Use a different way of calculating average in the marketplace so we dont get signs for like 1 billion gold. theres like 50 ways of doing average and Im sure theres a more appropriate one that wont get people argueing about prices in trade
I have an idea on how to average price. When I had it at school, it was called "Boxplot", I don't know if there is an English word for it, but this is how it works:
Let's pretend the same item is in stock for x times. For every piece, its price is listed in a list, which is sorted by price. x divided by 2 gives you the number, which price is considered to be the average price.
For example, if the same item is sold for 10g, with 9 items at this price in stock, and for 10000g with one item in stock at this price. The list would look like this:
10g 10g 10g 10g 10g 10g 10g 10g 10g 10000g
(9x 10g; 1x 10000g, so we have a total stock of x=10 items)
x=10, so x divided by 2 is 5, so the 5th price is considered to be the average price, which 10g.
I think the normal way of getting the average price is adding every price and dividing it by x, so in this case the normal average price would be 1009g, which is far away from the "real" average price.
There are ways to make Boxplots better, for example a average price span could be created, but this works more or less the same way.
The problem is not what the prices are, the problem is how people figure out those prices. Currently, the average price feature is highly skewed by overpriced items. A new player might look at the average and think that a near-worthless item is extremely valuable, further increasing the problem of inaccurate averages. If the average were calculated by median or mode instead of mean, it would be much easier for new players to discern the correct prices of items.All these ideas people are having is great and all but-
People could just sell things for normal prices...
While the mean and the median could be fairly easy to show, a set of data often has no mode, or multiple modes, particularly if there are not many bits of data, so it could be complicated to show the mode.Another option for fixing the problem of inaccurate averages is giving all the different methods of finding average: mean, median, and mode. Instead of just giving the mean and calling it average, they could give all three.
This isn't reliable. The only way staff could really do anything about it is if there is a rule of something like 'don't put items into the marketplace at troll values' or something like that. But this would cause problems because, as someone mentioned in a suggestion about sending money to other people, sometimes people 'send money' by buying something like a dirt block that someone else has put in for the price they want. This probably doesn't mess with the average much, since there are loads of dirt blocks on sale, but if they used, for example, a common choco hop card, it messes up the average much more. Also, there wouldn't really be a way for staff to judge what is trolly and what is not, since players could genuinely believe that that is a reasonable price, so I don't think the problem here is the players, since it can't really be controlledAll these ideas people are having is great and all but-
People could just sell things for normal prices...