The market. I don't get it.

Nearly everything I look at on the market to sell is being sold for the exact price it states on the tooltip for the item.

Correct me if I am wrong but doesn't that mean they are paying taxes on something they could just sell to an NPC an not have too?

I realize higher level stuff might be better and all that, but usually crafting mats are worth more than vendor trash, is that not so in this game?

On top of that, I can only have 20 auctions up at once? Or 40 with the 2 retainers I guess, but even then, why the limit? That doesn't make sense to me at all.
I mean, it literally makes me not want to take a crafting class since my enjoyment of crafting ties into the ability to make money on it.

And to be honest, with a 40 item limit I am kind of surprised the community hasn't settled in on 40 items that sell and that is all we would find on the market at all.

I don't know, I am confused as heck by the market in the game.

You're looking (and maybe selling) the wrong stuff: Cheap drops from monsters. I dont know either why people are bothering to out those on the marketboard...

But if you get into crafting you'll notice that the highlevel crafted gear and glamouritems (thats what you would be selling) are selling rather slow and that you have to adjust prices and such that having more than 40 up sounds like a pain to me... and I am a mastercrafter, selling my stuff slowly but steadly.

If you wonder how some stuff sell for the vendor price imagine how it would look like if everyone could put out everything without a limit. More stuff selling = less demand = less money.

Two part post due to character limit. Sorry.

Or maybe it is the fact that everyone is locked down to only selling a few items that the market board is not allowing for a truly free market.
In every game that I have played with an AH you can sell anything and everything you want except for the normal reasons you can't like it being bound to your character or account.

Then prices go up and down based on demand.

If you lock down the number of things someone can sell you also hinder the market. Which would cause a couple scenarios.
1) People whom use their spaces wisely and only sell high value stuff.
2) People whom don't care about the market and just throw crap up there to get rid of it in their inventory.

Take away the limit and all that goes away.
Crafting materials needed for early crafting levels would actually cost a lot more and actually sell a lot more. I can point to most any ah and show this. Obviously WoW would be one, but it isn't the only one.
The reason is because high level characters rather buy than farm and they will pay.

I will reserve true judgement of the system until I have more time in but to me it seems arbitrarily hindered.

Firstly, you can get around the 1000 character post limit by posting a few sentences then going back and editing the rest into your post immediately after. :)

Well, your main problem is that you're treating the Market Board exactly like an Auction House which it is a totally different concept. The MB is not an AH, FFXIV does not have an AH at all in fact, the MB is actually just a list of player bazaars that are administered by player retainers - think of them as player shops. When you buy something on the MB you're not bidding on it, you're buying it then and there, hence like real shops the more stores selling the same merchandise will cause competition and price wars, meaning undercutting - it's the basic tenet of capitalism, supply and demand. Common items will only attract low prices especially if the demand isn't there (or the item is easy to acquire).

Given how SE set up this system specifically to avoid the problems FFXI's AH suffered from (mostly due to RMT using it as a way of converting bot-farmed items into gil they then onsold for real money and the hyperinflation that resulted from it), I don't see SE changing this anytime soon.

Welcome to this game being different then?
A lot of stuff is simply not worth selling because there is no demand for it - or because that demand is already met by NPC vendors, selling lowlevel crafting mats and NQ gear for all levels.
This game simply doesnt relay heavely on the playerbase selling stuff on the market, infact, most crafters in endgame can and aim to be selfsuffient.

Why would a person who cares so little about what they get for their items that they throw them on the marketboard for LESS than they would get from an NPC need more space to clutter the market even further with beast blood?

When you actually try to sell stuff that, well, sells, I could understand the wish for more slots to sell - but currently that limitation (even if it can be bypassed by buying more retainers) also makes sure that there isnt only ONE person dictacting the whole market.
I dont know about other games, but as far as I can tell the system seems fine to me - but maybe thats because I still have nightmares about those three months when I was monitoring 40 sells each day to get the gil for our FC-house... when gil was still worth something and housing was rare...

Long story short: While I can kinda see your problem, I dont believe its relevant in this game. During my 4 years of playing and (master)crafting I never thought "Damn, I really want to sell more stuff!" - so yes, maybe you should look into the system more closely and learn how it works.

I think some of the reason folks put the common stuff on the MB is to just make it available to players leveling up. In the crafts you might not have a gathering job or it isn't sync'ed with its related craft. By putting the stuff up at low cost it can help folks level. Even things that can be purchased from vendors can be out of reach cost wise while leveling. You also have some players that won't really run dungeons so putting eligible gear on the MB helps them be able to upgrade to some degree and gives the seller a little extra gil.

As far as crafting goes you can make a decent amount of gil selling finished products. This is particularly true for HQ and housing items. I've also had good luck selling minions as long as you are patient. It helps the net profit if you have your own gathering jobs.

I played WoW for a long time. Unlike WOW you aren't limited to two professions so many players will have gathering jobs that line up with their craft. This results in a lower price for raw resources when compared to WoW's potential due to its players not being able to gather everything on one character. I still find though that I make enough when selling my excess materials.

To sum up FFXIV is geared more towards finished products and owning the full production process from raw materials to market. By keeping this in mind you can do quite well making gil by finding the products that do well on your server.

Stuff that people are selling for default price is just trash. They just threw it on there at the autofill price. Later on in the game certain crafting mats actually sell for a decent amount especially ones used for red scrips and ones gathered from timed nodes. The supply is controlled by 30min nodes, lockouts (dailies that give materia for example) and retainer venture supply.

I don't see many people farming raw crafting mats like hides from mobs because you can just send retainers to get them. The lower level crafting mats are devalued because there are ways to level crafts using dailies (ixal) that is free, or people just buy hq crafted items off the mb and do leve turn ins to power level instead of grinding. Once you get into Heavensward most of the stuff sells for a decent amount.

Once Stormblood is released, the same thing will probably happen.

There are some old 2.x items that are worth a bit because sometimes they like to sneak old items into new recipes like Platinum but it is only a few of them.

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Originally Posted by Grawbad

Nearly everything I look at on the market to sell is being sold for the exact price it states on the tooltip for the item.

Correct me if I am wrong but doesn't that mean they are paying taxes on something they could just sell to an NPC an not have too?

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An item being sold at NPC value or less is there because the players selling those items are doing it as a service to help those who need the item. When you NPC an item it's gone forever, so why remove an item from the game like that if you can just throw it on the MB and offer it to players that can actually use it? To them it's not about making the most profit but rather offering items that they know players could use.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Grawbad

On top of that, I can only have 20 auctions up at once? Or 40 with the 2 retainers I guess, but even then, why the limit? That doesn't make sense to me at all.
I mean, it literally makes me not want to take a crafting class since my enjoyment of crafting ties into the ability to make money on it.

And to be honest, with a 40 item limit I am kind of surprised the community hasn't settled in on 40 items that sell and that is all we would find on the market at all.

I don't know, I am confused as heck by the market in the game.

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So in World of Warcraft, once I hit a certain (and relatively low) threshold of gold, I was basically able to use the addon TradeSkillMaster and my oodles of free capital to move in on whatever market I wanted and take it over without having to give up on any other markets. I couldn't completely own it because people were willing to throw their time away farming mats as if that makes decent gold, but pretty much I could guarantee I was the one getting the most out of the market and part of that was making sure I deliberately did things to reduce what other people could get out of it. It wasn't just competition, but salting the earth behind me every morning. In FFXIV, while I don't have the gil to do that anyway right now, I'd be prevented from doing that by the cap on retainers. Since I can only have 40 auctions up at a time and not literally thousands, I have to choose a few things that will be the best use of my slot and go with those, rather than simply taking over everything because I can. I have to imagine that's the basic idea behind the limitation.

Also, basic economic forces keep people from simply selling 40 items max, namely competition. There is not unlimited demand. If everyone attempted to sell the same thing, the market would quickly be beyond saturated and prices would crash. Naturally that would discourage people from selling that thing, while some other thing would be relatively expensive, and they'd move on to that. Over time, we see people disperse to selling a great many things based on their own resources and preferences. This is a very basic idea of it, but it's essentially the fundamentals of economy and specialization.

Auction house =/= Market board.

auction bids are not the same thing, as just buying things from a block of wood. (joke)

so that partly why WoW market is different, people would need to bid on items which can increase the price. Or pay the buy out which in some cases be higher then the bid as a convenience fee.

all we do is walk up to the MB and buy it. no bidding so prices rise and fall, based on basic supply and demand.

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Originally Posted by BigRed5392

Auction house =/= Market board.

auction bids are not the same thing, as just buying things from a block of wood. (joke)

so that partly why WoW market is different, people would need to bid on items which can increase the price. Or pay the buy out which in some cases be higher then the bid as a convenience fee.

all we do is walk up to the MB and buy it. no bidding so prices rise and fall, based on basic supply and demand.

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You don't seem too familiar with WoW or the AH. For all intents and purposes the basic functioning of the AH and the MB are nearly the same. While there is a bid price, it's pretty rare for people to put things up without a buyout or for people to actually bid on things as a way of obtaining items for any purpose other than resell. The buyout is the de facto price tag and it's set in very much the same way you'd choose your price in FFXIV, which is to say it's the market price if you have any intention of actually selling it. All people do in WoW is walk up to the AH and buy it. No bidding. They don't even have to pay taxes on it. Regardless, even if it had a purely bid economy, supply and demand would still govern pricing. It would simply be more responsive to small fluctuations in either.