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

[MisakiSatomi]

[Hawklaser]

The 50% undercut is not the minimum price that I would want. Hell, some of the stuff I would sell for 20% of the market rate. I sell for a price that I feel compensates me for the time/effort that I spent acquiring the item. Could I just sell for 85%? Sure! It would probably not sell as fast, and where do you draw the line on "legitimate"? 85%? 80%? 75%? See where I am going?

Usually I sell for a price halfway between my desired minimum and the market price. If people undercut me, oh well, I can re-list.

As for profit, exactly how much do you think it costs me per item when I mine/harvest/fish something up? Think about it long and hard.

I have Miner at 50 along with Alch and Armorer, so I do know the costs when you go get the items yourself. Gear obtainment + Travel + Repairs + Time(both in getting the item, and leveling what it takes to obtain said item). Most raw mats take very little besides time to acquire in bulks. However you actually are not making any profit until said costs are taken care of. Just going to use bought HQ 50 Miner gear to illustrate. Said gear is likely going to cost you about 250,000 gil, to be able to mine whatever you want, start adding your travel costs, repairs, and time and the initial cost to be able to mine said items is actually up there a nice ways. Now if you are crafting items, you also have to take into account what you loose by doing said craft, sure it can cost you very little gil to go gather an item, but are you going to synth something whose end product is worth less than the raw mats it takes to make it? Not if you are smart.

The problem with rampant undercutting is that it destabilizes a market. Making it very hard to justify gathering or crafting said items, because they can loose so much value in day to to the point they are no longer worth the investment to obtain or craft. I am all for cheaper goods, but I am not happy about people constantly devaluing the investments behind the items either.

[Arkista]

Blind Bids Yes Please. Undercutting is getting stupid on my server. It's good for some stuff, but things like tome items are selling for super cheap now. Greedy lil kids trying to get gil to buy their titan wins.

[zenmetsu]

The problem with rampant undercutting is that it destabilizes a market. Making it very hard to justify gathering or crafting said items, because they can loose so much value in day to to the point they are no longer worth the investment to obtain or craft. I am all for cheaper goods, but I am not happy about people constantly devaluing the investments behind the items either.

Ding! You are unwilling to do the work that I will do for the pay that I am willing to accept. As long as you are still trying to sell the same product as I, you are a threat. You will either undercut me, or list at the same price and possibly take my sales. In the case of crafting, you will be buying up the materials that I need, and thus, increasing the cost of those materials. In the case of mob drops, like fleece/hides/meat you are competing for kills. It isn't always about undercutting.

Blind Bids Yes Please. Undercutting is getting stupid on my server. It's good for some stuff, but things like tome items are selling for super cheap now. Greedy lil kids trying to get gil to buy their titan wins.

You assume too much. Specifically, that a blind bidding system is going to stop people from undercutting. But the Titan bit was humorous. Would be a damned shame if everyone else ended up with their Relic+1s... you'd have a hard time feeling special.

[Rhapsodical]

Blind Bids Yes Please. Undercutting is getting stupid on my server. It's good for some stuff, but things like tome items are selling for super cheap now. Greedy lil kids trying to get gil to buy their titan wins.

So what is super cheap to you on the tome crafting mats? They were 30k on my server. Most in trade chat want them for 20k. People get a good portion sold at 25k. The market is starting to get flooded with the item because well people no longer need those points. The supply is starting to overrun the demand. Whenever a game launches it's about beating the pack to endgame and getting the big money before everyone else catches up.

Also spamming CM isn't even close to hard. I do a run in like 35mins. So like 1hr I made an easy 25k. 25k that is merely sitting on my character holdings millions already. Maybe square needs to start finding some worthwhile money sinks.


zenmetsu- I spent 250k to get my Garuda and Titan kill asap. Since I focused on crafting and making as much profit as possible. So I let people with +1 relics simply carry me then I can just go back and get the darklight and other gear.

[Tiraelina]

I'd like to see the logic behind these massive undercuts on items that are moving steadily if not rapidly at their current price. I just imagine they don't like making money of any kind. They also have no concern for keeping the markets alive when they flood it with stacks and stacks instead of staggering it.

[Hawklaser]

The only decisions made in haste are people that just blindly charge the same rate as everyone else. Oh wait, undercutting by 1gil is OK, I forgot. Oh wait, someone else came along and undercut by another 1gil... then another... and another... SHIT, now the market price is 5 gil less than what you originally listed it for, better go re-list it. 2 hours have passed, you go to check the market, the price is 10gil lower now because of people dropping the price by 1gil at a time. Hmm... see a trend? THE PRICE IS TOO DAMNED HIGH.

You aren't getting it. If people are trying to sell an item for 20k gil, and I can be happy with 10k, why would I sell it for 20k? We only have 20 slots on our retainers after all. So while you are trying to sell 5-6 items for 20k gil, i'm selling 20 of them 10k each. By time my stuff sells, i've made/gathered more and replenish my retainer with new stock. Fast forward 5 hours, I've emptied my retainer 3 times, sold 60*20k = 1,200k gil, and you've sold zero. I go off and do something else or log out, the price creeps back up in the absence of my supply and maybe, just maybe, you manage to sell a few before I log in and start at it again.

I *have* driven you, the competition, out of the market. You refuse to lower your price because selling for my price is "not worth it" in your eyes. In actuality, trying to sell for "your price" is what is "not worth it".

34,817,220... it represents an amount of something that I have, that you likely would love to have. If the corresponding number for your character is greater than this, then congratulations. If it is lower than this, then you probably should not be telling me about economics within this game. I went there... at great peril of looking like a douche, but sometimes people need a reality check.

First off, 35 million gil on a Legacy server is no impressive feat, considering plenty of people on Legacy servers started out XIV:ARR with 10M in gil not to mention other items. Second off, it does not take a large amount of gil to get how economics works, more often than not instead of making a massive bankroll of gil, I get what I need then continue doing other things.

Only time I would complain about an item being dropped by 1 gil increments is if said item was only worth 10-20gil to begin with, and at that point may as well just start vendoring it unless selling 40 stacks in the time it takes to get 40 more. People have not driven me out of the markets I choose to participate in, I actually do very well in the markets I am in, I just know better than to screw up an off market I may need to return to in the future. I take a very patient approach to getting to the correct market price as there is no way to know that without participating in the market for a while. If an item is not selling, I will adjust the price down provided the market is not currently being crashed, and if I can't keep them in stock I adjust upwards slowly. There is usually very little reason to drop a price of something by over 50% unless it has not sold in over a week or two outside of impatience.

I also don't blindly charge the same as other people, I use the market history a lot. It's actually how I make most of the gil I do when I need it. After all I'd rather waste a little time learning a market then blindly picking what to sell.

As to you being happy selling at half price, you could likely have even more gil if you would have sold closer to what the market price was. I would not be surprised if most of the people buying your half price stuff is turning around and reselling it, all you did was save them time unless you flood the market to the point your price sticks.

Ding! You are unwilling to do the work that I will do for the pay that I am willing to accept. As long as you are still trying to sell the same product as I, you are a threat. You will either undercut me, or list at the same price and possibly take my sales. In the case of crafting, you will be buying up the materials that I need, and thus, increasing the cost of those materials. In the case of mob drops, like fleece/hides/meat you are competing for kills. It isn't always about undercutting.

It is actually really easy to spot attempts like that, and those I don't mind. As have a few spots planning to do that soon as the free transfers are over. I actually do a lot of things much cheaper than MB, but I don't use the MB for those in the interest of preserving multiple sources of income.

[PTrick]

Come on people. This is how economics works in the real world.

Undercutting always happens, and at some point, it will go too far in a market. At that point, businesses will start losing money and they'll start shedding jobs and going under (recession). At some point, enough businesses will leave the market so that other (generally better run) businesses can start making money again and growth begins anew (expansion). This assumes no government intervention to keep poorly run companies in business.


In an MMO, this just happens at a higher rate of speed. One of the harder issues is determining marginal cost of production. If you harvest everything yourself (shards, items, etc), your marginal cost is quite low (repair costs + time). If you buy everything off the market, you're competing at a disadvantage and would be losing money. Now, FFXIV allows you to do everything and anything, so people willing to do everything can price much more competitively. In an equilibrium market, they would likely be able to price just a few gil short of everyone else and make a healthy profit; however, we're not talking about a world made up of business men trying to maximize their profits. We're talking about a world made up of teens, adults, college students -- many of whom don't understand marginal cost and marginal profit much less care. "I want to level carpenter, so I'll make 99 walnut lumber and sell them for whatever I can get". This will lead to much faster undercutting than in the real world, but it should also lead to much faster adjustments as they spend all their gil making their items and making no profit and boom, they decide crafting is stupid and quit crafting.

I price my items based on how I feel about them. For example, HQ steel dolabras were selling at 15K recently but I felt 12K was a reasonable price, so I did 12k. HQ Silver ingots dropped as low as 600 a piece, but I still price mine at 1.2k. It takes awhile longer to sell, but they do eventually. I play the market not based simply on other people's prices and the price history, but based on what is actually needed. There are alot of lancers, gathering is really difficult without HQ gear, crafting is much more beneficial with HQ gear. So, I make things that target those areas and price the items based on what I would pay for them taking into account rarity of the items (leather items get a price boost, velveteen too).

Also, you should notice that frequently the undercutters are selling large quantities of items. 99 steel ingots for 150 gil, for example. I don't want to buy 99 steel ingots very often, so I doubt most other players want 99. If you put up say 5 for 250, you'll get the sale because while the marginal cost per unit is higher, they won't end up with a ton of extra inventory left over.

The demand side could use some addressing. I generally don't bother trying to sell most battlecraft gear because there's not a demand for it. I target items needed for quests, gathering, or crafting as those are the only pieces of gear where the HQ items are a real upgrade that people are willing to shell out for. A re-balancing of item drop quality versus crafted quality and a reduction in the number of items handed out via quests (replace them with allagan so they can afford gear) would help crafters immensely, but I'm holding my breath on that one. Until then, crafting provides me gil via levequests and keeps my battleclasses outfitted with full sets of pretty good gear. (Having a full HQ set as soon as you hit a level is pretty valuable and then you only have to upgrade if/when you find a better dungeon piece)

[Pride_Xiv]

Funny how the OP is saying this is an SE problem and not a problem with people. Thing is I undercut because I want my stuff to sell faster than the other listed items. I also factor in that people are gonna list items after me so I pick a price that I am happy at letting the item be sold for.

In FFXI you couldn't see what the prices for items were set at but could see what they sold for just like you can in ARR. These are "markets" and not an Auction house meaning when you go to a market you see the prices for items before you buy. Markets and auctions houses are two totally different types of business. To me, the market place is working as it should and people just hate people selling the exact same thing for cheaper.

[Knives]

Nothing would change, people would still undercut dramatically and prices would still fluctuate heavily depending almost entirely on supply and demand. At least with the way it is currently, I can see the actual pricing for items and price mine accordingly rather than going by a selling history.