Earlier in the discord chat I mentioned an idea about limiting TG buyouts in a certain way, so I am curious what people think about it and if they see potential problems with it/solutions to fix them. My idea was to set a per-week credit of, let's say, 1000tg which allows you to make transactions and bid on auctions until your credit has reached 0. In the next week you'll receive another credit of 1000, which adds up to your previous (possibly still unused) credit. I think this works better than simply locking tg for the first week, which has been commonly discussed. The advantages I see with this method are that it will require people to prioritize their needs instead of buying out everything they (we) see to compete, and it will create a more balanced trading environment.
One of the problems are items which are worth more than 1000tg, although they are just a few. Or maybe they are not a problem at all, since people who decide to spend nothing in the first week will be able to bid more on rare SSSU items in the second week. Also, people who find SSSU items in the first week will not be eager to sell them immediately for a low price, which is also a bonus since these SSSU items will not give huge immediate advantage to a single person right in the beginning.
Messaging friends to bid for you can be a problem, although that would decrease their credit as well. The bigger problem and probably why such a system would not work well in practice are alternate accounts of a single person, unless there is something that can be done to work around that, as otherwise this would be a huge limiting factor for the people who play it fairly. Transactions of 1000tg to alternate accounts would still use up your credit for the week, but they can be prepared before a season, which creates the problem.
And of course, another problem is that this would limit people's incentive to donate (which is a problem of other suggestions in this direction as well), although it would make donations actual donations instead of pay to win situations. Another thing is that having such a system opens up the question whether you need more than 5k tg at all and whether that would impact people's desire to farm more in case there is nothing more to gain from it. Maybe a per-day credit system or different amounts per week (e.g. first 500, then 1500, then 3000, etc) could balance this. Practically, you'd never need more than 10k in the current system either, as long as you can recover your losses for the next season.