The markets, stalls, price listing and undercutting. (A suggestion)

[Physic]

That just goes to show you the value of ranking up a gathering class alongside a crafting class. If you don't want to do gathering, then complain about high materials costs, then that's your problem.

Gatherer invest time into gathering. A crafter who does not gather conversely has a lot of time to spare, relative to the crafter/gatherer player. That means that the crafting-only player should use that time in a more effective manner.

my point isnt that they should or shouldnt level gatherer, my point is that once it goes into gathering, its very subjective what any item is worth, some people think thier time gathering should be profitable, some people feel like they should just sell thier items at any price to get rid of them, so they can go gather more.

Essentially the problem is there is no real value to anything in a game, people have to compete with people who look at anything they get from gathering as free stuff, even though it costed time.
If someone sees gathering items as free items
and has a network of people to make items for him

Basically it is impossible to compete with people who see the items they are making as being free of cost, even though in reality, it costs X amount of time to gather, 4 or 5 midlevel crafters crafts, no one can compete with that.

Viion is like why npc when i can get 80k, but if the item costs in more realistic terms 2 hours from start to finish to make, and you can get 100k in an hour he is basically selling it at a loss of 120k because he doesnt feel like the time spent across the various gatherers and crafters involved in the process had any real cost.

No one can compete with that, if the npc is paying 1k, im sure vion would be willing to go down even further, to 40k, hey to him its free money.

Like i said, its a game, so i dont think there is any real solution, in a game, some people wont consider costs, just like in ffxi, most crafters had to lose vast quantities of money skilling up, and try to make money later on via HQs only.

[Jieddo]

Your still missing the point. The majority of the people selling things below mode market value are doing it to get rid of the items. We can only hold so many items at once. The fastest way to get rid of them is to sell at the NPC, but if I have an item I KNOW I can get more gill for why would I sell at the NPC who is going to give less than a 10th of what the item is worth.

If i have something of value in real life that i no longer want/need, chances are im going to sell it on ebay for cheap rather than give it to the salvation army. Im not thinking of the poor professional vendor selling the same item for a ludicrous sum of money, Im thinking about how can i get rid of this item as fast as possible while making a small profit so I have more room to collect more junk I probably wont need.

[viion]

incorrect, looking at what vion said, he basically said, i can afford to sell items cheap, because i dont consider gathering, or the act of crafting to be work, so its all free. Its impossible to compete with people like him, because in thier mind anything cheaper than npc is not that bad. For a proffesional crafter, or manufacturer, things such as item costs matter. sure, i got a bunch of iron ores from months of leves, that i may not have used yet, but after thats done, i have to either farm or buy the items, If you were actually consistently selling these are real issues, but they are not, when you are simply skilling up, you just want exp, breaking even can be fine for you.

blah blah blah

As I said I get all my materials myself so I have zero production cost. So I dont factor in that, I dont factor in time getting the materials because thats part of the game, im playing the game and enjoying it and I decided to do that why should I charge more for playing part of the game?

Also whats a "professional crafter" lol do you do it in real life? Got a degree in crafting


I sell a lot consistently on arm but i dont make items in a market that has a bad falldown, for example most of my gil comes from shards, I sell 10-20k stacks a time and I will always undercut, significantly even after 5-6 hours of elemental farming.

[Physic]

Your still missing the point. The majority of the people selling things below mode market value are doing it to get rid of the items. We can only hold so many items at once. The fastest way to get rid of them is to sell at the NPC, but if I have an item I KNOW I can get more gill for why would I sell at the NPC who is going to give less than a 10th of what the item is worth.

If i have something of value in real life that i no longer want/need, chances are im going to sell it on ebay for cheap rather than give it to the salvation army. Im not thinking of the poor professional vendor selling the same item for a ludicrous sum of money, Im thinking about how can i get rid of this item as fast as possible while making a small profit so I have more room to collect more junk I probably wont need.

thing is, he isnt selling it for a ludicrus amount of money necessarily, just like you said, due to inventory, you measure how much something is worth against the npc price, because you need to get rid of it anyhow. You probably produced it because you needed to skill up, or it fell into your inventory while hunting some NM. It has no value to you, it is infact a negative value of -inventory.
there is no way to compete with someone who puts no value in their items. or a negative value. This is the real issue.
Maybe they need to make crafting that gives no items, but gives skill ups, so people wont make items just to skill up, and think of them as trash items.

irl 90% of the items created are for either a specific purpose, or for money, in this game, too many items are created just for the sake of skilling up

[Oscillate_Wildly]

there is no way to compete with someone who puts no value in their items. or a negative value. This is the real issue.

If may, THIS.
I wonder how XI ever made it. Granted crafting is easier this time around, materials are easily accessible, so I suppose why not undercut everyone in front of you to get 5 gil more? If they're going to re-work the entire battle system, then this ought to be looked at as well.

I don't level weaver for my own health, and I certainly don't find any fun in the button mashing aspect. So yes, I would like a decent profit for the mindless hour and a half I've spent creating two stacks of cloth.

A limit needs to be set somewhere, the game can't thrive like this. At first I was worried we'd wind up in a depression like in XI during its peak of RMT activity.

Essentially PV is right, everything is free and has no worth. How are you going to manage an in-game economy where nothing is purchased from NPC's, or used for transport and other things?

I think working around the market place would be a good start. This game seriously does lack gil sinks that fluctuate with the game's economy because really we don't have one. It was interesting in XI when the prices of Chocobos would rise and fall depending on economic climate. Maybe we do need some sort of auction house or tax system in place in the wards. We have all this gil, and nothing to do with it so why not pay more for services?

[indira]

wait till people get there AH it will most likely have a sell history and thats gonna kill your income like everyother game that has it.

right now its still good if there no item no one knows what it sold for last so you can make your own price.

also stop being greedy and you'll sell stuff most items are free profit anyways

[Oscillate_Wildly]

It's not being greedy if you're attempting to sell a finished item for at least the cost of all the mats together.
That's called "breaking even."

[Rentahamster]

It's not being greedy if you're attempting to sell a finished item for at least the cost of all the mats together.
That's called "breaking even."

It's then called "bad decision-making" if you're trying to sell an item that you know will not sell for more than it cost to make.

[ApplePie]

It's then called "bad decision-making" if you're trying to sell an item that you know will not sell for more than it cost to make.

No it isn't, it is called ranking up your crafting classes and attempting to break even. I personally just NPC everything I make. Just because you want to form an issue because someone undercuts you doesn't mean SE should try to "fix" it. On Mysidia, Dodore Wing in the matter of two to three days dropped in 2 mil in value because of constant undercutting. How can you fix that? You can't.

[Shai]

Ugh I made it half way. This thread is a mess.

"Undercutting" is a natural ebb and flow of a marketplace. It is frustrating, but it's not immoral.

You (and others) assess the value of an item at 1m. Someone comes along and says, I can afford to let this go for 950k because it will sell faster than these other guys. That's normal. His sacrifice is 50k gil. Your sacrifice for charging more is waiting longer. You could (as suggested) buy it and sell it at your price. Of course that is risky. All investments are risky. Spending 2m on mats hoping to get 4m returned only to find the price has dropped to 1.5m is a risk. We all take economic risks as buyers and sellers.

At any rate, if someone can afford to sell something lower by their estimation, then they deserve to have it sold first. The only reason this gets sloppy is when RMT get involved, because they can monopolize a market and crank out products 24/7 while the rest of us (usually) cannot work round the clock to produce high demand consumables or rare equipment, nor can we watch prices 24/7 to make sure we're always on the top of the list. RMT is the problem, but not a legitimate player who is using the market system to his advantage.

I think you guys are confused about where the problems and unfair advantages lie. Everything described in this thread is completely fair. You either match prices, buy them out, or wait longer. That's how businesses work. Well, businesses who can't use market analysis or advertising to push their wares faster anyway.