You wrote, regarding the credit market, "By itself, it should lower the
price of credits, not increase it, since t makes buying and selling
easier."


This doesn't really make sense. Gold and credits are both currencies.
You could make the exact same statement about gold, saying, "By itself,
it [the credit market] should lower the price of gold, not increase t,
since it makes buying and selling easier."

Looking at the credit market as a way to sell gold or sell credits is
equally valid as is looking at it as a place to buy gold or buy credits.
What the credit market does is decrease inefficiencies in the market,
making it harder in the long run to be a re-seller, since re-sellers
perform the function of arbitrage here.

In real life, arbitrage is usually used to describe the practice of
buying low in one market and selling high in another market. In other
words, taking advantage of different markets. Arbitrage in most
commodities today in real life (gold, silver, pork bellies, etc) is no
longer a particularly viable operation as price differences between
markets tend to be eradicated in a matter of seconds, due to the
near-instant flow of information in the global market.

Here in Achaea, the re-sellers used to perform the function of arbitrage
in a sense closer to that of the real world in that you could buy
credits for slightly lower at one time of the day and potentially sell
them for more later (distance is never an object really). Now, the
re-sellers are simply assisting in bringing the price closer to its
"fair" market value. Nothing wrong with that at all. There are a lot of
players unwilling or unable to spend real money on credits, so they
gather gold instead. Being able to trade for credits at -any- price is a
bargain as far as I'm concerned, since Achaea is really developed and
operated primarly for people who do buy credits. Consider this: A
gold-gatherer could either spend his or her time here gathering gold, or
doing something outside of the game to earn money. If it's less effort
for you to earn the money outside of the game, I'd probably recommend
doing that. If it's less effort for you to make gold and buy credits,
I'd recommend that.

In any case though, the credit market is perfectly reasonable to me and
is working fine. Perhaps the only adjustment needed (as someone
mentioned at some point) is that perhaps there could be more things to
spend gold on.

Penned by my hand on the 20th of Scarlatan, in the year 336 AF.