undercutting is not something you want to get rid of, otherwise prices will only skyrocket and nobody would buy, making it an even worse economic downturn than a crashed market. IRL people look for these kinds of sellers like tigerdirect, amazon, newegg that gives products/items at discounted rates or wholesale which is really just undercutting big stores. The difference from IRL vs Eorzea is we have a market index that runs though the stockmarket and wallstreet that forces a value to any product that prevents them from going too high or too low based on real statistical values from whats available on the market.


Eorzea doesn't have a index, so a piece of lumber can be anywhere from 1gil to 9999999999 gil at any given time. The only thing that's stopping it from doing that is NPC vendor prices. Items that do not have a NPC vendor price will flux in any direction based on simple supply and demand theories, to stop that we don't want a static list price, we want an adjustable list price.

An adjustable list price for any item can be done through a internal program that calculates an individual item's history of how much it is sold for, rate of sale, and total items floating about on the market, and adds an average list price based on those values and adjusts every 24 hours. Why 24 hours? if it adjusts in real time, you can flood the board and lock out the list price system all together. Having a daily market adjustment will give headway to buyers and sellers and allow the market to flux through projections. Basically think of the stockmarket. If the market becomes empty on a particular day because of some demand or the market reached its all time low, it returns to the average list price the previous day, forcing sellers to sell higher and locking out undercutters keeping the market too low.

Basically the market is unregulated, and some people like this and some people don't. SE holds its player base responsible for the economic shit hole its in, which is how it should be. If SE steps in and adds large economic regulations from a static program, I think its going to be an even greater shitstorm than ever because we are asking SE to create a form of government.

Shai mentioned having a static list price with a 5% undercut rate that changes the list price, all you are doing is slowing undercutters from crashing the market but it will eventually crash, due to nobody wanting to sell at list price. The base price will just lower and lower until it stays at 1gil a pop. Very small percentage of players are white knights and we cannot rely on them to bring marketboards back up.