Quote Originally Posted by Elexia View Post
Yeah, sucks for people actually trying to make gil. Even doing leves isn't a good source of gil anymore as they adjusted it (and barring the 100,000 leve history achievement one.) Some people actually gather and craft to...buy thing. Shocking I know. So while you don't care (which I guess is the mentality of a lot of people who play this game) others do it and it is quite annoying being undercut by a very large margin.

If you want to "just get rid of stuff" you do know there's literally hundreds of NPCs you can sell it to, right? Nothing is "too expensive" beyond the new materia which people seriously believe someone will buy for 1-4 mil for almost no upgrade in performance lol.



Actually I do, and people obviously know the worth of some items that it's pretty much unaffected by a "free market" since prices for certain things, as exampled tier IV materia generally stay in the 100-500k range. If they're trying to compete with each other, don't you think people would drop it even lower rather than having basically a set price range for it? It's hard to compete when you're selling at the same price as your competition >.>

Since isn't a free market basically an unrestricted economy? You'd think people would be more likely to undercut certain luxury items atm (Lightning Brands and Tier IV INT/Lightning materia are basically luxury now.)
100k-500k is an "undercut" price. Think about how much these items cost when they debut (and subsequently how much they have fallen). Equilibrium pricing is a function of time, competing goods, and general inflation- Tier IV materia might stabilize around this range for the foreseeable future (equilibrium- supply and demand) until something better comes out (competing goods; price reduction- maturity and decline). The price may also wave with the cost of items on a whole (inflation/deflation). Look at how an item in XI changed in price (NOT value) from 2006 to the present. Or, for a real world example, consider the value of currency in Zimbabwe- I recently acquired a 100 trillion dollar bill for $5 on ebay (paying for the novelty)... the actual worth of which is about 2 cents. Back in 2005 a bus ride on Zimbabwe's public transport cost about 50 billion dollars.

A free market is in theory an unrestricted economy yes... the "invisible hand" guides it first and foremost. But in 99.9% of cases there will be some macro level controls that affect pricing. It's difficult to say for certain, but we probably won't see a dramatic shift in the pricing of these items until something superior comes out. Keep in mind, the principle of undercutting is based on the tradeoff of earning less revenue for a quicker sale. Such is why you see people undercut by 1 gil, 100 gil, 1000 gil, or whatever. People will not undercut an item to the point where it's undervalued because the free market will correct this.