Please Squeenix, implement blind bids on the markets...

[Hawklaser]

Supply and Demand, if you can drop something by say 20k and sell a bunch of them and still make a profit it makes sense to drop the price of an item.

The problem when you do that there is usually another 4-5 people that will undercut you even more. So something that might have went for 100k before, you dropped to 80k, and those other undercutters fighting to sell theirs first will drive it down to 10k before long. You just have to hope there is enough demand for an item to counteract that.

Something else one needs to keep in mind is some items have huge demand spikes. So just because an item is not needed on Tuesday, should not necessarily start undercutting the price drastically because it has not sold on Thursday when on Friday the demand spikes drastically. Most places don't mess with their prices because of a slow day or two.

IMO the real problem here isn't the market board itself but the fact that when listing items on your retainer you have no immediate means of checking other current listings. A lot of the massive 50% undercutting is coming from lazy players who don't bother to actually check the prices before listing and so use a random figure in their head... this is also why you frequently see listings of crafted goods at less than their material cost, because some people don't bother to check.

The supply and demand concept requires market stability to function properly, and when you have random people pricing goods using arbitrary numbers that have no relation to their actual value you have zero stability.

You actually can check the current listing prices for the items from your retainer as you are setting the price.