Extreme Market Board Undercutting is a Problem. Who ultimately benefits from this?

[Tomoebi]

Extreme Market Board Undercutting is a Problem. Who ultimately benefits from this?

those damn lalafell...
oh wait, i mean the customer

I've seen items that were selling for 8,000-$15,000 Gil comfortably, plummet to 100 Gil or less because several people jump on the massive undercutting bandwagon. In the end...NO ONE makes any money, so what good comes from it?

i know that feels, as a lvl 81 gatherer(gather stuff from cheaper server) and sell it at my own server, this thing will always happen. but there is a lot of reason for this.
I'm from tonberry, and afaik i never see a bot in this server, but here some of my not so important opinion :

1. World Visit
This could hurt your MB a little. whenever i travel to another world i will always see wanderer like me in front of MB, sniping cheap stuff and if the price different is huge we will buy in bulk to sell it at our own server. and since the price is differ, we can sell it much more cheaper than you.

2. Overpricing
Let's say some items is just overpriced, if i do the math for the mats (lol) and i can sell it cheaper than everyone else i will always sell it cheaper, because i want to recycle my inventory as fast as possible while still making some gill, and no i dont undercut by 1 gill. go big or go home

If supply exceeds demand, and you're selling high, the undercutters will sell first

Agree with this, some items with high demand have a stable price. And almost never fall down. And even if you not sell at the cheaper price, it will sell eventually because the demand is high.

[reivaxe]

Profits and worth are all subjective, it makes no sense to assume someone doesn't know such and such's worth when they make huge undercuts.

Someone uses a bot, they go to sleep as the bot loads up on 100s of a mat that goes for 700gil ... any price they sell it for is profit to them cause they themselves didn't gather it, right? They spent zero time or effort into getting this so it's pure profit.

Same with retainers. Send one out to gather 20 of an item and for the price of 2 ventures you now have 20 of something you didn't have to put any direct effort into. Run a dng or something and come back to profit.
Send one out and they bring back something that goes for 400K on the MB ... even if you slash that price IN HALF you're making profit cause you didn't have to make it or do anything other then send your retainer out. They could have given you something that goes for 10gil or something that goes for 200k+, it's random so you either get lucky or not.

Think of people leveling crafting by grinding out stuff. They make a ton of an item just for the exp and you think they should sit on it, only undercut by 1gil or 1%? Nope, they don't have all the room in the world so they dump it cause that space is more important to them then sitting around stalking the MB trends or being polite.

It's about the amount of time and gil you invest into something, this game has a LOT of ways for someone to get something with no or lil effort.

Part of why I want them to allow buy orders is to make this a 2 way dialog over having people just put up with fictional values the power MB gamers come up with.

[DaulBan]

Who benefits? You, me, anyone who winds up buying something for less than the most exorbitant fee. Sucks to be in a buyers market... if you're the guy selling. Frankly I'm glad its like this because it means everything is dirt cheap, makes my life easier.

[KageTokage]

I feel like crafting being as easy as it is is probably the biggest reason for the prices tanking so quickly.

The prices on stuff in HW was higher overall and remained that way even towards the end of each patch cycle due to it generally being more difficult/time-consuming both to acquire the mats for crafts and to successfully HQ it.

Hopefully 5.1 changes things up somehow.

[TwistedTea]

I feel like crafting being as easy as it is is probably the biggest reason for the prices tanking so quickly.

The prices on stuff in HW was higher overall and remained that way even towards the end of each patch cycle due to it generally being more difficult/time-consuming both to acquire the mats for crafts and to successfully HQ it.

Hopefully 5.1 changes things up somehow.

Gonna be skeptical. Throughout Stormblood, we were told that more difficult endgame recipes would be coming...they never did. Or look at how SE tackles gathering bots, which gather 24/7 for months/years...

[Raqrie_Tohka]

Most of the non max-level stuff isn’t in high demand so the turnaround and the prices won’t really make sense. Especially since low amounts of Gil are virtually meaningless to many established and rich players in the game (for whom 100k is but the slimmest pocket change) thus they don’t even really care whether it’s priced properly or not, just “here is something which would be a pity to throw away, so just take this off my hands before I destroy it to free up the retainer slot it’s hogging, which isn’t even worth being used to list this item”

[YojimboM]

Gonna be skeptical. Throughout Stormblood, we were told that more difficult endgame recipes would be coming...they never did. Or look at how SE tackles gathering bots, which gather 24/7 for months/years...

This is the thing I find most hilarious when people put up those posts congratulating SE on "banning thousands of bots" without actually reading the official numbers. They ban thousands of gilspammers or the dummy accounts used to facilitate RMT. The actual bots almost never get banned. There has been a specific bot gathering on my server since some time in 2.2 that I remember very clearly constantly being at the new 2* 50 nodes, then again at the nodes in HW from the release of the expansion, then again in Stormblood, and still here in Shadowbringers. It gets a name change/race change maybe once per expansion but it's still the same bot because its lodestone id is always the same. And that's just the one that I ran into a lot for some reason, I've seen plenty of others on and off that seem to be running different schedules and have been around probably just as long.

[YojimboM]

lol what?

The people who "willing to pay" is just a subset of the people who "want" set. That means there are plenty who want but not willing to pay - depending on the price. The easiest in game example is glamour. I'm not poor, although whether I'm rich or not depending on who you ask (over 100mil) but I had never pay for map glamour (like Ao Dai, Quintess ...etc...) when they come out. I have a very specific price that I'm willing to pay for these items, and that under 200k.

Would be curious which country you live in since you cite "irl", since it must be one that doesn't follow the economy norm. Either that, or you're a super rich millionaire that have the only factor deciding your purchase is your "want" irregardless of what you have to pay.

Just because you don't want to spend over 200k on glamour doesn't mean there aren't people out there who would in equal quantity. I've sold high-priced crafted glamour for every single expansion for millions of gil per craft, multiple times per day. It has to be a very, very low demand item if someone is not willing to pay extra to get it. In which case, the price wouldn't be high in the first place. People aren't posting crafted glamour for ~5 mil without anyone buying it, you can check the sale history even. And for the record, 200k is an extremely low price for those kinds of things, no one would ever sell them that low when they're current because people buy them frequently enough at 10-20x that. Even a single material for the current map glamour costs more than that.

It's the same for something like a luxury car or bespoke tailored suit in real life. Those things cost exorbitant amounts of money but some of the most profitable companies in the world sell them. If the issue was ever really the price, then the seller goes out of business.

And when you drop the price of a high demand item, it creates a bubble, like I mentioned. Which is the thing everyone that has responded saying "lower prices sell faster" is forgetting. The price will rapidly crash and stock will deplete and demand will fall, then the price resets itself back to its original place. Sellers lose money or drop out of the market because their items suddenly become worthless. It ends up wasting time for everyone involved since then sellers start pulling items from the market to wait on the price to rise again. Keeping a steady, consistent price on an item is always the most sustainable way to sell, and undercutting by 1 is how you do it. It puts your items up first and also maintains the established price.

Lol what. I dont know in what ig and irl worlds you are living where there is no poor people, and where everybody is swimming in so much money that they can afford everything they want for normal or high prices, but it is not the same as mine XD

Poor people aren't buying luxury items. High end crafted items are not "normal" items. You don't go buy a $3,000 suit if you deliver pizzas. The same as someone that barely plays not buying a 3-5 million gil glamour piece. Most people's most valuable possessions are things like housing plots, since those are useful for everyone, and those cost a massive range of prices. And that's why, even being such a massive investment, even "poor" people save up to get them, because they are useful and desirable to have no matter what. Usefulness is more important than price or value, and that is always relative to the buyer. Sometimes people get lucky and catch super cheap deals on things, just like in real life too, but that is always the exception and never the rule because that is simply not sustainable.

[Big_Bap]

There's not exactly a "fortune" to be made when the 450 gear has tanked as low as 80K a piece and the bot is usually willing to drop to half that before it stops undercutting.

Buying them out accomplishes little because they have excess stock they'll just relist immediately and even if you did manage to deplete their stock you still have other competition to worry about. It really is not something you can exploit for any meaningful gain.

In any case, people can choose what they want to believe, but I find the notion of thinking undercut bots somehow don't exist in a game as heavily exploited as XIV a bit silly when they're still a problem even in heavily enforced MMOs like WoW.

Now you’re just digging your hole even deeper. At first it was DoL materials. Now you’re talking about crafted items. Make up your mind or come up with better lies. Regardless, if you were to undercut whatever they put up for sale just before they do so in order to buy their stuff for pennies, you would end up with a fortune as your profit margin would be insanely high.You don’t have competition when you resell crafted gear at 99% off the normal price.

The most pro-eminent automation software for this game has made a statement that they will never even consider giving players the option to have marketboard bots. Probably because they can’t over the fact that they don’t want to open that pandora’s box.

Keep on believing they exist though, just know that you can’t be taken seriously when you have nothing to back your story (which looks like swiss cheese).

[Big_Bap]

Just because there's no solid in-game proof, doesn't mean they don't exist. Those that use them explicitly discuss them on Discord and a simple googling will tell you that they exist.

I'm curious though, as to why you sound so confident that they don't exist.

Read above.