Degrading Market

[Zeronic]

Since I like to take it slow I leveled my Miner en Leatherworker pretty slow, which I find ok. I usually level the first 2.5 levels with leve's. Then Craft/gather for 2.5 levels so I can sell everything on the market. Last time I had a huge chunk of ice crystals which sold pretty well on the market. Put them up for sale in small stacks. 2 days later I go check, and I am the most expensive seller all of a sudden ( only sold 2 stacks). I lower the price ( not lower then the lowest seller but no one buys my stuff if someone is cheaper, even if they sell stacks of 500 or something).
2 days later, same thing happened. This keeps happening, with people vastly dropping the price since they want to sell faster and faster imo. I also think botters/hackers have a huge role in this problem but its ridiculous!
Price of the crystals are no 33% of what I sold them first for. And the same happens with my Girlfriends toon that tries to sell wildfowl feathers of midland basil. 1 moment, price is ok (nothing too high but I try to see what is in demand). Next thing BAM huge price drop.
Is there anything that I as a player can do about it to make sure the market doesn't jump from 1 end to the other?

[Kazamoto]

Your first problem is you called your character a 'toon'.

But not really anything we can do about the undercutters. If you have a huge gil reserve you can try and corner the market, buy out the under-cutters and re-list at a higher price.

[Zeronic]

Figured as much. Shame, don't have any kind of that money. Otherwise I would try to boost the market! Even if I did though, people would undercut it again.

[SinThaSizah]

Square-Enix could easily solve this problem by introducing minimum prices, because this messes up the games economy. I'm a weaver. miner and botanist and I can sometimes only sell my wares at a big loss. Some people sell stuff that's easily worth 500 to 1000 gil of materials for less than 10 gil. How is this an incentive to go and gather / craft stuff. It doesn't pay, even worse, it costs money to dabble in the Disciples of the Land / Hand.

And buying up all the lower priced items isn't really a solution either. I tried doing that with cotton coifs. I bought all of them that were on offer below 1000 gil. Now I'm stuck with 30 or 40 cotton coifs in my inventory, and a few days later there's 50 more people selling them for 1 to 5 gil.

[aswedishtiger]

lol lots of ppl buy vendor trash and sell it marked up for profit. crafters and potential buyers know no difference

[MentalPoison]

What he said

I recommend only buying up a market if its hit rock bottom. For instance I recently flooded Mythril Ingot market, as I macro'd a crap ton and wanted to sell them.

After mine sold, the others in the market went into a frenzy of undercutting. They must of had a good balance before I showed up, because they went just absolutely but, selling HQ lower then RQ. Originally I sold about 1000 ingots at 444-666 per. After they sold, the others went as low as 50 per. I bought 600 at under 100 per.

Relisted for 555 per and sold them all by the next day.

[Rainth]

i say endure it, when housing hits a lot of them will get a wake up call(i hope)

[Wazabi]

snip

I've experienced the same scenario as you, but I've manage to come out with a hefty profit over the weekend. You're probably pricing it too high.

Square-Enix could easily solve this problem by introducing minimum prices...

How do you determine the minimum price value? How do you even know what should be the right minimum price? What happens if the market is saturated with that item and the real value is now below the minimum price?

Some people sell stuff that's easily worth 500 to 1000 gil of materials for less than 10 gil.

And buying up all the lower priced items isn't really a solution either. I tried doing that with cotton coifs...

Then why do you even bother crafting that item if you know that people are selling it at 10 gil? If you don't then why didn't you do a price check before crafting to sell?

As for your venture into cornering the cotton coif market, do you know the supply and demand of cotton coif beforehand? Or are you simply just buying things because they are cheap? Did you realize that ppl are crafting many items to level up their crafts, and early armor pieces are easily obtainable from quest reward...it's a classic over supply and low demand and you've just walked right in to it.

[Toranja]

There's already a minimum price.

Marchant's will buy anything in any quantities at a set price. That classifies as a minimum price.

If you want a legal minimum price... No.

[Amnesia]

I'm a weaver. miner and botanist and I can sometimes only sell my wares at a big loss.

A "loss"? What kind of loss do you have from selling items harvested through mining or botany?
And if you're selling weaver items at a loss, stop making them!

Either crafting is fun for you or it's not. If you're not enjoying it and you're doing it solely to make gil, then you shouldn't complain if other people have different ideas as to how to make gil. They want to make gil for themselves, not for you.