When someone tries to ruin the Market board...

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Originally Posted by Leloa

Haha... She likes to keep imitation windows to herself, god forbid if anyone makes windows and lists them below hers she will make 15 more and drop the price like nuts. She doesn't care about the money, she cares about keeping that item in her control.

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And? You can let the price drop or move on. But you do still have options there.

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Originally Posted by Xerkrosis

Small Imitation Window

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Why are we getting bent out of shape over the listing price of an item that costs 1882 gil in vendor purchased materials plus 6 shards to make?

Things are fairly slow at the moment, at least on my server. I will list a ton of items and then let them sit for a day or 2. If they haven't sold by then...well, time for some bargain prices. I will cut the prices in half or more which usually gets them to sell. Gotta get that space cleared for more stuff. Doesn't seem to be working a whole lot at the moment though, but I know we're in a bit of a lull.

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Originally Posted by Leloa

Most of the items, most items that make money or used to for sure. I always try to make items she isn't selling but then few days later suddenly everything I am selling she is selling too and much lower price. She usually has windows and other certain items for sale so I try to not touch her territory but surely she doesn't care about others. She has already made it clear it's just to annoy people, no matter if she can make money or not herself.

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I know exactly who you are talking about on our server, and it is definitely out of spite what they do. I have also tried to find items with little or no listings, come back later and they have listed an entire retainer's worth at 1/12 of the price. It costs more to craft the items they sell, than the price they sell things at.

I noticed this person so often, that I actually started remembering their retainer's names, and counted at one point, and they have something like over 30 retainers.

Between the MB listings all being under 50k.
Crafting now being "Hit muscle memory once to make everything".
And being able to get pretty much every housing item for free through the firmament.
The economy has been pretty much destroyed.
I just stick to housing skins and rare items now, anything else simply isn't worth the effort.

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Originally Posted by Hoshi-Shouri

I know exactly who you are talking about on our server, and it is definitely out of spite what they do. I have also tried to find items with little or no listings, come back later and they have listed an entire retainer's worth at 1/12 of the price. It costs more to craft the items they sell, than the price they sell things at.

I noticed this person so often, that I actually started remembering their retainer's names, and counted at one point, and they have something like over 30 retainers.

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I'm quite on the fence about this because...people can list stuff for any price they want. However I have a suggestion...try to sell things they don't sell? There is no way they can be selling EVERYTHING.

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Originally Posted by TwistedTea

Here again, we have a demonstration of people not understanding Opportunity Cost; time is the ultimate cost even if you gather everything yourself. The time that you spent gathering stuff yourself could have been used to do something more profitable.

To the OP, diversify the products you sell and try to sell across the DC. Undercutting doesn't matter as much when you sell diverse products across the DC.

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Depending on the item, self gathering can absolutely be the way to go, especially if your doing bleeding-edge content (like treasure maps).

Once you are at a node, the actual harvesting of mats is negligible. In my case if I want to self craft, I will always farm enough for 2-5 items with intent to sell the other 1-4.

If you are so worried about opportunity costs, you should never have leveled crafting or gathering in the first place since you would be better rewarded just farming and selling bleeding edge crafting mats, or flipping the market.

Point being, if straight gil is the goal, crafting is probably about the dumbest thing you could be doing.

Easy solution - buy all his stuff and try to resell it.

Not because you'll make a profit. Because you'll soon have a massive inventory of items that won't sell, and then you'll see things from the 'ruiners' perspective.

https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/c...pg?format=750w

That gif about sums it up xD

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Originally Posted by Penthea

I'm quite on the fence about this because...people can list stuff for any price they want. However I have a suggestion...try to sell things they don't sell? There is no way they can be selling EVERYTHING.

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If it's crafted by a carpenter, alchemist, weaver, armorer, goldsmith they probably have it listed. Rugs, plants, windows, furnishings, minions, lighting, they have 20 of items listed, from 2k - 30k. They've even tanked the price on items only crafted with fc ship voyage mats almost immediately. Buying their 'cheap and good' items to relist isn't an option because they would immediately make more and sell them for practically nothing.

And they definitely have a personal vendetta against anyone who tries to compete with them. I've also tried your solution of selling things they don't sell: I had a random mat from desynthing the other day, searched what things it crafted, made the fat cat clock because there was only ONE on the mb (not crafted by this person) thinking it would be a quick sell... the next day this person had 20 listed for half the price. lol They are a menace.

It's mostly just frustrating because there's really nothing anyone can do about it.

And you're right, they can list any price they want, but they are literally undercutting themselves with each of their listings, with prices going from 30k to 2k, and them only undercutting their own retainers in doing that. Where's the logic in that? Why spend your time gathering and crafting this stuff, constantly pumping it out in such a way you can't possibly be making any meaningful profit? Especially if they don't even need/want the gil, it seems like an even more confusing way to operate. If they aren't using bots, what they do must take a lot of time, so.. why bother? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There is a huge difference between competition in the market and this kind of behavior. Imagine if somebody came to where you work and offered your employer to do your job for half of your salary. And everywhere you applied for a new job, they did the same thing.

At the same time, I feel that the market is beyond flooded with items and materials. There are less and less desired things to be made. SE seems to be steering crafting towards making turn-ins to earn items rather than making the actual items themselves.

Personally I drop my prices more and more every time someone tries to undercut me by a couple gil. I'm really uninterested in sitting around hawking the market board to play the 100 gil undercut game, so I attempt to make it clear to anyone who is doing so that they're going to have to make larger cuts than they're comfortable with if they want to keep it up. I don't really post large volumes of items though.

It's not like most MMORPGs have working economies anyway. Items are too easy to make and it takes too much effort to research the opportunity cost of making an item and selling it versus selling the materials directly. For trash items it's common to see them being sold even below the price NPC vendors would pay for them. Regional and relatively small servers make demand for materials very spiky; if someone decides to level their crafting classes they can consume a significant portion of the supply, driving prices up. Then the providers notice an item which looks expensive and flood the market, but the demand is no longer there so the price crashes again. The lack of buy orders exacerbates this problem since there's no way for crafters to indicate they're willing to buy a material at certain price. Lack of commodities market makes it annoying to sell large amounts of items or buy small amounts.

EVE Online is the only game I've seen so far with anything resembling a functional economy. Unfortunately it's so PvP oriented it just doesn't appeal to me as a whole.

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Originally Posted by Jennika

At the same time, I feel that the market is beyond flooded with items and materials. There are less and less desired things to be made. SE seems to be steering crafting towards making turn-ins to earn items rather than making the actual items themselves.

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I think the core issue is that it's way too easy to make the most heavily demanded items compared to an average MMO; both in terms of how long it takes to gather the materials and how long it takes to get the level cap in the first place.

Having more time-gated and/or character bound resources involved would lower the amount of items coming into the market and increase the prices as a side effect.

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Originally Posted by tdb

It's not like most MMORPGs have working economies anyway. Items are too easy to make and it takes too much effort to research the opportunity cost of making an item and selling it versus selling the materials directly. For trash items it's common to see them being sold even below the price NPC vendors would pay for them. Regional and relatively small servers make demand for materials very spiky; if someone decides to level their crafting classes they can consume a significant portion of the supply, driving prices up. Then the providers notice an item which looks expensive and flood the market, but the demand is no longer there so the price crashes again. The lack of buy orders exacerbates this problem since there's no way for crafters to indicate they're willing to buy a material at certain price. Lack of commodities market makes it annoying to sell large amounts of items or buy small amounts.

EVE Online is the only game I've seen so far with anything resembling a functional economy. Unfortunately it's so PvP oriented it just doesn't appeal to me as a whole.

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Isn't EVE Online the MMO where being a cutthroat capitalist that literally tries to kill the competition (i.e. hire other players to blow up their ships and steal all their loot) is considered a enviable quality?

That said, this focus of this game is on the PvE and PvP elements. The Marketboard was never intended to be a primary gameplay component. There's no restrictions or limits - Marketboard prices update immediately - and with the standardization of fees across the cities, it doesn't really matter where people sell things. In addition, I also consider the MB the only true Pay-to-Win component of FFXIV - the Companion App gives a advantage to any aspiring capitalist as it allows you to update MB prices anywhere in the irl world - as long as you have cellphone access, and money to spend on Kupo Nuts (in addition to the extra retainer and chocobo bag slots).

It's also gotten worse lately due to the COVID-19 situation. More than a few people are working from home and have near constant access to FFXIV, hence the Marketboard.

I do not really pay attention to economic variables in the MB, as long as my gil pile is increasing, I'm assuming I'm doing something right. All this focus on Marketboard optimization doesn't seem to be all that interesting.

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Originally Posted by LystAP

Isn't EVE Online the MMO where being a cutthroat capitalist that literally tries to kill the competition (i.e. hire other players to blow up their ships and steal all their loot) is considered a enviable quality?

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Yes. But it's also the only one I've seen with a properly implemented market system. If you don't like the risk of being killed, it's possible to stay in highsec, even within one station, and play the market game. The scale of the economy and the tools available to buyers make it much harder for someone to control the market. Another ingenious idea is that there's no separate NPC vendors - rather the NPC entities have sell and buy orders (for rather large amounts of items) on the same market as players. But since each of the game's thousands of star systems has a separate market with limited reach, you can try to find locations where a particular item is in short supply. Investing into trading skills allows you to interact with markets quite a few hops away, and you can even hire other players to haul the items for you (with collateral in case they decide to run with the item or just lose it).

Well that is how capitalism works. You make something, someone makes it cheaper and the customer is happy cause he gets it cheaper. That is how the whole world works, better get used to it cause you will have a hard time irl if you can't adapt to that concept.

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Originally Posted by Ranaku

Well that is how capitalism works. You make something, someone makes it cheaper and the customer is happy cause he gets it cheaper. That is how the whole world works, better get used to it cause you will have a hard time irl if you can't adapt to that concept.

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In the real world though there are costs to consider. How much do the materials cost? If you sell it cheaper than that you'll make a net loss. How much time did it take you to make the item? If you're trying to make a living by selling them, you have to get enough to pay your bills. Hobbyists making stuff on their free time can largely ignore the time spent and may even be able to sell at a loss, but amount of items they can make is insignificant. You couldn't crash the furniture market by making chairs and selling them for one money, because the demand is in the millions. And on the other hand someone producing chairs at an industrial scale can get their materials a lot cheaper because they can buy in bulk.

In FFXIV on the other hand you can gather materials almost for free, and your character does not need a place to stay nor food to eat. Most players are likely to ignore teleport costs when they go out to gather materials, and as I noted earlier they probably won't bother to check the price of the materials on the MB. They're also likely to ignore the opportunity cost of making that item versus spending the same time doing something else to earn gil. So they craft something they feel is valuable and put it on sale at the lowest price. The incentives to not undercut just aren't there unless you put a decent amount of effort to calculating your profits. Strictly speaking there's also an opportunity cost involved in doing market research - if you spend two hours checking the prices of various materials and items, and as a result can optimize your two hours of crafting time to make 50k gil more, was it worth it? Chances are you could have crafted double the amount of items and made more than 50k extra gil.

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Originally Posted by Jennika

There is a huge difference between competition in the market and this kind of behavior. .

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There is zero difference in a video game where there is zero risk involved.

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Originally Posted by tdb

Yes. But it's also the only one I've seen with a properly implemented market system. If you don't like the risk of being killed, it's possible to stay in highsec, even within one station, and play the market game. The scale of the economy and the tools available to buyers make it much harder for someone to control the market. Another ingenious idea is that there's no separate NPC vendors - rather the NPC entities have sell and buy orders (for rather large amounts of items) on the same market as players. But since each of the game's thousands of star systems has a separate market with limited reach, you can try to find locations where a particular item is in short supply. Investing into trading skills allows you to interact with markets quite a few hops away, and you can even hire other players to haul the items for you (with collateral in case they decide to run with the item or just lose it).

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mining was very lucrative back when I played. made alot of doing that way. you could afford to hire really good escorts as well if you want to go into lowsec.

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Originally Posted by MsMisato

mining was very lucrative back when I played. made alot of doing that way. you could afford to hire really good escorts as well if you want to go into lowsec.

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Yeah, I've made most of my money in EVE with mining as well. IIRC I have one of the larger exhumers. I think 0.6 or maybe 0.5 is the lowest I've operated in. Almost lost my ship once to some players but fortunately they didn't have warp jammers so I was able to escape. Also did my share of can mining in highsec. Being the unsocial, slightly paranoid recluse that I am, hiring guards I don't know isn't really appealing to me. I might get more out of the game if I joined a corp with mining ops, but I find it difficult to commit to any kind of regular schedule. It's been years since I last played though so I don't know if things have changed any.

This player whom we all know is definately not alone about it. Either she has bots to work for her or it's a cartel of players working together. She/they are dominating sales entirely on ALL SERVERS in the light datacenter, in so many areas with I don't know how many alts (or other players) and gazillions of retainers that even if you craft 24/7 you can't keep up and the prices update almost immediately. Her/their sales are not about selling for the smallest amount on the market. God beware if you have the audacity to put one of your crafted items up! She/they will without doubt put another 10-15 items up, because she/they can't stand competition and very often she/they sell for UNDER the cost price. It's easy to follow in the history logs on all the servers where she buys her stuff from. It's just a twisted method to ruin crafting sales for everyone else playing the game, so don't give me the supply and demand speech. Some ppl just want the world to crash and burn no matter the consequences and if she/they crashes the market board meanwhile she/they dont care. It's all about her/their sales ONLY....and her bots/cartel.

Interesting how this person “dominates” all sales on all worlds for the data centre I am on yet I seem to be able to sell my things just fine at at reasonable price. Nothing wrong or against the tos for a group of people to band together and sell whatever they want to the market board at whatever price they want to. It is a free market after all. People are free to charge outrageous prices and others are free to charge reasonable ones.

If you really think that someone is doing this to dominate or spite you then first take a few moments to consider that and how improbable it actually is. Then buy up everything that they list which you consider to be under cost price so you can sell it later.

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Originally Posted by Bearded

If you really think that someone is doing this to dominate or spite you then first take a few moments to consider that and how improbable it actually is. Then buy up everything that they list which you consider to be under cost price so you can sell it later.

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It's not a tactic that works when materials are an unlimited resource and the other player is known to be a repeat seller. They'll usually have supplies to make more so they can relist as they sell.

About the only time it will work is when there is no maker's signature on an item that can have one. Those items are generally coming from quick ventures so the seller isn't likely to have another.

I've also noticed the weird MB thing going on on Odin. Someone mentioned the Neo-ishgardian stuff in previous posts, and I immediately knew what they were talking about since I was trying to sell some of that gear too. At first, I thought it was a person just manually undercutting. But then one night, I literally spent over 1 hour doing nothing but constantly updating my prices. It was insane. I only have 2 retainers, and by the time I was updating my second retainer, I'd see that my first retainer had already gotten undercut. After an hour or so, I was like: "To hell with this!" and I logged out. The competition, however, never seemed to go to sleep. I went to sleep at around 1 a.m. then woke up at around 6 a.m. just to check on the undercutting to see if the competition was actually bots. Lo and behold, the others continued to undercut the whole time. Like, do they even go to sleep? They undercut all day every day. And that's when I was 99.99% convinced they were bots. And even when I decided to just drop it for a while, wait for the bots' stuff to get sold, and then list mine, they would come back with more of these same items. It's never-ending and extremely frustrating. I have even come to memorize the names of their retainers and when I see them, I already know I'd be fighting a losing battle. I absolutely hate how these people are cheating and are getting an advantage over others. It's just unfair. *Sigh*...

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Originally Posted by kaynide

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Point being, if straight gil is the goal, crafting is probably about the dumbest thing you could be doing.

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I retired from crafting for the MB at the start of SHB. Gil is no longer my main goal as I've already exceeded gil cap. Most of the gil I make now is directly from the system (green gil)

Before I leveled my crafters/gatherers, I used to flip stuff on the MB. But prior to SHB changes crafting/gatherers was a consistent way to make gil. But with the 'accessibility' changes to crafting/gathering and the huge influx of crafters/gatherers that doesn't seem to be the case anymore.

And whether it's crafting/gathering, flipping,treasure maps, it's not like these things are mutually exclusive ways of making gil.

But I stand by the statement, that time is the ultimate cost.

Even in those 5-10 mins you went to gather, I could have just bought the mats from the MB and crafted several items and sold those.

It is really very simple concept, you guys just over complicate the issue
Do you know why there are only Pepsi and Coke Cola in entire soft drink industry?
It is because they keep the profit margin so low that there is no new competitor want to enter the market.
The person is doing the same thing on the market board
He is willing to lower the profit margin to bare minimum in order to get rid of the competition
Welcome to the Capital market system
Isn’t it is just fun?

Funny how some just want to categorize every crafting bot problem in this game with words like supply/demand rules and welcome to the capital market system, were "free" to do whatever we want. The marketboard is being flooded and dominated by ONE player or a cartel and too many think that's just fine, cause "we're living in a capital world". This is super organized, with buying up any items from competitors, instant undercutting, endless funds to rebuy new mats and reselling on other servers. This is not just a player "having fun"...

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Originally Posted by Auriya

Funny how some just want to categorize every crafting bot problem in this game with words like supply/demand rules and welcome to the capital market system, were "free" to do whatever we want. The marketboard is being flooded and dominated by ONE player or a cartel and too many think that's just fine, cause "we're living in a capital world". This is super organized, with buying up any items from competitors, instant undercutting, endless funds to rebuy new mats and reselling on other servers. This is not just a player "having fun"...

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Funny how some just want to categorize every supply/demand problem in this game with words like crafting bot and welcome to the capital market system, were "free" to do whatever we want. The marketboard is being flooded and dominated by ONE player or a cartel and too many think that's just fine, cause "we're living in a capital world". This is super organized, with buying up any items from competitors, instant undercutting, endless funds to rebuy new mats and reselling on other servers. This is not just a player "having fun"..

You do realize your statement is a two-edge sword right?
All I did was swapped two words
No context and no illustration to support your argent.
Someone undercut me? Must be bot!!
I lost the place card clicking war for a housing plot? He must used a bot
I lost the PvP? He must used hack

This is a problem on many server, I guess. Free market and capitalism is the usual answer. But:

1. When you check and item, see that there are many items for sale, check the history, and see that it's slow, you stay away from it.
2. When you check an item, see that there are many items for sale, check the history, and see that it's fast moving, you go in and sell a gil lower than the lowest.
3. You always try to sell as high as possible, THAT'S capitalism and free market.
4. Anyone that breaks these simple rules most likely don't understand free market and capitalism, or tries to destroy for others.

Exception is for those that need to get gil fast, or needs to empty their stock, but these will disappear fast. My way of seeing if this is true is to buy them out. If they come back I will destroy the market for them, completely, by underbidding them until they start loosing so much they withdraw. It might cost me a million, but the satisfaction of knowing that someone acting like that takes a huge hit makes up for it.

No you don’t that is not how a market works And I just gave an example on Pepsi and Coke.
The goal is not sell at high price but gain maximum profit, they are not the same thing.
You either act like Apple that go for brand and quality or lower profit margin but earn by quantity such as Costco and Coke/Pepsi

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Originally Posted by Divinemights

No you don’t that is not how a market works And I just gave an example on Pepsi and Coke.
The goal is not sell at high price but gain maximum profit, they are not the same thing.
You either act like Apple that go for brand and quality or lower profit margin but earn by quantity such as Costco and Coke/Pepsi

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Of course you go for max profit, and there are few cases, on normally populated servers, where maximizing the price, compared to others, won't give the best result. Unless, of course, we talk about ilvl 60 items, which most sellers don't seem to understand will be the highest possible gear for those who play for free (with this patch), so you do not sell them cheap, you wait for the market to understand that those items are more valuable than most ilvl 79 items.

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Originally Posted by Divinemights

Funny how some just want to categorize every supply/demand problem in this game with words like crafting bot and welcome to the capital market system, were "free" to do whatever we want. The marketboard is being flooded and dominated by ONE player or a cartel and too many think that's just fine, cause "we're living in a capital world". This is super organized, with buying up any items from competitors, instant undercutting, endless funds to rebuy new mats and reselling on other servers. This is not just a player "having fun"..

You do realize your statement is a two-edge sword right?
All I did was swapped two words
No context and no illustration to support your argent.
Someone undercut me? Must be bot!!
I lost the place card clicking war for a housing plot? He must used a bot
I lost the PvP? He must used hack

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You can question my experiences and observations all you want. For your information I don't just pull them out of a hat but I've had daily experiences and did observations for many many months. I could write a wall of text to give examples but that was not the point because most here recognize from their own experiences what is goin on, so the point was to sum it up. If you actually have had experiences and saw what was goin on on the marketboard AND actively tried to sell your crafts maybe you would understand and realise that this is very real.

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Originally Posted by Penthea

I'm quite on the fence about this because...people can list stuff for any price they want. However I have a suggestion...try to sell things they don't sell? There is no way they can be selling EVERYTHING.

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Shows what you know. They are in the marketing bizz of doing excatly THAT. Selling everything in inconvenient locations all over the planet. :O