Originally Posted by Martin Alvito

Oh dear lord. Sure, Europe has antitrust laws on the books, but it's apparently not illegal for the Europeans to form a consortium of all of their airline manufacturers, name it Airbus, and then support it with state-backed low-interest loans in order to help it compete against Boeing. Antitrust laws as we know them are enforced selectively in Europe and not at all interpreted as they would be in the U.S.; look at banking integration over there in the last thirty years, which occurred to a degree that would have been unthinkable in the U.S. until quite recently. U.S. antitrust laws were written with the defining principle that the formation of large concentrations of capital is inherently anti-competitive and dangerous; this attitude came out of domestic economic events from 1890 to around the 1920s. This norm is NOT shared worldwide; the general approach has been that anti-competitive practices which generate efficiencies are OK, but those that generate economic rents are a no-no.

U.S. antitrust laws have been broadly relaxed in the last 15 years as a consequence of lobbying pressure and efforts to compete internationally in sectors such as banking on equal footing.



BORDERLINE? You do realize that Honda was instructed by MITI that it was not permitted to sell automobiles in the 1970's; that they were only permitted to sell motorcycles because Japan "had too many automobile manufacturers already"? (Note that Honda chose to fight this directive, which worked out well for them.) Do you also realize the degree to which directorates over there are interlocked? Vertical integration is not only permitted in Japan; it is encouraged to a degree which would be completely impossible in the U.S.

The point is that, depending on what social choice outputs a society wants, it can make sense to permit collusive behavior and anti-competitive practices. Out and out price-fixing is banned pretty much everywhere due to its creation of inefficient economic rents, but that's not what these guys are trying to do here. You're upset that these players are sharing market research data. They don't have a stranglehold on supply.



QED. You want more examples, I have them.



Prove it. Now it's your turn. These statements are totally unsupportable. You have absolutely no data regarding where wealth is concentrated, how much cash/ectos the largest traders have relative to the rest of the marketplace or how many of the Asian minis they supposedly have a stranglehold on. You clearly know very little about the sheer number of ectos that have to be bought and sold at the trader in order to move prices up or down, and you also do not seem to be aware that players that have large numbers of ectos are strongly incentivized to sell them on the open market rather than to the trader whenever possible.

I'll give you an alternative thesis which fits the data: The vast majority of players are poor because they do not manage their cashflow effectively, don't do their homework on true item valuations before making purchases, buy stuff they don't need that they cannot resell for what they pay, and don't spend as much time trying to make in-game cash as the plutocrats of the in-game society.

The extremely rare items in this game trade for 100k + XXX or + XXXX ecto for two reasons:
1) What else can you spend in-game cash on once you reach a certain point of wealth?
2) Supply of those items is highly limited. Note that, with the exception of the Asian minis, the source of new items introduced to the economy is farmers and those players that win in HoH, not the trading community.

Face it, the market functions in this game. People get upset when there's a dupe because it causes turmoil in normally stable markets. This is just like a currency crisis. It tends to affect the wealthy disproportionately, but at the end of the day no one is particularly happy about it.