The Market needs a listing fee or it'll never be a balanced and fair economy

[therpgfanatic]

I'm sorry, but if "Item X" isn't selling, then move on to "Item Y"~ followed by "Item Z"

Each server has about 18,000 to 23,000 players. And we all have 2 Retainers who can sell multiple items.

The idea that if one item isn't selling you can simply go sell a different item just doesn't work. Other than extremely rare drops like treasure map minions and high-level crafting gear / materia, most items I've seen are sold for less than 100 gil. A lot of stuff is actually being listed for 1-10 gil.

And it isn't that there isn't demand. You can list items that are needed for leve-quest turn ins, and people will still list the items for barely nothing. It's because a select few players camp the boards all day relisting their wares to undercut other people to purposely crash the markets. They drive the prices down to as low as possible, then try to buy up each other's items and relist them at a march higher rate. It can work but when a bunch of people are doing it, it really just means the prices constantly crash.

it would make the issue of artificial price ceilings more difficult to cope with. Those people that dump multiple stacks of items at 'discount' prices, which results in a major downshift in pricing until demand eventually chews through it all.

Normally, if you were sure that it would be a long while before the market self-corrected, the only thing you could do was remark and 1gil him or repost in smaller quantities than he's offering.

Not true.

In a market board with a listing fee, if someone lists their wares at a huge markdown from the normal cost of the item, someone who plays the market is going to buy the items up and then relist them at the true average market price to turn a profit.

That's how auction houses in other MMOs correct themselves. But it doesn't happen here because there's no penalty to just keep changing your prices.