LeKjart
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Posted - 2006.06.17 16:08:00 -
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The NPC market actually has gone through a few changes in the last 3 years. At first it used to modulate volume availability, but we then changed it to price variability, triggered by througput volume over a period of 24 hours. In all cases, the market was never supposed to reset during downtime. The reset bug has actually happened a couple of times during this time, but in between, people have been perfectly able to make profit from the NPC market.
This last bug that we hotfixed now, was more difficult to trace as the market actually partially reset itself during downtimes, in an apparently random fashion. We finally found the culprit, and now the market is actually behaving as it is supposed to. Obviously players that have been raised to the faulty behaviour will see a big change.
I would though like to point out that the amount of profit available from the NPC market remains statistically the same for any 24 hours period, it is just much more difficult for a single player to get large chunks of it, like was happening before the fix. With some organization and careful monitoring of the market, you should be able to do quite well.
There might be some types that were never practical to trade that suddenly became quite profitable with the faulty market reset, and we might look into increasing profitability for those types as things slowly go back to normal.
Regarding the slow price reset, I believe this is due to the fact that at the time of the hotfix, the market was in an extreme price position (throughput largely reached for all orders). This should relax back to a normal (fluctuating) equilibrium within 5 days or so. There is an assymetry in how fast prices react, that was made to model real life economical behavior (e.g. gas stations are quick to raise prices, but slower to bring them down again).
The whole trading system is not perfect, but it has shown itself to work for those that take the time to master it. It was never designed to be an easy ISK dispenser. We understand that new players that did not know better feel nerfed, but believe us when we say that the situtation was not sustainable from an overall balance point of view.
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