Poor NPC vendor sell-backs

[Eravel]

I've been wondering for a while now why the sell-back value for items is so low. Weps/armour that would cost a couple of thousand gil to buy from NPC's can be sold back to them for anything as low as 20-80 gil sometimes, and items that require lvl 50 BTN etc. sometimes only stretch to under 10 gil/ea. Can anyone shed some light on why this is? I hate to reference XI, but I seem to remember (vaguely) that you would get at least 25-30% of the purchase price back when you sold something to a NPC, and I can't help but wish that was the way it worked in XIV too. Seems the only way to go about selling thing in XIV is the AH and even that doesn't work for bound items.

Thanks in advance for any answers

[ChrysaorUSon]

All about RMT my friend. RMT would utilize it to make mass gil to sell to player's like you and me. Simple really tbh.

[Eravel]

Oh, I hadn't thought about it like that. Sad that we all suffer for the actions of a few, but I suppose that's the way it has to be. Thanks very much for clearing that up for me

[ChrysaorUSon]

Yeah, the rmt would buy the gear or w/e piece and make a macro to spam sell it. Example: Buy it, resale it, buy it, resale it and so on..

[Enkidoh]

Not just that, but even normal players would abuse it, as inevitably one particular junk item would be found to give a big return and hence would be overcamped.

Such a situation was particularly notorious in FFXI, such as the old beastmen blood affair - leeches would drop said item which players discovered could be sold in bulk for a large return to npc stores, hence players would overcamp low level leeches (mostly on the beaches in the level 10-20ish area Biburiumu Peninsula) - it got ridiculous by one stage. In the end SE solved it by greatly reducing the resale amount for junk items, much like what FFXIV now has.

[Dliver]

To facilitate the market.

[Astarica]

The low vendor price is to make it less likely you vendor your stuff and more likely you use the market. This has nothing to do with RMT. The most valuable common item is a shard, which is easily farmed by RMT guys. In fact, RMT is probably helped by the fact that there is no high end items that are worth significant money to a vendor, so there is no need for them to invest in a higher level character. In a game like WoW, the stuff that drops decent cash usually require a close to max level to kill. In this game, pretty much everything sells for 1 gil to a vendor so killing level 1 stuff for animal skins nets you as much money as killing level 50 stuff for whatever.

[Eravel]

I understand the need to have a well utilized trading system between players in an MMO, a la the auction house in XIV, but can there be no happy medium between the AH and NPC vendor's? I for one despise the fact that there is no viable alternative to the AH, forcing us to have to deal with the constant price wars and having to continually check and adjust pricing just in-case I've went from being the cheapest supplier of an item to the most expensive in the space of a few hours :/

[Resheph]

You also have to consider that if items sold for decent prices crafters would just craft items and npc sell directly. I did it plenty in 1.0 and made a pretty good profit while leveling up my Goldsmith.

[ChrysaorUSon]

I checkmy stuff every 20 minutes so GOOD LUCK! haha! Can't get over on ppl that do that....unless your on the controller or kb constantly like me.