interesting... it's a problem that there are so few active users and so many, just so so many, items in circulation. shops restock way too much and too frequently and quests contribute to the constant influx of junk (especially battle quests). i seriously feel like the main shops could just... not restock for like a week to get the stupid amount of items under control.

i understand why hoarding would be discouraged, and i really don't agree with 's logic, but...

i don't mind this change at all, btw. i don't personally care who buys the deflated items, just that they're gone.

i really miss when the subetateam account would buy up massively deflated and prolific items to bring their value back up. now i feel like i need to do it for some reason. i don't know anything about pet site economies but ours seems really messed up. and i really hope fragging isn't removed because that seems like a good way to get rid of junk, but maybe i'm not thinking about it enough.

am i like... the bad guy? should i stop restocking? should i stop buying from user shops? i'm seriously asking, not trying to be snide. but like... what am i supposed to do?

i guess let me just put my clown shoes back on and honk my way into the main shops. :/

I was wondering if that had stopped (I don't check to see who brought my items, just that they are).

shrug I buy up cheap stuff when I find it too. I don't think that makes us the bad guys, I think that's the way its supposed to work. User A has stuff they just want to get rid of, so they price it low, other people find it and get a deal.

What shouldn't be happening is attempting to manipulate the prices of certain specific shop items by yourself, or with a group, by deliberately underpricing certain items, waiting for people to autoprice, then going out looking for those specific, manipulated items and buying the stuff you price fixed.

You used to get an event on your dashboard side bar when the Subeta Team would buy an item. There are many Rare and Super Rare items that are so cheap. I buy them up cheap to frag or sell at a much higher price for profit.

It would be a good idea to have the SubetaTeam account buy up a bunch of items to remove some junk from circulation. Half the issue stems from there being so much STUFF and the items that are easiest to get are just constantly injected into the economy. A good amount of stock just.. doesn’t move. Pricing at 1000 sP to catch a bunch of quick sales might be the best way to get rid of 200 battle loot drops that also happen to be restockable items.

Jokes aside, I also am the type of person to buy super deflated items, refresh the shop search til the cache catches up, and then price them normally. I don’t think anyone is being malicious by “undercutting” prices, they just use a site feature with unspoken rules in a different way than everyone else. Is it a little greedy if someone does it with the intention of “tricking” the autopricer and reselling? Sure, but it’s not actually ruining anyone’s ability to play the game.

I only sometimes doublecheck my autopricer and throw caution to the wind the rest of the time. But if I do check it and see a bunch of items priced at 1000 sP…. you bet your ass I’m gonna buy them all out for a profit 😂

It ruins my ability to play when I’m spending hours pulling all items under 1100 from my shops, buying up the others, then putting them back into my shops and having to hand price them. 😂 but I do check each shop as soon as it’s done pricing lol. Yes the profits are nice but I can’t ever price until I have time to dedicate to fixing it lol

That's quite the undertaking! My hack is, if I don't feel like repricing stuff I just skim the page before submitting the prices and uncheck anything under 2000. Maybe someone else'll buy the cheap items, but oh well haha

all i want is the autoprice sniping fixed tbh

I play on my phone and usually the page to skim the prices before completing doesn’t load halfway down lol. So I just complete and search the whole shop for <1100, r66-85 <5k and 86-99 <20k. I only pull the <1100 and shove them in my vault so they don’t get bought. The others I fix directly in the shop but yeah. Some days aren’t bad. I had near 200 night before last though. ☹️

After some thought and reading other posts in this thread I've changed my "fine" to a "nope" and my little whining to a long complaint.

Hoarding opens doors to certain behaviours that are frowned upon. Undercuts and monopolizations are bad because it ruins the economy and people's fun. However I do not see why hoarding itself is the bad guy that should be discouraged especially when the main reason most people hoard is because of RB and Frag. So we are basically being told that we are immoral for playing Subeta - you can get items and make money and thus be able to play this game through many ways the site has made available to you like quests, battle, restock etc. but you can't get items and make money so you can play this game through the RB and Frag because hoarding is bad, and hoarding is bad because.....?

It feels like a house was set on fire just to kill a cockroach, so, purely for the sake of respect, I would like to know: how me having 154 Dandybunnies collecting dust in my vault is breaking the economy, ruining people's fun and not "giving all users a chance to get this item"?

Just a quick summary of ideas I was thinking:

• SubetaTeam does the thing where they buy up junk from user shops and delete the items
• RB no longer asks for a set of specific items; anything can be donated to him to get RB points. Raise prizes values to compensate for the change of it being made easier as a result.
• Fix shops by doing the following: set a limit on how much each shop can stock (like limit Book Nook to a max of 25 items at once; there is no reason for it to have 287 books in it at one shot, especially since we don't have 'clears' in place); possibly go back to re-randomizing shop restock times; CLEARS. (You need to have clears occur similar to Neo's system. This will control the amount of items being available for someone to purchase from NPC shops)
• Look at retiring mass amounts of items again
• Cap the max amount of a single item a user can have? No one needs 100k+ Free Beers in their shop. Not sure if this could be done to make sure it doesn't affect currencies like tokens and frag crystals though. The cap would probably need to start 1000, and modify it from there as needed. This suggestion I'm not sure on the effects it could have, but it's something that I wonder if it could be done?

cutting features is too easy to do, and also not good imo because that's site content. how can we fix the systems in place so that they function better rather than outright removing it? Removing content like the Stock Market or Auctions was fine because they were seldom used. RB and fragging are very commonly used. And if you're targeting those, you have to target everything else that encourages hoarding, such as collecting forum tickets, Wiz Tokens, etc.

I just want(ed) a (easy) way to check and change shop prices before they go live after using the autopricer... that way I can decide if I want to sell at that low price or not before the item(s) get snapped up. I used the old trick of changing the shop into a gallery a few times before that was nuked.

This is a great change, thank you for implementing it! Hopefully the issue of some users massively undercutting in order to catch people autopricing their stuff then buying it all up will be fixed soon, too. ;)

I think the issue is more with users hoarding large quantities of large varieties of items, with the intention to sell higher than they’re worth. Some do deliberately cut prices just to gobble up the autopriced ones, then resell at the actual price after. People have been complaining about this issue for quite a while. Not specifically holding items that are super abundant. More like losing your profits on a 90k item because someone set the price to 2k. I think this is a step in the right direction but many other things need to come together along the way. I agree with a lot of the ideas has in the post below yours :)

I do understand the reason and I agree with its importance 😉 I just don't really agree with it being the very first step staff takes to solve the issue. It affects a bunch of people that has nothing to do with the problem without directly solving it. People can still undercut, they can still hoard, they can still abuse the autopricing system. There are bigger problems that if fixed would make much more of a difference ('s post is pretty much perfect) but they chose to add an extra handicap to everyone instead of a solution. And saying "we made things worse now but soon™ we will start thinking of a solution and even sooner™ implement it on the site ☺️" is kinda disrespectful in any sort of situation.

Plus Keith straight up said hoarding is bad and should be stopped. My question is, why.

What I see here are two separate behaviours trying to be changed:

1. Hoarding. This is a behaviour the staff doesn't like. The average user either does it themselves, or doesn't really care.

2. Price fixing. This is a behaviour the average user doesn't like. They feel like they are being stolen from, that their time/effort is being wasted by being denied profits and/or having to take extra steps to guard themselves from it. Staff only seems concerned that its leading to more hoarding.

The result is staff taking steps to curb hoarding which is only incidentally, and minimally changing price fixing. This is not going to satisfy users who want a real solution to price fixing without impacting their play style.

I'm a hoarder and to date nearly every single step staff has taken to curb hoarding has encouraged me to believe that hoarding is the most profitable and useful play style. However I don't acquire items from user shops to hoard (sure I'll pick up a few low priced items here and there, but its minimal), no, I get stuff to hoard from around the site, during site events, playing games and just don't sell stuff because of issues like price fixing.

ok now that i've had more time to think i'm going to comment again because my first instinct was to disagree with this change; when i read keith's further reasoning, i decided to give it more thought. i have, and i still disagree.

first, mass-buying ≠ hoarding. as keith mentioned, this is a "bandaid" effort to curb a certain behavior without doing anything about the reasons that behavior is incentivized in the first place. people mass buy because, for certain site features to be used efficiently, it feels like you're expected to mass buy.

the recycle beast shop has accumulated a LOT of items over the years, and many of them are obnoxiously expensive if you aren't diligently turning in hundreds of items day after day. (ETA: there's also an achievement for having 35k recycle points!!!!! this doesn't just incentivize mass-buying and hoarding, it incentivizes auto-refreshing!) i find this so overwhelming and daunting that even though there are items in there that i want, i basically never bother engaging with this feature. on the off-chance that i do feel like going through the process, of course i'm going to hop on the shop search, find the items that are priced lowest, and buy up as many of them as i can. those people who have shops specifically for RB items, with hundreds or thousands of copies of an item for a low price, are people i consider to be providing a service, keeping the price stable throughout the day and providing a one-stop-shop for you to buy the item and mindlessly refresh the page. otherwise, all the cheap copies would get bought up as soon as the day turns over!

fragging is another reason. if i happen upon an item that's priced especially low, i like to go down the line and snap them up until the price point hits a certain cutoff. as other users have mentioned, the crystal shop is a great place for random old retired / out of circulation items to be made available again. fragging is easy, and it ensures very few items are truly useless / worthless, and it's always good to have a lot of crystals on hand so you don't miss out on a high-value item drop. (honestly i'm in the habit of removing & fragging everything under 5k from my shop every time i autoprice.)

holiday currencies are another thing i'll sometimes mass buy; for instance, if i'm impatient during a holiday and having trouble making time to actually participate, or if i find i don't have enough leftover currency to get something i want / need in the off-season, it's handy to run down the shop search buying up the cheaper ones. and again, in this case, a small handful of people bottlenecking the market is good for me as a buyer.

now, if there really is an issue of that many individual users buying hundreds and thousands of items, keeping them out of the hands of other users, punishing all buyers every 5 or 10 purchases is WAY too low a threshold. and if you really want to fundamentally change the way items are created, circulated, and destroyed, that's an entire massive undertaking that's going to require a lot of thought and analysis, but this doesn't feel like the right first step towards that process.

I think you hit the nail on the head. It's not hoarding, hoarding implies we're buying all this stuff and holding onto it forever and ever. Mass-buying however is different. It's generally about to get slaughtered for fragging or RB, so it's not as big a deal imo to mass-buy. Some people go on mage amulet sprees and mass buy those to turn into tomes (I do this occasionally when the price is low). I could see a battler hoarding stat boosters, that's not unusual nor should that be punished.

I was sooo confused when I first got the message to wait before I could buy again. At first I thought, oh! This must be a temporary thing because the site events are causing so much lag! That stinks, but it won’t last long. Reading that this is a new permanent change, hoo, not a big fan at all!

I remember many years ago, when I could buy up hundreds of items in the blink of an eye just by holding down the Enter key. Those were the good days! I used to buy up tens or hundreds of thousands of items to mass-donate, especially clothing items. My giveaway events made so many people happy! It even inspired others to comb through their items and host their own giveaways. I liked to toss in valuable stuff too, so it became partly a treasure-hunt.

When the 1 second purchase limit was put in place, oof, that stung! Such a small change that makes a big difference when you’re a nut like me. And also being limited so that I can only donate items in batches of 100 instead of by the thousands like I used to? I ended up not doing my mass buying sprees and big giveaways anymore soon after that happened. It just became too time-consuming and not as fun for me.

Fast forward to my return to Subeta, and gasp! The Recycle Beast has soooooo many pretty new items, and the Fragmentizer is releasing batches of rare old items?? My spark to go on big ol’ shopping sprees was renewed with a vengeance! I was able to get over the 1 second limit, and now I was having all sorts of fun buying again!

My big giveaways may have stopped, but I realized that I could help people and make them smile in a different way. Instead of offering up all those free items, I’ll buy up their cheap items that they don’t want anymore, and they’ll get some sP to put towards the stuff that they do want! Then I take those masses of cheap and unwanted items, flip ‘em into crystals, and sell the crystals as they are or buy up the more expensive items and sell them for their flat crystal value to people who don’t have the time or patience to frag or buy crystals themselves. And for those who can’t afford it at all? We can simply trade items of similar values! I have collections that need attention, afterall!

Since it’s extremely easy to make over 1mil sP per day from questing alone, I never thought that buying up “junk” items to raise their value to roughly 3500 sP to turn them into crystals was that big a deal, especially because crystals are worth half that much. They’re not massively inflated over site shop prices, and you can make a conscious decision to either buy from a user to further spread a handful of sP or sink it back into the site by buying from an NPC shop for a little less. Everybody makes some modest sum of money and nobody has to miss out on anything!

And to be honest, I thought that Recycle Beast and the Fragmentizer were fun and elegant solutions to getting rid of cheap items and bringing back stuff that’s become too hard to get for the average user! And I really love trading and selling crystal shop items and spreading around sP! I don’t often make a profit from going on shopping sprees for fragging, it just makes me happy to do so. Doesn’t anyone else feel good selling an item for 10mil and then spreading that 10mil around to dozens and dozens of users via buying cheap items for fragging? Super satisfying!

So yeah, as small a change as this new limit is, it still hurts a bit. One of my favourite things to do is idly tap on my iPad to buy up lots and lots of cheap items while watching one of my favourite shows. It just discourages me from wanting to play as much as I normally do, and for mass-buyers even more impatient than I am, won’t that just mean more junk sitting in shops?

Heh! As silly as this is gonna sound, can the buying limit be upped from 7 items to to 10 items before you hit a cooldown? Feels better for my OCD, haha!

Personally, I am pretty opposed to this change, but then again, I don't see the backend of the subeta economy, so I'm bringing a grain of salt to my own opinion.

From my perspective, I feel like we should focus more on making item sinks and not limit user shop buying. And that the Fragmentizer is one of the biggest reasons things don't drop below a few thousand SP anymore.

a few ideas include:

•Questgivers getting a hobby and accepting random items that suit their theme. Allow people to return common quest rewards and keep them from being on the site for long

•Themed item gallery contests that users can vote on, and eats the items submitted. (needs some clear warnings)

•More random NPC event quests

•More incentive to sink money into pets (perhaps let players queue up books, food and toys so people use items instead of putting them in the resort)

•A mega quest that requires tons of random items but is less common than other quests so its not a daily slog

•Give pet jobs some supplies requirements (clothes, weapons, tools, etc. There's so many jobs, you could sink all kinds of items)

•Set some lore bait for a potential future plot by having NPCs request items and give out points to be spent some time later (With enough flavor text, this could feel like general world building)

•Allow people to vend to fill vending machines, and have some of the items get eaten.

I don't know the details of how much each of these ideas would take to implement, so I'm not gonna push it. But too many items are an issue, and I've been personally thinking on this topic myself.

And to get back to the topic more specifically, I get that hoarding can be a problem. But if people really are mass buying to turn around and do something with it, why not just set a limit on the amount one account can have of a single item? People could just pause and go frag it or whatever Heck, it would force me to restock different stores more. (I have so many spell components, but I keep going there because its a meager but safe return on something I can do on my phone like a fidget toy)