Please change taxes...

[Zigkid3]

Sotek: So you say there there would be no tax for the original posting, correct? Then what is to stop someone from undermining tax on price adjustments by getting around it by taking the item down completely and then re-posting it as if it were a new posting. Everyone would just use that roundabout way and continue what they are doing. If you don't want people doing that, then you'd have to tax the initial price as well. I will bet than in either scenario (especially the 2nd) people will overall pay more in tax over a given period of time than they are now, which would cause the supply shift I mentioned. With your idea, people will experience low turnover ratios instead of the higher turnover ratios they could have had, you'll screw up the market's cash flow.

[Sotek]

Sotek: So you say there there would be no tax for the original posting, correct?

Where do I say this? Because I'm fairly certain I've suggested switching the 5% sales tax (which again, servers no real purpose) to a pre-sales tax. IE you put something up for sale, and right there you pay 5% in tax that you'd otherwise only have payed upon sale. That makes putting something up for sale a commitment, adjusting price is then the only issue, one which can be addressed with a 1% tax whenever adjusting. This discourages adjusting the price, overall you'd be paying no extra tax unless you decide to start adjusting constantly. The entire point of this tax, and thread, is that it discourages the damaging level of undercutting... You can go back to pretending that isn't happening if you like, it is, and its ridiculous. This is not the basis for a stable market system. Prices are absolutely fluid because there is absolutely no reason for them to remain solid. A tax people wont want to pay is a perfectly apt solution to adding stability to this games market.

Food for thought: If taxing for every price adjustment is better, why don't we do this in real life? As it is now, real life taxes items once they are sold. Why is that?

Honestly, if this was remotely like real life, then every Retainer would get its own Market Board that players would have to check individually, just like you have to check each shop individually... Actually, they did that in 1.0, it was awful. In reality it is very difficult to obtain all the prices from every possible retailer (and supplier) out there, buyers and sellers do not have that luxury in reality, in XIV that's practically the whole basis of the Market Board...

Oh, and in real life, people actually want to turn a profit. Someone has to be payed to harvest the raw materials, someone has to be payed to process the materials, and so on. In a game, the only thing I lose harvesting and processing, is time. That's it. There are no cheap foreign labor expecting a pathetic paycheck from me. I obtained this, and I'm selling it. The same goes for everyone else. Instead, to turn a "profit" one has to judge what the time spent obtaining it was worth, and that is something which is purely subjective. In reality, the costs are fairly fixed. Equilibrium is much easier to reach when an items worth isn't purely subjective.

[Zigkid3]

Where do I say this?

Here: "You tax people for adjusting their price, it's an optional tax, one everyone can avoid with a little patience. If you don't adjust your price, you don't get taxed."
But since, as previously assumed, there is a pretax on even placing up an item in the first place, that's bad. If the initial price was free however, it would've then be not as bad but still bad (but then people will do the scenario i explained)

yes I am aware of the amount of undercutting, I see it. I just disagree that it's a bad thing, for it is actually a good thing. The amount of undercutting will slow down as the market ages.

[Sotek]

Here: "You tax people for adjusting their price, it's an optional tax, one everyone can avoid with a little patience. If you don't adjust your price, you don't get taxed."
But since, as previously assumed, there is a pretax on even placing up an item in the first place, that's bad. If the initial price was free however, it would've then be not as bad but still bad (but then people will do the scenario i explained)

The only thing a pre-sales tax does which is "bad", is block the poor from the market (how anyone manages this with the game throwing Gil at them, I don't know). Other than that, it changes nothing. If I was suggesting a pre and post-sales tax, sure, that would be retarded. But I'm not. I'm suggesting taking that worthless post-sales tax (again, nothing but a cheap Gil-sink) and making a pre-sales tax out of it. Then you have people putting items up for sale, and leaving them up. Unlike XI (which had a pre-sales tax as well) your items aren't forced off the market after X days so you have to repay the tax. It's literally just taking the existing tax and giving it an actual purpose. Without a pre-sales tax, an adjustment tax would be worthless. People would just stop adjusting prices and take the items down completely instead, and with Retainers practically doing that already there's really not much of a problem with that. Adjusting prices is just a massive convenience.

The amount of undercutting will slow down as the market ages.

How? How will the market being older make people go "Instead of adjusting my price when I'm undercut, I'm just going to leave it"? It wont. There is absolutely no reason not to make use of price adjustments. It costs nothing, it's convenient, its fast and simple. The only thing that will slow undercutting currently is people leaving the market because it is utterly ridiculous, but they'll be back because undercutting slowed for a moment. For example, I've stopped selling Silver Sharks, because watching the price crash utterly annoyed me. A few days later, I'd noticed the price had risen back up to 3k (was 4k), presumably because people stopped bothering when they dropped to 500G. Then people figured "Great, the price is back up, I'll go catch more!", and within hours the price fell back down to 1k. Rinse and repeat ad infinitum. Wild fluctuations like that aren't going to stop with time, slow downs in undercutting are in fact the cause of such fluctuations.

Without price adjustments costing something, rampant undercutting is an inevitability. It will only slow momentarily. Prices will continue to fluctuate wildly day to day. With price adjustments costing something, that fluctuation is much more tightly controlled. Nobody will undercut and undercutter of an undercutter if it's costing them. They'll leave it at X price and display some patience.

I really can't believe you're arguing the market will become more stable over time when it literally takes 5 seconds to destabilize any given item. Wasn't Yoshida also working on a Retainer Ap, or something similar through Lodestone? Holy crap, if we can adjust prices without even being in game, then yeah. I'm not even going to properly comment on how fucked up that will make everything.