i’ve tried making tuned, designs and paints but because not everyone will download them i’m perpetually stuck with cars i grinded for but either don’t need anymore or wanna sell and can’t even get 1-2% of thier value thus making me keep them because if i sell a 10 mil car for 80,000 obviously someone will just re sell that… not that i mind just if i can’t make millions no one else should off of my stuff, or in general to be honest, kinda makes me wanna play something else as i can’t really make money unless i do the same stuff over and over now and also can’t trade off my cars so makes it real unenjoyable if i work and miss a car and can’t sell one for it gotta grind even harder for it, so instead of having fun the game just becomes tedious to try and collect or have my favourites…
The auction house is a fickle mistress…and those minimum/maximum sale prices vary over time, which makes it even more challenging to know when to sell to make a buck in the game. At this point, with the backstage pass being a thing, expect most cars no matter how rare to really begin to settle down to “anyone who’s put 10 hours into the game can afford them” soon, which makes sense as the game is now trying to land as many casuals as it can, being 2 years old.
However, keep in mind, if you can’t sell a car for a certain price chances are nobody else can either, the demand just isn’t there.
Okay, lets start by pointing out two things:
- The value displayed in the car list isn’t the actual value, its just the nominal value. For many cars its the value the car has in RL, for others its just an arbitrary number. But in each case it has no connection to the ingame value (with the obvious exception of cars that can be bought via the car show, in that case its an upper price limit)
- It is imho really easy to earn money in that game. I don’t think I were ever in a situation where I wanted to buy something but couldn’t afford it… except maybe the first day when I wanted to have a CLK-GTR. I had to wait till the second day to buy that.
That being said: Yes, its pretty ridiculous that you can’t sell a car for the actual value, the value beeing set by the market. An auction would be the best method to actually find that real value, but since the price range is limited for 99% of the players to some arbitrary limit, it doesn’t work that way. This prevents us from having a working market with free pricing.
What we have instead is a situation were players like me, who have plenty of very rare surplus cars don’t offer them, because they know exactly if they put it up for the maximum allowed price it will be bought within seconds (probably via macro-script) and then reoffered a minute later for 100 times the price by the scalper who bought it, cause he’s a legendary and is not bound to the pricing limit. And since I won’t support that, I’d rather delete the cars then offer them. Its not like I need more money then I currently have.
Oh, but obviously for the pricing to actually work the auctions themself needs to be fixed, but that would be super easy. Currently its not the highest bidder who wins the auction, its just the last bidder. And therefore everyone that wants to bid waits till the last second and then places one offer. If its the last offer, he wins. Anyone who bids befor it says ‘ending soon’ is an idiot who’s just wasting his money.
This could be fixed in an instant by extending the auction by a minute everytime a bid is placed. This way every one who wants to bid actually has a chance to do so, and the actual value (set by demand and supply) can be achieved.
Because this game has a completely warped notion of what a “Legendary” creator is.
Once you have like 30, 40 million in this game you can buy the harder-to-get cars like a Superfast and a Monte Carlo and after that you literally have nothing else to buy, kinda like in RDR2 where the game encourages you to amass a fortune in gold and trinkets to fence even though after a few thousand dollars, you can buy all the game has to offer.
The game evolves from first release date where everyone wants every car up till today. It is a matter of finding a car that sells well, and making a profit from it to buy all the other cars. That is actually more of a skill, because you need to study the market.
To answer the question in the OP, the reason we can’t just sell cars for credits like in nearly every other racing game is simply to force players into going online to use the auction house. This is necessary for the in-game economy to work, since if players could avoid the massive inconvenience of the AH to sell their cars, they absolutely would. Bad game design at its finest.
IMHO the whole “economy” with artificially scarce cars is an unnecessary distraction from what this game actually does well with the car roster and actual driving, and adds a lot of unfun barriers to actually enjoying much of the content the game has to offer.