Last night, I wrote a Python script to scrape the order flow in the P2P trading market between players in the game.
Everyone thinks that as long as there’s a flea market, it’s a “decentralized economy” driven by player supply and demand. But the data I captured reveals a massive, unregulated “shadow hand.”
In @Pixels , the biggest counterparty isn’t other players at all but the built-in NPC shop and the algorithm that dynamically sets market prices. This is an extreme asymmetric “market making.”
When you spot a certain material being pumped on the player market, ready to cash in big, the system can instantly crash the price by adjusting the NPC's infinite supply pool; and when you desperately need a certain material and want to scoop up at low prices, the algorithm quietly lowers the drop rate across the server, leaving your buy order hanging in limbo.
In this so-called free market, all retail trading strategies are transparent. The project team watches from a god-like perspective, seeing you all chase tiny arbitrage opportunities like a school of fish. Once your profits threaten the overall token deflation plan, they don’t even need to announce anything; they can just tweak a parameter on the server side to reverse supply and demand instantly. Who are you really up against?
You’re playing poker in an “invisible casino” with someone who has infinite chips and can change the game rules at any time. The odds of winning were zero from the start.
#pixel $PIXEL
Everyone thinks that as long as there’s a flea market, it’s a “decentralized economy” driven by player supply and demand. But the data I captured reveals a massive, unregulated “shadow hand.”
In @Pixels , the biggest counterparty isn’t other players at all but the built-in NPC shop and the algorithm that dynamically sets market prices. This is an extreme asymmetric “market making.”
When you spot a certain material being pumped on the player market, ready to cash in big, the system can instantly crash the price by adjusting the NPC's infinite supply pool; and when you desperately need a certain material and want to scoop up at low prices, the algorithm quietly lowers the drop rate across the server, leaving your buy order hanging in limbo.
In this so-called free market, all retail trading strategies are transparent. The project team watches from a god-like perspective, seeing you all chase tiny arbitrage opportunities like a school of fish. Once your profits threaten the overall token deflation plan, they don’t even need to announce anything; they can just tweak a parameter on the server side to reverse supply and demand instantly. Who are you really up against?
You’re playing poker in an “invisible casino” with someone who has infinite chips and can change the game rules at any time. The odds of winning were zero from the start.
#pixel $PIXEL