The Marketplace

So, I used to sell the stuff out of wp back in the day before they added lantern oil. I sold, i dunno, dozens of blunt aoelean scimitars for tens of thousands of gil each. These things sell for less than 100 gil today.

I bought thousands of walnut bread from the vendor before they took that item off of his sales sheet, sold my share of materia, dabbled in dyes etc. The point is I don't craft, I trade and run instances. Some of you might recognize my retainers catgirl and doggirl.

A few weeks back I decided to try and correct the market and I'd like to share something with those who have the patience to listen. One of the truths about a virtual economy that has both a marketplace an a system of vendors is that there is a minimum price an object can be sold on the marketplace without losing money on the marketplace which has a 5% service fee. So if items vendor for 1 gil it's pointless to put it on the marketplace for 1gil. Some people have reversed the charges at 1 gil and ask that the buyer covers this cost. This is a gift from the seller since he could have made his same money by dumping it onto a vendor. So in it's simplest form, an item that vendors for 1 gil shouldn't be sold for less than 2 gil on the marketplace which is fine because generally to buy this item from the vendor is probably more like 10 gil. So this then is the market cost for this item a range between 2-9 gil. One little caveat to this would be HQ items, an HQ animal skin sells to the vendor for 2 gil not 1. It also seems like asa craft who would want that item that if given both as options at the same price that the hq version would be the one to go for.

Okay, now that I have gotten that math out of the way, I have bought all of it, over and over for weeks. Vending mats that I cant fit into my retainers and essentially making the people who sell to me lose money. Don't get me wrong I have vast stockpiles of under priced HQ mats and to me it's a better way of keeping some of my money than actually holding gil since I paid less that its face value in gil to get it. With the concept that this glut was created by so many people running up thru the levels many of whom are now no longer playing. Following along this train of thought you can see how I deem it an investment.

More importantly, I feel that for a long time there has been no reason for anyone to gather low end mats as they could be bought for less than they can be sold to a vendor for. This glut has caused a stagnation where it's not worth selling a large number of products on the market. So once again, I simply bought it all.

The reason I'm being so public about this... People keep doing it. I spend 30 minutes a day at the market board buying up all the things that have been added from the previous day which vendor for more than they are on the market for and in some cases, ( if I feel that market could recover) I will buy up all of them at the same price they can be vendored for. The thing is, If i make 10,000 gil in that half hour it's okay and I do think it's an important step to making our economy healthy but it really isn't worth my time. I can run wp in less time and I can sell the philo for 20k.

So my next idea is to post this easy way to make money and help the economy in hopes that others night pick up the mantle so to speak. I have set precedents for what seems like healthy values for the items 2 gil for commons, 5 gil for 3 gilers, etc...