How do you react to being undercut?

[waca]

And does anyone ever consider that people are manipulating the market to obtain cheep items. I have done this list an item for a super low price watch others under cut, then buy out the market use those mats and sell your own later at a price to cover your costs. It works great.

People constantly manipulating price of certain materia.

example: This was sold with 4.5k gil last night when i went to bed.

[HEC]

I've had a couple of tells asking me to stop selling things so low.

Really - how did they found our your character's name from your retainer's names?

EDIT: Well - your's is clearly easy to get but not so much for others (unless using "signed" items indeed)

[Wulfies]

Really - how did they found our your character's name from your retainer's names?

When you hover over the the item on the MB you can sometime see who made it. I noticed this when i sell my HQ gear on the MB.

The BEST way to kill the community - to DICTATE them to how much and when they can('t) post:
The following errors occurred with your submission
New forum post cannot be made due to either you have reached to your daily limit or your main character's level is not high enough.
SE - please do not replace a proper Forum Moderating with weak attemps to "moderate" the forum by putting silly limitations across the whole board! All you'll achieve this way is to turn away members trying to help others or simply chat with others.

I never new there were limitations to how many posts you can have in a day...I know there is a 1k limit on post size (which is stupid) but not the post count limit

[Wazabi]

People constantly manipulating price of certain materia.

example: This was sold with 4.5k gil last night when i went to bed.

It's pretty easy to spot these kind of manipulation...but how much gils were they able to make through this? The person in your picture would need to sell at least 12 PietyIII at 20k to break even...and within that 7 hour span, he only managed to sell 3. Manipuilations such as these has a window of time for you to capitalize. The longer it is, the more likely some other players supplying that goods is going to come in and undercut you, which will ruin your play. High population server makes it harder to pull that off.

[waca]

It's pretty easy to spot these kind of manipulation...but how much gils were they able to make through this?
High population server makes it harder to pull that off.

In my opinion Piety III is not a very good target. (But someone did it anyway)
There are some other materias, I believe some may figured it out, I won't name it here, have greater demand where these manipulators made money from, although I am only assuming they are making money since they have been doing this for a while.

Yojimbo is a relative low population server, I don't know how to summarize up our market habitat in a few lines, but I hope Wind shards sell at 44 gil, Lightning 40 gil (lowest price/bot price) can give you a slightly vague idea.

[Wazabi]

In my opinion Piety III is not a very good target. (But someone did it anyway)
There are some other materias, I believe some may figured it out, I won't name it here, have greater demand where these manipulators made money from, although I am only assuming they are making money since they have been doing this for a while.

Yojimbo is a relative low population server, I don't know how to summarize up our market habitat in a few lines, but I hope Wind shards sell at 44 gil, Lightning 40 gil (lowest price/bot price) can give you a slightly vague idea.

Yeah, I can paint the market picture in your server.

[synaesthetic]

Free listing and re-pricing would work fine and be a really good thing...

If all currency sinks--repair costs, housing costs, teleportation costs (the big long term one)--would automatically adjust for the current value of gil.

But they don't.

So what does rampant undercutting do? Cause massive deflation and a mismatch in how much players believe gil is worth and how much the game claims it is worth. Square only needs to change the system slightly to stop this (and it will dissuade RMT activity as well, since they are responsible for crashing most of the markets with their gather-bots).

How can Square fix this? Really simple.

1) Charge a brokerage fee when listing the item instead of a single tax when the item sells. This way people will be wary about pricing items too low with the intention of crashing a market.
2) Refund the brokerage fee if the item does not sell, but is not pulled down by the player (when the listing expires). This prevents players from being punished because their item didn't sell.
3) Charge a new brokerage fee every time the player adjusts the price of an item, or takes it down and relists it. This stops undercutting wars--people aren't going to undercut multiple times per day because it'll cost them each time they do it. You get market price stability as a result.
4) Charge the sales tax as per usual, when/if the item sells. Just a currency sink, nothing to see here.

This is no different from what any other auction service in the real world (i.e. eBay) does. If you list your old iPhone on eBay but nobody buys it, eBay still charges you for the listing. Most MMO auction houses also do this--you pay a smaller fee to list the item, and a larger "cut" to the AH when your item sells.

[Wazabi]

I get your logic on this issue, but that's not exactly how currency works, and definately not how deflation happens, and I can see how the misconception leads you to derive your conclusion. Your proposal won't "fix" things as you've intended (if any, it might crash the market faster). The issue about listing fees and its shortfall and misconception has been discussed here:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...taxes.../page2

Rampant undercutting brings the price of an item closer to its equilibrium price, and does not cause deflation. Deflation means general decrease in the price level of all goods, not just some of them. Thus undercutting happens, which reduce the price of an item, simply because there's an abundant of supply and little demand, period. Once it hits equilibrium or near it, undercutting slows down. Just look at the price of items in some heavily populated servers (Tonbery) and compare them to less populated servers (Malboro) and you'll see. If rampant undercutting consistently happens for an item, that simply means that item's price is not at equilibrium yet...otherwise it's just a short term thing.

[Dragon_Lord]

There is no such thing as undercutting. Undercutting is a term cooked up by someone who thinks the economical world revolves around them. They get upset when someone sets a price lower then theirs. Really?! What do you live under a rock? Look around you the real world, and you will see that selling items lower than the competition is normal. Specially when you tried to set outrageously high prices.

Let me give and example of outrageous. I went to buy a level five trade gear, In the market it's over 1000 Gils, but at the vendors it's a tenth of that. Really?! Really?!!

Supply and demand runs the economy, not some dodo head that tries to set prices with the argument that anything lower ruins the economy. It ruins your little economical world, but not the economy as a whole.

In the real world, people sell their products at a competitive prices and try to sell at a lower price then the competition. Why do you think Wal-Mart is so big? Because they sell at lower prices.

[Firepower]

I find the intention of not releasing all furniture recipies before the patch an interesting one as that will be what dictates the price of the market for the foreseeable future. As we do not know the required materials people cannot gather the materials in advance to avoid a massive inflation to the materials that are needed to make the most popular furniture.

As housing land prices gradually decrease the % of the playerbase able to own land to make a house increases allowing a steady market of furniture demand. But the cost of land is a huge tax on the economy further driving down the available gil players have to purchase with.

There is no fix to the economy or undercutting as almost every item is free (minus cost of repairing gear) with unlimited free supply the only real cost is time so items are essentially priced at how much people value their time used to gather the items compared to the standard demand/supply. With a still decent number of gatherer bots the time used to gather materials is almost 0 as nobody is actually playing the game and they can perpetually undercut the item down to almost nothing and then move to another item.