So Ectos Just Hit 11k!

You are confused about a number of things. First, despite your assumption, I did not fix prices nor have I claimed to. So the whole "ur not kewl because im richar" is both petty and irrelevant. Not that this matters much, but just to set the record clear.

Second, you posted about the wrong "rollback." I was referring to the several rollbacks on trader supply that happened in the weeks and months before that patch, NOT the game rollback you refer to (hereinafter "the patch"). This would make sense, as we were talking about supply and demand, not some hoarding incident that has no direct relationship to anything (although it was roughly contemporaneous and an indirect result of the price fixing).

As you perhaps recall, the reason the trader was out of whack was due to massive buyouts of certain goods (including ecto, dye, scrolls, and so forth) in an attempt to control the market. The first time the trader was reset was a few months or so before this update. The first several resets were "hot" resets, meaning it was reset without notice or a patch. The reset was usually only an infusion of supply. However, on at least two occasions a.net forgot to set the price at an acceptable level after the supply infusion, leaving tons of people to buy up the artificially low goods and stockpile (one of which was the rollback in your post). After these supply infusions, over time (roughly 6 weeks, but I could be off) the market was again out of whack as people continued to buy out the trader to control pricing (and it wasn't just one group -- as people saw how easy it was to do, many people started trying to choke out any good they could, including all dye colors and tons of other "mundane" goods).

The rest of your post is largely your epeen getting the best of you, so I will ignore it. For anyone still reading, suffice it to say the OP was mistaken in three things: 1) overestimating the size of the market, 2) mistaking arbitrage for fixing prices by controlling supply, and 3) underestimating the extent controlling the supply had happened in the past. Despite his protestations otherwise, you can look and judge for yourself that the "market" in GW can and has in fact been manipulated.

I'd like a nice glass of iced tea with a lemon, Please.

I'm in mate.
I say Gw should create rules to make all first letters and letters after "." capital letters. Dont you agree?

lets ignore the fact that ecto prices, before, and after the rollback, had remained pretty darn steady for the previous few months. and it was HARDLY a high number that people could benefit from. especially since ecto had gone from a higher price of a steady 8-10k in late summer 05 to early 06 and were steadily declining from 8k-pre-factions-5k during this supposed period of time that your friends in question had spiked up the ecto prices to make an unlisted profit. even when the merchant was out of ecto, the prices still remained fairly steady. sure, you saw a few dumbasses attempting to pawn them off for ridiculous amounts, but they more than likely failed to sell off any of their stock. for the most part, even when the merchant was totally devoid of ecto, they had remained in the price-range (player to player wise) they had been at previously. for the record, i'd still be interested in knowing how much you claim to have made from this scheme, and how much you were physically able to invest in it. not to mention, while its possible for a single person to clean out the merchant of a particular good, its more likely that it was due to people hoarding materials in anticipation of the factions release.
and no, the rest of the argument was not my epeen per-se. yes, i throwing wealth into the argument but only because it is actually a damn good countermand to your argument. you claim that you and yours were able to control the ecto supply; i maintain that because there are a SUBSTANTIAL amount of wealthier players, you'd be hard pressed to screw them out of money, without having a much larger financial backing.
lets assume you managed to achieve domination of the ecto supply from the middle-class (who probably overall hold the majority); effectivly giving you control of the prices, as you so claimed you did.
what do you think would happen to the tens of thousands of ecto possessed collectivly by the top 10 players alone, when they noticed that prices shot up substantially above that at which price they had obtained their ecto at?
answer; the rich players would dump their ecto onto the market in order to make their own profit, causing the prices to go back down (and the wealthy and middle class are different in 1 major aspect; the middle class can sell them off by the dozens, the wealthy can sell them off by the hundreds, or sometimes thousands) and potentially costing you millions.
now, ill be fair, it is entirely possible that you guys made money off of ecto investments, ill hardly claim this isnt possible. heck, perhaps you even managed to influence the prices for a bit, and perhaps it was you that empited out the merchant. but, assuming all of the aforementioned occured, you would still have to command a LARGE portion of the ectos in order to control the prices, even with no merchant for guidance. so, to claim a price CONTROL when there are hundreds of thousands of ecto hoarded by people who'd love to make a profit off of them, is a pretty bolsterous claim.
when all is said and done, between the old trader network, comprized of dozens of people worth tens of millions, you'd probably have to top a few hundred thousand ecto between the top 1% of wealthy players alone in order to achieve a dominance of the ecto supply. which is completly ignoring the effects of the middle class and i wont even dare to presume the top 1% command a majority of the ecto market.
this realization is why i settled for an influence, rather than a blatant attempt at a control of prices. because i had no intentions of losing half my liquid assets.
my whole point is; trader or not, in order to achieve a supply-side dominance or monopoly (at least to an extent great enough to establish the ability to control prices) you would need a VAST amount of wealth. so much so that you would have to be able to have a higher financial backing than both the very wealthy, and the middle class; and i dont even want to presume how many hundreds of millions that would require.
and then because the rich can afford to dump their ecto at a lower cost than the middle class (since a person selling 1,000 ecto at 7k will make FAR more than a person selling 100 at 7.5; and they will sell them faster, driving the price down, and forcing mr. 7.5kecto to lower his price) theres a very good chance that if you spent all that money to hike the prices up, someone else would reap the benefit from it, while taking the price back down again.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but what use is it for the top 10 players to sell their ecto? I suppose they've already maxed out their gold stock (1000k + x(100k)) for their account, so it's no use selling them for hard money. And because all trading above 100k is mostly done in ecto, I would just hold on to the ecto. The only difference will be the actual worth of the ecto, making it easier for the top 10 to buy that req 8 Crystalline, because they have to pay less ecto to the seller when ecto-prices are getting higher.

because what we do if we see prices go up, is we sell, and reinvest when the prices go back down, leaving you with more ecto than you had before.

Ok don't want to interfere in the discussion you guys are having, but I wonder how you handle the money, you can stuck a few million gold maybe, spread over a few accounts and a couple dozen characters. But when you talk about several stacks of 250 ectos, you'll need at least 3-4 accounts if not more?

i have 6 accounts.
at the time, i would normally carry about 5m gp between my accounts, and i was capable of holding just over 8m.
i seperated the ecto on my acounts fairly evenly.

You my friend are a BANK!!! Wanna loan out some money?

Ouch ... you've got more than the GDP of Cantha ...

It's dropped to 9.5k recently, probably as a result of the Sell! Sell! Sell! mentality.

i still can't figure out how come this thread hasn't been closed...its just an arguement between these two players....weird that something like this stays open but things like having the anti farm code kick in because you spent too much time doing the DOA quests (at one setting) get closed?? seems as if this isn't really and problem where as the Timeout thing is. just my 2 cents worth of offtopic sputterings.

At least they agree on one thing - a spike in purchasing from the trader can cause a spike in price from the trader. It could have been Ebayers or regular players or a combination of both, but most likely a spike in purchasing was the cause of the price increase.

The theory and in game experience of the economy and economics makes sense and seems logical. The hole that I see in applying the the "free market concept" to GW is that the traders have to be somewhat controlled/manipulated behind the scenes by the devs.
The reason I make that statements is that the buy price of ectos at the trader isn't in relation to the sale price. Except in rare occurrences the buy and sell price of a commodity are going to move in the same direction, with the difference between the two being the "profit" of the trader.
In GW the price that the trader sells for can go through the roof but the price at which the trader will buy them remains fairly fixed. This in turn leads to a run up in the price of ectos in the player to player market.........leading to the trader selling out of ectos (because the trader is less than the player to player market so everyone buys there), and the player to player market going even higher.

To me this explains why there have been the "rebalancing" tricks before. If the price that the trader would buy at was allowed to move in relation to demand price things would work much better for everyone. Sure, spikes will occur but they will settle down and the price will generally stay within a certain range.

Even when the wealthy make moves to monopolize the market there will not be a long term effect as more people will "farm" ectos which will in turn bring the price down. If in the end though, the few are able to monopolize the market and "control it", A-Net can always step in and rectify things by forcefully moving those players ectos to the trader and breaking the monopoly. Much like was done in America at the turn of the century (1900 not 2000).
A few stacks of ectos "disappearing" from those monopolistic players' accounts and showing up in the traders inventory will bring things back into perspective. It would not be fair to those few players, granted, but neither is allowing those few to hijack the game from everyone else.

if anet wanted to change the merchant price, all they'd need is a minutes of work...
far less labor involved than stealing from players, which im pretty sure anet doesnt do, seeing as how they'd lose players pretty quickly if they did that.

I agree completely. The price of the trader should be allowed to fluctuate freely. Which, as you say, would only take a few minutes of work. Just set whatever margin A-Net feels is appropriate and let things fall as they may in the market by taking off the ceiling that is place as to how much traders will pay for items. By doing that:
- it would allow players to "play the market", if they chose (buy low, sell high)
- it would also, in general, keep prices lower as high priced/demand items would be farmed more and subsequently sold to the trader more often and in greater quantity.

My comment about taking/seizing players assets related to those players that try to manipulate and monopolize the market to the detriment of GW players as a whole. In that instance, the needs/wants of the many outweigh the needs/wants of the few (engaging in "anti-market" behavior). If those few players rage/quit because they lost 1/2 of their massive fortune it would not be as bad as the whole game slowly dying because many many more people leave due to a "broken" economy.
While I'm not a programmer, I don't think it would be that hard to query the database of players/accounts inventory, identify the ecto hoarders, and "adjust" their ecto balances. But doing such a thing would be an action of last resort. In the end though, as I said earlier, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

Even with all that said, it would only take a change in the drop rate of items to bring the market back in control. A-Net really has the possibility of types of control over the GW economy that RL central banks only dream of, they controls supply and demand.