Quote Originally Posted by Lyrinn View Post
There's this thing called opportunity cost. In the time it takes you to farm all the random mats and shards (especially shards) to make "pure profit," I'll likely have sold more in the same time for a total profit greater than what you earned. Of course, this varies depending on what items you're selling but if you can get better gil/time, why not? I'm not advocating one way over the other as I care only about the raw numbers, but you're naive if you think you're not missing out on anything -- unless you don't even care about earning mass amounts of gil, in which case, why are we even having this discussion?
Maybe for fancy high-end stuff at launch that was true, but that's not the case for mid- and low-end stuff now. Aside from culinary, all items have 2-3 components that you can gather/farm 99 items in an hour or so. You're not selling that much to outpace the profit of doing it yourself. At game launch opportunity cost was a viable process, but that's not the market we have now. Your approach becomes a ponzai scheme when the market stabilizes. That's not the case when you do it yourself.