How we can reduce the price of diamonds

Alot of people are currently talking about how the price of diamonds has increased quite alot over time, and some are even wondering why or what we can do about it.

So here is a little discussion as to what can actually be done about it.

A rise in price of a good is a result of either a shortage of that good in the community, or the willingness of people to pay that higher price for the good. Or both.

What can we do about it?

One way to reduce the price of a good within a given market ( EMC being the market here) is to overcome any shortages and to actually force a surplus within the market. In other words, get out there and mine as many diamonds as you can, and sell them all the markets.

Another thing to do is to actually stop buying diamonds all together from shops or malls.
Couple these two together and what you get are alot of malls who have loads of diamonds and no one willing to buy them. This will force the market to reduce its prices to allow the shops to turn these diamonds into rupees.

I think you now get diamonds for voting (not sure if thats true). If this is true, everyone needs to get voting. This will help turn a diamond shortage into a diamond surplus and help lower prices of diamonds in the market.

How much were diamonds when you first started??

What ideas have you got to help lower the price of diamonds?

Problem is, the EMC shops has too much money, it would take like 10-15dcs of diamond to empty a huge shop for rupees.
No one mines 10-15DCs of Diamond...

Diamonds were 45r. And I completely agree.

Diamond prices are outrageous. Your two points, sell and stop buying, will work, but nobody can stop buying diamonds. What it takes are a few people who sell diamonds for 40r, and other shops will have to drop prices to compete.

Great thread by the way. When I first joined diamonds were around 40-50r. Your ideas proposed are all true and can work, but probably won't work. I think one of the main problems is that people are 'lazy'. They won't go out into the wild and mine their own diamonds because it's too time consuming or it's too hard and there is little gain in it profit wise. I think EMC's megamall style history has contributed to the laziness, as it's much easier to just buy a diamond from a megamall than to actually go out and mine.

There will ALWAYS be a high demand for diamond if diamond remains to be the top and best item to craft tools/armour because of how durable and fast it is. You cannot just simply make people stop buying diamonds, as there will always be people looking to buy them for the above reasons.

While yes you can get diamonds from voting, you can only get one like every 2 (?) days or something. Unless literally everyone voted, it would make no/little impact on the diamond market.

The more lazy we get, the more the demand for diamond will be and so the price will always rise.

When I joined diamonds were around 89r ... then they finally went down to around 30-40 zone ... the economy fluctuates on its own .. if we 'force' change things .... and make them lower .... people will buy more and it will just make the shop owners stock up on more to sell more diamonds ... and knowing a few people - if a lot of people are buying from their shop, they may even raise the price, because they know people will buy from there... just let it run its course ... if you're running low on rupees and can't buy diamonds... that's a misfortune, but the price as I see it - is fine as is

Sadly, the mega mall owners are very, very rich. take a look at todd_vintons signature if you don't believe me. It would take a massive upset to force down the prices.The question arises, is it a bad thing? I believe it isn't. I think that the higher prices help drive the economy through inflation. This inflation is very much needed. Most of us remember the 1r iron days. By having this inflation, the value of the rupee decreases. With the rupee value decreasing, more competition will arise. Soon players will be able to lower prices to compete without sacrificing their profit. I for one am for the increase in diamond prices. Now we can have competitively priced diamonds with the average price between 60-70. This offers shop owners a large range and a chance against the big malls. This also means that the average player can become richer. Sell prices have increased with the buy prices. I wish the log-in bonuses would increase too, but that was denied by the community when Aikar suggested it.

I honestly think it's quite easy to earn rupees. The log in bonuses don't have to rise. Rupees can be obtained in 3 simple steps:
1) Log in daily for log in bonuses
2) VOTE
3) Obtain materials and sell to megamalls or start your own shop/do jobs and services for rupees.

I'm not saying that it's too easy to get them though either. I think right now we have a good balance. To me if rupees were stupidly easy to get, it would take the challenge and fun out of the game.

What about setting up a diamond cooperative. Say for example, a bunch of shops get together and agree to fix buy AND sell prices at 65r. This way, no profits are made on the diamonds and if enough shops join the cooperative, it will put the malls in an uncomfortable position. Just an idea.

Being part of this cooperative might also be seen as a good thing for consumers who might be tempted to buy different products while visiting the shop.

Any thoughts?

I am pretty sure Todd has at least 3 dcs of diamond blocks

My thought was to always buy all the diamonds I could and then sell them for super low prices.

I remember the prices increasing from the high 50s to low 60s to the 70s after finch auctioned a dc of diamonds.

But, as long as you're buying from someone they figure their prices are working just fine.

But why would I want to buy and sell diamonds for the median price and not get any profit? Also, how would this hurt the big shops? They malls with higher buy prices also have higher sell prices.

It's a nice idea but easily flawed. All it takes is a scumbag Steve to buy the majority of your stock and then sell it for double/triple whatever so they can make tons of profit and you're back to square one. This could be avoided however by restricted selling, e.g. only letting people buy 20 and completely stopping people you may suspect will just sell on and not actually use.

There is a concept that you learn in economics which gets taught at weird times depending on location.. Many of the schools that I have seen in California wait until the senior year in high school to teach it.. But this concept is called supply and demand. There are 4 basic laws to supply and demand that apply in all cases (all of which can apply to the diamond market): (The following is copied from Wikipedia)

The curves that they refer to is a simple graphic which I can copy from google search..

Good question, i havent really put much thought into it, just an idea. Maybe the shop could use it as a loss leader to get greater footfall into their shop.

Or, wealthy shop owners will run to the player shops selling at 40r, buy them out, and stock their chests at 70!
Even easier, large shops will buy diamonds at 45r each, so every player will buy all of yours to sell to the shops to make profit!
Wait what did I just say? Nobody does this do they??? Crud.

Well, when I started diamonds were around 55 each, and has risen to 70. (27% increase)
The large question is, is a 15 rupee difference per diamond in cost really that bad?
Coupled with the voting, bonuses, etc... its really not that bad.

Diamonds are indeed one of the 'rare' items however mining is not the only way to get diamonds. You can kill a load of enraged, and vote as well to get them.

Prices have stayed about 70 for awhile and still seems to be holding pretty well (so far).
The whole supply vs demand will dictate prices of anything. Even at 70, a load of shops still sell out.
But, as always, when there is more money into the economy, prices rise.

I really don't see this as issue though. Players all around can charge more for the labors of their work as diamonds are indeed harder to obtain. But whether mining or enraged killing, they stand to make some more rupees.

How to lower the price? Well, if players really are in need of diamonds, its so easy to vote and mine them, if we all did that, we would be all pretty well off block-wise.
Plus, what is the need to lower prices? It would just stop players from selling their hard earned diamonds!
If you really need diamonds, use Iron instead! It will protect you enough to escape and go mining. At some point we were all using iron...right? (or was the iron phase just a lancer thing?)

If you go mining, use iron until you find enough diamonds to make diamond tools?
If you mob hunt a load, use iron and sell the diamonds and mob drops?

Most of the time it seems that diamonds are used for diamond blocks, to show 'status'. If you don't believe me, go take a look around player resses and check out some cool stuff built with loads of diamond blocks.

I remember when diamonds were 30 r.

Aikar has made some changes to help keep the price of diamonds from getting too high, but keep in mind that they are one of the more useful items in the game. There are a lot of diamonds being held in private stockpiles, but with an increasing number of ways for diamonds to enter the economy, eventually they will stop buying.

One days worth of voting bonus and login rupees will get you enough diamonds to make some useful equipment and maybe make some iron stuff to save some rupees.

If you are planning to make or repair diamond items, please buy them already made, as they are often farmed from villagers through emerald trades. This leaves more individual diamonds for specialty items.

This is a really good point that I hadn't considered before.
However, I haven't compared prices of raw diamonds with those of tools recently. If tools were more expensive than what I could buy the raw diamonds for, I'm going for the raw. I don't care if buying them today might increase the price tomorrow.