wizard tokens are already used for vending, token shop, and blackheart hollow. i only have like 2k right now and am constantly struggling to stay above water with them... would hate to see them used for more stuff ;_;

I don't think there's any real solution to Subeta's worthless junk items. I can't remember why vending was introduced now but it used to be a lot better originally. Then people complained that vending was giving out too many high rarity items so rarities in all but Ocean Depths were lowered so most vended items are worthless junk. now. Going by what Keith's said in this topic, worthless junk was the reason why fragging was introduced.

In the old days items were retired from the main shops on a regular basis. I've noticed that it's been ages since we had any new items in the main shops - all the new stuff is for holidays. Vesnali and Masquerade require special currencies as do non-holiday sources such as quest shops and the Carnival prize tent. This still leaves a lot of items in the main shops, though.

I’ve been thinking about that, how shops are so overstocked. I feel like, instead of outright retiring items, stocks should be reduced in number and items cycled in and out. Instead of selling 4-11 of any junk item at all times, stock up to 3 at any time and have it only sold on some random days. Cap the item at 3 until they get bought, then allow them to pop back up in their shop again, instead of letting their number creep up at every restock.

Like, say, Black Sand in Spells Galore. Maybe it’s only sold in the shop on odd number days of the month, or maybe it appears completely at random. It might be there three days in a row, and then not be available for a whole week.

I kinda like the idea of NPC shops stocking their items at random and in limited quantities. Brings back the fun of restocking and may create a little more demand for items. On the other hand, having stock rotate in and out on a fixed schedule would help to prevent artificial scarcity.

Is this still being adjusted? The last few days I've gotten this frequently just from questing. It's finally annoyed me enough tonight that I just can't do quests.

I have also noticed the higher prices on RB items lately... One of the worst that I've seen is the Cream Chai Plushie, which was in the pool on the 28th -- it went from ~3k up to 350k, where it is currently stuck despite being r30. (Granted, it this may just be a particularly volatile item for some reason. SubetaLodge's price history shows a similar jump to 999k in Dec '21, which I assume was also due to the RB.) I've also been using more of the ones I restock to help keep prices stable instead of turning them in for points, though I'm not sure if the higher prices is from more items being turned in or more items being snatched up for resale.

That said, I am definitely in favor of the user-unique RB pools, or some other method of handling it that will avoid the hoarding a specific item by the entire userbase for a day. That has always contributed more towards "negative" hoarding than anything, I think, since saving up RB points is a lot more difficult than saving up Crystals.

things like the chai plushie i don't understand the point in people trying to increase the price so much. no one is going to pay 350k for a r30 plushie. it's not going to be asked for in a quest. it's just gonna sit at that price point with no one buying until someone decides to finally undercut it to an acceptable price. my only guess is people are getting them through quests or something and just autopricing without realizing the only ones left in shops have been sitting at their silly prices for years, probably. it's another reason i don't care for the autopricer sometimes. =_=

i can't really see any downsides to user unique RB pools. it would definitely help prevent random items like the chai plushie from being more or less inaccessible for a time. and also stop people from feeling it is their personal responsibility to hoard cheap items to keep their value stable when the RB asks for them.

and now that keelhaul is over i have to say vending seems really bad... soooooo many items were generated by everyone (myself included) trying to get the freyalise items. and sooo many items value tanked into sub 2k zones. so much worthless junk generated by vending... it seems ridiculous to have hoarding considered a negative thing when there is a way to generate 250-500 (90% worthless) items a day, per user.

will there be anymore input from staff/Keith on this? any acknowledgement of the discussion? or just a lot of questions and ideas going in circles for no reason.

I assume that, over time, most users from the higher price ranges corrected downward, and then all of the reasonably priced ones were bought up for the RB, leaving only the highest few that were left from inactive users. If the price rebounded quickly when it was asked for last year (it dropped back to 4k from 999k within a month), then it's possible that there the price jumped from 999k to 350k to ~3-10k, giving little time for people to autoprice at each step and go inactive to create the price curve.

This could happen to any item that gets bought up and then drops back down quickly, especially with a smaller userbase. There are some items that are only in a handful of user shops, and none of them are "too" overpriced, meaning that the entire stock of a single item disappearing into the RB is a real possibility. (One recent example I've run into is the Roach Stale Ale. It's currently only in 11 user shops with the highest price being only 30k. Another is the Hamster Plushie from today's RB set.)

Asked a friend about why I keep getting this message while trying to buy things. Just posting to say that I am constantly running into it and it's driving me absolutely crazy. Every seven items I have to wait. Every. seven. items. Which means whatever time I'm spending trying to do something productive I now have to spend twice as much time doing it waiting for this cooldown to go away. Just to buy seven more items.

See an underpriced item so try to grab them up before a 50k item gets downsized to 10k? Double the time. Mage amulets? Double the time. I'm even running into it doing quests, which I already have a difficult time with because they take up such a large chunk of your day to finish, and now they take even longer. God help anyone who wants to buy any type of currency from users.

Seems unusual that it's been almost two weeks since this change has been implemented but staff hasn't chimed in again. Is this still a discussion or are we just stuck with this?

Two weeks already? Gosh, I never even realized... I keep thinking of this change as something that just happened, you know?

I'm surprised that nothing else was ever said about it, or changed for the better. I bought up enough rock-bottom priced items to get my Crystal Bank up to 150k Crystals! That's the most I've ever had at any time!

This change was supposed to prevent items from getting so cheap, wasn't it? Seems to me like the autopricing issue only got worse because people can't buy up items as fast as they used to.

I am chiming in quite late to throw in my agreement that this feels like a poor solution to a problem I didn't realize we had. I read through this thread and it sounds like this was supposed to be a solution against both hoarding and also Auto-pricer scamming.

With regards to hoarding, I understand that it's important to prevent this behavior for the good of the economy, and that the site is moving towards a play style where it isn't needed. Cool, but those play style changes have not yet been made. So until those changes are implemented - currency, recycle beast, etc. I don't think we should be restricted against mass buying items.

With regards to the item pricing, I don't see any realistic connection between making us take a 5 second pause every 7 items we buy. That's not going to stop scammers or prevent us from having to manually double check auto priced items...Right? Am I missing something? It's worse now than before because everyone stopped doing grindy stuff that is now 10x more annoying.

Edited to add: This has absolutely nothing to do with my Jelar hoard, I promise lol

How many hours did it take you to get that many crystals???

Yeah, this change may be starting to backfire in light of all the vending for keelhauliday......

Oh man, I hadn’t been keeping track. I like to idly buy cheap items while watching TV, and my Crystal count doesn’t even take into account the thousands of Recycle Beast items I bought. I’m sitting at 13,960 of those at the moment. Miiight be a week’s worth of idle purchasing?

I guess we're stuck with it.

I miss people buying up cheap junk to hoard from my shop. It means having to hoard it myself because I can't get rid of it. :)

After all, did the change help decrease the undercuts? My last GA was before it so it's tough to get a good idea of prices in general.

...

This is making it really hard to buy currency. It is much cheaper to buy Steamwork Trinkets with SP than it is to buy Masquerade items for SP from resellers.

I don't know if this is possible to code, but if someone has 1000 Steamwork Trinkets in their shop, I'd like to be able to buy them without it taking a year and a half. Perhaps this could not apply to currency?

Also...I have 15 pets and when they are all out of the resort I like to feed them new foods. They stay in for a month I don't always get 15 copies of the items, or of 101 and old 175 items being passed out through quests, so I need to buy the copies I didn't get now that they are affordable.

As long as people are setting absurdly low prices to screw others up via the autopricer, I'll still buy those up and sell them, but I don't really hold onto them. I would rather not do it, tbh, but I would also rather not sell items at half what they're worth or less.

(Although I know that there are some folks annoyed with me because I won't sell items from currency shops that are open year round for much more than it costs to buy the currency needed, because I don't understand why anyone would pay over a million SP for an item that they could get by buying a hundred 3000 SP trinkets.

I ran into a probably-new person who was setting their prices at 5 sp below what things cost in the restockables shops...regardless of the rarity--once.

It has been said earlier in the thread, but I just adding my own take on it:

The buying limit isn't supposed to impact normal questing, and for the most part I have not run into it, but it has popped up when I'm really rushing. It's easiest to hit with Saggitarius, since higher rarity items are less likely to be in stocked the main shops and need to be bought from users.

A lot of people are wondering why no staff member has commented on this topic for ages.