Yeah, I've had people refresh their listings just seconds after I update mine. I always win in the end though. After a certain point it isn't about the gil. It's about the message. :p
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If you're capable of checking every 10 minutes to see you've been undercut, you're also capable changing the price on your listings every 10 minutes.
If you can do it, so can other players.
I'm not saying there aren't bots out there. I'm saying what you're claiming to be "proof" isn't.
I'm sure this game has the same type of cutthroat market barons that I competed against in WoW who did nothing all day long but check prices and relist items because that was fun to them. They're play to be rich and gil is their scorecard.
The worst thing you can do is participate in an undercut war because then you look like you're a bot yourself. Decide on what you think is a reasonable price and stick with it. There are players that hate the undercutters and bots, and they will pay a little bit extra to try to avoid buying from one. If you're still having problems selling items, switch to something else to sell. There are thousands of items to choose from and many of them are very profitable while being overlooked by the bots and even other crafters in many cases.
And everybody else wants to be selling those because once upon a time end game gear sold for huge prices because few players were capable of making it.
It doesn't anymore. Too many players are capable of making it now and even if not all of them are selling it on the MB they're still making it for themselves and their friends, which cuts down on the number of buyers for the gear.
Find other things that people are still buying. There's plenty of items I see selling the MB for 75-100k that cost less than 5k to make. There's 70k profit. Exarchic or Aesthete might sell for 125k but how much of that is profit when you consider cost of materials (or what they would sell for if you sold the materials instead)?
While it is true that undercutter spamming is not necessarily indicative of a bot, these days it usually is as their aggressive behavior is what drives/drove the competition away.
You can almost always check on the undercutters in question and see that they're bare-bones accounts who've done basically nothing other then level a single DoW/M class to 80 then maxed out all of their DoH/L jobs, and it's not uncommon to be able to find them gathering their mats out in the field where their botting is much more obvious.
If you are trying to make gil of the board..really just look for what has relatively few listings and go with that.
And generally ignore the topmost/newest stuff. There will always be people who need level 10-50 gear. Not a big haul but it adds up. Alternatively just sell materials at a markup (you can buy many from NPCs and just resell it for profit).
Unless you are trying to make millions real fast in which case, crafting isn’t the way.
You are much better off doing treasure maps and selling drops…
I undercut by 1 gil multiple times a day, even then sometimes just after I'm undercut in the same way. It may be bots or a very dedicated player, but I suspect bots for this do exist. We get bots for most things, even for treasure maps themselves, so I do believe some items may be affected by undercutting bots. I don't know what we can do about them, so I keep undercutting anyway.
I always undercut by 1 gil, because I don't want to destroy the market and margins for that item... to me is far worse when someone undercuts by a large margin. Someone will undercut them in turn, and they will lower their price even more. I was selling an emote yesterday. It was 800.000 gil. Some mild undercutting was happening, until someone lowered their price to 700.000. Next time I saw it it was 580.000... There, market destroyed. (said emote was consistently selling for around 800k).
Since undercutting is inevitable, if everyone undercut by 1 gil the market would be so much better! The goal is only to get the first listing anyway...
You’re not wrong, and like Vanlnir said just straight selling maps ain’t a bad idea. I get a fair bit of coin out of my submarine fleet at this point in the expac but even that is drying up.
I think for OP (and anyone really) if you are planning to make serious money, you have to plan to spend serious money/effort as the expac launches and be on bleeding edge for crafting. The more people that can provide supply, the lower prices are gonna plummet…
Selling maps, older gear used for leveling both for DoM/DoW and DoH/L is easy gil.
Selling some materials people lazy to get but need in bulk (Dwarven Cotton Ball) for example.
Starter gear sells like hotcakes. People rather go to a marketboard than find the gear seller. I've bought gear for 50-100 gil and sold it for 20000+.