[Lucid:]

You really can't really claim anything about the purpose of buying low and selling high when you're purposely buying high. That's a whole new game. And buying higher than the asking price before anybody is offering anywhere near the offer made IS artificial inflation.

We can't exactly live by the Gaia definition of artificial inflation because we're not Gaia. We have a completely different marketplace than they do. Gaia's artificial inflation happens mostly in the MP, not the exchange.
If someone pays a higher price and then everyone follows, sure, that's natural inflation. But if someone, or a small group of people, pay a higher price and everyone complains about it, that's artificial inflation at work.

If an Anka set hasn't sold for a whole year and someone wants to put a general estimated price on it, that's not artificial inflation because there's no standard market value on it. People might buy it at that price, they might not. It's hard to make a straight sale on an item that is rarely sold, and that's why auctions/offers are handy.

I'm not sure how or if I will be able to enforce an artificial inflation rule completely, but I do think that there should be a better distinction between selling and taking offers. Because right now, most "sales" in our marketplace are actually short-term auctions.
There may be a fuzzy line on where sales and offers meet, but there's still a line. The way I see it, if the seller has a general idea of how much they want to sell for, and states their price in the thread, then it's a sale, even if some haggling and offering goes on, even if the item sells for either higher or lower than the original asking price. If the seller doesn't tell any of the potential buyers how much they're looking for, and just lets the offers go up and up until they've gotten the best deal, that's not a sale, that's an auction.