Do you sell cheap on GOM?

I've been noticing that smaller and smaller volumes of L$ are selling for less and less on GOM for the past few weeks or so now.

I'm curious as to the motivations behind it.

If you've sold less that say, 10k for less than $4/block, what was your reasoning?

I'm not going to speculate yet, but I am dying to know.

because IGE is paying 4 USD.

1. Because if it is marked $4.00 or even $3.98 it will sit there for days. Marking to whatever is one cent below the rate, say $3.94 when it is at $3.95 means you will unload your parcels and cash out faster. Why fuss over, say, 25 cents on a 5000 Linden sale?

2. GOM has really let me down 2ce this week. Once, it lost my cash for two hours -- I didn't know where it was. I will stay with GOM because I like their personal touch, but that rattled me.

3. Another time, GOM gave me a message that I could only deposit up to $250. That also rattled me -- why is GOM trying to put a cap on me giving THEM money? This is some anti-landbaronism thing? But why?

4. I don't know where you get the idea that IGE pays $4. The last 6 times I went to IGE they said "SORRY WE'RE OVERSTOCKED". There was no way to sell to them. I bought 2ce on IGE this week because GOM was down or persnickety, and it's painful to pay $5 for what you can get for $4 on GOM. I even checked ebay -- it's never under $5 on there, either. We are spoiled by GOM, perhaps. GOM has much better in-world service -- IGE takes hours to show up sometimes. And they sometimes put you through extra check-up paces for no good reason, even when you use verified Paypal.

i sold to ige wheeling yesterday morning for 4 USD a block. that is where i got that idea.

Well when I went there several times yesterday, too, it said "SORRY OVERSTOCKED". Who knows how it runs. I have had that message enough times that I feel like I shouldn't bother.

probably because i sold them one million lindens

I sort of thought this reason might turn up. It still confuses me because the more people use this tactic, the lower and lower the L$ will get.

Just as conjecture -- is this caused by fewer buyers for L$? Or lack of faith in the market?

I suspect it is to limit the possibility of the reoccurance of the couple of scams they have suffered in the past. If they limit the amount of money a person can put in, they can limit the amount of damage the person can do before they are noticed and stopped.

It's to limit their exposure to chargeback fraud. Their arrangement with LL means that if someone does a chargeback, they won't lose much money, but rolling back all the transactions that were involved can take a few days.

Why assume that just because a transaction is large, i.e. over $250, that it is evil? Buying something from another player shouldn't be considered intrinsically evil. Obviously $250 is too small a cap for this game given the size of transactions.



Icon, we're not here to play Girl Scouts. You don't try to do someone "a public service" by voluntarily taking a hit and not lowering your packets for the so-called perceived "public good" on something like a currency exchange market.

For one, when you do that, you merely feed both the Lindens and the GOM's business interests, but never your own. Why should you play socialism while they play capitalism?

I'm sorry, but that's not how RL exchanges work, and they can't work even in a Berkeley-socialism type game like this one, either. People do not trust a market that is FALLING. People do not trust a market that never benefits them. The rate has persistently fallen since August although it's had some peaks. It's not the burden of each individual to somehow avoid loss of confidence. The company has to do that.

What you see happening is that someone with a million Lindens goes to another company besides GOM. Someone who wants to deposit more than $250 a day goes to another company besides GOM. That means GOM has to look at its market share and its role. And someone whose currency was lost and incapacitated by GOM for hours goes to another company. And that's life in the big city. It has to be market-driven in that fashion or it won't have value. To make any kind of indignant calls for people to somehow be "socially responsible" and "not knock GOM" and "not spread panic" and "not sell below $4.00" is really not in the players' interests ultimately or even GOM's interests -- it's not even good play-money style Monopoly.

What you have to realize is that despite the tendency of players scalded by a downturn like the current one since August, the price has gone back up from a low of $3.92 or even $3.79 to $4.00 or $4.05 some weeks. It hasn't continued to plummet precisely because more people see they can come in, sell low, and get out safely. That brings them back. That means it goes up again. That's how equilibrium works.

It seems to fluctate based on payday on Tuesdays when many cash out, and be tied to the Lindens' roll-out of new sims, when people buy and sell more real estate. It might also be tied to holidays when people have more time to spend inside the game doing transactions.

You can't get people to keep the Linden at $4.00 by public-spirited self-sacrifice. The only way the Linden, like any currency, can stabilize, is when the self-interest of each person aggragates to create a public interest of a higher currency value because it really has value.

just kidding! i have never seen more than 1/10 of one million lindens in my account. my net worth in game isn't even a quarter of that.

but i did sell them lindens for 4$/block

We've recently been having trouble with PayPal's (supposedly-) Instant Payment Notification system. Normally deposits are credited to your account within a couple of minutes, but occasionally PayPal has taken up to ~1 hour to send us the transfer information. If this bug hits your deposit, please feel free to send a support request! We do get notifications through our internal deposit management system, and make every effort to ensure your account gets credited ASAP, but an extra gripe here and there wouldn't hurt...



The $250 daily deposit limit was put in place to limit our exposure to chargeback fraud. After the last time we took a big hit, we felt it was best to implement a default limit. We think $250 a day is large enough to accomodate most users, and anyone who wants their limit raised can contact us. We're usually quite happy to do so.

THank you for the long-winded vitriol --

I think you could've said it in one or two sentences and have been a little less accusatory and condenscending. However, to address your reply and explain my conjecture a little further:

It seems that people are selling their L$ for "just one cent less," so that they can cash out faster -- rather than -- better. This kind of rationale doesn't make sense to me. It's not the price that counts, but the motivation.

See, I imagine that in real markets, sure lower prices will happen on higher volume exchanges and higher prices on lower volume exchanges -- that's equilibrium. If you're going to sell 20k L$, then yeah 3.80 might be a good price for example. But if you're going to sell 5k... why sell it for 3.79? Just so you get to sell out quicker than the guy who's selling at 3.80?

That's what inspired my question as to wether there's simply not enough buyers in the market to warrant higher prices.

Not because I'm some leftist that doesn't understand capitalism.

Sorry for slight hijack... BUT I SWEAR! I thought the subject line of this thread was:

Do you sell sheep on GOM?

I've been hanging around schwan and lecktor too much.

/hijack off and sorry again!

icon, you prob. already know this but in RL, if you are uncertain about a stock or unsure about whether you can move an entire block, there are certainly some people that will take a lower price in order to unload the whole thing rather than wait and take the risk of doing it piecemeal.

If people sell 1cent lower and the price drifts down, then so be it. Supply/demand equilibrium, but you know all this already... LL can only control currency issues so far with money supply. Demand for goods, land and services is what will push the price up (just as it did earlier).

I haven't had trouble with the PayPal end of it, that's not what is at issue.

What's at issue is when I attempted to make a deposit of Lindens into your terminal, the terminal simply took it and went silent. Other people at the terminal had the same experience.

About 5 minutes later, the money came back into my account. It's a sign of my general trust in GOM that I simply redeposited it, although it was a large amount. And back it came again after awhile -- more like 10 minutes. So it's a sign of my general trust in GOM that I tried yet a third time with the large deposit. I saw a new person get confirmation of their new account as they stood there, and figured the server was working. So I made the deposit....and silence. An hour, two hours go by, nothing. The errors generated trouble tickets and I also manually sent a complaint and it was fixed in about 3 hours, but still that kind of timing can wreck things you are trying to do.



OK, I'll try to make it shorter and sweeter next time. I just want to make sure you're not trying to guilt-trip everybody into not selling a cent lower on GOM. Why should they wait hours or days to cash out? They might need that cash for things they're doing. So they undercut a cent. Wealthier people with leisure can afford to park 80 packets on there for $4.05 and wait for weeks if they have to. The point is the undercutters don't wreck it. If you want to find some player to blame in the process, it might be those who use it to speculate, buying and selling GOM all day, using bots or hovering at their computer terminals, to make a buck off these fluctations. But I don't care if they do that, they're part of how a market works, too.

Not a problem. While it may work to assume things about some people; you might not be right all the time. So it's just safer not to assume anything -- it's also a little way to be a smidge more pleasant.

As for blame or anything -- no. I seek only to understand and gather opinion.

I've never had ANY problems with ANY transactions via IGE Prokofy - might want to check it out. Currently GOM is priced at 4.00 a block of L$1000, which is EXACTLY the same cost as IGE ($20/L$5000). Beyond that you pay 3% a sale on GOM and 2.9% + $0.30 to deposit. If you check IGE you'll notice they directly take credit card payments and will paypal you immidiately, 24/7.

Just FYI -- IGE is selling at $22.92 for L$5k (equivalent of $4.59 per block). The best price for L$5k on GOM is $19.85 ($3.97 per block). Even with the 2.9%+$0.30 deposit fee we're still cheaper.

sorry ...new here

trying to get hold of how all this SL stuff works

what is GOM and IGE?
land owners cooperatives sort of thing?

Currency traders. Basically they (both through different methods) allow people to buy and sell L$ for US$.

-Adam

I hate IGE.

Ive used IGE the last two times Ive sold.

Why?

Because IGE's market price isnt dropping due to the retarded notion that lower price means selling faster.

Ife everyone posted 1000$L = 5.00US it would all still sell for the same price at about the same speed and you wouldnt be losing penies you would be gaining dollars. Dumbasses.

look at the actual amounts for sale in each price group, fill gaps higher.

For Example. a 100 block unit, a 50 block unit and a 20 block unit for sale at 3.98, and at 3.99 there is a 40 block and a 20 block and like 4 or 5 blocks of 1. Try posting your blocks HIGHER at a more attractive block size. Fill the niche dont sell yourself short. DO NOT Lower Your Price, change the packaging.

Well, call me retarded, Ferran.

Yesterday I eyeballed GOM carefully. I saw it had no 25 packets, just a lot of 1 and 5 and 50. So I put in 25, 10, etc. Just for an experiment, I priced them at like $3.99, $3.94 etc. And hours go by, and nothing sells. Then a whole day goes by. Well, come on, I have to go Christmas shopping here. So I sold out at the lower price. It's in my interest. This isn't a wiki, it's a currency exchange.

With all due respect....if everyone where to raise their prices on GOM the value of the $L would indeed rise. The people that are lowering prices just to sell faster are indeed helping devalue the $L. Of course they are allowed to, it is a free market. But it is not in your best interest to do so if you are selling $L. Alot of the devaluation is occuring because people are stepping on each other's heads to get out of the swimming pool.

Yes, when a swimming pool has been steadily draining water for months, and steadily declining, you'll excuse me if I step on a ladder -- not the head of some desperate poor victim newbie, but perhaps the head of a rich guy with 100 or 800 packets on this exchange? In fact, that ladder is selling low -- and on my way out of the pool, I'm extending that ladder back to the next guy who wants to buy, low, too -- because he doesn't want to buy some fantastically priced huge packet on GOM or IGE. (Of course, he could also be a day trader buying and selling rapidly to make a few pennies on the difference too, and I will leave it to the GOM officers themselves to tell us whether such churning on their exchange isn't in fact the "stepping on heads" that we all should worry about, instead of selling low.)

The system enables it, it is in my interest, and appeals to public-mindedness have no place in a currency exchange, that's not how they work.

The very rich (would you fall in this category?) can afford to put large packets on there and let them sit for days -- weeks -- months. They have many positions spread over many places and it doesn't matter for them. Smaller traders are indeed well within rights and reason to sell lower and get out.

Before you ask those people selling low to make sacrifices, and portraying them as evil beings stepping on people's heads, perhaps the fabulously rich (such as yourself?) could make sacrifices, lower their prices and split up their packets from their huge real estate deals so that the entire thing floats up a few notches, and then people can go back to waiting several days to sell again higher, hmmm?