Market Bug / Exploitation

[Foltest]

I understand Sheepy's concept of Laissez Faire markets and I appreciate that we effectively control market prices.

 

 

You can't sell more food than what you have on-hand at that point in time in a single trade.

 

 

 

You can sell more food than what you have on-hand in multiple trades, set to different prices.

 

 

 

 

I thought this was a fairly straightforward "hey it's sort of simple to go around your code / rule" thing. I'm not suggesting that you have to store resources in each trade offer until it's filled or canceled - just use the same code that prevents you from offering more food in a single trade than what you possess to block multiple trades that add up to more than you have.

 

 

 

I don't want to take away from the free market and I don't suggest removing multiple offers (as long as you have resources) - I just literally watched someone abuse this "exploit" to crash the food market and now prices have normalized at the price they unfairly set.

[seabasstion]

its not going to crash the market it will just drive the price to equilibrium faster if it even does anything at all. the sales you price undervalued to the market's worth will be bought (or in the case you are describing, cancelled, as you dont have it) for people looking to trade resources. for people that actually need it, they will choose the cheapest price, so they will click yours. oh you dont have it? it will be cancelled and they will do it again. repeat until they get the resources they require.

 

i suppose sheepy could do a simple check comparing current inventory against market offer + current market offers but i think this would be self policed pretty well with the cancelling feature but i really think it would be fixing a problem that doesn't really exist. for example: lets look at screencaps showing this 'crash'

 

first of all abu you didn't 'profit' 200 bauxite along the way. look at the trades you executed on the 10th when you 'crashed' the market. there were only 6 for bauxite

 

trade 1) bought 200 for 2039 each (-407,800)

trade 2) bought 30 for 2020 each (-60,600) 

trade 3) sold 20 for 2018 each (+40,360)

trade 4) sold 20 for 2012 each (+40,240)

trade 5) sold 20 for 2040 each (+40,800)

trade 6) sold 20 for 2090 each (+41,800)

 

net sales: +150 bauxite, -$305,200 (2034.67 ea)

 

so really all you did was in a roundabout way buy 150 bauxite for 2034.67 each with this 'crash' that you did. your cost average for the 230 that you bought was $2036.52. this is savings of $1.85 per unit that you ended up buying. 

 

this means all the effort you did to create this 'crash' earned you a grand total of $277.5 ; or about 1/8th of the value of a single bauxite.

 

 

 

now this doesn't mean it couldn't work. yes, someone could come in with 5 total bauxite, stack trade offers to make it look like there was an offer for 100 selling bauxite at 2000, 1900, 1800, 1700, 1600, 1500 in the hopes that someone comes in and tries to undercut in the 14xx range with a relatively big volume, but even at 1000 profit per unit it would take a large offer to make it worthwhile to do this exercise in my opinion as the failure rate of this scheme would far exceed the success rate and i wouldn't want to spend all day submitting offers in small increments under the highest buy offer in the hopes that someone would undercut me with a price that i may not even see as someone else could swoop in and profit from. that just seems like a very frustrating exercise

 

 

so yes i would consider this an 'exploit' but i really dont think it is very exploitable and would be about as successful as going around to young kids offering to trade a big nickel for their little dimes. i think the self policing would still be sufficient