How do you make money on the market boards?

Seriously. I hit omnicrafter a couple of months back and materia-melded to the point that I can do the 3star crafts without needing any high-quality materials. I've never recovered the gil I sank into it.

It's wildly unprofitable on my server to purchase composite materials and try to sell finished products, and even the composite materials themselves will sit on my retainers for days, requiring continuous markdowns before they finally sell-- most often for 2/3 of my original list price or lower.

I have roughly 48 various items spread across several retainers that have gone unsold for close to a month now. Every piece of advice I've read and received for crafting and selling has failed to yield any significant returns. I routinely go to bed with the only postings of certain items on the market board, then wake up to dozens of others reaching as low as 40% of my original list price or lower.

The only real profit I have ever made on the market board is with pieces made from materials that drop in the group treasure maps, the acquisition of which is pure RNG. I'm not interested in a lottery. I'm looking for a sustainable methodology for generating money from crafting. What should I be doing differently?

You don't use the marketboard to make money. You use the marketboard to prevent others from making money.

tbh I made most my 9mill from doing maps with some friends ... sadly they are not getting on lately they been playing other games So i got no one to map with :(

Most of my gil comes from just selling whatever my retainers bring back, selling some of the furniture that is new-ish, and whatever else I can get for tomestones that sells relatively decent.

Trying to make significant income from crafting mainstream items like consumables or crafted gear this late into a patch is largely a lost cause.

Most people who want the stuff already have it, plus the obligatory bot farmers will usually have tanked the prices on everything too low for it to be very profitable when it does actually sell.

I make most of my money from selling niche furniture/glam items that aren't totally overstocked but still sell reasonably often.

Leveling crafter become a joke in this patch, with how many crafter out there now it's kinda hard to make profit from MB.

Last patch i make over 90 mil just making potion in my free time which is not that much, this patch? Barely 9 mil...

Look at the purchase history and determine how often the item is bought. We just got out of the rankings for Ishgard Restoration so the main items that were going fast were the Diadem materials. But now that it has ended, everything is in the pre-patch lul.

When 5.3 hits, I believe we should get a new set of gear for people to craft, crafting set this time since we just got the Neo-Ishgard sets for the battle classes and we've been sitting on the Facet crafting sets for awhile now. People will pay for the mats to make it as well as paying for the completed craft. Treasure maps may get updated with a new craftable glamor to obtain as well.

I re-sell items mostly. Most people are lazy and don't care to find the NPC's that are selling the items they need even with SE's intervention on the matter, so it's a fairly simple affair to buy a stack of 99 of a particular item and just parse it out to 3 stacks of 33 to sell for a profit. Likewise housing items are generally a good, if slow source of money if you're on a big enough server. That goes doubly so for any two step crafted items that might go into them or items that require you to run dungeons to get. If you're willing to play the long game with small profits over a long period of time it does eventually add up.

Your on Balmung look at Glamour items or items that have zero things to do with progression. It doesn't mean you won't get stuck with stuff. But always feels like older pets, housing and glamours have bigger returns. Sometimes you can find a mat on another server for a few k since its a quick venture item and sell it for 100s.


The only people who seem to get return on current gear sales are first week sales. They are overmelded and seem to have time to work on gathering mats and crafting for patch day.

Send my retainers on back to back to back quick expeditions. Sell the occasional tradable item for a few k less than the current lowest price. Profit.

crafting is too easy now so you can't make any money on endgame gear and similiar items, you just need to research the market on your server and find items that sell and which others are not making.

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Originally Posted by The_Distinguished_Anarchist

Seriously. I hit omnicrafter a couple of months back and materia-melded to the point that I can do the 3star crafts without needing any high-quality materials. I've never recovered the gil I sank into it.

It's wildly unprofitable on my server to purchase composite materials and try to sell finished products, and even the composite materials themselves will sit on my retainers for days, requiring continuous markdowns before they finally sell-- most often for 2/3 of my original list price or lower.

I have roughly 48 various items spread across several retainers that have gone unsold for close to a month now. Every piece of advice I've read and received for crafting and selling has failed to yield any significant returns. I routinely go to bed with the only postings of certain items on the market board, then wake up to dozens of others reaching as low as 40% of my original list price or lower.

The only real profit I have ever made on the market board is with pieces made from materials that drop in the group treasure maps, the acquisition of which is pure RNG. I'm not interested in a lottery. I'm looking for a sustainable methodology for generating money from crafting. What should I be doing differently?

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Because crafting is so galling easy, you have to search for the nichey-est of products with obscure mats.

Most of my gil is made in the week following a patch.
Doing new maps and selling the new rare materials, etc.
Can make a good few million.
The gil I make between patches doesn't even come close.

You don’t. Not now anyway. After crafting and gathering changes and how easy square made them to level in casualbringers the market board is useless for making money these days. Items I used to sell with others for 700-1m now sell for 150k and have gone from me and maybe two others to about 10-20 sellers. All you gotta do is look at the crafted weapons. My server has them for 50-100k I’ve never seen them go for that low, even when not current they never go that low. But having 30 seller fighting the price plummeted. Ow and again you might find a lower level item that’s not got anything you can make a small monopoly over but once it sells and people see that the hoard will soon come to join you and make it worthless again. So make the most of it while you can.

An example was a small housing item I was selling for a few days, sold maybe a dozen of them for 60k done quite well for me. Wake up on third day and there’s now another 5 for sale and the price is at 17k. Sold what I had and moved on. But yea unless selling new crater gear on week 1 over melding is really not worth it these days. You’ll never get the money back you sink into it. I’m still building back to break even after buying a mount 2 weeks ago and that’s a lot cheaper than materia you’ll buy.

Make more money now doing roulettes every day and running or making map parties and hoping for good rng runs. Makes about 500k - 1m if lucky.

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Originally Posted by The_Distinguished_Anarchist

Seriously. I hit omnicrafter a couple of months back and materia-melded to the point that I can do the 3star crafts without needing any high-quality materials. I've never recovered the gil I sank into it.

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Welcome to the hundreds of thousands of other crafters just like you who hit max melded Omnicrafter thanks to Enix's free hand outs and can also churn out endgame gear sets like candy.

There is no real gil in crafting anymore. Players who had no interest in crafting wanted a slice of the pie, it got divided among a million and everyone got a crumb each. The value of most items has dropped by 5-20x from Stormblood depending on the item. There's just way too much supply. I don't expect 5.3 will have a long profit window either.

That said, I'm surprised you can't recover your gil. If materia/mats aren't absolutely worthless on your world, you could always try gathering. You gather from timed nodes, Extract Materia, sell those + mats. It's not amazing profit but you might be able to pull together enough to recover your gil. There's a chance DoH materia might be worth more in 5.3 too so doesn't hurt to stockpile.
https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/...=1#post5326759

I don't go out of my way to do so. I have 4 retainers and just make money off Quick Ventures. 90% of the time it's GC seal or desynth fodder, though when it can sell for something, it's not so bad. Little time investment and I usually wake up to a few hundred thousand every day on average which is more than enough to get by; it's enough money to buy out markets to control them if I desire. I also make a lot of money not by revenue, but mitigated expenses. For example, I never had to grind crafting; I stayed on-top of my GC dailies, beast tribes, and custom deliveries early on, and was caught up on them before I finished the MSQ. I only made money while crafting, and barely ever had to buy materia off of competitors.

I imagine if I wanted to dedicate time to making money I'd get an efficient map team together. Crafting isn't without merit but with it becoming more accessible and them adding new stuff to maps every big patch, treasure maps seem much more of a competitive income source. Treasure map materials will always be required for the hottest new mounts or glam items that people will murder each other to get.

I stopped selling seriously back in 4.2. I don't need the money anymore. Heavensward was a gold mine for legendary node mats (sold mostly miner/bot content) given few went to the trouble of getting the books. Now they've made that so easy and bots have taken over a good part of many of the high end sales.

Now I pretty much sell materia and tome mats given I have the tomes/materia drops and need to keep my inventory clear. Hunts are a good source of income with cluster drops and they are just a bonus when it comes to capping my characters/alts.

I can make 500k from one series of 4 A rank trains and prices are somewhat depressed now when it comes to materia. That will change soon enough when 5.3 hits.

I make witty retainer names and hope people buy my stuff.

Big way to make easy money is to figure out what's new (especially glamour) and how said items are made, then NOT MAKE THEM, but farm the materials and sell them. Often this is things like drops from trials or treasure maps. Basically the latest fashion/furnishings are where the money is.

After that, you can kind of stumble onto random open items (again usually furnishings or glamour) that you can make pretty easily, but no one is going through the trouble at the moment. See if they sell pretty regularly and if so, make 1 or 2 and sell. Rinse repeat on several different items. Things like Dye are a good example of this..people just don't want to go through the trouble of making them.

It's like stocks. Find a lot of things, work those things and when they stop being profitable, drop them and pick up something else.

alllll that said, you can make really good coin just doing daily/weekly stuff- retainers, NPC deliveries and Doma alone can net you an easy payday; just don't forget to use your scrips and sell whatever (usually materia). Add that to challenge logs and you'll generate a lot quickly.

Sell consumables or glamour items basically.

Good Profits in FFXIV only exist at the start of savage raid patches typically when people use crafted gear to get a boosted start into raiding. Once the patch matures and people get tome gear and such... crafting is for food/pots and glamour only.

Crafting materials are ridiculously extremely easy to obtain and crafting has almost no barrier to entree. Combine that with all crafted gear being entree lvl endgame gear basically, there just is not enough demand to keep prices high.

So mass supply and small demand... aka profits are garbage.


Best way to make money now is get the materials. Sell some materials and craft stuff with those materials and sell that as well. That way you can move the materials you gathered faster by selling raw materials and finished goods. And expect people to constantly spam undercut you by 1 gil every 5-10mins.

sell late range levelling gear. So from about the x6 up to x9. At 50,60,70 people can buy gear with tomes so wont shop much. the MILLION market bits dont usually venture down that far, so only be dealing with other crafters, which, since they are all trying to get their piece of the neo market, should let you make some gil

The most profitable crafts in the game come from the random chance you get the required mats from the content that gives it. Even after you obtain/craft it, you will have stiff competition from those just a lucky as you are, on another chance encounter that one of the small percentage of players who can afford it will buy yours before your competition undercuts it by one gil in your sleep.

Making gil via the MB isn't rocket science, nor is it difficult to establish sustainable profit. However, if you want gil flowing out of your pockets in large chunks, you have to put in the time. Personally, I find my time better spent bringing in smaller profits consistently rather than banking on a few big ticket items. A combination is actually ideal where you have at least one high ticket item up, but still bring in those smaller profits.

No matter how you look at it though, it is next to impossible to find in demand items that are in low supply, so you have to swim with the sharks if you want to make a lot of gil.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by The_Distinguished_Anarchist

I have roughly 48 various items spread across several retainers that have gone unsold for close to a month now. Every piece of advice I've read and received for crafting and selling has failed to yield any significant returns. I routinely go to bed with the only postings of certain items on the market board, then wake up to dozens of others reaching as low as 40% of my original list price or lower.

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If something isn't selling, stop and take a look at the sales history for that item. Has it been selling at all? If so, how often and at what price?

I can't count the times I get something back from quick ventures that I want to sell. I go to list it, see the currently listed items at 75k gil each then check the sale history. The item's been selling steadily at one or two sales per day but it's been selling at or under 20k each time. I know now that people are willing to pay up to 20k for the item but not 75k. I'm going to list at 20k. I don't want it sitting there taking up a listing spot for several days until I luck into someone willing pay the higher price. I want it sold today, or tomorrow at the latest, so I can list something else.

I make about a million a week from crafting. I dont put in much work.

Each week I have my retainers hunt for crafting materials, get some other materials from desynths, buy some from beast tribes, buy some from the market board and maybe spend about Twenty five minutes gathering other odd bits myself.

I put about twenty minutes into actual crafting. and about ten into checking the marketboard to see what what has a good price and moving average.

All in all I don't invest more then an hour and a half of my time into crafting and gathering each week and I don't bother crafting end game stuff (although I can 100% it very easily).

If you just want a relaxed gill income with little time investment the best thing to do is craft housing items, leveling equipment and old end game stuff that is now used for glamour.

Your biggest enemies are other crafters and people running quick exploration with their retainers. These people will undercut you all to heck. So make an effort to avoid making the obvious stuff (which is why I avoid current endgame items).

To limit the number of crafters your competing with make things that use components sourced from monster drops, timed nodes, the grand company, tomestones and yellow scrips. Fewer crafters will make these items so there will be less price dropping once you put something up for sale.

Be sure to check the sale history on items before crafting them. Not just the current price. If there are 10 of item X for sale already and the sale history shows that only 1 of item X moves in a month, then even if the price is currently high for item X you can expect a spiral of undercutting to reduce it before yours actually sells. On the other hand if the number that have sold within the last couple of days exceeds the number currently for sail, then you may be able to price it higher than those currently up and still see it move.

I also recommend price matching rather than undercutting. I mostly match the price other crafters list items for rather than undercutting. My items still sell, but by doing this the competition is less likely to undercut me in return, so when my items move they do so for more than they would after an undercutting war.

Like everything else, crafting got smacked hard by the "dumbed down" stick this expansion. Behind the abundance of more crafters, how easy recipes are and bots being allowd to run rampant, you'll not make much with the i480 gear or consumables. Your best bet is to find a few stable markets and see if you can settle in for a bit before switching over to something else as people catch on.

Simply put, you dont right now.

The game economy today is in the worst shape since Shb release, thats because its stagnant and overrun by bots.
Wait for the next patch and then you will be able to do some money, at least i hope so.