Brother, I've been messing with materials in the game these past few days, and I can't figure it out.
Here's the thing — I have quite a bit of wood sitting in my warehouse, thinking of waiting for the price to go up before selling. Today I went to the market as usual to take a look, and while the order volume for regular wood was stable, guess what? The buy orders for hardwood quietly crept up a bit, but there was absolutely no one on the sell side. You can see with your own eyes that there are people willing to pay a higher price to buy, but no one is willing to sell at that price.
This kind of bifurcation phenomenon, to be honest, is much more interesting than the price fluctuations themselves.
Why has hardwood suddenly become 'stubborn'? I flipped through the recent event calendar and talked with a few veteran farmers in the guild, finding a possibly overlooked point—the workshop upgrade quest line that was updated last week has nearly doubled the consumption of hardwood at several later nodes compared to before. But what about the production side? Hardwood mainly relies on advanced axes to chop specific stumps, and the refresh time for that hasn't changed, so the output naturally can't keep up.
Speaking of this, we must mention the role of $PIXEL. Just think about it, when a resource shows signs of being 'valuable but unavailable', what would a normal person do? They wouldn't foolishly practice advanced axe skills (which would take several days), but would go directly to the market to buy with PIXEL. Each of these 'lazy transactions' is genuinely consuming the liquidity of $PIXEL. The more mismatches in supply and demand in the game, the more frequently $PIXEL changes hands.
I'm not saying you should rush to buy tokens or anything, don't get me wrong. I just feel that staring at those bouncing candlestick charts for half a day is really not as good as spending more time in the game market. Micro signals won't deceive you because they reflect the choices of real players—stocking up, snatching, being lazy, grinding hard, all written in the orders and transactions.
Have you recently encountered any materials that suddenly became hard to buy? Or conversely, has there been something that dropped in price inexplicably? Let’s have a discussion in the comments, I'll treat you to virtual beer 🍻