Quote Originally Posted by Galdous View Post
Not happening on balmung. Too many shard bots for it to work. Average price in 35-40 Gil and who would put up 9999 shards to play an undercut game.
There are times when shards go up to 100~ a piece. At these times nobody wants to pay 10000 for 100 shards, but they do. Then someone puts up 5-6 stacks of 9999 for 75. Those stacks do not sell, but everyone else immediately undercuts them down to about 50 within an hour. You usually see one crafter buy up 10-20k shards at this point from the smaller stacks people are undercutting with for half the price they were an hour before. Then you see the 9999 stacks vanish. Some times I have seen this happen when the prices are already at 50, and they plummet down to 25-30 before someone gobbles them all up.

The very first time I found a crafter doing this was with HQ dzemael tomatoes back when they were used for artisan specs. The price was up around 4k and this person put up stacks of 99 for 2k. A couple people undercut them, but I bought all of them, including the stacks. I was then immediately asked by a crafter to return her tomatoes as she was trying to get people to lower their prices. I routinely notice (now that I was looking for it) her retainers, and her FC mates retainers doing this on quite a lot of consumable items on a daily basis. Currently her crafting FC is doing this on MCD material and the price is down to 80-90k. They are using stacks of 15-45...they tried to get them down to 70k...but I bought their MCD and relisted for 100k (all sold), this was a couple days ago.

So although their are RMT botters and they are annoying, a lot of price fixing in the current markets (at least on coeurl) is crafters, not RMT.