@MrTRogers said in Chipper Update:
@ComebackLogic said in Chipper Update:
If I told you that in order to keep the market active (market dies, game dies too) SDS buy and sell most of the cards themselves with an automated algorithm that will continually buy and sell the cards at set time intervals, provided the price falls within the median value of pre-set parameters, would you believe me? I’m not offering a shred of evidence to support this, I’m just asking for opinions.
I wouldn’t call you crazy. If I remember correctly EA has bought cards off the market in madden before, though I’m not sure it was a regular thing, so I would doubt SDS would do it regularly either
That’s my pet conspiracy. I live in England, so I’m around when the game is very, very quiet. You can’t find a game easily because there’s simply not many players online at 10-11am GMT. Still, orders fill in waves at off peak hours. There will be nothing going on at all, I’ll sit there drinking coffee or whatever, then suddenly as if by magic, a bunch of orders will go through almost simultaneously. Then nothing again.
The exception to this would be cards like PS Griffey, who I listed at 444k which was the lowest bid at the time. Everything else I had on there sold, but as you might expect, nobody wanted to pay that price for a 95 overall. No human would anyway, but that’s where I got to thinking about the ways you could exploit such a system for personal gain. Say it automatically buys and sells cards at timed intervals, that’s great keeps the market moving and so on. But, if someone figured this out, they could subsequently buy all of a card with fairly limited supply for 350k each or whatever, relist them at 1m a pop and wait for the automaton to do it’s thing, reaping a huge profit.
A simple way to prevent this is to have an upper and lower value for each card and only buy if it falls within that range. This also brings an added benefit to SDS, in that they can effectively set the floor values of a card. If the automated system is set to buy all of a card if it falls below a certain price, they can hold the values of cards at a set minimum, as we’ve seen with the run it back cards, which have very strangely held a rigid value since release, with very little declination considering there is an infinite supply of each card. Finally, to have a market “crash” or boom, such as we’re experiencing right now, all SDS have to do is alter the median values up or down by, let’s say, 20%? The knock on effect would not take long to set in and these prices would become the new normal in no time. We actually see a lot of these things happening quite frequently, as I’m sure other market hawks are well aware.