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

[starburns]

Then I will continue to buy them all up and re-sell them at 300x the price. Also, I can understand with a popular item this happening. But what I've noticed is like 2-3 people will extremely undercut and then everyone just follows suit, which basically saps all value from the item.

300x the price. nice lie dude who has never sold a materia in his life, go waste more time leveling crafters ill stay here undercutting everyone till the day I die because thats the only way to sell anything.

[AngelCheese77]

I will major undercut if someone puts a level 10 item up for 10k gil. Been seeing alot of new players on Siren, so I want them to be able to get some gear. If it gets bought up and resold, not much I can do about that.

[Big_Bap]

I'll say it again, just because the most famous one doesn't have it, that doesn't mean there are none out there. You forgot to mention in your search that there are some offering one. The reason the biggest botting one doesn't have it, is the same reason why a certain website for the market board no longer offers free updates to the prices but offers it for their patreons.

Who is offering? Literally no one. Why? Because you know damn well the moment this gets into the public's hands, it's game over for these platforms.

The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Nice contradiction with your sentences above. Don't ever try to make law school.

[Alucard135]

Who is offering? Literally no one. Why? Because you know damn well the moment this gets into the public's hands, it's game over for these platforms.
Nice contradiction with your sentences above. Don't ever try to make law school.

You claimed that they do not exist simply because you didn't find evidence of that. Nice Ad Ignorantiam right there. And yes, I know what will happen if it spread out like crazy to the public. But again, that doesn't mean they don't exist. I can't help you if you can't google stuff out though lol.

If you were to say "They exist but not a lot are using them" as Callinon said in their post, I would have agreed with you right there. But saying with 100% confidence that they don't exist, given the fact that someone can easily make one for themselves and we have different kinds of bots in the game, then you need to work on your reasoning skills.

[NessaWyvern]

Being a crafter myself, I've learned to adapt over the years so it's whatever, but it does make me question why this person is choosing to sell items at a loss.

They probably collected their items themselves, and then chose to sell the end product, rather than the mats, so that it might sell faster. Technically still get full profit if you collect the items yourself, rather than buying them.

[Penthea]

It is frustrating though.

I understand the frustration. It used to bother me as well, but it got to a point in which I stopped giving in to undercutting so much that I bought out any items or undercutted below the point of its minimum value.

What I do now is I stop undercutting at a certain point. I just let the stuff sit there until it sells, and it eventually always does. Sometimes waiting a few days for something at 300k to sell is better than selling it sooner for 100k. This depends on the item of course. This strategy tends to only work for items whose materials are a pain to gather, or the item itself requires top-end crafting. Or anything at least moderately rare.

Items such as raw materials? I try to sell in stacks that are attractive to players. For example if a popular crafted item uses 5 of an item, then I'll sell in multiples of 5. If an item is only ever required to have 1 per craft, then I never sell it in stacks. Similar to the above I won't undercut into oblivion. At a certain point I will stop and wait, or just take it down from the mb and use it myself.

And sometimes you just have to realise that some items are not worth selling on the mb. The game has countless items to try to sell instead.

[TwistedTea]

They probably collected their items themselves, and then chose to sell the end product, rather than the mats, so that it might sell faster. Technically still get full profit if you collect the items yourself, rather than buying them.

It's not full profit.

There's opportunity cost. The time spent farming/gathering something yourself could have been spent buying the mats from someone else and doing something more profitable.

This applies to retainer ventures as well.

However, there are people who don't value their time or might find farming/gathering themselves as fun, so they see mat cost as 0 gil.

[DumdogsWorld]

It's not full profit.

There's opportunity cost. The time spent farming/gathering something yourself could have been spent buying the mats from someone else and doing something more profitable.

This applies to retainer ventures as well.

However, there are people who don't value their time or might find farming/gathering themselves as fun, so they see mat cost as 0 gil.

Possibilities and profit are not the same thing. Sure, they could have made more gil by just buying the mats and selling the item at a higher price, but the person hasn't lost any gil by farming the mats themselves and selling at an arbitrary desired price.

Not making some theoretical currency you may or may not have made if you had done <x> =/= A loss of currency you currently have invested in some endeavor.

[hiedra]

It's not full profit.

There's opportunity cost. The time spent farming/gathering something yourself could have been spent buying the mats from someone else and doing something more profitable.

This applies to retainer ventures as well.

However, there are people who don't value their time or might find farming/gathering themselves as fun, so they see mat cost as 0 gil.

I also want to add that the items they are selling use mats that come from the new tomes. So even if they're self sufficient it still takes a considerable amount of effort to craft those particular items that they then ended up severely undercutting.

[SamSmoot]

Stuff that you craft for profit might be trash for other players who just want to get rid of it quickly no matter the price.

Most of the stuff I sell is just to clear out my bags. I'll usually undercut by a dignificant amount just to get rid of the stiff quickly. Other items, if I see that the HQ version is going for 100 times the price of NW, I consider that unfair, and will sell my HQ items at a MUCH lower price than the current HQ's, but usually twice the highest NQ.