What's causing all the inflation?

1. Fluctuation in prices are natural, based on the overall supply, along with the overall demand. When there is high supply with a neutral demand, prices tend to stay lower in order to off load backed up items. When demand is high demand with a neutral supply, prices tend to be higher, as there is more people out buying this one item. The prices for gasoline can be considered as an example here. When theres the consensus that the supply is high, prices will usually tend to be cheaper, where as when there is a consensus that the supply is low, prices tend to be higher. Gold market is also highly volatile to supply. When theres even a slightly large amount of new gold introduced, prices can drop easily.

In short, supply and demand fuel natural inflation and deflation. Since we didnt have a sudden drop in the supply of Glove ATT 60% scrolls, or even a sudden rush of people looking to buy them, artificial inflation has occured.

[COLOR="Blue"]The definition of artificial here is where things get dicey IMHO. There was a sudden drop in supply of GFA60% as they were being temporarily removed by the merchants.
In addition to the removal of supply there was an increased demand due to people wanting to scroll the new agent gloves. Sooo, which is more artificial to you, the merchants increasing the scarcity of a supply to make more currency or Nexon arbitrarily adding more demand by introducing new gear that requires scrolling?

Remember when the NLC glove scroll quest came out and GFA60% prices dropped like a rock? Was that 'natural' because Nexon decided to add this quest? It sure was a sudden increase in supply with a neutral demand since there wasn't anything more to scroll. It also dropped the price of 8,9,10 atk gloves as a result.

The merchants figured that due to the hard to get nature of a 3 atk 4 slot glove that 60% non breakable would be the preferred target for scrollers. [/COLOR]

2. Its called price fixing, google it and youll most likely come across stories on Samsung price fixing their flash memory modules, and another from either nVidia or ATI/AMD fixing the price on their GPUs.

[COLOR="Blue"]Price fixing in the real world requires collusion on the part of the suppliers. There are real world laws against it. Samsung paid $300 million in real life dollars.

Price fixing or temporary price manipulation in a virtual world is not against the rules. At least not in maple. Many people may find it apprehensible as it affect their gameplay but i'm not aware of any Nexon rule against it. [/COLOR]

3. He said he was preparing for the inflation, not in those exact words, but its what he said. And to prepare for it, he essentially created the inflation in the process.

Considering iCollect by his own admission manipulated the price of a single scroll type, he didn't create overall inflation. He undoubtely contributed to it to some degree. I don't know how many GFA 60% scrolls are in the maple economy at any given time, so it's hard to say what the overall inflationary contribution from this price manipulation scheme was.


And to the last bit, you technically can clone the Land and Labor portion in a game like Maple. Just create a new character and/or account. When one merchant-used character is full of items to sell, set their items up in a mushroom shop and continue onto another character, rinse and repeat. You could essentially fill a whole FM room up with your own shops.

I was referring to your use of real world examples. You cannot clone real world items. Cloning or duping has cause more than one on-line game's economy to be destroyed. That's impossible in the real world.

We can agree to disagree on what's natural or articifical in the maple world. I understand that it likely annoys the crap out of you when players mess with the economy but that isn't going to stop anytime soon. In fact, as more people start buying dirt cheap mesos from these sites, I predict more price volatility.