Rework the market system to allow purchase offer listings and eliminate undercutting

[Vahlnir]

Also, if an item hasn't sold in a week, I usually chop the price by half without even looking at the current prices

Yeah, this is basically what I do. After some time has passed and some items are still sitting there, I will just slash my prices like it's Black Friday. Within a day they are usually gone and I can list more stuff. As far as I can tell, such behavior doesn't affect the market much. Maybe for a few hours, but after that prices return to what they were (and perhaps go up) and the cycle starts again. Free markets are cool like that.

[hynaku]

Only thing see broken about the market now is have to compete with prices to every server in your database because of world visit. Maybe if they made the market board datacenter wide and add option like bidding to it. Played one mmo where each week it average what sell price to item was and they set it to that and ones couldn't sell there items for less than that.

[Rasikko]

Just implement player bazaaring like in FFXI.. real good way to avoid undercutting / market crashes.

[Dirwen]

I like people that undercut that means I can buy stuff cheaper. Granted I rarely buy stuff from the MB but then I mostly log in to do dailies on my main and alts then log off.

[Liam_Harper]

Only thing see broken about the market now is have to compete with prices to every server in your database because of world visit.

It's affected it less than I thought it would.

For example, some Seeing Horde weapons are 400k on Lich, 800k on Zodiark and 1.7m on Shiva and according to history they were all selling. While some players are taking advantage, most seem to just ignore cross-world shopping.

[MariaArvana]

It's affected it less than I thought it would.

For example, some Seeing Horde weapons are 400k on Lich, 800k on Zodiark and 1.7m on Shiva and according to history they were all selling. While some players are taking advantage, most seem to just ignore cross-world shopping.

Well can't speak for others, but unless its a really expensive item, I tend to ignore cross world shopping since its super tedious to teleport to a main city, and then go through the list of servers one by one, wait about 10+ or so seconds for the transfer to pop + actually transfer, then run to the MB, check, make note of it, then repeat 5x more. Adds so much unnecessary time to the point that unless I'm buying something expensive, I'll just buy locally. I wouldn't be surprised if similar reasoning applies to many people.

[Nabril]

I would like to see the market system reworked in such a way that players are able to put up purchase offers like sell offers and that items are not listed plainly and explicitly as they are now.

If anyone here has played Old School Runescape and used the Grand Exchange you can see exactly what I am talking about. You can put up sell or buy offers for items and each item has an average market value. However you cannot see all the listings and their exact amounts, because of this, you don't have people undercutting each other by exactly 1 or 2 gil. Players are able to put up buy offers for a certain price, given the average market value of the item you can choose to go up or down 5% as many times as you want or still set the exact price that you are looking to purchase an item for. As a buyer, you automatically receive a purchase that is at or below your offer and are refunded the remainder.

Being able to put up buy offers makes it so that whenever someone puts up a sell offer that meets someone's buy offer, the item often sells instantly as you do not have to wait for someone to decide to come to the market and look for what you are selling as there would likely already many people that have buy offers set up.

As for not showing sell offers explicitly as they are now, this would eliminate scummy undercutting practices, as im sure many of you know if you are engaged in the market, as the only option for undercutting would be to go below a market average amount.

Edit: apparently some of you intelligent people made the assumption that the average would be set by SE. Wrong. False. I never said that. Read again. The market average is determined by whatever people are buying and selling for. I urge you to look at how OSRS's superior grand exchange market system works. Still 100% player driven.

You are not so important that your prices should be locked in stone. You are not so important that you cannot be undercut.

[Barraind]

Best AH system to date is GW2's.

Ties every server together in a simple interface, has the option to buy, create buy orders, sell, or create sell orders.

It's by far the easiest system to work with I've ever used.

[SamSmoot]

If anyone here has played Old School Runescape and used the Grand Exchange...

I must have played the "Older School Runescape".. There was no grand exchange, you just logged onto a particular server, went to a town who's name I don't recall, and kept calling out what you were selling and the price until someone contacted you.. It was a pain finding each other to open a trade.

[YojimboM]

The OP is asking for a system that functions like a real-life auction. When you win an item at a blind auction, you usually only have the pay the amount of the second highest bid (called second-price auction) plus the fees of the agent/auctioneer. So, at a second-price auction you can submit a bid of the maximum amount you are willing to pay for an item, and if you get it then you make back the difference between your highest bid and the highest losing bid.

Personally, I've also always found this kind of marketboard system superior in games that have it, since you can submit your maximum price and have someone fulfill the order later if they're willing to drop it to something lower than normal for a quick buck. EVE Online features this kind of market system and it's renowned as one of the most competitive player-driven markets in any MMO, to the point that people have used it for studies in researching how free markets work.

It not only offers potential for instant sales for sellers by showing a list of what people are willing to pay for their products without any guesswork, but it gives buyers potential to make long term purchases without continuously checking a marketboard over and over for days at a time waiting on a price to fluctuate.

FFXIV's current marketboard system is very archaic as it is, so I'd love to see the addition of buy and sell orders finally. I've actually been hoping they'd introduce them for years.

At OP: You should have titled your post as a suggestion for buy and sell orders being added to the marketboard instead of mentioning undercutting. People lose the ability to comprehend words when they see the word "undercut".