Quote:
Originally Posted by TimUnleashed
While I take your point, Nihilist, I personally would be much happier if, for example, all the shopkeepers in PA Mall were running thriving, competitive businesses, because then people would have a good reason to come into the mall. At the moment, and this goes for all places where there are shops, if there were more reliable shops, more people would come and that would be good for business for everyone.
If you can run a business in a shop that isn't undercut and destroyed by auction, then it's hard to see it being undercut and destroyed by other shops, but maybe I'm wrong.
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well thats already how it is.. the shop owners set prices UNDER auction.. and still people would rather use the auction.. not due to prices.. but due to the lag they encounter when they run around in the malls.. and also due to the fact that they can quickly scan everything in the auction.. they have no chance to quickly scan everything in a mall.
i watch buyouts of cheap tt crap on auction selling all the time.. even while shops have much lower buyouts available. so something is obviously wrong with how the malls work..
adding a cheap rental/mini-auction near all the tp's would further decrease the usefulness of malls.
Quote:
Originally Posted by QuintusMagnus
Good point there. Sounds like you're a fan of creative destruction. Indeed, higher competition may increase the specialization of shops (selling unique, rare items and such). However, I'm not sure if there's enough of them on the market in absolute terms to sustain many shops.
Of course, the extra competition WOULD squeeze the profit margins a bit more, making things slightly better for the economy as a whole. Whether it would increase or decrease shop ownership in the long run would be a function of the availability of goods, though, I think.
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most of the unique gear is already owned by players that don't own shops.. so they use the auction to sell their gear. for a shop owner to specialize in that unique gear he would have to pay the auction buyouts or hopefully bid lower then market rate then resale at a higher markup. which of course nobody wants as that just increases prices and inflation.
then theres the catch 22 situation that if a shop owner (take slithers recent blight for instance) sets prices on nice crafted gear too much under auction the resellers snap it up and put it on auction at a higher markup.. coupled with the auction fee's the resellers pay, prices then inflate even more.