Marketboard Treatment

[Axious]

I knew a friend back during arr with max gil. Their strategy was to buy whatever was selling immensely at the time.

Literally would buy everything out and control the market board prices themselves.

How they would go from 1 character with max gil to an alt with max gil.

I personally don’t find economics fun but eh people love money I guess.

[xenahawk]

With what you say i really dont think its anything personal i think its seems like they are just trying to corner the market especially if your friends see it too. Unfortunately undercutting isnt against the rule but hopefully if they are using tools like another post said is a possibility that it will be found with the investigation unfortunately if an fc is that big and popular with players that there is more then just one its easy enough for them to corner stuff like the markets on a specifc server. Havent seen it on ff but i have seen it in other games.

[PirateRyanG]

I knew a friend back during arr with max gil. Their strategy was to buy whatever was selling immensely at the time.

Literally would buy everything out and control the market board prices themselves.

How they would go from 1 character with max gil to an alt with max gil.

I personally don’t find economics fun but eh people love money I guess.

This was a fun thing to do in early days of WOW. I did it to a slight extend in FFXI too. It is impossible now in WOW due to the new way their AH works, but I don't know about the latter.

You would find something that was relatively hard to farm, or perhaps boring to farm, but people would still need.

You buy up everything in the AH, and then relist it at a considerably higher price. For a few hours, you would have control of the market. By the time the price starts to fall again, you will have made a profit.

Dealing with the economy in an MMO is always the fun part (at least for me). In FFXI, I had a linkshell and we would do our best to control the crystal and raw mining supply market on Sylph. We didn't always succeed but, when we did, it went well. Lots of Gil.

I get some people want affordable prices for everything, but that isn't how an economy works. Stuff sells at a high price because people are willing to pay a high price (and those people are not RMT)

[Jojoya]

No this is my only account and sorry about the late reply busy workweek. If you are online currently Jojoya I can meet up with you.

Well then this confuses me a bit

To protect myself from further harassment I am posting on an alternate account I made.

I guess you meant character where you said account.

But yes, I'll be happy to help you if we can connect. I wasn't online earlier today and I'm probably going to be distracted by Dynamis chaos this week but I'll try to keep an eye out for you posting in this thread again.

I get some people want affordable prices for everything, but that isn't how an economy works. Stuff sells at a high price because people are willing to pay a high price (and those people are not RMT)

And sometimes you'd make more gil selling at a lower price because more people are able/willing to pay the lower price. I always take a close look at high priced items that sell rarely. Is this something that would sell more often if I dropped the price significantly, leading to a better net profit per week than the current seller(s) is getting?

You have to be smart and think about exactly who is most likely to buy the item instead of thinking "maybe someone rich will buy it at a high price"

[MedicalChimp]

Hello everyone,

I am writing this post because I wanted to share my experience while currently trying to make gil on the market board and hopefully get some advice for how to deal with a bullying situation. ...(for length)... be honest I don't mind the undercuts, but purposely targeting me is a whole other issue.

They have gone as far as using members within their FC(s) to put several stocks up so that anyone thats interested in the materials will only go after theirs. And it's gotten so toxic because of retainer signatures that they have made versions of my name or used rude names each time I put something up or bought my things to relist and harass me with it. I've reported the player to GMs and they said they were investigating. I've changed my retainer names and I've had friends try and help me sell and they do the same thing to them. They have sent people to stand near me at market boards and even next to our FC home to watch me. I've even asked someone in their sister FC at the time kindly why were they doing this because I dont know them and if they would stop harassing me and they just laughed at me. This should not be considered normal behavior even if you are trying to make gil and I wanted to speak out and hopefully if anyone else has gone through this can share their experience. Honestly, the whole thing has made me start to want to stop in general and take a break from the game. So I am asking for genuine help and advice on what to do. Thanks for listening.

Quit giving them the satisfaction of caring. Either undercut them to where they're selling dirt cheap - buy all their stock and relist it higher, or find another market.

Either it's bots or it's people who've had a market cornered for a long time and aren't willing to give it up. If you can't own a market for a specific item or type - then you NEED to diversify or your wasting your time and losing out on profit. I accidentally drove down the cost of the quest fish for FSH quests by over 20k gil on my server in the last week. Ya know what I did? Bought the cheap stuff and relisted it at the normal price. Beat them at their own game - and then everyone wins. Just make sure that them selling at the low cost isn't manageable long term, or you're playing into their hands.

[Shibi]

This was a fun thing to do in early days of WOW. I did it to a slight extend in FFXI too. It is impossible now in WOW due to the new way their AH works, but I don't know about the latter.

You would find something that was relatively hard to farm, or perhaps boring to farm, but people would still need.

You buy up everything in the AH, and then relist it at a considerably higher price. For a few hours, you would have control of the market. By the time the price starts to fall again, you will have made a profit.

I've been doing that for months with onions, although I've not done it for a few weeks now as I've been preparing for a new FC on Dynamis recently.


(And universalis being down makes inter-server selling a pain!)

[MikotoV]

Some people really see the marketboard as a pvp arena and they don't even care about making money because they have so much at this point that it's about more than profit for them. They want to sell first, and that's it; and if you undercut them by 1 gil, they'll "teach you a lesson" by just crashing the market for fun. This can get really nasty when you're selling crafted items that have your username attached to the bottom of it, because people can see exactly who's undercutting them and take their anger beyond the market space. While I've never dealt with this personally outside of occasional undercutting, it doesn't surprise me to see this occur and I've seen people sort of talk about doing it more than once (the "crash market" thing, not the bully thing). Sometimes the only "aggressive act" you need to engage in to gain someone's aggro is to compete for the same market share. It's legit possible that all OP did was "dare" to sell something that a mentally ill market-pvp champ also wanted to sell.

Anyway, good luck out there. Some people in this game are really, uhhh, "Special" lmao.

This sums up my plight well. Couldn't fit everything I wanted to in here but I post more soon.

[NekoMataMata]

The undercutting is normal, but the rest of it is weird.

[MikotoV]

This nightmare of an experience only started after entering markets that were doing particularly well in sales. I did my research and looked at price histories and quantities that people were buying up. I differentiated mine from this player because I knew not everyone was buying 99 stacks or large amounts. And the tactic seemed to work until all of this happened. I'm guessing this player felt incensed by me re-entering the markets after successful sales and used extremities (such as those I listed before) to make sure I didn't enter it again so they could properly get it back to their control and have their monopolies. Selling has been a struggle for me ever since because of my signature being attached to my retainers and I only have 2 compared to their several and fc mates. I am also a working person along with my friends so I cannot babysit my retainers or the market like they do all day unless I have a day off.

Nonetheless, I've just decided to take a pause on selling things and pulled what I did have up because the FC continued to grief me even when i shift prices. I hear and appreciate all of your guys' advice on putting up more things, fighting back and such but unlike them I don't thrive for drama or want to invest energy into their toxicity after all this. It seems like it would only fuel the fire. My friends and I are looking into shifting towards another data center to resolve this.

As for the mental health, yes that could indeed be a factor and I am probably not the first person they have targeted or engaged such tactics with nor will I be the last. I will not bash this person (or people) if they are struggling from such issues, but my hope is that if they are suffering then they need to reach out and seek professional help and follow their own slogan advice and relax because at the end of the day this is a game. I also hope the Dev's look into changing the mechanics for the market board for specific issues like this so that no player has to face this and those that engage in this disgusting behavior are properly disciplined for it.

[Bukachu]

How are they locating the items you've posted tho? considering market board runs on awful engine and there're tens of thousands of items