Undercutting

[dspguy]

As another poster already put it: It's all about supply and demand.
If the demand for a product doesn't support/warrant the price then guess what: The price goes down.
If me undercutting a product causes the market for said product to immediately "crash" as you put it then it means the initial price was inflated to begin with.

Yes and no.

Many sales in this game are not decided by price, but simply by a player wanting that item. They don't care if the item costs 500k or 100k. They will buy it. Then it all comes down to who has the lowest price at that time. So, you can either sell it for 100,000... or 499,999. But it will sell all the same.

While I know supply and demand makes sense to a lot of people, in this MMO, that's not always the case.

Let me put it this way. Let's say I list a piece of gear for 250k. All the recent sales are for around 250k. And another player comes in and lists it for 200k. It isn't like this "deal" is announced serverwide that "Soandso is selling the Body Piece of Pwning for 50k less than the going rate!" Nope. What actually happens is that another player sees the price drop to 200k and then lists theirs for 150k. And the next person lists it for 100k - and so on and so on.

It has very little to do with the price (when it comes to commonly available items like crafted/gathered items). It has everything to do with who has the lowest price.

So either rob yourself of 100k by undercutting by 100k, or undercut by a few gil like the rest of players on the server. Players are fooling themselves if they think their items sell faster because of how much more they undercut by. They don't. And in the cases where someone undercuts by enough to warrant another player buying them out - all you did was hand a bigger profit to a competitor.