Game Economies Versus Real Life

Since the internet hides sarcasm, is that a serious suggestion, or saying there's no hope in applying text book econ to Maple?

Well, a book is long, hard, complicated, and wordy. Spice and Wolf has this:

 Spoiler

I'm not saying there's no hope in applying textbook economics to MapleStory. You could if you did it properly. But is it worth your time and effort to learn and apply such methods?

To apply real-world economics to MapleStory, you should understand that the constraints on the system are not the same. Supply and demand is a very broad and general concept. In real life, the application of this concept involves calculations that determine the supply and the demand, considering the resources, the current economic status, and actual success of businesses.

For example, you can say the concept of Supply and Demand applies towards Gasoline; Supply is constantly diminishing in the world. It's a fossil fuel, and cannot be so quickly replenished at the rate we use it; however, how is it that the prices can fluctuate so much, and even go down? In Hurricane season, as another example (not necessarily true, I just remember this from somewhere), gas prices in the United States should increase due to the Hurricanes disrupting the process of off-shore oil rigs.


How this applies to MapleStory is simple. There is such a thing as supply and demand; however, in recent cases such as that of Diamonds, everyone believed that there was going to be a demand so explosively large, that no supply could ever meet it. Thus, everyone decided to horde Diamonds, but not sell. As a supply of an item increases, its price will eventually go down. Likewise, as the demand increases the price will go up. But what happens when only one changes? You can have a dramatic change in the prices. Diamonds are the pyrite (if you've been watching S&W II). No one wants them now because there's such a huge supply but low demand; they are not as seemingly useful as everyone had hoped they would be, nor are they as expensive. The market so called crashed. When some large supply begins selling the Diamonds for a low price, everyone else will follow suit because its price has effectively lowered, and they will fear that they will begin to lose even more money if they haven't already.



As Herbert said, there is no real regulation of prices in MapleStory. New things are constantly coming into the market at any given time, unlike in real-life. If some new-fangled invention that was omgwtpbbq awesome appeared, you could be sure that whoever had it and was selling it would make a lot of money. Of course, what would happen is that they're the only ones who have it, they would make a contract with some business conglomerate to sell it for them, and so-on, regulating the price from one monopolised source. In MapleStory, anyone and their mothers can get their hands on something like a Miwok Artifact. They can then price it for whatever they feel like and when someone purchases it that's the price they go for, unlike in real life where there is a much stricter range for values. That's not to say that there are no regulations on prices.

What happens now is that the market has prices set for it by the demand of the players; money speaks. If someone wants an item and they have the money, they'll try to buy it. For example, Glove ATT 60% is 10m. Some shop decides to set it at 12m. Someone decides to buy some at 12m. Now, depending on how many were bought, where this shop was, who bought it, etc. the market's actual price can change; if the person bought a lot, the Shop Keeper can start to believe more people are willing to buy for said price, and price them higher. If the shop was at a more prominent position, like FM7, where lots of people pass through, they will get the idea of pricing at such a range; however, people can also set competitive prices to sell more quickly, or to sell more than others, which will also affect market prices.

tl;dr
Horo is my waifu. To have successful business, you need a harvest goddess following you.