Originally Posted by
Analytical
Aight, I will attempt to add on what manipulation means as well. If you think it's too long or are lazy to read, feel free to skip it. Not forcing anyone to understand it better. That said, don't shy away from correcting me if you think I made a mistake.
It seems to me some if not many are still confused with the act of hoarding an item regardless of its quantity, versus manipulating the market supply and demand of an item.
Manipulation means you are trying to control or in another words, bold enough to SET the market price for AN item in the SHORT TERM, by artificially creating the market demand (fake offers) and market supply(taking down the whole auction 24/7). Usually the latter seems easier to most richie. And how can one do that? Well you need to make sure no one other than you and a few others agreed with a standard price that's being set, hence effectively manipulating the price of that particular item at you or your monopoly group's will. Chances are, if you see a sudden, often RIDICULOUS rise in price of an item of any kind in a relatively SHORT span of time, its likely and suspicious enough for the result of market manipulations.
That said, is it easy to control the entire market of one relatively expensive item? Big no. How many people in AL can do that if the market has for example over 1,000,000 supply of the same item, say each one of it cost 1m? I would say only a pathetic few. And bear in mind this is just one item, let alone to control most if not all of the items with different price range in AL. Which is why, when market manipulations happen, its usually not just one person (in this case the person that has been exposed here), but very likely a collective few elite players that's doing it to a few items they deem to be profitable.
On the other hand, Hoarding implies that you are going to "hoard" literally the meaning of the word itself is to KEEP for the LONG TERM and not selling it until new market supply catches up with new market demand to determine a new accepted market price range. There's no manipulation involved here. You simply created a LARGE VOLUME (not depleting all supply in market, like in the case of manipulation would require) OF DEMAND for an item in the short term that is certainly gonna affect the new market price because now the supply seems to be temporarily in shortage before supply from other unaware sellers slowly RECOVER again to bring its price down to its previous price range or a slightly higher price range.
An example of how hoarding affect market price is the last day of eggsaviers, many decided that hey its the last day of the event, I should hoard some eggs! There was a sudden acceptable spike in prices of eggs and then slowly it dropped back as people who have been holding their eggs in their stash release it to the market.
To reiterate, unlike manipulation, hoarding does not attempt to take down ALL supply in the market (even though the buyer may think so when the auction is empty because of him), so you are less likely to create a ridiculous spike in prices in the short term, although price will certainly and likely increase rather significantly.
In short, if you aren't wealthy enough to take down all supply in the market ("market" here is not just the auction alone, it includes all sellers, can be found in towns/people u know of) or collaborate with others to do so, there's no way A SINGLE INDIVIDUAL(or a few elite individuals on an agreement) can SET the market price for an item. Which is to say, you can't be involved with price or market manipulations IF AND ONLY IF you can't succeed in SETTING the new market price base on your command alone.
That's my go at it, hope it helps. Feel free to add your input.
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