Has anyone empirically tracked aggregate markup over time?

Entropia Universe Economy General Economy Discussion
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I have noticed quite a few Entropians confidently exclaiming that certain changes to Entropia, such as the placement of existing resources into space mining, have in some way harmed aggregate markup in Entropia. I usually chalk these claims up to inappropriately applying linear cause-effect thinking at the event level to macroscopic properties of a complex system, as well as the asymmetry that even during aggregate-neutral markup shifts, negatively affected Entropians will be incentivized to speak as if the world is ending while positively affected Entropians will be out finding and realizing new opportunities and incentivized to be silent.

I donā€™t really think high aggregate markup is the best target for game design to chase for its own sake, but it would be interesting to see how it has historically changed after updates.

Has anyone, either currently or in the past, published any data generated from the EL auction tracker or any of its predecessors simply totaling the TT value and the markup of expiring auction items over time, or perhaps even a histogram of the distribution of markup over items (holding the total markup fixed, lower entropy might be interpreted as greater opportunity)?

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So you think that there is no cause and effect? Also by your statement, even if there was it creates new opportunities and that was Mindarkā€™s goal the entire time? I mean donā€™t need a whole lot of data, we saw what happened to tier components when Mandark changed the way tiering worked, was a direct cause and effect.

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Classic - overthinking everything.

Itā€™s plain simple - people who never mined before now mine in space, and straight receive rare materials that you would need to otherwise have knowledge and skill to find.

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Nope, only data what people have is clear drop on majority of MU and poor sales.

Mind you i am used to the normal MU flux but when your loot sales dont even sell for lowest MU you will stop fucking around.

Thatā€™s my empiric experience.

First noticeable shift in market happended during first RM.

After that weā€™v seen MU:s lowering all around, more people slowing cycling and economy having alot less PED to spend.

Dont mention all the fuck ups between that and space update. ?

I wonder why? Wouldnā€™t happend to be because everyone is stuck with the fucking tokens and refuse to get fucked in the ass while waiting for vendor pull that might never come?

People are unhappy, lack faith or refusal to depo more before MA delivers something.

This might have something to do with the MU:s these days and again sorry dont have the data or need it when itā€™s so clear observe.

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Quite the opposite, I think complex systems emerge from such a proliferation of cause-effect relations that it is difficult to genuinely disentangle them, while just so stories bridging the micro-macro gap post hoc are easy to construct and propagate. I wouldnā€™t say such causes can never be identified, only that the just so stories warrant a degree of skepticism.

Note that there is also a big difference between a claim about an effect on the markup of an individual item and a claim about an effect on the entire market. Does lower markup on Tier Components lead to lower aggregate markup in the economy, or folks spending their budgets on other things? I have no opinion on MindArkā€™s goal in these situations, as I think getting clear on the actual market dynamics would be a necessary step in making an informed guess at that.

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I mean you sound amazing.. but doesnā€™t take a rocket scientist to see whatā€™s going on ā€¦ back to Suljeā€™s point.

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Itā€™s like Leon Hawkeye says. This community as a whole isnā€™t very smart. 99% of the time it truly is just a cause and effect type of situation.

Shoot, you see the price of CLDTs change multiple weeks AFTER an event happens because the lower community doesnā€™t know how to react faster than a snail.

I do say though, generally the health of the economy is related to tier comp pricing, rare ore pricing and output amps for the most. With my own gathered data shows a direct correlation to those mateirals MU and at the bare minimum CLDT pay outs and Entropia Life globals. Now I know CLDT isnā€™t the be all end all, but itā€™s more than good enough.

If people arenā€™t cycling hard with dmg enhancers, pyrite/output amps are down for example. Is it perfect? Of course not, but itā€™s very blatantly obvious BECAUSE this system and this economy is NOT complex.

Thatā€™s where this whole idea/concept ends and begins.
This games economy IS NOT COMPLEX. And anyone who says otherwise who has spent even just 10-20 hours involved in the market, reading the history of updates/forum posts etc Can see that.

When thigs are going good and people are having a good time and spending ped, economy is good. When people are not, economy is not.

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Suljeā€™s post is so ideologically committed to appearing simple that it might even take a rocket scientist to see what Sulje believes is going on. What is the economic effect thought to be? Low aggregate markup in the economy? Low aggregate markup in mining? Homogeneity in mining markup resulting in the differential between high knowledge/skill mining and low knowledge/skill mining getting smoothed over? Is this effect intrinsic to the mechanics of the systems involved or just a result of the attention shift caused by space mining being new? The world may never know!

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To answer your actual question though. I think entropia life did have data on aggregate markup per category, but I suppose it broke some time ago

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Amen ?

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it is even simplerā€¦
in ecoinomjic terms, gane ius DEFLATIOINARY
activity tqax erodes PED in cards and let residual peds worth more
only way to have more MU is to PRINT (MINT, seniorage) more PED
at the moment PED are most desirable asset in game

anyway filelrs are rather high, i saw lysterium holding prices over 103ā€¦ that is awrsomeā€¦

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And i thought rednecks are hard to understand.

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This is such an unfathomable statement to me, although I do feel where itā€™s coming from. In my mind, and I think the minds of just about everyone who has been here for enough years, the Entropia community is, perhaps essentially, exceptionally smart and exceptionally capable of applying intelligence, imagination, knowledge acquisition, and creativity to pursuits of excellence in realizing personal ideas and goals. An alternative interpretation to Leonā€™s could be less about Entropiansā€™ potentialities and more about the recessiveness thereof in the context of Entropiaā€™s present state and development direction.

Effects such as probability blindness are believed to be similarly context-dependent (Amos Tversky famously remarked that most people tend to bucket predictions into ā€œgonna happen,ā€ ā€œnot gonna happen,ā€ and ā€œmaybe,ā€ instead of thinking in more useful gradations, yet in wagering contexts they have no conceptual trouble with phrases like ā€œ3 to 1 oddsā€). Similarly, the stereotypical old lady in the checkout line exchange Lady: Why isnā€™t the payment working?, Cashier: What does it say on your screen?, Lady: Debit or Credit?, Cashier: Which one do you want?, Lady: Debit, Cashier: Press the Debit button, Lady: Now why isnā€™t it working?, Cashier: What does it say on your screen?, Lady: Do you want cash back? Yes No, Cashier: Did you want cash back?, Lady: No!, Cashier: Press the No button, Lady: Now why isnā€™t it working?, etc. isnā€™t actually too cognitively incapacitated to read text on a screen, but has adopted a habit of feigning ignorance in certain contexts, perhaps as an act of ideological resistance against being made to interact with technology.

My belief is that we may be in about the top of the fourth inning of a terrible unraveling of most of the properties of both Entropia and the Entropia community which have traditionally constituted their respective natures and invigorated Entropians with an optimism about the value potential of our future, largely due to a detrimental feedback loop between actual development processes and resulting adaptions of player expectations toward future development, related to a phenomenon Iā€™ve coined the crisis of developer proximity, but I do not know what proportion of this devolution is an actual exodus of capable, growth-oriented Entropians in favor of intrinsically defeatist and myopic ones, versus a ā€œmereā€ shift toward capable Entropians no longer viewing Entropia as a context in which expressing their best selves is deemed worthwhile.

Either way, I am wary of drawing conclusions so bold about the simplicity of the economy, if only because it takes a very small proportion of the community being on top of arbitrage opportunities to produce complexity even in the absence of proper diversity of beliefs, desires, goals, and actions among Entropians more broadly. Even efficient market hypotheses, which are much stronger claims to attribute to a market than my calling it a complex system, would not demand CLDT prices adjust immediately after an event, even events which eventually contribute to such adjustments, only that they adjust perpetually to reflect all available information. It could well be that an announcement is made which contains some information about a new system or feature, but the information ultimately more important for price is how widely that new system or feature will be adopted, which is not available at the time of the announcement. I do think correlating the Market Values of specific materials to CLDT payouts is a worthwhile endeavor, and wouldnā€™t be surprised to find some valuable market inefficiencies though.

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as a theorycrafter, i made all excel models that represent arbitrage in crafting for several items, i lust love to play with numbers.
yes community is not smart, if considered as a complex entity with a brain.
but this is a partial understanding.
as an example: i want a xxxx armor, efficient market commadn me to calculate the farming cost of materials and check if it is lower or higher than my purchase price of the pre.made item.
BUT i am also doing missions, farming codex and the materials can be considered ā€œpartā€ of daily gaming fun.
so the utility value itself is not the ONLY argument that influences decisions.

another point is the ā€œmarginal utilityā€ of an item, as an esample the NI Chimera incision plates lootable item. they dropped one every 700 to 1200 kills, so each 2 hours with 5 hunters we can have a set made. every day it is 24 sets.. in one month there it comes the price to zero MU simply there is not people wanting it anymore.

an SB90 has a pulling value of about 45ā€¦50k. no one want one? all melee knife fighters either dont have level 90 to use it or already have one? it is 14000 on ah. liquidation price. big bargain for who buy it to self use.

could make 100 examples, like people purchasing L8s with 26 ped MU instead of terra6 with 6 ped mu, same effect 20 ped loss ā€¦

The percentage of people that read wiki and look for opportunity is small, so in this sense whe community as a whole is not smart, but compenstae with fast reaction. if there is a MU niche, it is quickly arbitraged. and in this sense it is SMART so its not so easy to determine.

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No, they arenā€™t. Thereā€™s a small minority of us who probably even have proper education to understand markets, economy, cost analysis etc.
We see time and again people using very uneco weapons, not even understanding how efficiency, dpp, etc. work. We see people show their logs and donā€™t take everything into account. We see the price of cldts rise 2 weeks INTO merry mayhem, even though the first 2 weeks are ALWAYS the most ped cycled during any maybe.

You give people a bit too much credit since the people who generally respond have some working brain cells. But there truly is not a whole lot. Which is fine, because if you didnā€™t have dumb people and people who donā€™t care about all that who play the game, then the game wouldnā€™t exist in itā€™s current form and past forms.

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Can I change this to:

Grumpy/negative Entropians will be inclined to speak as if the world is ending while positively-minded Entropians will be out finding and realizing new opportunities and incentivized to be silent.

?
This alone would create a bias towards more writing on the forums being negative, even if the actual balance amongst players is neutral or somewhat positive.

To answer your OP, I cannot claim ā€˜empiricallyā€™ from the thread title, but I can claim observation over many years.
If there is a new advantage to be gained from a vu, then current AH offers are likely to be snatched up fairly fast, followed by some people still placing offers at daily/weekly mu without knowing of a likely rise, but others will place offers at higher values and find that these also sell. The mu thus begins to rise.
If there is a new disadvantage, such as a sudden higher volume of x being looted, then the market will see those in the know trying to sell faster by lowering their offers, which lowers the mu, but with the added short-term visual effect that more unsold offers of x can be seen listed on the AH.

It is also fairly common to have waves of activity avoidance or higher density as awareness of saturation or new opportunities grows/fades. Mining may be avoided due to low mus, but lower turnovers increase the mus again (if demand stays the same), and more people return for a while, until they oversaturate and leave again.

However, longer trends are built from longer-term changes in demand/trust. If growth in the number of rings is faster than the growth of players to whatever relevant levels (beginners new to the game, but also more people skilled and wanting not adj, but mod, imp, perf), then mus will drop. What we can see by basic observation of histories is this longer movement: I doubt many of us actively track prices seperately.

Some unl items are thus destined to go down in mu unless the game actually grows, and for a few years now that appears to have stagnated, or even become shrinkage. If new opportunities also appear to disappear, then more people than usual will be voicing their concerns.

If some people are doing great in the new space mining, then this wonā€™t be seen in any share payouts. Some people are simply likely to go silent for a while yes. Unfortunately, Iā€™m not one of those. Either by bad luck or a turning of the screws by MA, my returns have not been positive (apart from at the start). I get the impression (from watching globals) that multis are rarer, but larger, but my personal averages are not bearing out acceptable returns. My tide is out at the moment, which is not empirical overall, but itā€™s enough for me at the moment.
If mining mus show signs of recovery, THEN I can take this as a sign that the effect is maybe more widespread than just with meā€¦

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I actually donā€™t take mistakes as an indicator of low intelligence. Failing to update beliefs to correct mistakes as appropriate might be, but I take the fact that someone is asking mechanical questions about Entropiaā€™s systems or logging their activities and asking for methodological help as a net positive sign. I also donā€™t take education to be prerequisite. Personally, I knew nothing about economics when I started playing Entropia. It was rather the other way around; Entropia, and the brilliant folks analyzing its systems, was what sparked my fascination with markets and all things financial, and I sort of view whatever shred of economic literacy I might have obtained from outside sources as an extension of my growth as an Entropian.

Perhaps it should be noted that I am not concluding Entropians are (essentially) smart by observing the modern behaviors of Entropians. Rather, I am drawing from some combination of a conceptual analysis of the Entropian in relation to the Entropia Universe concept and historical behaviors. If you (or Leon) said the Entropia community isnā€™t very smart at any time during Entropiaā€™s first decade, I think the standard reaction would have been to check if it was April Foolā€™s Day. The Entropia community has traditionally been renowned for its atypical makeup. Even back in the days of both gaming and the Internet being deemed spaces for the anti-social, immature, teenage male to waste time, the Entropia community somehow exhibited an almost surreal defiance of its reference classes, constituting a gender and age diverse, intelligent, creative, financially mature, learning hungry, and broadly capable community, welcoming and helping other Entropians, building statistical models and software tools, cultivating new ideas, and genuinely contributing to the evolution of the Entropian user experience every bit as much as the developers.

The problem weā€™re running into now is how many years weā€™ve spent being progressively lambasted with a kind of content and underlying development philosophy that tries to inject entertainment value and meaning through an extreme authorial intentionalist paradigm, into an ecosystem fundamentally shaped to thrive on the decentralized emergence of these goods. This is not in any way to suggest that all development has been detrimental or otherwise unwelcome; there have been a lot of positive advancements over the years, and others are certainly needed. But the relentless focus on missions, tutorials, trade restrictions, streamlining, simplification, the removal of item dropping, the utilization of policy to prioritize developer intent over individual creativity in contexts as basic as flying away from mobs while hunting, and the relative lack of sandbox-aligned content, strategically rich combinatorial structure, and causal interactions between systems for Entropians to explore, combine, transform, and synthesize into their individual procedures and goals has been brutal. It has been the natural trajectory for planet partners incentivized to prioritize an endless cycle of grabbing the attention of existing Entropians, but has been an absolute plague not only on Entropia itself, but on the Entropia community and its constructive relation to the Entropian user experience. What I donā€™t know is how much of this hollowing out of the excellence qualities which make Entropians who they are is due to selection pressure on who becomes and remains part of the community, and how much is just preference adaptation, Entropians learning to stop putting forward their best because theyā€™ve slowly adapted to a development paradigm which doesnā€™t respect their efforts as a primary source of Entropiaā€™s value.

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Itā€™s likely a bundle of related things in this ballpark. Iā€™ve gone back and forth a bit on what degree of negativity is warranted. I think itā€™s important to be civil, but focusing on disagreement with bad proposals and changes is fine when the overall development trajectory is off track.

I think the Entropia concept has entirely unprecedented potential, but the development trajectory has been off track for a long time. Still, I donā€™t think the narrative of MindArk being a worthless progenitor of idiotic louse-ups is the right one either. I do think weā€™ve seen a number of high-level strategic mistakes which warrant criticism, but my take is that developing Entropia the right way is actually pretty hard. We have the benefit of criticizing history in hindsight, and I think most of the mistakes come from overvaluing other MMOs or industry standards for inspiration, rather than putting Entropiaā€™s unique nature first, and drawing inspiration from a wider variety of sources once there is more clarity on the right questions to ask. Some of the other things relate to corporate incentives, which arenā€™t as easy as they sound to get right. I donā€™t think weā€™re doing well enough for Entropia to succeed at changing the world in the way it could, but grade-adjusting for the difficulty of the task, I might give MindArk a B- or so.

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Wasted potential indeed, finaly i can agree on something. ?

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Except these people donā€™t do that. They donā€™t ask questions, they donā€™t update their beliefs. We see it with people who have played for a decade + and still donā€™t even come close to even trying to understand loot 2.0 or anything that might help them succeed in game or in the market.