When someone tries to ruin the Market board...

[Jennika]

There is a huge difference between competition in the market and this kind of behavior. Imagine if somebody came to where you work and offered your employer to do your job for half of your salary. And everywhere you applied for a new job, they did the same thing.

At the same time, I feel that the market is beyond flooded with items and materials. There are less and less desired things to be made. SE seems to be steering crafting towards making turn-ins to earn items rather than making the actual items themselves.

[Ogmion]

Personally I drop my prices more and more every time someone tries to undercut me by a couple gil. I'm really uninterested in sitting around hawking the market board to play the 100 gil undercut game, so I attempt to make it clear to anyone who is doing so that they're going to have to make larger cuts than they're comfortable with if they want to keep it up. I don't really post large volumes of items though.

[tdb]

It's not like most MMORPGs have working economies anyway. Items are too easy to make and it takes too much effort to research the opportunity cost of making an item and selling it versus selling the materials directly. For trash items it's common to see them being sold even below the price NPC vendors would pay for them. Regional and relatively small servers make demand for materials very spiky; if someone decides to level their crafting classes they can consume a significant portion of the supply, driving prices up. Then the providers notice an item which looks expensive and flood the market, but the demand is no longer there so the price crashes again. The lack of buy orders exacerbates this problem since there's no way for crafters to indicate they're willing to buy a material at certain price. Lack of commodities market makes it annoying to sell large amounts of items or buy small amounts.

EVE Online is the only game I've seen so far with anything resembling a functional economy. Unfortunately it's so PvP oriented it just doesn't appeal to me as a whole.

[KageTokage]

At the same time, I feel that the market is beyond flooded with items and materials. There are less and less desired things to be made. SE seems to be steering crafting towards making turn-ins to earn items rather than making the actual items themselves.

I think the core issue is that it's way too easy to make the most heavily demanded items compared to an average MMO; both in terms of how long it takes to gather the materials and how long it takes to get the level cap in the first place.

Having more time-gated and/or character bound resources involved would lower the amount of items coming into the market and increase the prices as a side effect.

[LystAP]

It's not like most MMORPGs have working economies anyway. Items are too easy to make and it takes too much effort to research the opportunity cost of making an item and selling it versus selling the materials directly. For trash items it's common to see them being sold even below the price NPC vendors would pay for them. Regional and relatively small servers make demand for materials very spiky; if someone decides to level their crafting classes they can consume a significant portion of the supply, driving prices up. Then the providers notice an item which looks expensive and flood the market, but the demand is no longer there so the price crashes again. The lack of buy orders exacerbates this problem since there's no way for crafters to indicate they're willing to buy a material at certain price. Lack of commodities market makes it annoying to sell large amounts of items or buy small amounts.

EVE Online is the only game I've seen so far with anything resembling a functional economy. Unfortunately it's so PvP oriented it just doesn't appeal to me as a whole.

Isn't EVE Online the MMO where being a cutthroat capitalist that literally tries to kill the competition (i.e. hire other players to blow up their ships and steal all their loot) is considered a enviable quality?

That said, this focus of this game is on the PvE and PvP elements. The Marketboard was never intended to be a primary gameplay component. There's no restrictions or limits - Marketboard prices update immediately - and with the standardization of fees across the cities, it doesn't really matter where people sell things. In addition, I also consider the MB the only true Pay-to-Win component of FFXIV - the Companion App gives a advantage to any aspiring capitalist as it allows you to update MB prices anywhere in the irl world - as long as you have cellphone access, and money to spend on Kupo Nuts (in addition to the extra retainer and chocobo bag slots).

It's also gotten worse lately due to the COVID-19 situation. More than a few people are working from home and have near constant access to FFXIV, hence the Marketboard.

I do not really pay attention to economic variables in the MB, as long as my gil pile is increasing, I'm assuming I'm doing something right. All this focus on Marketboard optimization doesn't seem to be all that interesting.

[tdb]

Isn't EVE Online the MMO where being a cutthroat capitalist that literally tries to kill the competition (i.e. hire other players to blow up their ships and steal all their loot) is considered a enviable quality?

Yes. But it's also the only one I've seen with a properly implemented market system. If you don't like the risk of being killed, it's possible to stay in highsec, even within one station, and play the market game. The scale of the economy and the tools available to buyers make it much harder for someone to control the market. Another ingenious idea is that there's no separate NPC vendors - rather the NPC entities have sell and buy orders (for rather large amounts of items) on the same market as players. But since each of the game's thousands of star systems has a separate market with limited reach, you can try to find locations where a particular item is in short supply. Investing into trading skills allows you to interact with markets quite a few hops away, and you can even hire other players to haul the items for you (with collateral in case they decide to run with the item or just lose it).

[Ranaku]

Well that is how capitalism works. You make something, someone makes it cheaper and the customer is happy cause he gets it cheaper. That is how the whole world works, better get used to it cause you will have a hard time irl if you can't adapt to that concept.

[tdb]

Well that is how capitalism works. You make something, someone makes it cheaper and the customer is happy cause he gets it cheaper. That is how the whole world works, better get used to it cause you will have a hard time irl if you can't adapt to that concept.

In the real world though there are costs to consider. How much do the materials cost? If you sell it cheaper than that you'll make a net loss. How much time did it take you to make the item? If you're trying to make a living by selling them, you have to get enough to pay your bills. Hobbyists making stuff on their free time can largely ignore the time spent and may even be able to sell at a loss, but amount of items they can make is insignificant. You couldn't crash the furniture market by making chairs and selling them for one money, because the demand is in the millions. And on the other hand someone producing chairs at an industrial scale can get their materials a lot cheaper because they can buy in bulk.

In FFXIV on the other hand you can gather materials almost for free, and your character does not need a place to stay nor food to eat. Most players are likely to ignore teleport costs when they go out to gather materials, and as I noted earlier they probably won't bother to check the price of the materials on the MB. They're also likely to ignore the opportunity cost of making that item versus spending the same time doing something else to earn gil. So they craft something they feel is valuable and put it on sale at the lowest price. The incentives to not undercut just aren't there unless you put a decent amount of effort to calculating your profits. Strictly speaking there's also an opportunity cost involved in doing market research - if you spend two hours checking the prices of various materials and items, and as a result can optimize your two hours of crafting time to make 50k gil more, was it worth it? Chances are you could have crafted double the amount of items and made more than 50k extra gil.

[Deceptus]

There is a huge difference between competition in the market and this kind of behavior. .

There is zero difference in a video game where there is zero risk involved.

[MsMisato]

Yes. But it's also the only one I've seen with a properly implemented market system. If you don't like the risk of being killed, it's possible to stay in highsec, even within one station, and play the market game. The scale of the economy and the tools available to buyers make it much harder for someone to control the market. Another ingenious idea is that there's no separate NPC vendors - rather the NPC entities have sell and buy orders (for rather large amounts of items) on the same market as players. But since each of the game's thousands of star systems has a separate market with limited reach, you can try to find locations where a particular item is in short supply. Investing into trading skills allows you to interact with markets quite a few hops away, and you can even hire other players to haul the items for you (with collateral in case they decide to run with the item or just lose it).

mining was very lucrative back when I played. made alot of doing that way. you could afford to hire really good escorts as well if you want to go into lowsec.