitively expensive after their natural generation ended. It mentioned scratches twice in ways you could easily substitute for other distributions, neither of which said AC.

@Shirokami07 said in Solution to market hoarding:

@Novaline said in Solution to market hoarding:

Market is fine, been functioning perfectly fine as is. If it's not broke, don't fix it. You're going to anger more players with a change like this than "fix" anything. If it was really a problem, this would of been solved 8 years ago.

It's a problem in NA, not in JP.

NA is currently being played globally, yet there's no legal or safe way to obtain AC outside NA. Whole world demands AC items and the supply is only NA. In JP, it's not the case.

??

I'd argue the issue is much worse in JP since there are items that haven't been revived in years. This sounds like you want special treatment or some shit, please stop. The server isn't even a year old and you guys are complaining about things that are the least of NA's issues. We haven't even had a revival scratch yet. Chill.

It's not really something to be defending though.

It's forced artificial scarcity designed to hopefully get people to spend on scratches to make meseta to buy inflated cosmetics (which are hoarded by people -- let's be real here, things out of rotation don't go higher naturally), or hopefully to get people to scratch now before their favourite thing is gone.

It's a thing on the Japanese servers, and it's still a bad design decision there too.

I'm of the opinion that temporary scratches as a whole are just a really shitty monetisation method, but hey, uhh, "it's free lol, stop complaining, they need to pay the bills somehow, why don't you appreciate the fact that the game is FREE?"

To the one who said it wasnt a problem in JP: Tell that to the people selling items for 180mil and up. Let's also add in to get AC in JP you have to use a sketchy app to purchase ac just like ya'll do now to obtain it through the NA server. There's no issue with how the market system is now and hasn't been for years. Do i think things we obtained in past scratches be available again for the PC players who weren't on xbox OB? Sure, use that 4th slot for AC scratches that we used on support items for a "Previous Item" scratch. But it'll also be another way for us to hoard it again till we can resell them for money. This is the beast of any mmo with a player ran economy but at least it's only cosmetics. I don't agree with a ridiculous time limit on items when we're paying real money for said items so whoever thought that was a good idea, go sit in a corner. Other than that, just be patient for re-releases and don't buy the items if you dont want to pay the price. No one is forcing you to buy cosmetics to play the game. There's no P2W in this game and cosmetics definitely aren't going to make you kill a monster any better.