Extreme Market Board Undercutting is a Problem. Who ultimately benefits from this?

As someone who recently got into crafting and gathering and leveled everything up to an extent, I've been spending a lot more time selling items on the MB. Now, I've gotten in a groove with certain things that sell well, and I am making a humble 60-100k per day on average, sometimes more sometimes less.

However, I've noticed that EXTREME and I mean EXTREME undercutting seems to run rampant on the MB. Who benefits from this really? I've seen items that were selling for 8,000-$15,000 Gil comfortably, plummet to 100 Gil or less because several people jump on the massive undercutting bandwagon. In the end...NO ONE makes any money, so what good comes from it?

I have to wonder are these people who are all maxed crafters and gatherers with millions in the bank and just simply don't care about tanking the entire MB pricing structure or are these new crafters so desperate to make a Gil they will take anything.

One way I've gotten around this is by buying up all the extremely low listings and re-selling them higher and just taking over the MB for that particular item, but this, of course, is a gil investment and there's no guarantee I will make it back. Thankfully, it has usually worked in my favor.

It is frustrating though.

your selling in a bots market they spend no effort to get the items so any money made is profit

If so many people are willing to sell the item at so low of a price, there is an abundance of that item. It's just free market at play, happens at every game with an auction house, nothing strange about it. If there is an item with high demand you will make money with it. This can be seen with materia, the grade 8 materia sells really well but it has seen a natural reduction in prize as more people have gotten their hands on them from dungeons and what not.

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Originally Posted by Samsta

If so many people are willing to sell the item at so low of a price, there is an abundance of that item. It's just free market at play, happens at every game with an auction house, nothing strange about it. If there is an item with high demand you will make money with it. This can be seen with materia, the grade 8 materia sells really well but it has seen a natural reduction in prize as more people have gotten their hands on them from dungeons and what not.

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Then I will continue to buy them all up and re-sell them at 300x the price. Also, I can understand with a popular item this happening. But what I've noticed is like 2-3 people will extremely undercut and then everyone just follows suit, which basically saps all value from the item.

I think part of the problem is that there is little reason to buy anything on the MB but lots of reasons to sell. SE needs to give people more reasons to buy crafted items.

We had more reasons in ARR. You needed a crafted HQ weapon to start your relic, materia came only from spiritbonding, crafting gear was all crafted, low level crafting gear was more important, some crafted gear was better for DoW for leveling especially accessories.

It's just kind of not like that anymore.

Stuff that you craft for profit might be trash for other players who just want to get rid of it quickly no matter the price.

Dont forget some item are just overpriced

The number of retainers you have is also something that will heavily change how you sell things. If you have 8 or 9 retainers thanks to the mogstation, with way more storage and selling space, of course you can afford to put high prices and wait way longer for something to be sold. But when you have only two of them, that the number of items you can sell at the same time is pretty limited, and when you know that tomorrow you will get even more items that will badly start to bloat your inventory, you can not afford to wait days or weeks long that your previous items get finally sold at a high price just for the sake of not undercutting. You have to sell fast, to free some space for the next items. And the best way to do that is by selling things cheaper than everyone else.

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Who ultimately benefits from this?

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Asian RMT companies.

There is a rather alarmingly high number of bot farmers present in the average server economy when it comes to mainstream items like crafted gear or consumables and some of them run market board bots that undercut at whatever frequency they feel is necessary to maximize their sales.

They've basically chased all of the legitimate crafters on my server out of the market at this point. I don't think that's ever going to change unless they complicate crafting to a point where bots can't reliably HQ items anymore or some such.

I'm perfectly content to compete with human undercutters, but I'm not going to waste my time trying to keep up with a bot that's adjusting its prices every five minutes 24/7 just to move one item for 150Kish when I could probably have made more money in the same amount of time doing something more engaging.