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

[Shai]

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.

Sure you can. Buy them all and resell them at whatever price you please.

Anytime someone undercuts you, buy it. Everyone wins in this scenario - except you if you 1) can't watch the market 24/7 or 2) can't sell Dodore Doublet fast enough that your profit justifies your expenses - in which case that means the price you're asking is too high to begin with. That's what that means.

[Shai]

I should also add to the Doublet argument...

A casual stroll through the streets of Ul'dah reveals 50%+ of the population wearing a Dodore Doublet. This also indicates that the price should drop - of course when you are making more Doublet than you have customers who need a Doublet the prices drop rapidly. This is common sense, guys.

[Rentahamster]

No it isn't, it is called ranking up your crafting classes and attempting to break even.

All games have trade-offs. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Otherwise, there's only one good way to do everything. If you're playing as a crafter, you can either:

Maximize for SP : grind mats over and over as fast as possible regardless of the monetary cost

or

Maximize for gil: Analyze the market and only synth those items that will make a profit quickly but will not likely give you a lot of SP

[Physic]

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.

Markets dont work by magic, goods have a base value irl, IRL no one sells anything for less than it costs to produce, unless they have failed miserably and just need to offload an item. In this game, that is not the case, people have fun crafting or gathering, or look at leveling up as a cost they have to pay. Not everyone, but enough people that, what ends up happening, is items are worth less than they cost to produce. This was extremely common in FFXI, and it looks like it will return here. Its not about the best price, or a fair price, some people have no costs, because they interpert it as something they were going to do anyway, or have fun doing, and others look at crafting skilling up, as a loss they must bear to make stuff they want to make later.

Its not a real market, prices arent being guided by the invisible hand of captalism (which probably doesnt even work on its own) IRL a company that sells items for less than it costs to make would go out of business, irl people wont make a sword out of iron, if the iron is more valuable, they will just sell the iron. Only because people are required to make items to progress, do you have people who would rather make the sword, and undercut you than sell the materials for more money.

I mean, it isnt the end of the world, because in this game you arent as dependednt on money (especially since everyones been at level cap for 8 months) but the fact is the market does have serious issues.

[Azurymber]

didn't bother to read the rest of the points.
the the op: this is supply and demand. Very simple economic concept that everyone should understand. If supply of items is increased, the price will go down. You make it sound like people are doing something wrong with undercutting. If you don't like it go start a communist country and see how far that gets you.

In short: there is no one to blame but yourself. Because of the way -your- brain (and everyone else) works, capitalism functions the way it does.

[Shai]

Markets dont work by magic, goods have a base value irl, IRL no one sells anything for less than it costs to produce, unless they have failed miserably and just need to offload an item. In this game, that is not the case, people have fun crafting or gathering, or look at leveling up as a cost they have to pay. Not everyone, but enough people that, what ends up happening, is items are worth less than they cost to produce. This was extremely common in FFXI, and it looks like it will return here. Its not about the best price, or a fair price, some people have no costs, because they interpert it as something they were going to do anyway, or have fun doing, and others look at crafting skilling up, as a loss they must bear to make stuff they want to make later.

Its not a real market, prices arent being guided by the invisible hand of captalism (which probably doesnt even work on its own) IRL a company that sells items for less than it costs to make would go out of business, irl people wont make a sword out of iron, if the iron is more valuable, they will just sell the iron. Only because people are required to make items to progress, do you have people who would rather make the sword, and undercut you than sell the materials for more money.

I mean, it isnt the end of the world, because in this game you arent as dependednt on money (especially since everyones been at level cap for 8 months) but the fact is the market does have serious issues.

You are solving your own conundrums, though.

Goods in this game have variable base values. The cost to produce is different for everyone. Some people may get all the mats for free from their LS and thus anything is a profit. Some people may farm mats and factor in the time spent farming toward the base value of the mats they farmed. Some people may use the NPC price as a guide, or the NPC buy back price as the true "base value" (which is laughably low). So while I agree that items have a base value, in a game economy the base value is in the eye of the beholder. It's simply how much are you willing to let go of an item, and how much is someone willing to pay for it. It's not that hard to understand and there's no wrong doing involved.

The problems in XI stemmed from a manipulated price history. I could get a few characters to buy everything in stock at a price I want to sell at and then badaboom I have set the price at 10k in a few easy steps when the base value may have been 2k five minutes ago. No one knows the difference unless they have been watching the item over a period of time. RMT are what killed XI's economy because they could flood the market with goods at a marginal profit and completely control it indefinitely because of running multiple instances of XI 24 hours a day.

Now you can do ^ that in XIV, too, but ANYONE can do it. You can go to the wards right now and buy every single item and start reselling them at your own price - and someone can buy you out and resell you for higher (but that only benefits you in this case). Yes, undercutting will happen as people assess their gains and have lower standards, but that's for them to decide and for them to benefit by being sold out first, unfortunately if you are able to hold out long enough you get your asking price and they don't.

IRL a company can sell a product for less than it's worth (cough FFXIV cough) if they have other interests elsewhere that even out the deficit. If I make 10k per fish selling black sole, I don't care if I lose 8k on some synth I'm getting decent SP on. I have an income and an outcome that's invisible to others.

The Market Wards is actually a pretty fun system. I'd level a Merchant class if I could. ^^ I like playing around with prices, finding good deals, buying and reselling. You guys just are butt hurt because you charge too much or expect everything to break even or "be fair" when you can't calculate other people's cost assessments on their time spent, their materials produced or provided, or any other investments they have generating income. That's how it really works.

[Azurymber]

Markets dont work by magic, goods have a base value irl, IRL no one sells anything for less than it costs to produce, unless they have failed miserably and just need to offload an item. In this game, that is not the case, people have fun crafting or gathering, or look at leveling up as a cost they have to pay. Not everyone, but enough people that, what ends up happening, is items are worth less than they cost to produce. This was extremely common in FFXI, and it looks like it will return here. Its not about the best price, or a fair price, some people have no costs, because they interpert it as something they were going to do anyway, or have fun doing, and others look at crafting skilling up, as a loss they must bear to make stuff they want to make later.

Its not a real market, prices arent being guided by the invisible hand of captalism (which probably doesnt even work on its own) IRL a company that sells items for less than it costs to make would go out of business, irl people wont make a sword out of iron, if the iron is more valuable, they will just sell the iron. Only because people are required to make items to progress, do you have people who would rather make the sword, and undercut you than sell the materials for more money.

I mean, it isnt the end of the world, because in this game you arent as dependednt on money (especially since everyones been at level cap for 8 months) but the fact is the market does have serious issues.

1. the invisible hand has been proven to apply to all human beings in all societies based on the fact that -scientifically- the -majority- of people are interested in relative gains and not absolute gains.

2. your idea that people will not make a sword out of iron if the iron is worth more irl is very incorrect. In order for most companies to stay competitive they have to make technological advancements or build on a brand.
Imagine phone design is a craft in real life. A phone crafter (ex. RIM) will have to create a phone that is technologically competitive with other phone crafters out there (ex. Apple). The RIM phone might suck and they might know they will make a loss on it, but to not make anything at all would be worse because it would cause them to fall behind technologically and hurt their brand name. FFXIV falls into the same case. Even at a loss, letting it die would be a disaster to the brand. So while they could be investing resources into other areas they are pumping them into XIV hoping to turn it around even while operating at a loss. Also take video game systems. Many are sold at half the cost of production with the expectation that they will make money back on games and royalties. There are 100s of other reasons why companies would take a product like iron and turn it into a sword and sell it for less than they could have sold the iron for. so YES: IRL LOTS OF COMPANIES SELL PRODUCTS FOR LESS THAN IT COSTS TO PRODUCE.
edit: if you dont get the point. People sell the crafted item at a loss because it is an -investment- to them in order to get crafting high, where they perceive that they can make a profit. "I will craft now and lose money so that in the future i may craft and make money"

this game is a real economy. The only difference it has from a real economy is that there aren't limited resources. As such the "limited resource" in this virtual game economy becomes time. In other words, people will only be willing to spend x amount of time to procure x amount of an item that they believe will sell for x amount. The invisible hand works just as well in this game as it does in the real world.

And if your going to google the invisible hand and argue that people have criticized it IRL, don't bother. The legit criticisms are based around externalities, which are actions by individuals who effect other people. Ex. an oil company destroys the environment in the process of making a profit. Games don't have negative externalities (at least FFXIV doesnt). So the argument against the invisible hand doesn't hold.

Please, if you're going to argue economics, at least learn the basics of it. It takes like all of maybe 4 hours, to figure out how supply and demand and the invisible hand works.

[Rentahamster]

Markets dont work by magic, goods have a base value irl, IRL no one sells anything for less than it costs to produce... IRL a company that sells items for less than it costs to make would go out of business

Last time I checked, Microsoft and Sony are still alive and kicking.

[Physic]

Last time I checked, Microsoft and Sony are still alive and kicking.

xbox and ps3 is a two tiered sale item, you can use either without buying their software, it would be equivalent to selling bows cheap, if after that every single person had to buy your arrows, this type of model doesnt exist in this game.

Also, xbox and ps3 were expensive initially because they were a new business, the costs of production go down rapidly over time. the only analog in this market is making something when its 10 levels higher than you, but without being able to sell crafter exclusive arrows there is no incentive for that model.

You can bring up these things, but the fact is this the system is not even close to analgous to a real free market system, and even that needs a lot of oversight. Im not really that mad about it, you dont really need the market that much in this game. But its obvious that the end result of this games economy is going to be pretty screwy. The key to any business model is too make profit, in this game, that is not a lot of peoples goal, so it will never work.

To the above dude even the main proponent of the invisible hand said it needed the government to step in and stop collusion. In case you didnt study your history, go look up the industrial revolution, without unions, government controls like minimum wage, anti trust laws, FDA and various other outside forces, this system would have ended in bloody war.

[Asmeret]

Supply and demand.