Cornering a Market

When we started playing, one of the silliest things (and there were a lot of silly things) was that we had absolutely no understanding of how the auction house worked. I remember going over to an auctioneer once, clicking open her little window, seeing nothing for sale, and then not going back for about another 10 levels.

Now, when Feifer and Skrah play, a good portion of the time spent (usually after questing or whatever) is spent working the auction house angle. We both make stuff to sell, buy mats and materials, and just generally cruise the auction house. Kinda strange that a game would consist of that kind of "play," but the game is full of surprises.

So, recently Skrah got into Thorium in a big way. Mining it, sure, but also buying thorium ore cheap and selling thorium bars (once smelted) a little higher. In one day of doing this, Skrah can make a good 10 or 20 gold. Then came Uktheredon (name changed slightly), who, on our server, decided to corner the thorium market.



I noticed it first when all of my thorium got bought out by Uk, and when I went to sell more, I saw that s/he had bought everyone out and completely stabilized the market in terms of price and numbers of units. Where as thorium bars were once selling for anywhere from 32g to 50g for a stack of 20, now there were only stacks of 5 and each was 8g. Go Uk go!

So I got in on it, starting to price my own stacks of 5 just below Uk's price. But Uk was having none of it, and kept buying me out ... which, of course, worked for me. In a few hours of this, I made 100 gold. Then I ran out of thorium and had to wait. Boo!



Anyway, I'd never seen someone in the game try to corner a market before, and in the long run, it was only minimally effective. With thorium, at least, there are just too many people out there with it who are willing to sell for whatever price. But I'm still convinced that Uk's moves pushed the overall price up, which was clearly one of his/her goals.