Easier Shopping

[The Roger]

The troll/fake vendors unfortunately are really hard to counter in an automatic way. Becase the system will certainly hit alot of false positives; this is a job to be done manually using the human dicernment by a Moderator tasked to periodically go through all the vendors and evaluate them. And i dont think we have one to do this.
And the other option of an automated system will be damn huge and still not perfect. Needs to contain all the items associated to a highest minimum "fair" price preset into it, scanning all the autotraders periodically like, once a day? Hmm once a day seems reasonable. And log out those that has certain prices indisputably high for that particular item.
Example: red herb set price in the script at 2k max. First, its a fixed cap price set arbitrarily from outside the market, and thats not really good always. Plus the trolls would just put Red Herb single vendors priced at 1999 Z.
But for red herb its easy, what about other obscure, niche, items, that maybe one day will spike for some reasons unknown yet but could not be vended at higher price because there the script set lower?
Also, the main problem: is it really possible to build such system in first place? Are there some values able to read, like, are we technically able to retrieve the vended item's ID and relative set price for it on certain vending merchant character? I have no idea about this.
Since the population is small atm, the best route imho would be a human Market Moderator that goes around and logs out vendors not passing its evaluation of fairness. But then, Will he/she kick a vendor selling a piece of equipment at a really high price, but that "really high price" its subjective for him/her because he/she doesnt at that time know really and etirely the possible true utility of such "seemingly Overpriced" gear? Like, i can make 10 more vendors and display on them 12 green babydolls and 12 kauvras at 20M each. Currently sometimes one or two gets sold at 10m, so are those 12 vendors with items double the current price fair or are 10 troll vendors? How and who will or can judge that?
Its impossible in the abence of a fixed market, with a fixed list of all the items and fixed priced assigned to them, as reference. What if that list "lists" green babydoll at 2M zeny? I wont sell GBDs ever again! People will then always say "9-10m? but the suggested official price is 2m, you are trying to scam me! Sell it to me for 2m or nothing." Well, boy, it is you that needs this GBD so, cough up 10 mils or good bye.
Prices are usually obtained from: difficulty of obtaining, rarity in chance of obtaining, how much useful it is, how much strong it is, how many classes and builds can use it.... and, last but not the least, how easy is to farm raw zenies.
And the ability of farming zenies varies from player to player relative to mainly the gears they have, and minimally knowing where are the best places they can farm zeny.
So if the population is composed of generally players that can not really farm raw zenies efficiently (or obtaining them is fairly difficult), the Currency will have a high value and prices could be numeralically low.
If instead they are easy, the prices will be high because of the high inflation.
But also we can have high prices in low farming zenies environments, simply because theres scarcity of that good on the market.
People used to complain with me alot about "prices too high!" but its always subjective; high for you, not for others or for me.
Even more: prices should be higher than are now, just because if you can and know how to, farming zenies its not hard. Personally its what, 2 years or maybe even more, im not farming raw zeny with that only end goal, but if i want, just to bring an example, i can farm ~7M zeny/h. Without Beewings. If i really want i can pump up 45M a day.
And i dont do it. I wont do it. That'll help only at increasing the inflation more. And that kinda bad.
But the currency injection into the market is also regulated by the time players actually have or can invest into playing to farm raw zenies.
Because it doesnt matter if people CAN farm huge amounts of zenies: if they dont do it, the injection of currency into the economy will be low like the scenario in which making millions of zeny farming is hard.
Also items's prices are a mix of "how much time do i need to obtain the item directly, compared to how many zeny can i raise if i farm money for the same amount of time needed to directly obtain it?". For me, obtaining a GBD is easy, but doesnt mean i have discount it, because of the subjectiveness of the good: for many others its hard to directly obtain it so for them its value is higher. But killing monsters for small amounts of zenies its always easy so everybody can just repeat that process and one day raise the amount for the gbd.
I could go on rambling for longer but all this walltext to kinda provide some basis to my argument of "Why a regulated market on RO its a bad idea" and how difficult will it be to even attempt moderate it partially on the low side because nobody really knows whats the real price of an item.