Why I hate flippers...

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crushkyle a écrit :

Anyways, I don't hate flippers. I just find silly some of attempted rationalisations that the provide an important service to all

Maybe my problem doesn't happen as much on Ambush/Standard where there are a lot more players with a lot more items but sometimes I get stuck waiting for multiple days to buy an item on Invasion. The seller is not online and not responding to messages and there are no other equivalent items on poe.xyz. If a flipper had just bought the item when it first got posted I would have gladly paid him more to not have to wait days for the original seller to finally log on to sell it to me. Flippers are extremely active players. Joe Schmoe doesn't play Wednesday-Saturday because he works 12 hour days.

Also one thing I've seen posted several times in this thread is the opposite scenario. I'm trying to sell a rare and valuable item that is only useful in very specific builds. It may take me a long time to sell it because there just isn't anyone looking to buy it immediately. If I sell it for slightly less to a flipper who is willing to wait then I can spend the currency on something I do need. That helps both me and another player/flipper.

The role of flippers is to sustain GGG income, buying stash space

Flippers are simply craap, i hope they die painfully.

I hate flippers as well. In fact I hate the whole Path of Economy so I might be slightly biased here but in my opinion majority of pro-flipping argumentation on this thread is flawed one way or another.

First of all the liquidity argument is partially valid only because of how GGG has handled the trading in game. With system that allows offline trading with set buyouts flipping wouldn't increase liquidity at all (i.e. a proper auction house would remove the only positive thing flipping provides). Currently the trading system is built for flippers to profit (maybe GGG thinks flippers as HC traders and considers this desirable).

Flipping doesn't increase the item availability on market. Real world comparison to local market re-selling for profit is invalid because in PoE there's no equivalent of local market - there are no risks in storing stuff yourself, everyone has access to same customers and everyone has access to same tools of trade (forums, poe.xyz, trade channel and in game trade). In general customers don't benefit from flipping like they benefit from having a food store conveniently near them.

Also flipping tends to take economy closer to monopoly (it's not exactly a monopoly but shares enough traits for comparison) and hastens the inflation. It sucks lower priced items out of the market (flippers tend to have lots of currency so they're able to do this), raises the average price of an item on the market (buying cheap items quickly and putting them back on the market with higher price tag) and sets perceived prices on items that aren't based on demand (the idea of illiquid asset isn't directly transferable to game economy such as PoE).

So in my opinion flipping in general is bad. Unfortunately it's not easy to prevent without severely restricting the trading (a proper auction house with weekly limits for items bought and sold could work but I'm sure many would consider it too restricting).

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