Not being able to buy single items from a stack on the marketward.

[BLaCKnBLu3B3RRY]

I was just thinking I should make a thread about this, come to the forums and hey it's already here :P



Actually, imo, it makes the serller's life easier too. Currently if you have a lot of an item to sell, you need to weigh whether or not a buyer is going to be willing to buy a whole stack of that item or not. If not, you have to split that stack up into smaller quantities which takes up valuable selling spaces on your retainer. You're also losing potential sales because say you decide that you want to sell 400 of an item in 10 stack quantities because that's a quantity that people normally buy. You fill up your retainer with 20 stacks of 10, meaning that you only have 200 of your 400 for sale. Well what if that rare buyer comes a long that for some reason needs 400 of that same item. They buy up all of your 200 that you had for sale, but you lost the sale on the other 200 because you didn't have room in your retainer.

If people can choose how much they want to buy out of a stack it simplifies the whole process for everyone. The buyer doesn't have to pay more money for items that they don't need, if the seller happens to be selling in quantities higher than what is needed (which is often the case currently), and the seller can safely sell entire stacks of items to save space on their retainer without worrying about the stack sitting there for days because no one needs 99 grade 4 glamour prisms.

alrighty. that makes sense. but this is rather situational and won't apply to every merchant. so if the ability to purchase individually isn't controlled in some way... then it benefits EVERY consumer. all the while it will only benefit SOME merchants.

now my previous idea was to script a check through the sale history. but it should honestly be much much more simpler.

all Square Enix needs to do is give the player a simple option when posting the items to the market board. the option will allow or dis-allow the purchasing of individual items from that stock. it should be relatively easy to implement. and would 100% satisfy the entire player-base.

[Habbit]

no offense... but this thread is retarded.. Selling in stacks is a market technique, remove it and there will be no balance, some items will dissapear from the marketboard because it's not worth getting anymore and some items will skyrocketing in prices, it will also remove the abillity to control the market and make the retainer limitation pointless. Close this thread already

[BLaCKnBLu3B3RRY]

no offense... but this thread is retarded.. Selling in stacks is a market technique, remove it and there will be no balance, some items will dissapear from the marketboard because it's not worth getting anymore and some items will skyrocketing in prices, it will also remove the abillity to control the market and make the retainer limitation pointless. Close this thread already

please keep an open-mind. if they added an option the player could enable to allow the purchasing of individual pieces from their stock. and also default the option to unchecked. there would be absolutely nothing wrong with it. it's called user control. if the person selling WANTS to sell their items like that, then i see no harm in allowing it. and then at the same time the player isn't forced to sell like that. so to each their own. it's win/win for both consumer and merchant alike.

[Sakuraluna]

please keep an open-mind. if they added an option the player could enable to allow the purchasing of individual pieces from their stock. and also default the option to unchecked. there would be absolutely nothing wrong with it. it's called user control. if the person selling WANTS to sell their items like that, then i see no harm in allowing it. and then at the same time the player isn't forced to sell like that. so to each their own. it's win/win for both consumer and merchant alike.

Actually, if they added that kind of option, everyone would feel obligated to sell everything single purchase enabled because stacks that are would go quicker than stacks that aren't. So I doubt there would be any real user control there.

[BLaCKnBLu3B3RRY]

Actually, if they added that kind of option, everyone would feel obligated to sell everything single purchase enabled because stacks that are would go quicker than stacks that aren't. So I doubt there would be any real user control there.

ah. yeah i understand. well that sucks. i don't know then. lol oh wells. :/

[Niwashi]

For this to work, we'd need to be able to set two different prices when we list a stack for sale. For instance, we might place a stack of 20 items saying it's 100 gil each if you buy the whole stack or for 200 gil each you can take however many of them you wish, leaving the remainder there for sale to the next buyer. For some buyers it might be worth paying 200 gil for one rather than 2,000 for twenty, and the seller gets the higher single-item price to compensate them for being only a partial sale. Other buyers who think they'll eventually use them all will buy up whole stacks to get the cheaper per-unit price.

[Kinseykinz]

Yeah, guys:

Every person playing this game has the option of having up to 4 retainers.
Each retainer they have can sell 20 items (or 20 stacks of items)
Furthermore, if you purchase an additional retainer on your account (or 2), that applies to ALL characters made on your account:

So in my case, lets say I bought the 2 additional retainers.

That means I can sell 80 stacks of items on my Main...in addition, I can sell 80 stacks of items on my 2 alts.

80x3=240 stacks.

240x99=23,760 of ONE type of item I could place up on the MB's at any time I desire....I could totally corner the market of one item if I so decided....but really, at these odds, I could actually corner several markets...as could others. (And that's not even considering that if I wanted, for the same sub price, I could have 8 characters on the same world. or 80x8=640 selling slots (640x99=63,360 individual items if selling in stacks of 99 and buyers could now buy individually) )
We need people to have to decide to sell stack vs. smaller quantities because tbh, with the retainer system, it wouldn't work to allow people to purchase from stacks. Now the seller AND the buyer have to make choices, you can buy cheap but in bulk, or buy at a higher cost but in the amount you need. Trying to sell a handful of something quick? List it low/at the same price as the same item in a larger quanity.

If they allowed buyers to buy individual items for stacks, it would create a beyond royal mess....and drive the markets into the ground. You really don't want this.

[BLaCKnBLu3B3RRY]

For this to work, we'd need to be able to set two different prices when we list a stack for sale. For instance, we might place a stack of 20 items saying it's 100 gil each if you buy the whole stack or for 200 gil each you can take however many of them you wish, leaving the remainder there for sale to the next buyer. For some buyers it might be worth paying 200 gil for one rather than 2,000 for twenty, and the seller gets the higher single-item price to compensate them for being only a partial sale. Other buyers who think they'll eventually use them all will buy up whole stacks to get the cheaper per-unit price.

here we go. this sounds like it could actually work. i can't see anything wrong with this idea. please, Square Enix! look!

...

please don't bring up additional retainers and/or using alts. that is not a solution.

[Kinseykinz]

please don't bring up additional retainers and/or using alts. that is not a solution.

Ummm.... I'm not bringing them up as 'solutions' I'm making the simple point that they ALREADY EXIST.

Everything I said, already is in place in game....so in order for 'buying what you need from the stack' to work, SE would have to basically rework the entire retainer system, and either severely limit how many selling slots you have on each retainer (IE instead of 20/retainer you now have 5) or limit how many retainers you can have access too/have selling items.


Assuming we ignore how much of a waste of development hours and time would have to be devoted to re-balancing the Marketboards to allow for 'buying from the stack' without letting it totally bomb the boards, this would really really, upset the current in-game balance, and tick off the playerbase....because it would either set up a situation where 'additional retainers are basically useless' which would tick off those who invested in them...or it would set up a potential situation where you would almost NEED to buy 2 additional retainers just to have the same selling capacity the game use to give you for free, which would tick off those who don't wish to buy extra retainers and set off the crap-storm of 'pay to win' posts that happen anytime a pay-to-access feature is added.


The reality of the Market Board Selling/Buying situation is this:

The system we have simply will not function or support allowing single items to be purchased from stacks. The sheer amount of selling space each player has (40 slots w/o purchasing additional retainers up to 80/per character via purchase) alone creates a situation wherein allowing buying one item at a time from stacks would equate to epic market saturations, and you would basically create 'the great depression or Eorzea' Seriously, the markets would crash so hard, so fast that nothing would sell, nothing would be worth gathering, and nothing would be worth crafting. (And no, time would not rebound it...there are just too many players on each server with too much selling power to make it so the market would adjust itself. So again, unless they SEVERELY limited how many active selling slots we had, it's simply not a viable option to allow selling from the stack)

The CURRENT system is based on allowing the seller to decide the item, quanity AND price they want for it. So maybe I see you are selling 99 ores for less than they're worth to me. No worries, I'll sell mine in 33 packs and make the profit margin I wish to make. Maybe I am feeling lazy on farming and have lots of open selling slots, so I don't mind selling items in small groups of 1-3 at a time for a premium price. Or maybe I am trying to clear out my inventory before a long gathering session and hold a 'everything must go! sale' on my retainers selling random amounts of items at rock-bottom prices.

So a smart seller, can avoid directly competing with others selling the same items by placing them up for sale in 'smart' bundles and at the right price point...heck, you can even take advantage of 'look that dude is selling 76 of those items in grid, I'll sell 77 of them in Uldah for the same price and mine will both list above his and people who are already in Uldah might prefer mine to his as they can avoid taxes.

Point is, the current system forces competition on multiple levels. A 'you can buy 1 or 20 from a stack of 99 system' only forces one level of competition (lowest price wins). And in a game where you have the ability to single-handedly, on ONE character sell 80x99 of any SINGLE item, you need a variety of ways to compete against other sellers to attact buyers. Because if it was just a 'who has the lowest price' battle, the markets would implode.

[Snugglebutt]

As a buyer and seller of stacks even I would ideally like the ability to buy from a stack instead of buying the entire stack however as a seller we would need a way to make this workable for selling all those stacks we gathered from leveling our DoL/DoH classes without crashing the market and without having a backlog built up so big we have to NPC every other thing we ever gather. I personally don't have a good solution to the problem but I do consider there to be a problem.

Selling stacks hinders sales in itself but hinders it less than using all 20 spaces in a retainer for one stack split into parts meaning we cannot sell the many other things we need to sell due to storage limitations but ideally we need a way to remove both forms of hindrance like that of the buyer stuck buying stacks instead of what they need and sellers forced to sell in stacks due to how much they gathered while leveling to 50.

Maybe a possible solution is not even in changing the marketplace but changing non-marketplace storage, I know if I had an infinite space chest in say FC house or personal house or inn room specifically for minerals/materials then I would have been quite content to sell in smaller stacks as it would of given me the freedom to only sell what I want to sell instead of having to sell even the things I did not currently due to space limitations between retainers and character plus keep all the crafting materials I gathered of which knew would want to use as some stage but could not keep due to space limitations.

Though even that I imagine would not be without marketplace consequence. All current issues from selling perspective to me always come back to storage problems whether retainer space forcing selling of stacks instead of smaller amounts or storage space limitation forcing the saturation of market because no way to keep all the materials would if was enough space for them. The extreme undercutting that goes on is also partially due to space limitations which is another thing that could partially be helped by what I suggested above.

The most affected and worst hit by the current system is the new players because not only are they forced to sell at wholesale due to the sheer quantity of materials will gather while leveling their new character to 50 if they like most pick a fighting DoW/DoM plus a money maker DoL/DoH to compliment it as many new players do. So they are forced to sell in stacks because of quantity will gather from leveling it plus forced to buy in bulk because most people sell in stacks like they would be doing. The older players will probably already have some DoL/DoH 50's with completed logs so can be much more selective in how much and what they gather or make to put up for sale while new players don't have as much of an option since they have to gather and sell only what they have unlocked in the log so far.

Does not seem to be an easy win/win way out as buying what need and not stacks is good for the buyer but selling only what people need instead of stacks is bad for the seller due to limitations on retainer selling spaces at least for DoL/DoH (though more so for DoL than DoH). It is not like the seller stops finding loot or gathering materials while waiting for what is currently being sold so there is a vast backlog that builds up if split stacks to make it easier for buyers. I don't see a way to not have either the buyer or the seller taking the bullet and suffer a consequence...but currently seems to me we have both buyers and sellers biting this bullet which might be worse than just one group suffering instead of currently both.

From my perspective why people undercut? Storage problems forcing them to try and clear up space as soon as possible...why do people saturate the market? Storage problems unable to keep what they gathered for use or sale later...why do most people sell in stacks? Storage problem yet again. My solution is resolve the non-retainer storage problem via infinite material/mineral chest in the inn/FC or personal house but keep retainer selling spaces as they are at 20 per retainer.