Whoa, I seriously thought I responded to some things in this thread instead of posting and running. Well...it's not necromancy yet!
metalmario wrote:
I hate hate HATE the limits (just let me buy what I'm shopping for right now!) but they do play a nice role in the fight against inflation. It takes a while for item prices to finally roll over that 100k or 800k bump in prices, just because people don't want to bother with selling it on the "next hardest" place to sell it. (from shops to trades; trades to neomail to auctions) I remember when Draik Trans potions were stuck at 800k for quite a long while because they were so easy to sell, the sellers just wanted an offer and to accept and be on their merry way. Of course those have inflated to hell and back, but at least the limit held it in one spot for a while!
I'll admit, I hadn't considered it as an anti-inflationary measure. Then again, enough people neomail me with (alas, lowball) offers of 250k that I'm not entirely sure of how much the hassle factor affects pricing. It definitely affects it more than I considered, though.
shapu wrote:
But the real reason for these limits was because of scammers - people would lose their accounts, and someone could easily empty out a 100 million bank account in one single trade if the limits didn't exist.
Now that scamming has been reduced (heck, we don't even have a PPT Mafia anymore!), and the introduction of PINs on bank accounts, it seems that the limits have lost their purpose.
The initial shop limit was 75k--it was raised to the current limit in late December 1999 (before the TP), if I remember correctly. I don't think it was instituted as an anti-scamming thing, but it definitely served that purpose.
I can't find a limit raise since November 2001 on the TP (though there definitely was one of about 200k sometime after that), though I did find
this interesting note:
TNT in April 2001 wrote:
The Trading Post now accepts trades of 250,000 NP (up from 100,000). We will be taking this limit away entirely in the future.
(Bolding mine.)
The Neopian economy has really changed since 2001. I think it might be worthwhile to start sending in editorial questions about it; they've acknowledged it as a possibility in the past.