Architect Archive
Thread: People who are jacking up our economy...
Dayln wrote:
And we have shown that no lawyer would touch it.
A winery owns its product form land to grape to bottling to trucks to sales to the final customer. The reason it is not a monopoly is that every other winery has access to do the same. The only time it would be considered a monopoly is that if one held such an advantage that others could not.
I do not hold such an advantage, I am a tiny percentage of the reproduces, a tiny percentage of the sales, and hundreds upon hundreds of other architects have the same access and do exactly what I do, in fact any architect could have such access if they choose too.
There is no unfair advantage. It would not apply even if that law did exist in SWG.
which it does not.
True but then again they don't sell to distrubutors for 10 times what they sell the bottles themselves. They have a MSRP they follow.
Ok I see a problem here. The real world has 6 billion people. Our server has 6000 maybe. You need to remember economy of scale. Your impact is far greater than you percieve. You figure with harvesters there may be 1000 total customers. Which means if you've sold to 100 of them then you have a fair amount of market share. Which would therefore mean that all of these laws do apply.
Rath wants to price fix, he wants the value to be his favored price, that isnt the way it works.
If I came up wtih a way tomorrow to make gasoline that others could also use that dropped the price in half, they could not sue me for selling for less. Just becasue this is the price they want it to be does not cast anything in stone.
Allone would have to do is show the actual cost of the material ( for SWG it is less than 1 credit ), and the case would be closed.
this is a non-issue
One more thing...
The manufacturer suggested retail price that we give to a store. We also sell direct to customers and so have no manufacturer suggested price to follow, we are the manufacturer. We can sell for whatever we want, even if our Cab is going for half of what others sell for. In fact we have done exactly that, we can sell our wine for whatever we want too.
We do NOT have to follow what others sell for. There is no law saying you cant sell for a profit lower than your competition. That law does not exist.
Wow wow, I don't see that, I actually didn't read that at all Dayln, I think you are taking a personal path here, so no offense but you are acting not professional at all, I take this discussion very seriously I see both your points HOWEVER I don't agree with this last post..
Logically thinking there should be a middle a base for the prices and it should be the price of the resource according to what people sell it, according to YOUR server.. not to please the rest in your profession but to make the game more enjoyable, like I said not condoning however charging double what the resource cost it seems a bit unreasonable to me, that I was once a novice player with very little money, we need to give those players a chance to enjoy the game too, not make it impossible 
Ten percent of the market does not a monopoly make. But if Dayln has that much of the market, well, you go boy!
Not only do anti-trust laws apply only to monopolies, they were also designed to prevent restrictions on free trade as well as to protect consumers from monopoly abuses( like high prices :tongue. They were not designed to protect inefficient competitors, except to the extent that the monopolist used its power to restrain trade, which was what Microsoft was accused of. The ultimate goal of anti-trust actions is to improve competition, or introduce it where none existed.
http://www.economist.com/research/Economics/alphabetic.cfm?LETTER=A#ANTITRUST
So...That just means I can continue to fund my harvs from two incomes and continue to undercut you...And when no one buys what your selling (after you've bought from me, and jacked up the price), you can fall back to crafting other things, and I can keep on doing two things. Cool. I can live with that. Will you?
Rath wrote:
So what combat skills do I have to fall back on? I'll answer it for you, none
Rath wrote:If you have ever read any of my other posts regarding architecture I have always advocated adding decay to harvesters and factories, along with making our expirementation mattered. If we did those two things than our wares would sell for considerably more because there would be something that differentiates us, the masters, from those coming up the ranks.
LikeI said I don't think the Devs should add "laws" to the game to prevent things like this from occuring. What I want them to add is a way for us to justify the cost we want. As someone else pointed to earlier, the only thing that differentiates are structures is cost, nothing more.
I hope you didn't think my post was a personal attack, it wasn't intended that way at all. I think that we are agreeing on most of the points anyway; I also have said that we need experimentation to matter, (in fact, it was me who pointed out the pricing thing, although others probably have as well).
What I guess I am trying to say though is this: What some people are asking for is similar, if not exactly, price fixing, by setting a minimum sale price as opposed to a maximum. Both are technically illegal, as far as I know. And everyone agreeing to a minimum price would not help solve the problem. The answer, as you say, is to have some other way to differentiate buildings than price.
As far as if Dayln is using sound business practices, I would have to argue that he is, as long as he is in fact making a profit. Of course, what is a sound business practice for him may not be for everyone, by which I mean it might hurt his competition. Still, in real life monopolys are a completely smart business practice, and worked so well that we had to have laws against them in order to keep up a free market.
Antitrust laws apply to more than just monopolies. I am stating on the facts of verticle trusts which is not a monopoly. Dalyn keeps bringing up Standard Oil, but standard oil was dissolved by President Taft, not for being a monopoly, but for having too much controlling interest inthe whole process of oil. That is what the Clayton Act specifically prevents. IBMwas alsobroken up for the same reason. They owned every company that designed every computer component and then also controlled the distrubtion of said computers. They had a verticle trust.
Tommar wrote:
Ten percent of the market does not a monopoly make. But if Dayln has that much of the market, well, you go boy!
Not only do anti-trust laws apply only to monopolies, they were also designed to prevent restrictions on free trade as well as to protect consumers from monopoly abuses( like high prices. They were not designed to protect inefficient competitors, except to the extent that the monopolist used its power to restrain trade, which was what Microsoft was accused of. The ultimate goal of anti-trust actions is to improve competition, or introduce it where none existed.
http://www.economist.com/research/Economics/alphabetic.cfm?LETTER=A#ANTITRUST
You CAN sell for less than you competition if you do not use any unfair advantages that others do not have access too. That is simply not the case, if you choose not to use it that is your own affair.
That has been proven over and over. Kmart can sell the same product for less than Sears does. My winery can sell its Cab lower than the competition does, I can even sell it at al loss if I want too. In SWG the cost of a resource is not whatever the market sells it for.
If what you were saying is true then no one would be allowed to sell anything for less than anyone else. look around, that is not the case.
And I have no unfair advantage, I have no access that others do not have.
I am not a monolopy, He is trying to apply something that isnt even close.
I think you are missing the point that Rath is trying to say. When compairing the 2 economies from RL and SWG you have to take into account the scale differance of RL the population of SWG. When your dealing with a vastly smaller pool of clients a small change could be drastic and have devestating negetive/Possitive effects on it.
So reguardless of the law it's principal stays the same. I could sue some one who sets up shop next to me and sells the same Iron Kids loaf of bread for a dollar less then me if that was my primary base of revenu. Now if they set up shop accross town then I could do nothing about it. but in the case of SWG with a limited client base we are all neighbors.
The only solution I see to this is giving value beyond storage to houses and making decay a viable option to reguvinate the client base. You can only catch so many fish out of a small pond that has no inlet or outlet before you run outa fish.
You HAVE to restock and there is no means of doing this yet in SWG.
Another reason for the crappy economy in SWG is there is very very little inter dependancy from one class to the next. So in a sence we are all holding manopolies and depend on very little to suceed. If we all had to go to some one else to get some thing completed then there would be an inherant mark up due to what you had to pay to complete the item.
This was very well done in EQ 1 but the empasis on crafting was not there to support the volume of new items introduced to the game. But the interdepandancy(spelling sucks!) was great.
To conclude.
1. Decay decay decay ( restock our pond. )
2. Interdepandance ( In order to complete this guild hall I have to visit a doid engineer to get the management tools for the guild hall (mark up 1) and then have to visit the tailor to get the cloth furnishing for the house (mark up 2).
Dayln wrote:
Rath wants to price fix, he wants the value to be his favored price, that isnt the way it works.
If I came up wtih a way tomorrow to make gasoline that others could also use that dropped the price in half, they could not sue me for selling for less. Just becasue this is the price they want it to be does not cast anything in stone.
Allone would have to do is show the actual cost of the material ( for SWG it is less than 1 credit ), and the case would be closed.
this is a non-issue
again for the 10th time , niether rath or anyone else on this thread is trying to price fix. what we are saying is archs should base their prices on their servers MARKET value of resource.
it is simple if your server market value for resources is 2 cr and it needs 10k in resource to build the item Your BASE price SHOULD be 20k than you can charge what ever on top for what is fair to craft. if your servers market value it 4 cr per unit than your base price should be according to that. Now price should go up and down depending on the value we place on our time crafting the items NOT what the resources cost us. resource value should always be based on the market value.