Please Undercut Wisely

[Lyrinn]

In answer to Dorin's remarks.

Time is money if you have a deadline to deliver the goods. No such thing in this game. You make your own time. You have to level gathering anyways, but if you don't like gathering I can sell you a stack of materials, but you will pay the Piper's fee. LoL

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?

[OldGeezer]

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.

[Nicco]

you think it sucks be undercut by 300? i remember multiple times being unndercut by 10k on a 22k item >.< or 2-4k on others... people are dumb, that is all..

[Mitski]

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.

No. You may think that what you're posting sounds intelligent, but anyone educated on the topic can see that you don't even know the meaning of the words you're using. Please stop posting.

[rex1976]

you're abslolutely right. if i see you have flooded the market with an item that i keep stock of in inventory and you're undercutting by 1 or 10 gil i'll keep on undercutting you trying to bait you into putting them up below value of mats/crystals. then i'll scoop em up and wait for market to correct itself, and put the gil in my pocket you would have made if you weren't an idiot.

[Lyrinn]

Hence why I said I don't advocate strictly doing one method or the other. If I have time, then of course I'll go farm the mats myself.

But the way things are on my server at least, I'm still selling faster than I can craft for half the day. Mats cost average 3k, items sell for 10k+. I'm not competing with other farmers for hours to make an extra 3k when my retainer is standing around with open slots.

Maybe one day, I'll go super tryhard and build a stochastic model just to see how much downtime for farming I have. Too much effort for a game though.

[MomoOG]

The OP doesn't have a problem with undercutting. He has a problem with illogical undercutting. If an item is selling regularly for 2k (based on history) then the logical undercutter would only drop it to 1999 to go to the top of the list. The illogical undercutter drops the price to 1k. The only reason to drop the price by that much is if the item WAS NOT SELLING at the previous price. I see this happen all the time and it really is head scratching.

[Mitski]

I'm smoking algebra. 1000 is 25% of 4000. 0.5 is 25% of 2. I realize the PISA scores for the US were disappointing, but there is no need to broadcast the failures of US educational system on these forums.

1.)Personal attacks based on race or nationality are petty and pathetic.

2.) I wasn't referring to the actual math. I was poking fun at the terrible analysis you tried to piece together by applying simple math to words and concepts you don't understand.

That's a 25% [profit] margin and that's perfectly reasonable. However, what is the real out of pocket cost you're taking on. The only thing there that is not gatherable/craftable is the 2 buffalo milk to make the smooth butter for a whopping cost of 2 gil. 25% margin for 2 gil is 0.5 gil. So you're real out-of-pocket expense is 3 gil and you want to charge 4000. I can sell mine for 1/2 your price and still make twice the profit you do. Yet, I am the evil person who is undercutting you and should be banned. Maybe you can gather some of the materials and not hitting people with a glorified vat.

The part where you included your profit margin as part of your out-of-pocket expense was particularly entertaining.

[rex1976]

The OP doesn't have a problem with undercutting. He has a problem with illogical undercutting. If an item is selling regularly for 2k (based on history) then the logical undercutter would only drop it to 1999 to go to the top of the list. The illogical undercutter drops the price to 1k. The only reason to drop the price by that much is if the item WAS NOT SELLING at the previous price. I see this happen all the time and it really is head scratching.

see above ^ when i am undercut on a flooded market logically (by 1 or 10 gils) i will undercut the market seemingly illogically. i do this because 1) you've made me mad, 2) because i am baiting the rest of the sellers into undercutting me again, and again. to the point where you are selling at a breakeven or below cost price. at wich point i will buy your items and pull all of mine from the market. then i wait a day or 2 and put the items back up after market corrected itself. stop scratching your head

[Astarica]

It's pretty incredible that people can play MMORPG without realizing the price of goods always tend to crash with few rare exceptions (usually involve stuff that are dropped).

The bulk of your profit is made from other crafters, which makes the whole thing a Ponzi scam. Ponzi scams are not sustainable, and add to the fact that most MMORPG decline on a server level after launch, the pool of suckers to make your money from is ever decreasing, so you have to be very aggressive. If you're playing on say WoW when it was new, you could afford to be less aggressive because the game was clearly growing so you figure there will always be new suckers to buy your stuff, but you can't do that here.

Right now the only reason why people can even make some money off market board is that because gil is useless, guys who can destroy your profit have no particular reason to do so. I can sell something that goes for 5000 on market board for 500 gil and still turn a profit (as a note, 1 star items have very low time-to-gather due to level 50 nodes yield multiple per gather). I don't do that because I have no reason to need more gil so the only reason I'd do it is to see you suffer, and I am not that bored. If there was a legitmate use for gil, then someone will take 500 gil over nothing and the items will crash spectcularly.