market value

[quarrel]

There once was an MMORPG. It had guilds, and it had trading, but it had no default in-game currency. One perennial guild that cropped up in it year after year was called The Goods. Its purpose was “to assist citizen retention...by facilitating trade”. It kept a central stockpile of all raw and simple manufactured goods in the game, it maintained its own abstract out-of-game currency records, and it published transparent formulas for adjusting prices based on supply and demand.

One simple manufactured good was pinch rollers. Pinch rollers were a low demand item. One or two were needed to upgrade some manufacturing equipment, which only needed to be done a handful of times, ever, for an entire player community, and four were needed to pay tuition by any player who wanted to raise his Mining skill to level 3 (which was most players who ever wanted to mine ore, which I estimate was at least half the playerbase). The iron they were made from was in high demand due to the sheer number of other things made from it, and the amounts of those things that were needed, and the fact that many were consumable and needed constant replacing.

There was also a player. I’ll call him R. R did many things that annoyed many people. He acted, in fact, like someone off his meds, which he himself blamed his behavior on at least once. Up to that point in the game’s history, he was the only player other than deliberate griefers that the general community discussed banning. (The administrators never banned players for their actions toward other players, no matter how malicious. They gave this power, by design, to the players, leaving themselves to handle only offenses like hacking or crashing the server.)

R had a theory. R believed The Goods were fixing prices and running the game in a blatantly obvious conspiracy. Their formulas were a smokescreen. The players who got the best deals were always, always, always friends with Goods members. And the icing on the cake: according to those allegedly totally fair and objective pricing formulas, pinch rollers were worth less than the iron they were made of. Less! No rational, honest, natural market could possibly value a finished good at less than its cost of materials. Ever! This was bona fide proof that their prices were artificial.

No one believed him, of course. He was a kook.