Greetings all,





I consider ‘Caerleon Cartel’ topic necessary to make a statement about it.



As I have shops at Caerleon and some of you declared me the boss of the Cartel, I wanted to talk about some important issues about this topic from my/our perspective.





I will tackle with this text under these entries that I found important topics to clarify the topic:





A. First of all, I will explain you what I am doing in the game, how I become that powerful and how I started to own shops.







B. Secondly, I will discuss why we had to found a tax system even there are lots counter-views.







C. Later on, I will express approx. how I invest into this and in exchange of it, how much I profit.







D. Also, I will talk about the ones who are trying to represent themselves as ‘local heroes’ via criticizing the system we found. I will explain how these ‘noble* heroes’ are trying to benefit from this situation and also trying to profit much more than anyone else while they are crying on platforms such as forums.





E. Lastly, I want to talk about how this bidding systems which is served by Albion Online put shop owners in a tight spot and how this system caused that high taxes. In addition, I will give example about why there cannot be a low tax system under this conditions with exact numbers from the last month.







A. First of all, I will explain you what I am doing in the game, how I become that powerful and how I started to own shops.





I have been playing this game since Alpha. From the moment I have started to play this game, I was thinking and researching consistently about how I can support my guild in terms of in-game economy to provide them maximum opportunities from the game content.





During the Beta, the main cities of Albion Online were Kingsmarket and QueensMarket. According to my research and brainstorming about the game and the guild economy, I decided to enter market ownership business. From that that to-day, I am investing in that business time to time.





After the official release of the game, with the support of my guild who are playing together during the Betas, we have bought 6 shops from the city. At that time, we had no real profit from those shops but I invested them just because of taking benefit from the 15% bonus. These shops also had diffuculty to meet the bidding defence costs where we found the solution to ask the guild for the help.





After playing continuously for a while, we decided to have a break to the game. During that time, we sold all of our shops, convert our silvers to gold and took a break. The point of converting our silver into gold is just lean on we thought that in time gold value could be increase against the silver currency.





B. Secondly, I will discuss why we had to found a tax system even there are lots counter-views.





Approximately 6 months ago, I started to play Albion Online once again as it is a game which cause addiction you know.





At that time, I noticed that there is a tax system in Caerleon (which is definetely not found by me). And I realized that with that system there could be a chance to profit from the shops more than my past experiences. With that motivation, I re-entered the Caerleon market business.





While I was buying the shops from a player, he told me that there is a discord server where all the rules for the shops are taken and if I wouldn’t join that discord and/or set any taxes different than the system, they are all going to attack me. So I was warned by the ex-owner of the shops in terms of that topic. I accepted the conditions and joined the discord server.





I am going to explain the system that they were using to you, to make you informed about what was it:





The founders of that system divided Caerleon marketplace into 4 pieces that they named those districts as A, B, C and D.



⦁ District A constitutes from the shops which are the closest ones to the city center.



⦁ District B constitutes from the shops which are located just after the District A.



⦁ District C constitutes from the shops which are between District B and District D.



⦁ District D constitutes from the shops which are the farthest ones to the city center.





The idea of zoning the marketplace due to these districts is: Making the closest zones (A & B) most expensive where individual craftings could be done with minimum of walking in the city. On the other hand making the remaining zones (C & D) cheaper so mass crafting processes can be done there. By this way, they tried to constitute a balance between different zones which can form a platform where all owners can profit somehow.





As I stated before, I accepted those conditions and started to do my business as they stipulated me.





I had wasted approx. 2 hours a day to take care my shops and at the end of the month when I had a chance to calculate my net profit (which is equal to: +total_income-food_expenses-bidding_defences) I am able to profit almost 30% of the total income. This workflow continued approx. 2 months as this.





At those times, I was playing with the PoE alliance which declared war to Caerleon and conquered it. In a guild meeting after that conquest, PoE officers put an idea forward about we can profit too much from



Caerleon via Daily Taxes. By this way, the first recent transformation have been started: they attacked to shop owners of Caerleon (let me mention that they attack especially BananaPuding who has lots of shops at Caerleon). Of course as the owner of the city, doing these kind of actions are the rights of them and they targeted the highest tax possible from the city.



If there is anyone who does not know what I am talking about, let me explain what it is:





As you know every major city has a guild as an owner. These guilds are taking the 25% of bidding defence costs as their monthly city tax. For example, if this month 5B silver was spended during auctions, 25% of that expenses go to the city owner as a tax day by day (which means every day the city owner guild take 41M silver in return of 5B bidding).





Under this conditions, they started to bid the shops very heavily to all of owners and bidded even heavier to BananaPuding. After this bidding war, lots of shop owners including BananaPuding left their shops and the new shop owners (which are mostly from PoE) were broken that tax system. Unfortunately, the new order caused a fatal error and all of the shops were started to make a loss. You may know that 30% of the owners from that period withdraw from the market because of can not sustain their shops under those conditions. During that period, I had shops in Caerleon too, I watched to market and gained insights about it.

Unfortunately, I was loosing money too that is why I sold my shops.





If there are someone who are playing the game at that time can easily remember that the price of the Caerleon shops were reduced to 35M and later on I have seen that some shops couldn’t be sold even from



25M. Because everybody knew that those shops had no profits and even they were loosing money.





In that period, I took a break and started to play another game (Legends of Aria) and found myself managing shops there too. But after a short time, we understood that LoA hasn’t got a bright future (at least from our perspective), and we decided to re-start playing Albion Online.





At that time, we were not crowded and I didn’t want to labor with managing guild issues that is why I asked Mojo for taking me into their guild. My main idea was playing the game in a relax mode without drama.



Actually, I have experienced some of the best memories of my Albion Online with Blue Army.





On the other hand, in short time, I realized that everybody is running away from Blue Army while I couldn’t find a chance to even dismount to fight. Because of everyone even if they are more crowded than Blue Army are running away, I get bored playing with them within that style of gaming.





At that moment, I communicated our old French and Turkish members and re-found the guild Articulo Mortis.First days of our re-constitution, we had no home plots that is why I had to invest once again to the

Caerleon marketplace. I had enough experience about how markets work and decided to play the game seriously with my guild once again, I started to form a system for myself to tracking and calculating the values of each shops of the market.