From the ideas behind your post I can tell that you understand how the economy works. Refreshing :)

There are plenty of garbage items that I buy up, and thus restore the price to, in order to frag and keep the market for those trash items (mainly clothes I've noticed) a little higher than like 20 sP. They are garbage to almost everyone bar the newest of users, so when I say something is garbage I'm talking about the viewpoint of the majority. In terms of items sitting in the store, I'm saying that an item will dip below stock price if the item is always in-stock. If an item becomes lower than its stock value it is basically garbage and suffering from poor market policy. When an item can't be sold for more than wholesale stock value then it is removed from a shopfront. Retirement is Subeta's way of doing this in a weird way. I do not think retirement should be permanent and I think retired items should have a function.

I agree with you in terms of the new items in the new stores. They have ZERO effect on the old items and old stores. What we're afraid of is the possible use of this mechanic in the current stores (not likely as stated above).

In terms of the jealousy thing, you're probably right. Your reasoning was intriguing and most likely right, but we both know an economy can't exist in a relatively healthy form without restocking. Because some people don't like it, doesn't negate the fact that others do like it just because they're the quieter bunch. I also believe that looking at an economy for what it is and acting accordingly (like a rigid economist) is the best way to care for such an economy. Thus the things I say.

In regards to Vending I think you don't understand the long term effects unrestricted vending has. We both remember pre-vending days, the days where even garbage was slightly profitable. It is a reality that the market is controlled by those that actually want to put in the time to developing it. Social equalisation is just cheapening the value of items to make up for the fact people don't want to put the time into or don't enjoy restocking. I personally don't like this, thus I hate vending, but vending can exist in this economy with restocking without dragging it down in the long term. The first steps to this was to limit vending. 500 is a decent amount and it keeps everything status quo. But there are plenty of flaws to this system that show themselves if you look at long term trends.

Questing is sort of like vending, but not really. Questing is just as easy as vending but it occupies a unique place in Subeta and thus its economy. Most income comes from quests, which is fine as this is how the uniqueness of Subeta has existed for a long time. Tweaking the quests to bring down the amount of sP/rewards that flood into the economy is a good thing, which Keith is doing. This in the long run will increase the value of sP and thus lower prices.

I agree 100% with the store and sP sinking. There are plenty of other ways to do this.

In the end, a market must be supported under its own weight. The old days of SubetaTeam buying up items that had dropped below a certain price point are over. I think the site and thus the administration can handle the adult handling of an economy (albiet a virtual pet site one lmao). All you really need is correct management and great precision.

part of any capitalist-like economy, even a toy economy like Subeta's is that there will be an oversupply of some items compared to demand and folks will undercut just to get a profit (I do this) since there's no actual cost of owning the means of production. That certain items will drop to your defined garbage-value is a certainty. You think that Subeta should be more interventionist on the whims of the userbase and it's shaky faith in an economy that they don't understand. I do not think this level of control is necessary. Since the cost of owning the means of production is so small, too much intervention will result in a Comintern style black market. Neopets works that way and restocking there sucks.

It's my own personal experience that with both Fragmentizing and the Recycle Beast that nothing's worth less than 1500K. Yes, if I was a robot I could test this out for sure, but I make a decent living just doing the things I do for fun so I don't bother. Randomly acquired stuff I sell at a price that Recyclers will support, and I frag what they don't buy.

We don't know that unlimited Vending will do what you say, because the Fragmentizer wasn't supported back in the day. On top of it not being supported, the minimum price for gift bombing someone with newly-and-randomly created garbage-value stuff just so they could frag it instead of buying it up from the already existing economy was pathetically low. Users actively thwarted this then-very-weak correcting mechanism.

Yes, an oversupply is inevitable. And yes, I am aware that the means of production can't be owned however you can define the stock price point as some sort of production 'cost' which means something at least. I think Subeta should set intelligent market policy, precisely because it is not a true real life economy. You need to have a whole system support an economy (production, wholesale, retail space etc) and I don't think the basics of Subeta's capitalist economy is completely sound. And neither do the administration given their constant tweaking. However I am saying that INTELLIGENT DESIGN of the economy is required, not patch work things like SubetaTeam buy ups like back in the day. I'm advocating for design, basically system level intervention, not patch work policies and regulation. Control is required in the design of a free market system

I believe it is possible to tweak things so we do not have a repeat of Neopets. Neopets was a very different situation given its sheer population. Subeta has a much smaller population and an even smaller restocking base. Thats why things are even profitable on a small scale at all.

In regards to Recycle Beast and Fragmentizing: I think reworking those two things could assist the economy. An expansion of the would be nice. They are very important parts of garbage collection and they do their job quiet well. But combined with vending and question, it just isn't quiet enough to stave off the garbage creep. Back in the old days we had an inflation creep, now we have a deflation creep without the currency deflating with it. It IS a problem. In my view, nothing is worth less than around 400-500 sP. Including commons. Given the value of the currency, this is garbage. Especially for some normal items which I actively try and repair the prices for.

Anyone with any common sense could see, without more demand, more supply leads to garbage-tier prices. This is a basic fact. Unlimited vending without adequate item sinks would be disastrous long term. It is a pretty basic concept, the administration saw this and limited vending. Even with the Fragmentizer combined with unlimited vending, you would eventually have an issue as not everyone frags their garbage. This could be mitigated with more crystal uses or stocks but I digress.

When you have items sitting there, en mass going below stock prices by a huge amount, there IS a problem. And there is plenty of that. That is why Maleria is buying up all of the junk weapon items that are sitting in the user stores en mass right now (I suspect). Vending and low demand cause this exact phenomenon. It is easier to control vending, as evident by the 500 limit.

Subeta is a very hard thing to manage in terms of the economy mostly due to the tools being so alien to the real world. Little toy economies can be annoying and unbalanced haha.

If Keith wants to get rid of restocking because it was "copied" from Neopets its time to shut down Subeta. Pets, NPCs, quests, NPC shops, user shops, profiles, pet profiles, forums, cults, battling, reading books to pets, feeding pets, minions, maps of the world/locations, plots, games, trophies... it was all on Neopets first!

Seriously, its time to get over the "Subeta can't keep anything NEOPETS had" attitude. Neopets is the pet site, insanely popular and successful. All pet sites borrow ideas from Neo's successes because that's how things of the same genre work. You see what your competition did well and not so well then use those basic ideas to build on your own idea. Subeta's similarity to Neo is part of why its popular, especially right now with Neo dying and its users fleeing to new pet sites.

I don't restock because I don't have the time or love for it that others do but that's no reason to just wipe it out of existence. I like being able to just buy what I want immediately but like others have said that's really not all that exciting. Having a balance of both like we do now is fine. If all shops move to the unlimited always-in-stock type what's even the point of having shops? Just automatically deposit the items in our inventories and take the sP.

I'd be okay if restocking becomes more akin to having the appearance of GoOutside, putting the items in "aisles" or something, but still keep the whole "random" factor restocking different items every so many minutes.

Basically make a hybrid of the two.

If restocking were ever to go...I will honestly probably leave for a while, or at least be not as active. =/ I'm not all that active as it is, so I guess my opinion isn't all that significant, but when I do get bursts of Subeta enthusiasm, I always stick to restocking. It is what kept me here for so long. You can only grind away at quests for so long. I might stay around to work on my pets, but that's about it.

that said, I don't really see it happening? It just doesn't seem rational, considering how many restockable items have been released lately. Then again...

I'll just have to wait it out, I guess.

this thread is a bit too tl;dr for me given the subject. I'll just sum it up by saying, restocking has only been being made consistently better and better with changes to try and make it more profitable, including vending, questing and of course direct restocking changes. vending, as I'm sure people have pointed out, is likely to get the axe, which is even better for restocking.

Given the amount of work Keith put into the restocking system just earlier this year coupled with the amount of new items that have been added to the normal NPC shops, I doubt that Keith is still planning to get rid of restocking for the time being. Users have voiced their opinions quite a bit on this topic over the past number of months, and the general consensus has consistently been that restocking needs to remain an active site feature (in it's current form, not in the same way as the always stocked shops like Dara's Darlings).

I agree with others that it seems more likely that vending will get the ax, at least to some degree. It throws the whole economy out of sync, and there's not much that staff can do about it due to the random factor involved.

I would like Vending un-nerfed. An example of where Vending is useful. TUBES is one of the few items that is worth a lot of return at Beach Shack. It goes out of stock because nobody buys it, since going there to restock is a low-return choice compared to other shops. This drives the price of this item higher, out of proportion to its rarity. This is not the only item that stocks in low probability shops like this that is increasing in price.

There just aren't that many restockers here to smooth over the odd kicks in the gallop of the economy caused by the "temporarily removed so that it doesn't clog the shop" solution to a non-problem.

Restocking now is supported heavily. If that much effort was put into Vending, it would work too. To my mind there's nothing special about choosing-to-buy instead of getting-by-chance. Restockers can choose to buy certain items with irrational exuberance ("they're rare so they HAVE to be good!") and IME this drops value faster than any Vend.