How do you make money on the market boards?

crafting is too easy now so you can't make any money on endgame gear and similiar items, you just need to research the market on your server and find items that sell and which others are not making.

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Originally Posted by The_Distinguished_Anarchist

Seriously. I hit omnicrafter a couple of months back and materia-melded to the point that I can do the 3star crafts without needing any high-quality materials. I've never recovered the gil I sank into it.

It's wildly unprofitable on my server to purchase composite materials and try to sell finished products, and even the composite materials themselves will sit on my retainers for days, requiring continuous markdowns before they finally sell-- most often for 2/3 of my original list price or lower.

I have roughly 48 various items spread across several retainers that have gone unsold for close to a month now. Every piece of advice I've read and received for crafting and selling has failed to yield any significant returns. I routinely go to bed with the only postings of certain items on the market board, then wake up to dozens of others reaching as low as 40% of my original list price or lower.

The only real profit I have ever made on the market board is with pieces made from materials that drop in the group treasure maps, the acquisition of which is pure RNG. I'm not interested in a lottery. I'm looking for a sustainable methodology for generating money from crafting. What should I be doing differently?

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Because crafting is so galling easy, you have to search for the nichey-est of products with obscure mats.

Most of my gil is made in the week following a patch.
Doing new maps and selling the new rare materials, etc.
Can make a good few million.
The gil I make between patches doesn't even come close.

You don’t. Not now anyway. After crafting and gathering changes and how easy square made them to level in casualbringers the market board is useless for making money these days. Items I used to sell with others for 700-1m now sell for 150k and have gone from me and maybe two others to about 10-20 sellers. All you gotta do is look at the crafted weapons. My server has them for 50-100k I’ve never seen them go for that low, even when not current they never go that low. But having 30 seller fighting the price plummeted. Ow and again you might find a lower level item that’s not got anything you can make a small monopoly over but once it sells and people see that the hoard will soon come to join you and make it worthless again. So make the most of it while you can.

An example was a small housing item I was selling for a few days, sold maybe a dozen of them for 60k done quite well for me. Wake up on third day and there’s now another 5 for sale and the price is at 17k. Sold what I had and moved on. But yea unless selling new crater gear on week 1 over melding is really not worth it these days. You’ll never get the money back you sink into it. I’m still building back to break even after buying a mount 2 weeks ago and that’s a lot cheaper than materia you’ll buy.

Make more money now doing roulettes every day and running or making map parties and hoping for good rng runs. Makes about 500k - 1m if lucky.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by The_Distinguished_Anarchist

Seriously. I hit omnicrafter a couple of months back and materia-melded to the point that I can do the 3star crafts without needing any high-quality materials. I've never recovered the gil I sank into it.

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Welcome to the hundreds of thousands of other crafters just like you who hit max melded Omnicrafter thanks to Enix's free hand outs and can also churn out endgame gear sets like candy.

There is no real gil in crafting anymore. Players who had no interest in crafting wanted a slice of the pie, it got divided among a million and everyone got a crumb each. The value of most items has dropped by 5-20x from Stormblood depending on the item. There's just way too much supply. I don't expect 5.3 will have a long profit window either.

That said, I'm surprised you can't recover your gil. If materia/mats aren't absolutely worthless on your world, you could always try gathering. You gather from timed nodes, Extract Materia, sell those + mats. It's not amazing profit but you might be able to pull together enough to recover your gil. There's a chance DoH materia might be worth more in 5.3 too so doesn't hurt to stockpile.
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post5326759

I don't go out of my way to do so. I have 4 retainers and just make money off Quick Ventures. 90% of the time it's GC seal or desynth fodder, though when it can sell for something, it's not so bad. Little time investment and I usually wake up to a few hundred thousand every day on average which is more than enough to get by; it's enough money to buy out markets to control them if I desire. I also make a lot of money not by revenue, but mitigated expenses. For example, I never had to grind crafting; I stayed on-top of my GC dailies, beast tribes, and custom deliveries early on, and was caught up on them before I finished the MSQ. I only made money while crafting, and barely ever had to buy materia off of competitors.

I imagine if I wanted to dedicate time to making money I'd get an efficient map team together. Crafting isn't without merit but with it becoming more accessible and them adding new stuff to maps every big patch, treasure maps seem much more of a competitive income source. Treasure map materials will always be required for the hottest new mounts or glam items that people will murder each other to get.

I stopped selling seriously back in 4.2. I don't need the money anymore. Heavensward was a gold mine for legendary node mats (sold mostly miner/bot content) given few went to the trouble of getting the books. Now they've made that so easy and bots have taken over a good part of many of the high end sales.

Now I pretty much sell materia and tome mats given I have the tomes/materia drops and need to keep my inventory clear. Hunts are a good source of income with cluster drops and they are just a bonus when it comes to capping my characters/alts.

I can make 500k from one series of 4 A rank trains and prices are somewhat depressed now when it comes to materia. That will change soon enough when 5.3 hits.

I make witty retainer names and hope people buy my stuff.

Big way to make easy money is to figure out what's new (especially glamour) and how said items are made, then NOT MAKE THEM, but farm the materials and sell them. Often this is things like drops from trials or treasure maps. Basically the latest fashion/furnishings are where the money is.

After that, you can kind of stumble onto random open items (again usually furnishings or glamour) that you can make pretty easily, but no one is going through the trouble at the moment. See if they sell pretty regularly and if so, make 1 or 2 and sell. Rinse repeat on several different items. Things like Dye are a good example of this..people just don't want to go through the trouble of making them.

It's like stocks. Find a lot of things, work those things and when they stop being profitable, drop them and pick up something else.

alllll that said, you can make really good coin just doing daily/weekly stuff- retainers, NPC deliveries and Doma alone can net you an easy payday; just don't forget to use your scrips and sell whatever (usually materia). Add that to challenge logs and you'll generate a lot quickly.

Sell consumables or glamour items basically.

Good Profits in FFXIV only exist at the start of savage raid patches typically when people use crafted gear to get a boosted start into raiding. Once the patch matures and people get tome gear and such... crafting is for food/pots and glamour only.

Crafting materials are ridiculously extremely easy to obtain and crafting has almost no barrier to entree. Combine that with all crafted gear being entree lvl endgame gear basically, there just is not enough demand to keep prices high.

So mass supply and small demand... aka profits are garbage.


Best way to make money now is get the materials. Sell some materials and craft stuff with those materials and sell that as well. That way you can move the materials you gathered faster by selling raw materials and finished goods. And expect people to constantly spam undercut you by 1 gil every 5-10mins.