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I’ve noticed that as well. I’ve managed to once get a Gaia store item I was looking for, for less in the market place. But that was about only 100g less.

I don’t know for sure why they think people will spend 10x the amount a store item is worth. When you click on the marketplace store links, there’s even a spot called ‘store price’ that tells you what the item is actually worth.

It may be that there are enough Gaians out there who don’t think their purchasing decision through. But seeing how hard it is to earn gold, I know I try to be careful with my buying decisions. And I’m still just a ‘noob’.

It may be that people are desperate for gold. Stuff on Gaia is expensive. And like I said, gold can be hard to earn – especially if you don’t have a lot of time to spend earning it.

If you have an item worth 10g that you don’t want, and you put it on ‘sale’ for 100g, and it takes a year to sell to someone who doesn’t know their getting the short end of the stick, you still come out ahead.

You are right that the economy here doesn’t make sense. And often times it seems absolutely corrupt.

Another reason does come to mind. The bidding. People are competitive, especially for items they want. And bidding prices usually tend to be less then the store prices, while the buy prices are set higher. Then people bid for the item they want in order to get it for cheaper, but who knows how often they loose track of how much they’re spending? If you get competitive and no longer pay attention to the worth of the item, you can end up spending more then you intended.

The same thing happens on E-bay. People get competitive and end up buying things for way more then they are worth.

You could always try pming the market storeowners who set the ‘buy’ option for items at more then their worth and ask them how often Gaians ‘buy’ at the inflated price as well as how often the bidding wars end up over the in store price.

The inflated prices of store items is just stupidity. Anybody who buys at those inflated prices are either stupid or generous. Now donation items are another story. They used to be cheap, 5k in the market. Then came the Kiki, those were so popular that they jumped to 10-12k in a matter of a day or two. This was also when donation items were beginning to be able to be used in several ways. A few were still at the regular 5k but then came other popular ones like the guitars that shot up quickly. After that, they just began to start in the 10k range.

A lot of the donations sky rocketed.
Like horns, chain wallet, ankles.
It's crazy right now but it's good for those early users.
:3

If they don't know it's sold in a shop for a smaller price, then they really need to learn how to pay attention. if an item is sold in stores, it says so in the marketplace by saying store price.

One of the problems is that the Gaian economy is built in a manner that readily causes rampant inflation. Look at how many ways there are to get gold. Browsing, posting, polls, fishing (you generally profit), word bump, towns, and daily chance, these all create gold. Then you have the shops and the casino, these are the main ways to remove gold from the economy, I know there are some other more minor ones. It's too one sided, gold flows in and trickles out. The marketplace only changes who has the gold. In real life, if you keep printing more money, it just becomes worth less.

The daily chance may seem cool, I mean hey, it's five free things a day, but it's just bringing in a huge amount of gold in with no way to get rid of it.

Then there is the biggest offender: the bump. Bumping should not be limited to a certain area, it should be banned! It adds nothing to the community but brings in probably millions if not billions of gold a day. The people who sit and do nothing but spam all day add very little to the community but have all the best stuff. Because they can get anything and gold is no object, they'll pay higher prices. Since it's selling at higher prices, everybody raises their prices. This means that everybody else has to suffer as they will have to deal with these high prices.

The gaian economy is confusing too.In the marketplace,everything is cheap but in the marketplace,items are 2x more expensive.Also i don't really get why some items prices skyrocket.I mean Gwees has already just got released and i'm already starting to see people sell them for 20k instead of the usual 9k-10k.Why the need to make items many times more expensive then they should be,I don't know.Most gaians users raise prices unreasonably high just for the sake of possible greed or maybe they just want to complete quests or maybe because in the FAQs they state the mods want to teach you the value of hard work or whatever.

people, its a website that is more about you posting than earning gold. They never run out of items at the store so that when you finally accumulate something of substinance you don't have to go to another store or buy it at inflated prices. I doubt there's anything to this economy than you earn by posting; you buy clothes for you avi. its all about us buying stuff for our avis.


yes i agree that the marketplace is chockfull of people who like putting zeros where they don't belong. I guess they figure we're all stupid.

and this is a website for you to create a little person with cute clothes and chat with others. i doubt any good life lessons come out of this unless you're talking about lessons and such with other people.

Heh...The prices and gold rate are rediculous (2g, what the hell?). Unless people sit around and spam, critique all day in the arena, or click away on their internet browser, I have no clue how they've manage to have 35345+k in savings.

There are newbies that are poor and newbies that magically have extremely rare items after two days of membership... A pair of pants are like 200k. Furthermore, I've only been on Gaia for about a week and I'm not going to be able to log on regularly, due to school. I just think there should be a bit more democracy and a battle system that deals gold (...one that's actually in progress).