I admit I play video games.... no big surprise. While playing one over the weekend I ran into people "Merchenting." Which is defined as buying an item below average price and selling it at a higher price to make a profit. This happens in the real world frequently and I am questioning the ethics of it, real world and cyberspace. Technically these people are only taking advantage of the system of free trade. They are doing no work, and are in essence scam artists.
Why do we run into these type of people?
What makes up the appeal of scamming?
Well scamming may be slightly harsh, but still, what makes the appeal? Personally I see it as a way to gain profit with extremely little to no work, and benefit at others response. Do people feel bad about themselves after they have scammed these people? Or do these people just have a different set of morals?
Are video games that much work in the first place?
ReplyDeleteSRSLY, conning for money in a video game is a bit of a waste of time. However, if there's a short route between two points and it gets you to the leisure quicker, so be it, BUT ONLY IN VIDEO GAMES. Real life isn't like that. You can cheat in video games if you want to have more fun, but cheating in real life is wrong.
BTW, what's wrong with entrepreneurship? Imagine if you were in the woods and you wanted a banana. There were no bananas for miles around, but all of a sudden a man is walking by selling bananas at two dollars each. This may be overpriced but imagine that you need that banana. If demand is great enough, the supplier has a control on price, and you'll be forced to buy a $2 banana. Not the nicest thing for the salesman to do but he is calling the shots. Plus there's always haggling.
Do I ramble too? Yes.
There is a lot more that goes into merchenting, it actually a bit of a science and can be gone about in a number of ways. You can either buy items for less than they are worth, which I find to be smart but scamming,and then you sell them for more than you bought them for. But would it be acceptable if the items were purchased for a lower price and kept, or would that be wrong? Another way would be to buy up as much of the same item as possible, and if you are in a group it is most effective, and hold onto them for a while so demand increases which will cause the price to increase and then you sell the items when you desire. But you want to research which item to buy up because you don't want to buy a bunch of an item whose price is dropping, stagnant value is often the easiest to get a hold of, and rising value is obviously preferable. Also, you can hog all of the creatures that drop a certain item and camp the spawn points for that item and collect them all and then the price will rise and then you can sell them, but you would want to do this for an item that isn't sold by NPCs. Also, how long you hold onto the items that you are merchenting takes analysis of how the price is fluctuating and you need to know how in demand the need for the item actually is and keep that separate from the level of demand that you create for the item. If you hold onto items for too long and just keep buying all of them that become avaailable people will either report you, quit, stop caring about the item, hack your account, kill your avatar, find an item or service to trade you in exchange for said item, or just move onto the next best item, next item, or just the items for the next set of levels. Also, if items have level requirements and there are not many people of that level yet in the game then that would be the optimal time to buy those items because there would not be as much of a demand, and if they were items with spawn points then there would be a constant supply if nobody camped it. And, if you had these items you could then hold onto them and sell them when more people reached that level so they could use them and then they would try to buy them because a demand would be created. And if there were spawn points for those items then not as many people would buy those items but if control the spawn points it can fix that problem although you would probably want to be the level needed to use those items or close to if not above if the spawns are in a PvP area so you can protect yourself. And, people are just lazy.
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