Please implement a listing fee!

[synaesthetic]

The economic issues are something all of us are familiar with and the causes are not quite as obvious as people would think. Yes, part of the issue why everything is so worthless is because everything is worthless. Relic weapons, dungeon drops, raid loot and token gear (darklight and AF2) are equal to/better than five-melded two-star crafted gear.

People get the crafted stuff made to gear alt jobs, or to fill spots when stuff doesn't drop, or to make minor tweaks to their attributes--I recently had our company crafter make me a pair of rose gold earrings, which I melded to replace darklight and gain a modest boost of critical hit rating and determination.

The philosophy tome materials are so cheap now because the roulette and LotA are flooding people with philosophy tomes they have no real use for. Most people either have all the darklight gear they'd ever want and/or have no interest in buying more. These tomes would otherwise go to waste, so people use them to buy potash, coke and animal fat, then put that stuff up on the market boards. The supply far, far outstrips the demand and thus the prices plummet.

There aren't many worthwhile things to sell on the market and what good markets there are quickly are crashed by a combination of a design flaw in the system (I'll explain this later), the concerted efforts of Real-Money Traders (RMT) to intentionally sink any given market and the sheer ignorance of players who do not understand economics and just want to get money ASAP.

Why the RMTs want to crash markets should be obvious, and it is twofold. They play the market, methodically undercutting in order to bring the average prices down very, very low, and then they buy up all of the supply and re-list it for a profit. This also has the added effect of creating more customers for the RMTs themselves--if nobody can make money off the market, then more people will be more likely to convert real money into fake money.

The real problem--and why all of these things save for the "worthwhile" issue can happen at all--is that the market board system has a serious fundamental design flaw:

There are no listing fees.

It really is that simple. The market system charges a tax after a sale is made to function as a currency sink, but the system does not charge you to list an item and you are only charged if your item sells. Worse still, the system allows you to freely alter the price of your item without removing it and re-listing!

This system is broken and it should be clear as to why. Without listing fees, when a new seller posts an item, it's very easy to undercut them. This leads to rampant, unchecked undercutting--and most players aren't especially smart about undercutting and tend to slice off huge chunks of their buy prices in order to sell as quickly as they can.

Fixing the economy completely would require making trade goods that were actually worthwhile, of course, but listing fees would go a long, long way to stabilizing the economy and allowing players to make money (assuming they had something worth selling).

The revised system would work like this:
- When a player lists an item on the market board, they would be charged a fee equal to 2% of the list price. This fee is non-refundable, regardless of whether the item sells or not.
- When a player adjusts the price of an item on the market board, they would be charged an additional fee equal to 2% of the new list price. As before, this would be non-refundable.
- When the item sells, the appropriate tax (less the amount of the listing fee) would be deducted from the amount earned.
- Currency entering the system would be adjusted to compensate.

Two percent isn't a whole lot, but it adds up, especially for those people who undercut their items multiple times per day. By charging that fee, players would be loathe to change the price of their item more than a few times at most. The markets would stabilize as a result. Additionally, the RMTs would find their efforts to crash the market stymied. Further additionally, this would be a far more effective currency sink than those hilariously stratospheric Free Company housing prices! Consider just how many transactions take place on the market boards on a daily basis... then compare that to how many plots have actually been purchased.