Undercutting

[Jojoya]

Price things the way you want. You decide the value of your time, not others.

If someone thinks you've listed it too low, they're welcome to buy the item to relist for profit. That takes your low priced item off the mb and returns current prices to what they had been, usually before anyone other than the buyer has noticed.

Only one way to get a definite end to undercutting. Buy orders.

AKA: Someone makes a request for an item for x amount of gil, and no one can sell below that amount until that buy order is fulfilled.
That way it would be significantly harder for someone to crash the value of items by grossly undercutting them.

I list a buy order for 580 gear at 1 gil.

I didn't just crash your marketboard. I killed it. No one is going to sell to me for 1 gil because materials are more expensive but now they also can't sell to others because my buy order has to be filled first under your system.

The last thing you want to do is give buyers such absolute control over the market prices because they're looking to pay as little as possible just as sellers are trying to sell for as much as possible. That's why the free market exists - so a price point can be reached that both sides are willing to accept as reasonable.

The problem with your logic is that by the time people area ready to buy the stacks of whatever you bought for 600gil to sell at 4000gil, the original seller will have already gathered another few stacks to sell at an abnormally low price. No one knows if they've been gathering non-stop the whole time or if they're just bots. People are free to do whatever they want in the market but it doesn't make it any more interesting if they screw it up for everyone. It's essentially market griefing and while not against the rules per-se unless they use bots to do it, it's still a pain in the arse to deal with. There are quite literally people fine making a 40k gil profit when they could be making 700k gil profit instead. But they chose to grief the market and keep griefing because for some reason in their mind, it's a reasonable price and they would feel guilty selling it anything higher. They don't realize that by doing this, they are upsetting people who are working their butt off to hand-craft or gather these things and consider the actual cost of everything involved up to that point. If they feel guilty for "overcharging" then they should also feel guilty for upsetting the market.

If such prices are exceptionally low as you claim, bargain hunters will snatch up the items to relist long before the gatherer has their next stack ready to sell.

There is no griefing involved. They're selling at the price they find acceptable even if you don't like that price. You're always welcome to find other items they aren't selling and sell those instead.

I'd also love to see your realistic examples of items that players will happily pay 700k to buy when others are ready to sell at only 40k. The average player is not that rich and the player who is rich enough to afford that much probably got that way by doing their own farming instead of buying.

Let me make you angry. A while back, I wanted to get a Platinum Scarf of Slaying for an alt's transmog. I planned to be lazy and buy off the MB but they were going for 100k gil each, which was ridiculous considering I could buy the mats for about 1200 gil. I checked the sales history and sure enough, almost no one was buying them. There had been 2 sold in the last month and the sales history extended back 6 months to where the scarf had been selling fairly consistently at 10-15k before someone decided they wanted to jack up the price to 100k.

I'm now selling 10-15 Platinum Scarfs of Slaying at 10k gil each per week. I did play with the price at first to see what would work out best for profit by volume. Sales dropped off almost immediately when I tried posting them at 20k+. Dropping the price below 10k didn't increase the volume being sold so I settled at 10k.

Because I'm using an affordable price for the type of player most likely to buy (new players who have reached level 50 but don't even have access to tomestones yet), they're selling well compared to the dismal rate they were selling at prior to me "tanking" the market. I didn't tank it - I revived it. I'm not the only one selling them now. Other players have also been selling them at or slightly below my price in recent weeks. Compare that to the 1-2 per month being sold when I first went looking to buy one.

Greedy sellers are their own worst enemy because they kill their markets by listing at prices higher than players are willing (or frequently able) to pay. Profit is still profit. It adds up fast over time as you sell more.