New marketplace and its listing fee

[Lanzer]

Hello everyone,

Hope everyone had a great summer. Next week is our summer festival! I wish everyone can make it.

For the past few days there had been a lot of concerns about the new marketplace which takes a listing fee of 2% from completed transactions. I wish to take a moment to let everyone know what it is and why it's here.

The explanation is rather lengthy, but to sum it all up, we wish to make the Gaia market more balanced and more fair for new and old users alike.

Our intention is to try this new system with the release of the new marketplace, then monitor what will happen. The Gaia economy is as complex and difficult as one can imagine, and we don't think we have the answers to everything. A short time after the new marketplace is released, we will decide whether the whole system is working and whether it's fair.

For those who want to read more about it, please check out the next post. We will continue to read through feedback and be responsive regarding this new system.

-Lanzer

[Lanzer]

It has been our objective to make Gaia a great hang out, and it has been our objective to make Gaia as fun and fair for everyone. Gaia is not a perfect site, and there are many changes and improvements that we need to make in order for Gaia to keep working right. In recent months, we have been looking at a glooming problem over the Gaia economy.

Initially we made Gaia with virtual stores and gold was given away. When gold is spent in stores like Barton Boutique, gold goes back to the system, or the "bank", so to speak. Now there are a lot of things that happened throughout the years. We created the marketplace, which allows users to send gold to each other. With this feature, most gold now trade between users. Gold then keep passing back and forth between users, and gold accumulate in user accounts. In a way, everyone get "richer" because of that. That would not be a problem except that users now drive the prices in the marketplace higher. Everything now cost more, as prices rise higher than anything like the real world. In fact, prices go up 10 times higher than real life.

Brand new monthly collectible used to cost 4,000 gold to get, now days it cost up to 15,000 gold or more.

We talked to many economy experts, and received many advices. Then we asked an economics major to spend months with us to figure out the Gaia economy. After all our research, we came to a conclusion that one of the ways to help with the situation is to have a "listing fee" in the marketplace.

The listing fee is more like a transaction fee, it goes towards completed transactions. The listing fee will help with inflation issue but only a little, because we're only putting in a 2% listing fee, and we don't want to charge more. Never the less, it's a start. There are much better reasons why the listing fee is important, however. The listing fee in many ways help balance the marketplace between the rich and poor, and it also help prevent fraud and market manipulation. We will try to explain these concepts more in other messages.

To be honest, there is a chill down my spine when I heard that we should have a listing fee. Nobody likes to be charged on a site that is supposed to be free. The implication of this is certainly not nice, and many Gaian would get upset, especially the more successful users who make a lot of gold off the marketplace today.

Now we're faced with almost a lose-lose situation. To apply the listing fee, and make many users unhappy, or if we do nothing, we wait until items in the marketplace cost so much and face the reaction of unhappy users.

Our intention is to try this new system with the release of the new marketplace, then monitor what will happen. The Gaia economy is as complex and difficult as one can imagine, and we don't think we have he answers to everything. A short time after the new marketplace is released, we will decide whether the whole system is working and whether it's fair.

We like to let everyone know that we're listening, and we read through almost all your feedback. We believe in making everyone happy just as much as doing what is right. Strange to think that after 4 years we are still trying to figure things out, but I hope that we will start working towards this problem that is with us since the beginning. 3nodding

-Lanzer

[Lanzer]

To further explain the concepts and reasons behind the new listing fee, Sagger-AT3 had been active in the site feedback form responding to everyone. The is a thread by him that explains some of the concepts:

Posting by Sagger-AT3