Fixing the Markets. As much our problem as SE's .

[mmcsky]

Ok all of you fail to understand the OP's point.

No one is arguing your freedom to sell your crap for free, but it is to make you understand than in doing so you are not doing "economy 101" but are only giving money away to the money sink and pretty much wasting your time.
Nowhere in real world economy someone sells high demand items for a 1/100 of what the next competition offers, it is dumb and it only hurts the one selling it.
Another point, this is not a real world economy where everyone is subject to follow a trend on prices, here we have the vendor npcs and the AH marketing, if people throw money away into the AH ( by selling less than or equal to vendor) they are not helping the economy they are destroying it by removing gil out of the economy.
The whole issue is not about you personally doing your "free market" the way you like it but about the terrible approach of the majority that undercut.
Undercut yes, but do it smart and maximize profits.

[RahlZul]

The free market decides the value of a product at any given time a sale happens. A product is only worth what it sells for. Just because you think that your products are worth more than they really are doesn't actually imply fact. If your time is truly valuable, you would be gathering/crafting/selling items that regularly sell for the value or higher than the value you think they are. With a limited number of sell slots, and on the contrary, sells slots being given free to anyone, you run into instances where a person here or there throws up an item at the prices they sell it to the merchant. It happens so rarely it barely effects the economy of the item. If you think that people undercutting below what you think an item is worth, the item is worth that to them. You have to balance your inventory space against the time its going to take to sell the item. They don't want to lose all of their value that they put into the item, but if it isn't selling at a certain price, then it isn't worth that price. Every resource in this game is free, don't forget that. Next time you find yourself unhappy that you spent time creating something that you cannot get equal or greater value back on, simply means that you value that item higher than it's actual value. Again, the resources are free, they cost no gil to obtain, simply time, thus any products are made out of free materials, its simply time that people are selling. But then again, it has nothing to do with that, it's merely supply and demand, in it's most simple and explicit form.

[Seraphita]

It's called economy. Get. Over. It.

Reallly? I guess people always do this is the real world economy. People love going out of business.
Idiot...

[RahlZul]

Reallly? I guess people always do this is the real world economy. People love going out of business.
Idiot...

Most Businesses Fail in their first year, and name calling is uncalled for.

[Shizato]

No one is arguing your freedom to sell your crap for free, but it is to make you understand than in doing so you are not doing "economy 101" but are only giving money away to the money sink and pretty much wasting your time.

It's a video game. Games are for entertainment. If players derive entertainment out of giving away their video game items for little to no video game money, then they are not wasting their time, now are they?

Perhaps you should find a video game you find entertaining so you won't be wasting your time, like they did?

[Maddox]

I like how people selling items for less than they cost to make, or less than what they'd go to a vendor for gets childish responses like



No, it's really not. Undercutting items into the ground, to the point where there's 0 profit, and in some cases a loss, is not "economy".

Actually I beg to differ. It is Economy, and is known as Price Based Selling, and your grocery stores do it all the time.

No matter where you are in the world, if it involves a Free Trade Market where prices aren't controlled, people will always undercut others prices to sell their goods.

You want the prices to remain steady? Do what others do, buy up the cheap goods and re list them at your price. This too happens all the time irl.

[Kogaki]

Reallly? I guess people always do this is the real world economy. People love going out of business.
Idiot...

Lol so many butt hurts. Makes me smile

[Nullie]

Reallly? I guess people always do this is the real world economy. People love going out of business.
Idiot...

Last time I checked this was a video game with fake currency you get from quests or selling stuff to npc vendors with unlimited gil. I'm sure people do that in real world economy as well.

[Medura]

Players hasnt broken it, rmt has.

[Nedhitis]

You wrote a compendium about a problem everybody noticed, only to fail to pinpoint the actual problem on its root because you forgot to throw away your self-entitlement before posting... I am not saying the problems you mentioned are invalid or false, but they are far from being the core reason for the game's economy's downfall. In fact, those are the consequences of the real problem, not the problem itself.

Friend, no hard, personal feelings here, but, as a dedicated crafter myself, I can tell you that the current system is almost perfect, but that missing "almost" chunk is a flaw critical enough to break the economy, as we witnessed. Funny enough, though, this "chunk" needs to be described as several small problems recurring everyday, which, in turn, makes it look like the problem is big. But trust me: it really is a small flaw that could be hotfixed in a week or 2... I will get to that now.

Really, people, the main problems are simple and evident (and therefore, easy to fix for SE). Nonetheless, I will go over them in detail, for those who believe the main problem is people not having a Ph. D. in economics to use the MB appropiately like our friend here:

• People can sell items that they obtain from quests. This is a critical mistake done by SE; do notice how absolutely every weapon/tool awarded by quests is currently broken in the market, with even HQ versions being close to impossible to make a profit from, and weapons/tools are just the worst case, not the ONLY case. It seems they never thought about why other MMOs automatically made quest items bound to our characters, eh...? Well, now we know and, hopefully, SE will notice not long from now.
  
  Obvious solution: please make quest items instantly bound to players when obtained, for reasons already explained AND more, which are too obvious to mention, though I still welcome you to do so if you wish.

• People can sell items at a price lower than the "vendoring" price, or, better said, than the gil that NPCs give you when selling items to them. This is downright retarded... even worse than being able to sell Allagan Pieces on the Market Board (what was the big idea behind that, anyway...?). Combine this with problem number 1 and you have a perfect recipe for economical chaos.
  
  Obvious solution: make it code-wise impossible to sell items at a price lower than NPC selling price. If an item says "Sells for 30 gil", then 30 or 31 gil should be the minimum MB price, and no less.

• People cannot buy OR sell (from) a stack of items by units. This reality alone single-handedly KILLED the market for gatherers and material-crafters all over the game. In case you did not understand this point: say you want to sell 99 Silver Ores. With the system as it is now, you can either sell the whole stack or split it in smaller stacks, but this last option must be done manually EVERYTIME you want to sell smaller stacks. So, if you want to sell that stack of 99 by stacks of 3, good luck hitting buttons 33 times over to make it happen. Then, on the other side, you have the same effect from a buyer standpoint; say you found the item you want, at a fair price, but it is only sold by stacks of +60 (an all too common reality for me and many, so this example was easy to call upon) and you only want 5 or less. Well, tough luck: you cannot choose to buy less than the full stack. It is all or nothing. Hell, imagine if our everyday groceries had to be bought that way each passing day... Not a preety thought, I assure you. Unfortunately, that is precisely what is happening on this game.
  
  Not-so-obvious solution: I am not sure if other MMOs have done this, but I do know it is possible, plausible and, if I know crafters/gatherers well enough, welcome by everyone. It more or less goes like this:
  
  -> When a retainer is given a stack of an item to put up for sale, an option should be available; an option to allow customers to buy "units" from said stack. If, for some reason, the seller wants to control the amount of units sold per purchase, you could even allow it to choose the minimum number of units a customer can buy. Example: you put the same 99 Silver Ores for sale. You can just go and put the whole stack at once, but then the option appears (first as a "checkbox") to ask if you want to allow unitary purchases. By default, this should be checked (this is important), and you can uncheck it if you do not wish to sell any less than the full stack at once. If the option is checked, a "sub-menu" should be visible where you can adjust the minimum amount of units to be purchased, being half the stack its maximum possible value (for odd numbers like 99, round it up to the lesser number; that is, 49). The default value of units should be, of course, 1 (and also the minimum).
  
  *As a side-note: this could modify the tax rates for many items with a low selling price, more specifically, it may be rounded down or even not be present at all. But... this is not a problem now, is it...?

• Last, but not least, up until recently, there was no easy way to know the appropiate price for an NQ item that was also sold by vendors. You would normally think that the logic price is any price lower than the NPC price (perhaps a LITTLE more expensive for items that can be bought only in one specific city-state, that is acceptable too), but still more than its "vendoring" price, right...? Well, go to your nearest Market Board and see how long it takes you to find an item sold by NPCs that is more expensive than what the NPC sells it for by a LONG shot. If you take any longer than 3 minutes, you are not fast enough. And this happens precisely because people had no way to know an item's selling price without going to the vendor itself, which usually implies a long travel that is most certainly not worth the time and/or gil.
  
  We now have this "Eorzea Database" to make things easier. OK, all nice and neat, but... if I had to take a guess, I would say this is not going to help at all. Law of minimal effort, people. Nobody will minimize their game window (or turn a computer on for PS3 users, which is even worse), go to the database and query for an item's selling price EVRYTIME it is needed... It would quickly get tiresome. Do notice I did not mention people who will downright not use the database regardless of being active on the game's economy, which, if I dare say, will still be the vast majority.
  
  Semi-obvious solution: allow an easy way to know when an item is sold by vendors without having to travel to any vendor, and what its price is if it is sold. Maybe... something like a price chart accesible from the Retainer Window...? Or something like that, you get the idea.

And these are the problems that I have witnessed personally (as in, one single player's experience), and I have not even hit any class over 35 to date. Just imagine what will happen if things continue the way they are when endgame mats and items become mainstream in the economy. Oh, I certainly do not want to see that...

So, long story short: the critical problem I described here could be defined as "Impaired Supply and Demand Syndrome". You know how it goes, right...? If not, Wikipedia defines it well enough (this time):

The four basic laws of supply and demand are:
- If demand increases and supply remains unchanged, a shortage occurs, leading to a higher equilibrium price.
- If demand decreases and supply remains unchanged, a surplus occurs, leading to a lower equilibrium price.
- If demand remains unchanged and supply increases, a surplus occurs, leading to a lower equilibrium price.
- If demand remains unchanged and supply decreases, a shortage occurs, leading to a higher equilibrium price.

Right now, these laws are either exaggerated to its worst expression, or completely absent. The effects mentioned therein do happen indeed, but the so called "equilibrium prices" are anything but equilibrated due to the end result of the problems I described plus anything I am missing and other players have seen. Stupidly low selling prices are as much of an accepted standard as stupidly high prices. Why...? Because we can. Really, because we can... Like I said, players are not economists; they just play a game. You cannot lay all the blame on players when the system on itself has so many evident flaws which, to be honest, I have no idea how they failed to foresee or at least consider.

...you know, perhaps I should make a thread out of this post, depending on what other players think. Who knows, we may get lucky and draw SE's attention. A lot of addressed issues started as threads made by some random player, after all. What say you...?