Hello! I've noticed a pattern where, at least to me, it appears some users intentionally list items at very low prices, likely to trick others into autopricing their own items at that low value. Then, they buy those underpriced items and relist them in their own shop for a much higher price.

I've seen this happen a few times in my own shop, items selling for much less than their usual value, only to find that the buyer is reselling a bunch of them for way more. While it's true that users are ultimately responsible for pricing their items, this seems to affect cheaper or mid-tier items the most, the ones people are more likely to autoprice without double-checking. At least in my experience it is usually 50k100k items going for 10k20k.

And sure, it could be that the user pricing things at a huge discount is not the same user buying your whole discounted stock to resell at a higher price, but the point of the autopricer being easily exploitable still stands.

💸 So here's my suggestion: Could we have an optional feature in the autopricer that sets limits to prevent drastic underpricing? For example, users could choose a max percentage difference they're comfortable with, like not pricing anything that’s suddenly 80% cheaper than before.

It would add a layer of protection and help reduce this kind of exploit that, in my opinion, damages Subeta economy. (Otherwise I'd be doing it myself, seems like a good way to profit, just scummy)

OMG PLEASE!! the number of times the autopricer has done this to me…ugh. If i come across any highly undercut items on shop search I always try to return high-value things i see to the original shop owner when i can, but sometimes since the shop disappears after a purchase it can be hard to get the shop owner i purchased from.

I love your idea so much. It would cause so much less stress on those of us who autoprice daily. Full support!

Can't agree more! At times we've had people price literally dozens or even hundreds of unique items at like 1sP or 5sP (which makes NO SENSE, btw)... It sucks finding out later that your items were sold at those prices as well... I used to check my shops after autopricing because this would go on for a long time. AND YES, people are allowed sell their items for whatever amount they please but ruining the game for others... that SHOULD be a big fat "no".

Hmm, I know currently users are pricing items much lower than current USS cost to try and fight inflation caused by Mauve's quests. The goal is to get enough of the items in a collection of shops at a more reasonable (non-falsely inflated) price so that people can actually do the quests. These people who are doing this (RSing items, pricing lower in the shop) are not then buying up and reselling. It's unfortunate that some people are. Right now this is an ongoing issue that would likely be resolved by adjustments to the quest on Kumos. That would then reveal if anyone is actually autopricing low to trap others like this or not.

What really irks me, is when people purposely price quickly selling, high demand items such as morties and tomes for several hundred k under the asking price - it then causes users such as myself, who depend on things like that as our main course of income, to take huge losses when we sell in bulk unless we remember to manually check the prices right after we autoprice.

But as faune said - with the way mauve quests are going, a lot of us - myself included - are fighting to keep inflation at a minimum by selling massively inflated items at a reasonable price, to keep quests doable. This is not us trying to cause people to lose out on profit, but instead trying to cut the value of something back down that never should have gotten high to begin with. The kumos quest artificial inflation issue would have to be ironed out before any tweaks to the autopricer could take place, imo.

I'm going to be that user:

Unless it eliminates user error, which can happen when pricing things by hand if you don't have the funds to put into a GA, you're (general) just angry that someone made a mistake in pricing. This seems needlessly strict and unfair. If you (again, general) want to control the market on here, just say so.

Personally, I'm tired of tiptoeing around people that would rather see certain people out a feature before they share benefits or would see them unable to use it because of "exploiting the system."

So is it an exploit to typo 1,800,000sP on your Nth item? No. Is it cheating at the game? No. Does it hurt you? No! The item will be bought at that price and you'll (GENERAL) will still be sitting pretty on your og price and likely sell at that og price and the market will correct itself in one or so days.

Don't at me on this. I'm tired of this coming up every few months. It's absurd.

There’s definitely a difference between human error, lowing the price to be more reasonable (like a CS item being sold for the CSC equivalent), and using the autopricer for the reason of just profiting off of someone else not being able to manually check 500+ items to make sure they aren’t being undercut. The first two things are not the issue. Accidents are fine, but manipulating the entire scenario as a way to make a profit is just disrespectful. There are plenty of other ways to make sP without harming other players.

On several occasions I have found items which sold for 1sP in my shops. It is hard to believe this was someone's error due to manual pricing. I know it's my responsibility to check the prices before I hit the autoprice button but when there are over 2K unique items to go through it's impossible for me when I am an old person with arthritis.

I found this previously with the autopricer, that I would end up with items listed at 1sP because someone had (I guess) entered "1" in the price box rather than the remove this number of items box. My workaround is to autoprice, then search for any items listed in my shop under 1000 sP - then I can just set them all to zero sP so I can manually check the prices.

I know there's the red text to show what items are going to be priced lower than they currently are in the shop, but I find it pretty mind-blowing to go through the list (especially when my shop is pretty full) to check!

I don't quite know what the answer is, but there must be something that could be altered about the autopricer to make it easier to use, and to help eliminate any unexpected massive price reductions (whether other users had priced them low intentionally, or accidentally)

genuine question: is this not what the autopricer's average price feature is sort of for? i never use it because i'm lazy and just live with the occasional undercutting of my random crap tbh but i kind of thought it was the middle of the road option to avoid being undercut.

i do acknowledge that since it takes an average of the current items listed in search (i think???) it doesn't really price competitively if you're wanting to sell quickly, and maybe a change to the option like 'use lowest price [averaged over the last month of autoprices]' or... something mathematically helpful idk... would be better, but using average over lowest would still work to fix the issue at hand on an individual level even if it's not 100% ideal. i would totally be down with an amendment to the average price feature that's maybe slightly more competitive if that's the reason it's not being used, though!

This is very nice of you! Once someone anonymously sent me back some over 1M item sold at my shop for very low, I actually wanted to just gift something back to them but.. No idea who the user was lol

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Oh, I'm aware of the Mauve quest problems, and trying to counter the inflation is actually great!

But what I'm trying to point about the autopricer being actively exploited by a few users is a whole different thing, the item that made me stop being lazy and finally make this post, was a holiday item from a while ago. It is not any current event, and not Mauve related. I had a decent stock of that item I got from the holiday event, but the autopricer priced it super super low without me noticing it, and someone bought the whole stock at once. Then, I checked their shops and saw 200+ of that item restocked there. It is not the first time it happens, and I wish users could have more control over the autopricer as to prevent huge undercuts. Like, being able to chose a min and max % they would want the autopricer to work on. I believe a feature like that would not hurt anyone.

As for Mauve, I'm trying to buy stuff on their kumos Shop because if I remember correctly, there was a thing where the more you buy, the more "trucks" arrive to restock, or something like that? But I'm not sure if that feature is still working x_x

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Yeah, accidents are fine. I only take issue when I notice more than a few items being bought at a super low price, and then instantly reuploaded to the buyer's shop as it does indicate the intention to monopolize that item (when it is something that doesn't restock) and artificially inflate prices.

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"but there must be something that could be altered about the autopricer to make it easier to use, and to help eliminate any unexpected massive price reductions (whether other users had priced them low intentionally, or accidentally)"

Yes! I do think this is the best mindset to have on this issue. " unexpected massive price reductions " is the problem that can be solved with adding new features to the autopricer. That would also allow people to sell whatever at 1sp if they want, without it negatively affecting other users.

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If I'm understanding the Average option correctly, it will consider the overpriced items, meaning, if everyone used it, that would generate inflation overtime: Shop A: 1M Shop B: 110k Shop C: 100k

Average: ~403k

So yeah, it would need some tweaking to ignore items priced much above your current price. That's why I suggested going by every user picking how much in % they are willing to discount (or raise) the price

Also for everyone: This post was not made with the intention of attacking anyone. I didn't name anyone and I won't name anyone. But this issue has been happening for long enough, it would be nice to see a solution. It doesn't need to be my solution ( adding a feature to pick the min and max percentage you allow the autopricer to work on), more ideas on how to fix this issue in a way that is good for everybody are definitely welcomed!

Autopricer definitely needs some improvements. Having the option to sort by price cuts would be nice, with the greatest differences at the top of the list. Assuming non-malicious intent (since I notice quite a few new users who price close/at to main shop prices because they're trying to be nice), it does feel ridiculous that a handful of users can accidentally deflate an item's value – sometimes even permanently, requiring to buy them up instead – and the workaround is tedious.

That said while it does suck to see something sell cheaper than it should've (and definitely feels bad if someone is taking advantage of it), I don't think it's so much of a problem beyond being annoying. Like, I keep a stock of 700+ items. And out of 700 item, maybe five things, at most, will be undercut more than I'd want.

Maybe there could be a shop option to limit how many duplicates users can buy from your shop instead? E.g. you can have one shop set so users are only allowed to buy 3 dupes per day and one shop set where it's a free-for-all. This doesn't necessarily solve the issue of undesired price cuts (or the opposite), but this could at least stop or slow down the handful of exploiters. I used to manually control the stock of my items like this (and this also gave me a good idea of which items sold fast and which ones sat).

Had that happen a number of times. It got me into the habit of checking my shop post-autopricing for anything under 5k. I've often bought out whole shops where the player priced all of their stuff at 1-5k sP intentionally, and then I've gone back to buy up what undercut items I could from usershops to turn a profit. :x

Sometimes users without GAs just price things low to sell them quickly, not with malicious intent. It's easier to copy-paste "5 000" into each price box than it is to check each item individually via user shops. Is it annoying? Yes. Is it good reason to check those shops and buy stuff up, then turn profit & keep other users' shops from getting undercut via autoprice? Also yes.

I don't see the need to limit how many items someone can purchase from a user shops, that's... extreme. A little warning message on the autoprice page + highlighting the undercut items after the first "price scan" would be enough, imo.

I hate the autopricer as it is and I will not use it. It definitely isn't worth a Gold account. I think there are many different reasons things list for outrageously low prices but that really doesn't matter to the overall goal of this thread. We all want a better autopricer and since it is one of if not the biggest selling point for Gold accounts it is worth improving.

100% support to autopricer improvements.

The idea of a percent difference limit that we can set individually sounds really good. I will not be satisfied until it is easier to auto price only some items. I do not want to autoprice all my items every time I want to update my prices. Some items I know will go back up and I'm very patient waiting on my shop till so I can wait for them to sell.