Welcome to Gaia! ::

In this post a number of things will be shown.

1- New gaians who do not have access to daddy's credit card have to search for increasingly creative methods to legitimately earn enough gold to buy a new donation item.

2- The creation of daily chance has destroyed the value of inks, both common and rare, as well as the work ethic required to create them.


1- The starter business and the Gaia Economy:

When I first started on Gaia, I realized that that were a number of ways to make gold on here.

posting
surfing
voting

All "normal" ways to get going.

But I then saw from several mates the other way. Starter businesses ..... labour intensive , creative and profit making. We had bug collecting to create ink, and the ink mixing to create rare inks. We had the flower and paper businesses. All three seemed to be linked and worked wonders for getting you the cash required to buy the donation items every month , or to buy investment items to resell later on. We still have to some extent , the ticket market and the fish market, both with end products if you convert the fish into items or sell the tickets for gold. But again effort and time are required.

For a very long time this worked just fine, any number of special items were available for Gaians to supply other Gaians with raw material for said items. But the paper bag mask was discontinued, and the the hats you get from paper are not exactly flying off the shelves . Regardless of the value of any of the items created, they were still worth more than the raw materials, and lazy Gaians had to pay for them , as well they deserved to, it's not like they did anything to create them. Sorry if i don't feel sorry for the person complaining that things cost something. All things cost something, as they are made of raw material that took time and effort to collect, then assemble then to mix sometimes , until they became items worthy to one extent or another of purchase at higher value.

Said hard working enterprising and industrious Gaians would then take their profits and move up the ladder in the gaian economy and become better off and move into larger more expensive items. Shockingly, this made logging into Gaia a pleasurable activity that simultaneously built character and sharpened peoples wits and helped them spot trends. Hardly a bad thing. In fact a large proportion of older Gaia business people started off selling paper, bags ,inks and flowers.

As it stands there are fewer and more complicated means available to Gaians to get started without reaching for their parents credit cards. The fact that the market for paper and flower products is not strong leaves the two other items that can produce modest profit, Inks and fish . Fish has a few super stars who make huge amounts of gold, it's believed most of these are bots and illegal, leaving INKS as a consistent money making item that a small seller could use to sustain their growth. Plus the cost of everything on Gaia, according to manyhad got far too high,.Early items were out of reach of the average person and the new ones had reached a new higher base price . IE: the old envelopes were 4k at most , now at first issue they go to 20k then settle at 10 to 15k ( unless of course the item is a hit. )

Well lets address those issues, of course early items will be rare and consequently expensive. We cannot and should not pretend the laws of supply and demand don't exist. As for the price of envelopes now... of course they will have risen as well. those who sell the items determine the price, and to be honest , if every month you gamble there will be a new Katana sword, it's only fair you pay a fair price for the limited chance to get a valuable item.

And yet the chorus of poor Gaians who don't seem to be interested in a bit of effort are ever growing, and the powers that be have decided the route to popularity among the masses is to undermine the very thing that made the place interesting in the first place. I read in one place , that some girl didn't think there was a problem with inks, as she was getting them for free , and that suited her fine and hoped it would soon be possible to get other items for far less or free as well. To be honest if all she wants is to chat and have free cool stuff , she can go on msn and pilfer pics off the net. This type of person is coming to epitomize the new Gaians . They are more concerned with free stuff andhave little or no interest in any activity that requires effort. Some of the most recent quests are an example of the pandering to such types.

Is Gaia taking it's entrepreneurial class for granted or even hostile towards it ? Not entirely. Those of us with investment items, having existing stocks of gold or items of greater value, are able to recognize and take advantage of the occasional "opportunity" to make gold , are far from feeling unappreciated or un-wanted. The new market while it improves a few old glitches from the old, and sucks a few coins away in the shape of sales tax is not so bad. We quickly learned which bits to ignore and which to use. Sellers still fall into the basic groups :

1- Noobs with no idea of the value of anything and willing to sell at any cost, no matter how low. ( Very handy when buying investment items)

2- Gaians who are just selling goods so they can get new ones for their avatar. Consequently, they won't give it away, will they?

3- Users who try to play the short game built around the lowest selling price. Depending on what time of day you do this, your chances of good profits are increased

4- Patient investors who take the long view and sell items at the prices they are worth.

5- Inflators , who buy up stock to inflate a price for short term profit before the price settle back to "normal" .

There are plenty of ways for middle class Gaians and higher to make money, and I for one won't spill the beans. Figure it out yourselves, we had to.

2-So How did Daily Chance take the laws of supply and demand and destroy the common and rare inks market?

First of all lets see how the laws of supply and demand work ....

at its simplest you take the amount of product available and divide it by the amount of persons wanting it . You then arrive at a value that reflects the price people are willing to pay for said item.

It's a bit more complicated though . So lets take inks for example .
When I started in Gaia these were the prices for Inks.

blue 500g
red 250g
brown, black, yellow and green 100 to 150

then when you considered the mixing and quantities required to create rare inks , 3000 to 8000g was not uncommon for things like white and gold etc...

why so much?

Well you had to go into towns, and collect the proper bugs at the proper times, some are harder to find then others, and of course it takes time.

This helped establish the production value of inks and as such also the fair market value. The equation being real cost+profit margin= fair market value.

Inks being useful as an item to tint paper for presents and bouquets as well as a "speculative" item in view of the oft promised and oft delayed tattoo option, they kept a solid value. New Gaians could and did get into the ink business and used it to get into the higher brackets.

When Daily Chance was introduced , several types of items were given out .

1- Inexpensive basic store items
2- Some raw material items ( bugs , flowers, paper, cheap fish, and junk)
3- gold
4- Tokens
5- Bait
6- and lastly........ common INKS!!!!!! ( a produced item)

within a week , the value of common inks tumble dramatically to next to nothing . How did this happen? was it the fault of inflators??? don't make me laugh. It was the effect of flooding the market with huge amounts of stock that was never created in the proper sense of the word.

Now lets just look at blue ink. Assuming 40, 000 DC users a week getting 3 blue inks a week thats 120,000 units a week that appeared out of nowhere, multiply that by 52 ....6,240,000 units a year . There is no way the hard work approach can produce that much blue ink in a single year. Do the same exercise with the other base inks.

So what happened next?

Noobs, and inexperienced members flooded the market with common inks, in many cases selling it at 1 gold or 10 at the most. So not only was the supply outstripping demand, it was selling for less than it cost to produce.

Within days the prices crashed, rendering previously valuable inventories worthless. after a week the cheap easy inks had fallen to 20 and 30g and blue to 50 . Worse was to come, the sudden influx of common inks in the market , made it easier for those who wanted to work, to acquire large stocks of common and start mixing in earnest. The increase in supply of rare inks caused the prices of those inks to fall as well. Now rare inks which were at 8k had fallen to the 250 to 2,000 range. Also causing catastrophic devaluation of existing stocks which were now worthless as well. so for a second week , the inks took a huge hit.

The industry of Gaians working in towns or buying bugs in market to make inks died. The sellers of inks were put out of business and left holding stock it cost them far more to produce than they could ever hope to sell for now. Could it get any worse? Yes it did, the next thing that happened was the shutting down for a prolonged period of time , the ability to mix inks to create rare inks. Though stabilized, the prices of rare inks never really recovered and the commons had gone as low as they could go, as you cannot sell something for less than zero.

A year on or so from the creation of DC, we finally got Tatoos, Oh that was sweet if you speculated on inks and took advantage of the initial spike in ink prices, but eventually, this too levelled out and the only valuable inks are the red, blue and black and even then it's not what it used to be. Surprisingly, black is doing well, who would have thought eh? Not content with having destroyed a perfectly nice stable starter business on Gaia, having re-established the ability to mix inks, they added rare inks to the daily chance. The same flooding of the market occurred, the same selling off at insanely low prices that in no way reflected the cost of production occurred.

The powers that be at Gaia destroyed the last decent chances to make any starter gold with effort alone. And specifically inks were targeted. Job well done, Inks are worthless now, or more to the point the production of inks is pointless and the sale of inks is now down there with the selling off of unwanted items like starter clothes .

I and many others have found countless ways to make gold and enjoy the marketplace, but then we have our reserves of items and gold already in place. Pity the noob who has to try harder and harder to do half of what we did. The knock on effect is that they will too add their voices of frustration to those who can't be arsed to lift a finger to get something around here worth more than 50g. I'm sure those of us who worked the system and played by the rules will be again paying for this somehow or other.

When the battle system comes out, how long will it be before weapons are added to the DC? Will we be rewarded for effort or will yet again the less than motivated masses be given for the price of a few clicks, the wonderful bejewelled items of combat needed to excel in the arena?

This is how the ink market was killed by the Daily Chance.



As always, crew feel free to post suggested edits