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As originally implemented, in order to get more shelves for space in the mall, an exponentially increasing amount of chips is needed. I paid up to 1,280,000 chips bringing me to 110 shelves before I decided it wasn't really worth it any longer, but I put up a silver star with the price of 2,560,000 chips and if anyone ever bought it I'd use the chips for the next 10 shelves. I just noticed today that a few days ago, someone did buy my silver star, and I've purchased the next 10 shelves for a resounding total of 120 shelves. Of course the next 10 will be 5,120,000 chips (which I have again put a star up for). I raised this issue with Ryme in the past, that this was too steep a cost for more space and a more fitting model would be the one used for getting more memento space, or atleast something non-exponential in growth. Considering that we now have approximately 1700 or so items (maybe more, rough estimate), most of which can be sold in the mall, I can sell less than 10% of the available items. And that took a considerable amount of chips to achieve. Is it possible that the model of progression could be made more lenient? Because I don't think anyone's going to buy that 5.12 million chip silver star, and I've got a lot more than 10 different items sitting around I could sell even if someone did.

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Leader of PFE league. If you wish to worship me, ask me about joining my secondary league Cult of Satan (the largest league in the game!).

I decided early on upon starting this game that I'm not going to bother with the mall or trying to sell anything, and I didn't even know that you had to purchase each individual shelf. That only seals the deal. I run a very profitable store in another game similar to this one. However, it's only successful because there's such a large player base to purchase things from my store. By comparison, the player base in this game simply isn't large enough to support a successful mall operation. There are, essentially, two kinds of things in the mall.... Items that are easy to get in the game, so people are very unlikely to buy them when they can just get them themselves, and items that you can't get on your own which are hideously overpriced if they're even in the mall, at all. While I don't have much problem building up the costs to buy rare items in the other game, I know that I'll never be able to work up to the costs of the better items in this game.

Well, as with any game, an economy can't stabilize until many, many players are using the market. Even in this game, I've seen prices stabilize for plenty of items, it just takes a lot longer. The reason I want more shelves is so I can sell more varieties of items, because I have almost all of them at my disposal, so if I get extras, I'd rather provide them to the market (where most of them aren't even offered in the mall at this time) instead of just autoselling or searching for a manual trade.

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Leader of PFE league. If you wish to worship me, ask me about joining my secondary league Cult of Satan (the largest league in the game!).

Yes, but the more items in a store, the more resources it consumes. The mall is one of the bigger resource hogs in the game, and when a store is stuffed with 100 or so items that do little more than sit there and collect dust, it's little more than a constant drain.

To say nothing of the fact that, as a player, overstuffed mall stores tend to be more annoying than convenient.

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The churches are empty / The priest has gone home / And we are left standing / Together alone
--October Project: "Dark Time"

This may not be true for most players, but if I want to buy something, I typically search and buy it directly from the search screen, erasing the 'clutter' issue, for me atleast. I just hate having tons of items that I could be selling that I can't put on there.

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Leader of PFE league. If you wish to worship me, ask me about joining my secondary league Cult of Satan (the largest league in the game!).

Given the current state of the game, I don't really think that more shelves are going to be a boon to anyone that holds them. There simply isn't enough of a market for there to be value. Still, I don't think that the outrageous costs of shelves are justified, either. I understand the concept of having people pay chips for space... it's a chipsink. It's a tactic to remove chips from the open economy with the intent of keeping prices low in the mall. However, with the current number of mall users, it doesn't work that way because there's no real competition. If anything, mall owners would raise prices to comp the amount that they spent on shelves.

In my opinion, the prices of shelves should be lowered, but an upper cap set on how many shelves any store can have (grandfathering in any stores that currently exceed that chosen number). This would save on the game's resources, while taking some of the weight off of the storeowners (who are in the mall to make chips, I assume, not spend them). Yes, the mall would be less diverse with smaller stores, but it's really not very diverse, anyway. If I look up an item and find five stores carrying it, that's a lot, and there's no small number of items that aren't even sold in the mall, at all. If not for topping off my supply of electronic computers and iMyself blog software components, I'd never use the mall, at all.

Well, nobody is forcing people to spend 2 million chips for an extra 10 shelves. If someone wants to waste a small fortune, that's their choice. I have no problem with the accelerating costs. I currently have 50 shelves, which is more than I've ever used. 10 more would only cost me 40,000 chips, which is hardly difficult to manage. It only becomes back-breaking when you're already well beyond a reasonable number of shelves where a cut-off is likely to be.

"Doctor, it hurts when I move my arm like this."
"Then don't do that."

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The churches are empty / The priest has gone home / And we are left standing / Together alone
--October Project: "Dark Time"

True, but if the reason for keeping stores small is resources, then the cut-off would be more effective than exorbitant pricing. After all, while some people may choose to pay the high scaling price for more shelves, NO ONE can go beyond a cut-off. It's not like the chips are real money that can then be used to acquire more resources for the game. It's just a chipsink in an economy that doesn't need one.

Now, if the extended costs were in stars, which DO add to the resources of the game, then it would make a lot more sense. Plus, when you're paying that many chips for shelves, it's comparable to stars in value, anyway. If someone wanted a ridiculously large store, they could then buy stars (thus, using real money) to do so.

Although, no one's really buying stars right now, if the recent mall prices are any indication. Or maybe people just aren't selling them as much.

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Leader of PFE league. If you wish to worship me, ask me about joining my secondary league Cult of Satan (the largest league in the game!).

Lack of supply drives up prices; lack of demand drives down prices. Stars are expensive because nobody's selling them.

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The churches are empty / The priest has gone home / And we are left standing / Together alone
--October Project: "Dark Time"

Those rules only strictly apply if there is a demand for the currency. Since there's not really a large demand for the currency, the market in general is stagnating.

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Leader of PFE league. If you wish to worship me, ask me about joining my secondary league Cult of Satan (the largest league in the game!).

I would say the fact that the 5 stars I put up at the beginning of every month are gone within 12 hours pretty much means there is a demand for the currency.

I'm not saying that there's no demand for the currency. Just not an extremely large demand. And when I say currency, I'm talking about chips, not stars. Most of us have near no use for chips anymore unless we're in a restricted run, where we generally can't get too many chips outside our own actions anyways. And even then we need on average like, 30k chips to complete a run? What I mean is, a lot of the older players that have stuck around have more or less accomplished their goals and their supply of chips is much larger than the demand the game requires of them. The newer players are the ones with the high demand for chips, but we have far less of them staying in the game now.

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Leader of PFE league. If you wish to worship me, ask me about joining my secondary league Cult of Satan (the largest league in the game!).