3. Cannot sell subscription tokens

Cannot sell subscription tokens


  • I'm new to the game, and enjoying it quite a lot so far.

    TL;DR there should be no up-front cost for creating a SELL order when the item being sold is a subscription token.

    I'm trying to learn the market so I can buy and sell with people.  To that end, I bought a subscription token so I can sell it to someone, get some credits and start trading with people.

    However I now have a huge problem.

    When I tried to sell the token for 3M credits, it returned error -6, that I don't have enough credits to create a SELL order.

    The only BUY orders on the market are complete rip offs, the average price is much higher than the current BUY orders and so nobody in their right mind would sell a subscription token to someone with a BUY order at the moment.  (This may not always be true, but it has been true for the past 2 weeks since I've been playing).

    5% of the market price 3M is 150k credits.

    So I thought fine, I'll start selling the minerals I have to get 150k credits so I can create a SELL order.

    The problem is that since I am forced to sell minerals to people who already have BUY orders, and I have to pay the energy costs, I am effectively locked out of dealing in subscription tokens for seemingly MONTHS of time until I have enough rooms and have sold enough resources that I have 150k credits.

    This is insane.

    Subscription tokens should either not have any price associated with creating a SELL order, or you should deduct the 5% fee AFTER the order has been placed rather than up-front.

    If your intent is that no new player can ever use subscription tokens, then kindly refund my money since you are choosing to make my purchase completely useless and you failed to disclose to me at the time of purchase that I am buying something that has no use whatsoever.

    Thank you.


  • Dear Xist,

    Removing the associated credit cost with placing sub token orders would make the market too volatile. If I created a sell order for X and then someone creates another sell order for X*0.75, I won't be dropping the price on my order because that would effectively mean losing 0.25 of the credit cost I had to pay originally. I would only drop the price if I don't believe mine is realistic anymore or if I am in a hurry. This is why you see such a wide array of prices in the orders on the sub token market.

    I also disagree with your conclusion that the buy orders are unrealistic. Please check the sub token history to see that the majority of transactions so far are actually with buy orders not sell, because the sell orders are unrealistic. The market price for sub tokens is what the history of transactions suggests: ~2.5m. This value may rise of fall based on supply and demand mechanics, but this is undeniably the current value.

    Kind regards,
    Atavus


  • Thanks for the reply.

    I agree with your assessment that the current market value is between 2.5M - 3.0M credits.

    However to sell the token to a buy order means I will get 1.2M - 1.4M, or LESS THAN 50% of the market value.

    Only a fool would do that.

    I do not understand why you prohibit me from placing a sell order in the 2.5M - 3.0M range which is clearly the appropriate value of the item.

    In any case I am still requesting a refund of my subscription token purchase.  It is impossible to sell it for its actual value without spending MONTHS of time generating enough credits to cover the 5% transaction cost and spending HUGE amounts of energy in the process, which is completely ridiculous and was not at all made clear during the purchase.  You should put a big warning on it "WARNING YOU'D HAVE TO BE A COMPLETE IDIOT TO BUY THIS SINCE YOU CANNOT POSSIBLY EVER TRADE IT FOR ANYWHERE NEAR ITS ACTUAL VALUE UNLESS YOU ALREADY HAVE MILLIONS OF CREDITS".

    I will not ever again try to support the game buy buying and trading subscription tokens unless you change this market mechanic to allow me to sell it for its actual value.


  • Dear Xist,

    It seems the sub market suffered a collapse this week. The buy orders were for 2.5m until a few days ago. I suggest waiting until they rise again.

    The market is still volatile. Two months ago, the NPC price adjustment caused a significant drop in prices (credits were going for 4m) down to 2m. One month ago the world war increased the prices back to 2.5-3m due to a credit flood from the top players. It may be that the market is readjusting now and the new price will settle down to 1.5m.

    This is part of what's interesting about the market. Do you sell now? Or do you hope the prices will rise and you will get a better price later?

    I think the problem is with your definition of "actual value". Since this is a player driven free market, the value of any resource is a matter of perception. There is no "actual value". Think more in terms of stock market rather than supermarket.

    Three months ago, some people (including myself) payed 4m+ for sub tokens believing the price will rise. The market suffered a collapse and theoretically we lost a lot of money. I took a gamble and lost, but that's all part of a free market.

    One small piece of advice though, this community appreciates reasonable, civilized discourse. Try to manage your outrage and use of caps. In the end we're talking about 20$. You pay more for a night out.

    Kind regards,
    Atavus


  • I try to use caps and bold face to identify the particularly important aspects of the point I'm trying to make.  I don't intend for it to signify outrage.  Therein is a problem with written communication and I thank you for your patience when reading my posts.

    I think the main thing that I'm trying to get at here is that there is absolutely no benefit whatsoever to preventing me from making a sell order.

    Since the market prevents me from making a sell order, my only option is to add code that polls the market EVERY TICK, and if someone creates a buy order for a price I like, then I make the sale to that person.

    What is the benefit there?  Hundreds of people polling the market using ghost prices and every one of them trying to close the same deal at the same time?  What an insane waste of CPU.

    Just let us make sell orders.

    Everyone will see that there are 100 people trying to sell tokens for 2.5M and the price will come down.  Better yet, inordinate amounts of CPU will not be completely wasted just trying to circumvent this artificial market limitation.

    I do not at all understand the implied value the market sees in preventing people from making sell orders.


  • Changing order price every single tick is only a 0.2 CPU per order per tick cost - it would be totally reasonable to manipulate the market using rapidly changing prices if there were no cost associated with creating a higher order (and increasing the prices of an order).

     

    Getting enough credits to create a sell order is relatively easy selling energy and/or minerals to buy orders, I do not believe at all that this is a large barrier to entry. Creating an order selling 1 token for 2.5 million credits only costs 125k credits - while this isn't inconsequential, it is easily reachable through a bit of interaction with the market and selling 625k worth of your average mineral, around 17 harvests.

     

    It's true that the market has some barrier to entry, but it's also true that that barrier is very crossable, and if you are willing to go a tiny bit under market value, fulfilling a buy order does not have any of these disadvantages.

     


  • Several months later, now that I have plenty of CPU, polling the market every tick is indeed nothing to be concerned about.

    When I wrote this comment I had a very very low GCL with maximum remote mining consuming 100% of available CPU - polling the market looking for deals all the time was not insignificant overhead that was preventing me from leveling up my GCL at maximum speed, which was (and still is) my primary concern.

    FWIW I am fairly active in the subscription token market now.  Because of the market's poor implementation, it is easy to make a lot of credits by setting buy orders at very low prices.  Along comes a low GCL player who is forced to sell to me even though my pricing is not at all competitive, and voila!  I've made a small fortune.  Rinse and repeat.

    Am I happy that it's so easy to make credits if I use the system like this?  Not really, but I do it anyway.  Does it show that the market is working?  No.  It only illustrates how broken the market really is when it comes to forcing new players to use buy orders rather than allowing them to create competitively priced sell orders.