Social Experiment

[janedavitt]

There's an event going on at Neopets now that, donning my Hat of Pomposity, is a reflection of human nature and greed as well as a lesson in economics, supply and demand.

Let's start at the beginning. On Neopets, the currency is Neopoints and items are won on games or purchased from other users. Some items are valueless, priced at 1 NP, a glut on the market. You literally give them away when you get them, donating them to the Money Tree for people to pick up or discarding them so that they disappear in a cloud of pixels.

Some items, rare ones, can go for millions of NP.

From time to time, there's an event or a plot on Neopets. The last one had a Supernatural nod and wink; this time it's Firefly, but that's irrelevant.

There's a spaceship and three machine parts, each with three sections. At roughly twelve hour intervals, you go to the page, the scientist tells you what it'll cost to buy a piece of the machinery and when they're all assembled, you get something nice.

This is stage two of what's probably going to be something big and the items required are all 1 NP items and you need, say, 12 per go (three veiled autumn hats, five rotten omelet sandwiches, three amber swords for example).

Cheap. Easy. No problem.

For the first one, yes. But whereas my first machine part was number three, someone else's was number five, etc and within a very short space of time, a list was posted of what valueless items were needed to complete the machine, some sixty or seventy of them.

Now some are so common it's impossible to corner the market. Others less so. WITHIN HOURS, items that two days ago were being thrown away are now going for 40 -50,000 NP. People are buying them, inflating the price and making a fortune.

I have millions of NP. I can buy what I need and do the same for Lauren and Eleanor if needed, but let me say when I went on the neoboards and saw Neopians rallying to trade the worthless items between themselves for free to beat the profiteers, I felt a glow of pride.

Yeah, you could profit from this. Supply and demand, right?

Or you could think of the newbies coming into their first event with not a lot in the bank (Yes, Neopia has a bank and you earn interest) and play nice.

Comments

[bluewolf458]

Somehow that figures. If the world's wealth was evenly distributed among everyone at 9am, by mid-day you'd already have a rich and a poor class; the profiteers and con men, versus the... well, possibly gullible. The too-trusting. (Not to say all rich are profiteers, a lot are honest and hard-working, just as some of the poor, but not all, bring it on themselves.)

[janedavitt]

You are so right. people might be created equal, but that doesn't last long...

[sorrel]

Ahahaha, I play a big MMO, and watching the quirks of the economy is ridiculous. The funniest one to me recently was about a month ago the devs announced that they were going to be doing something different with runes and sigils (weapons and armor upgrades) to make some of the lesser-used ones more powerful, and at the moment that they announced this on their livestream interview some canny profiteers went about bought stacks and stacks of the cheapest ones and relisted them at double, triple the price two hours later when other profiteers saw it on reddit. The best bit was that the only ones who got caught out by that were other profiteers who were trying to do the same thing. A week later, everything dropped back to normal- giving normal players time to buy the ones they hoped were going to change before the more concrete announcement last week. It's just all so ridiculous. Fake money shenanigans!

[janedavitt]

That sounds very similar! It's fascinating to see how it all develops.