I filed a ticket a couple of years ago to ask about this, because I noticed one item in particular had been bought out of shops, and then showed up in a large quantity a couple of days later in a users shop - at a pretty inflated price. I don't even remember what the item was to be honest. I filed a ticket to ask if it was against the rules, didn't even mention who it was or what the item was, just wanted to know, because it seemed to be such a clear case of gouging. The response I got was pretty much 'It's never against the rules to buy items from user shops, for any reason.' Doesn't matter if you're buying them all to inflate and resell - staff doesn't give a crap XD We don't really need them micromanaging the economy, and they don't want to or have the time.

This was back in the days before so many users on Subeta had this pervasive 'I deserve everything' attitude - we've always had achievements for having x retired or uber expensive item(s) in your inventory/wardrobe/gallery. Always. I'm not sure when the first response to these became to scream at the top of our lungs that it's not fair, we can't afford that, it's not being released anymore, we have to work for it?!? You think it's hard to have all of the argyle sweaters in your wardrobe? Ask some of us how hard we had to work to scrimp/save up collat and build our reputations and wait months and months for even the chance to borrow for something like the Royalty achievement back when there were literally only a couple of some of those crowns onsite. And yeah, yeah, times have changed, but that doesn't mean that staff has to hand everything to us like we're children. It's a game, with sets of goals, and we seem to have decided that we don't have to work towards those goals anymore; we can just whine until someone gives us what we need to fastclick our way to the top.

/endrant

Monopolizing the items is a rude thing to do. Everyone can agree on that. But with monopolizing come the risks of the price dropping again suddenly, leaving that person 50mil in the hole for buying up all of one item. If they want to take that risk, then let them. If you're questing and an item you need to find has been outlandishly inflated then just quit the dang quest and move onto the next one.

To make the staff regulate the user shops and a buying cap is absolutely ridiculous. Some shops, like the Millionaire Center, have time limits as to how frequently you can buy items. It's a set thing they don't have to constantly monitor. But for RB items? To regulate purchase of those listen items? That would require, in all likelihood, several hours of coding daily. I don't know about you, but that is certainly not worth the hassle to the staff. If you want to reap the benefits of the recycle shop then find a way to get on earlier in the day, at midnight when the items change, or just settle for only handing over a small handful of items daily instead of mass quantities.

TL;DR banning "monopolizing" is a terrible idea and 100% unrealistic to put caps on how many of an item you can buy at any given time from user shops.

I can sympathize with the frustration, but no. It opens up a whole can of worms (pricing/gouging is subjective, staff could be accused of playing favorites, etc…) and staff have more than enough duties as it is. I think this would be a poor use of site resources. If you think someone has been guilty of "price-gouging" simply don't buy -- that's what I do when I feel something is over-priced. I walk away.

As it is now, the site does not favor one user over another in this regard. If staff were involved, the site would be favoring one user over another. I just don't see a fair way this pricing ideal could be implemented. Sorry.

This is why I don't support this idea. I know that the OP is referring to people hoarding older/retired items, but there's no feasible place to draw the line as far as what could be "fairly" hoarded vs. items that would result in breaking the rules.

Pretty much any time I find an item that's over r40 and selling for under 300 sP in shops, I buy all of them and frag them. The other day I bought 200+ Mr Shady Guys for under 300 sP, and they're back down at 121 sP. Is this hoarding? Sorta. Am I artificially influencing the price of this item? Yes, but no one cares because minions have no real purpose other than looking cute. If owning 200+ Mr Shady Guys suddenly became an achievement, everyone would be up in arms though.

Like many others have said: if a cash shop item is so rare that its price is wildly disproportionate to what it was originally worth, suggest that it be rereleased or added to the Hustler's queue. There is always a huge risk when a user attempts to monopolize items on Subeta because "retired" means nothing here. Items can be rereleased at any time, resulting in a massive loss for the user who drops millions trying to buy up a rare sticker or something.

tldr: No support because there's no reasonable way to police monopolization. My suggestion would be to petition for scarce items to be rereleased.

As much as I also find this annoying and encounter it almost daily right now while doing Quentin quests, I don't want staff getting involved in policing fake inflation either. I'd rather they focus on site content, events, bringing in new revenue sources to keep out of the red, and continuing to recode the site. Besides, fake inflation doesn't happen all that often. Trying to regulate the economy as a whole also seems like a better use of resources in my opinion instead of trying to regulate individual items, but I definitely understand the frustration first hand. This will always happen in any economy like Subeta's though, real or fake. That's just capitalism.