Item duping is killing Crafters

[Rainsford]

*snip*

I seriously think you're missing the point.

This happened recently on Diabolos. A player transferred from Coeurl (could tell based on the names on his crafting gear) with a 50 Weaver, 50 Leatherworker, 18 Glad, 23 Miner and not even a mount registered on his account. Suddenly, every 2-star weaver/leatherworker item had him posting 2 copies of NQ and HQ versions at seemingly arbitrary prices. HQ Vanya leggings for 444,444, NQ Vanya Leggings for 222,222. Gryphonskin ringsfor 555,555, with NQ ones for 333,333. This one a server where crafting mats were regularly selling for 35-40k on the AH.

Now, this crafter had no materia socketed in his gear, and had no other crafting classes leveled, yet flooded the markets with these items (all with his signature). If you're going to stand by the idea that it was a quiet FC pooling their resources, how foolish would they have to be? Why not just sell the mats and make more gil? Why craft so many worthless NQ 2-star items? Why not have the crafting mule actually socket materia/level his other classes to 15? Why no logic in what they priced at?

It just makes no sense. Of course, about 5 days later, all the items disappeared off the AH, never to be seen again. I'm left to assume that SE banned the account, but I guess we'll never know.

To respond to your edit, I don't understand how you think that people selling tome items for less than the cost to make consistently makes any sense. It's like me drilling for oil that I can sell for $20 a barrel but, instead, converting it to petrol and then selling it for $15 a barrel. When the price to sell raw materials is higher than the price of the finished products, why would you ever sell the finished product and not the raw materials?