How is one to make any PED using the Auction as a low spender or new player?
Spam chat all day trying to sell low quantity materials, looted (L) guns and other low value items?
Why cant we input PEC values when selling items?
Listing a 50PEC gun on auction for 1PED and the fee is 52PEC we lose money. Allowing us to list at 1.25PED would allow us to possibly make some mark up.
This goes for low quantity materials.
Yes I know there are “buyers” out there that buy low quantity materials off new players which is nice but they are very few and not always available.
For smaller items, it’s easy to want to remove the 1 PED minimum.
However, once you look at more expensive items, reducing bids to 1 PEC is a problem.
Pretend you are selling an Item worth TT +10,000 PED. You want as much markup as possible. BUT the folks trying to outbid each other just go from +4,852.26 to +4,852.27, to +4,852.28…
in this universe we’re so used to see the problem that noone can see solutions anymore
paying customer oriented game design could fix this by letting the auction creator chose their minimum bid increment but hey, why even use a brain anymore these days
It comes up naturally to wonder about this, and to want to change it. Hold on for a bit and think again. The 1 ped minimum step is what affords you a better markup as a beginner, when your looter and other skill levels are low and your returns diminished compared to further advanced players, and/or you’re playing on a very small budget for any reason. I can list a stack of muscle oil worth 30 ped tt for 31 start bid and 32 buyout, and get it sold quickly almost every time. That’s 106%, or 104.9% after auction fees. Higher-level players who produce a lot more and would list stacks for 10x or 100x more have next to zero chance to get it sold for more than tt+1 or +2 ped, because there will always be listings that undercut anyone who tries for more. If it was possible to bid or list in pec steps, this advantage would no longer exist. I’ll admit it took me far too long to understand this, and I probably even wrote a similar request once. (There are a few items where this leads to problems, like Rubio which isn’t stackable but has such low tt value that markups on auction are just horrible. People should stop buying them from auction, it’s a trap.)
If this was possible, then the sorts of items you envision new players listing would be among the most frequently offered items on the entire auction, and that 50 PEC gun might sell for about 53 PEC rather than 1 PED. The patience to find buyers rather than selling on auction is likely being compensated to new players in the prices they receive. Nanocubing is now an option for low Market Value stackables, so alternatives do exist.
I would strongly advise new players to avoid the narrative of cycling as the primary mode of playing Entropia and selling/shopping/exploring/etc. as secondary means to an end, but rather to view all activities afforded to them as building block from which they synthesize their own mode of playing.
Edit: I see now that you were not also advocating for auction fee removal, so the actual Market Value might tend to slightly higher than 1 PED, with the net payout to the seller and the conceptual point remaining the same. Another thing you have to factor in is the probability of an item going unsold. If you expect players to offer 50 PEC guns and eat 52 PEC auction fees for a chance at 1.25 PED payouts, then the guns had better not sell only half of the time.
That would work i think, and under a certain tt value (10-15 ped) the 0.5 ped fee not taken.
Would allow newer players to maximise mark up on lower amounts maybe.
That’s in part what shops are for. If you want that extra edge, then you need to invest in a shop.
As CH mentioned though, the auction fee is what is the challenge for new players. The PEC addition would help as much there. Us shop owners are also limited to only being able to go down to TT+1, so each system has some different challenges to work around when dealing with low MU (in ped terms, not %).