As soon as you open the Earth2 land marketplace you see properties listed at 99% discounts or ridiculously low priced T1 properties, only to find they are from locked countries or from frozen accounts and you cannot buy them.
Lets understand below the host of issues this brings, why are users still listing as such, and finally whether a simple filter can do the trick.
Discounted listings impact the Earth2 perception and user experience
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Distorted view of land valuation: Many new users who come to the marketplace think the Earth2 property values have crashed to almost zero without realizing that the said 99.99% discounted listings cannot be transacted. This spreads misinformation outside and has been nefariously used by scam-tubers to attack Earth2.
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Discovery of properties: Users find it hard to find the cheapest transactable properties, which is the primary function of the marketplace to begin with. Users currently have to scroll several pages to reach the first transactable listings, or they jump pages to get there and therefore miss some listings which are more cheaper.
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Impacts the land floor price: Because this impacts liquidity at the floor price many users start undercutting the floor price and list properties simply to ensure that their listing is seen in the first few pages of the marketplace. Thus this impacts the appreciation of the floor-price
Why are the players listing properties at 99.99% discounts?
First, the players listing them from locked countries are fully aware that their listings wont go through. One of the reasons they do so is – putting a 99.99% discount pushes their listing to the very top, which is an excellent source of advertising for either their listing to invite bids or to display their 5% referral codes.
A simple potential solution – The ‘In-Stock’ Filter
You may have noted most e-commerce websites having the ‘in-stock’ filter
This helps users filter out items that they cannot purchase, and improve the item discovery.
Probably something similar is required on the Earth2 marketplace. If there were filters to hide frozen accounts and locked countries with a ‘purchasable tiles’ filter it would avoid the need to scroll countless pages to get to the first transactable T1 property. Even better, if the default option is to hide such properties.
While I understand Earth2 dev team has their hands full, this maybe an important thing to add to the list, specially since Shane has already mentioned that the locked country issue is not getting solved anytime sooner. Thus a simple filter (even if temporary), could vastly improve the Earth2 marketplace experience and discovery of properties.
ZEU$ out.
