Sunday, September 7th, 2008
Issue: 90   Editor: NYX2000


Bullet price to High? RefuV12
Bullet Price too high? Think again, in fact bullets have not been cheaper then they are now! Am I crazy? far from it... and this is why:

In my opinion there are 4 ways to 'calculate' what a acceptable bullet price is:
1: Points/bulletprice-ratio
2: Inflation
3: Economical growth
4: Supply and Demand

1: Points/bullet price ratio
simple method, what does it cost to get bullets by using points and how much does it cost to buy at a factory.. as you probably know 10 points = 500 bullets so..

using points: 10 * $730,000 = $7,300,000
buying at a BF: 500 * $4,250 = $2,125,000

This would mean that in theory we could ask $7,300,000 / 500 = $14,600 a bullet but i know that points should be more expensive as you keep those when you die so i would say a bullet price of $10,000 a piece is justified according to this calculation

2: Inflation
Inflation is defined the following: The rate at which the general level of prices for goods and services is rising, and, subsequently, purchasing power is falling.

In essence it comes down to this: what was i able to buy in the past with my money and what can i buy right now with the same money. Relating this to BL we look to how many points you can buy per hour from the profit a BF makes.. As I am one of the fortunate people in BL that has been able to hold BF's from the start of the reset till now I can make quite an accurate comparision using the following:

bullets * price - production costs = profit / point price = points per hour

Early this reset:
1125 * $75 - $15,000 = $69375 / $5,000 = 13.88 points per hour

Now:
1125 * $4,250 - $15,000 = $4,766,250 / $730,000 = 6.53 points per hour

If i want to make as many points per hour now as I did back then i would need a bullet price of:

13.88 * $730,000 + $15,000 = $10,143,750 / 1125 = $9,017 per bullet

And this is pretty accurate and early in the days you didnt hear anyone about bullets being too expensive, so why complain now? Right now i cant even buy half the points per hour as i used to do.. thats what they call inflation

3: Economical growth
This isn't really a good measure, but the outcome is kinda fun...
The 'economy' of BL is represented by the amount of money in BL which grows and decreased due to various things (OC's, crimes, stocks, war, bank transfer fee's, kills and such)

When you look at the money graph on the statistics you see it almost represents an exponential growth (a part from Sabin banning about 100 billion out the game), the average daily growth percentage can be calculated in kinda the same way as the Bank Interest Calc. on blhelp only now we change the interest to a to be determined growth percentage.. formula would be like this:

Money today = money after day one * ((1+X) ^ days running)

in this formula only 2 factors are unknown, the money after day 1 and X, the percentage of average daily growth. For the money after day 1 i will set this on $5,000,000 which i think is quite high in fact

$352,177,642,689 = $5,000,000 * ( (1+X) ^ 678 )

working this out will result to X being about 1.7%25 average daily growth. This is in fact quite low as daily growth is about 3%25 (bank interest) but on days with a lot of killings the money can be reduced quite a lot

If we use this 1.7%25 daily growth on the bullet price we would get (with the following notes):
-minimum bullet price: $15,000 / 1125 = $13.33
-first couple of days/weeks there where no BF's in the game

$13.33 * ((1+0.017) ^ 625) = $764,627 per bullet

Again, this calculating isn't really useful but the outcome is fun

4: Supply and Demand:
You can base prices on supply and demand, but this is difficult as it would only work if all BF's would have about the same prices..

Only if all BF holders set the same price (say $10000) and the bullets wouldn't sell we can say that there is no demand at that price. If only 1 sells at $10000 there are cheaper ways to buy, doesn't mean people are not willing to pay $10000 if all BF's had that price

Another flaw in this way is that crews generally have people buying bullets who get refunded, these people would buy for $10000 but would get refunded so they pay little to nothing at all

To conclude, bullet prices can, for as far as i think, be doubled without reaching unacceptable high bullet prices.