Hi Wren
Yes... in fact... in recent months, we have seen two distinct instances of abused prices (although the first is debatable):
The problem
1) Lysterium ingot - 2005/05/18 - Three purchases (214%, 220%, 195%)
Three purchases around 19:00
MA time, pushed the average price of Lyst from 146%, to 180%. Due to the high frequency of Lyst sales, the price was affected for three days.
2) Mind Essence - 2005/07/16 - 47500000% markup (1 unit)
This item, took 1.5 weeks to be shrugged off the private beta graphs, and of course, still features on the historical graphs.
Of course, the second item is immediately suspicious, since only one unit was sold at that price, which would be well below the ratio of units/sale of ME.
One solution...
In the new auction tracking code (which goes into testing on the production server tonight) each auction item has a toggle of "IsCorrupt". In cases where a specific auction item (as
MA says "where the standard deviation is too high"***) goes through the roof (or drops through the floor), a bot can automatically flag the item as suspect (thereby disabling it), and as soon as a moderator has had a look, he/she can be approved the item (entering it into the history automatically) or deny it (which blacklists it permanently).
A history page on the front-site will be able to list all the suspicious items that appeared for a specific commodity, so peeps could look at these blacklisted items, and raise a flag in case it was not really corrupt.
For the moment, yes... this is a concern, and it will be abused. As with the previous incident of ME, (like I did on the private beta homepage), I'll post a warning notice on the MyTwoPecs.com page, and remove the *corrupt* commodity from any tickers that feature it.
GSI, GSI, wherefor art thou, GSI...
About an average price of tt+120 on GSI... any avatar that would want to abuse this item, would have to put fifty GSI's at tt+120 to affect the price to that point. It must be said however, that GSI has actually been over tt+120 recently, so I'm not sure that tt+120 is a suspicious price :P
GSI movement mid-May to July...
Click to enlarge
Note: 
- Blue line is avg of last 50 on auction at that time
- Purple line is avg of last 200 on auction at that time
This avatar placing the items back on tt for 120... will affect all auction trackers, including
MA's client loader prices (this is probably the stat this player tries to target).
We can probably raise awareness, and just be aware ourselves...
I must admit... the last GSI I had looted, was sold for tt+90, whereas the avg at the time was tt+80. Some avatars are happy to buy a slightly higher price on buyout, than paying the standard price. Question is... are they reselling it?
Lyst Manipulation - Nov 2004
I remember that in late November 2004, some sort of syndicate bought up all the Lysterium ingots they could buy. The price of Lyst jumped to 160% and higher, and stayed there until early January methinks. Once I've plugged some more historical data into the chart factory, I'd be able to prove this :P
Footnote
*** Deviation
Quote:
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Originally Posted by someone at MA
The average price per amount is shown for the top most sold items in the Project Entropia auction during the last seven day period. The percentage is the difference between Trade Terminal Value and Average Market Value. Items where the standard deviation is too high are excluded.
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