Overflowing stupidity

[Wazabi]

I think the only overflowing stupidity here are people who didn't do sufficient profit analysis, supply/demand analysis on an item that they want to sell, went on and craft the item anyway, fail to sell it at the price that they want, and then blame it to undercutters.

[beth_ann]

The real problem is not the undercutting, which is crazy enough in itself as the sales of items can (depending on the server) go quickly. What irritates me is when you have crafters who undercut the price it costs to sell to an NPC! I take the time to research prices and try to come up with a fair market price based on what NPC are selling it for and try to align myself with current sellers, often charging more than the lowest seller and my items still sell at a steady rate. The items I refuse to sell are the ones that are below rock bottom. If only everyone would use 1 brain cell to understand that markets are about making money and not about undercutting everyone and their mother, then the flow of the market would improve. Thank you for letting me rant.

[stpetepiper]

It's not like your always losing business from someone undercutting you, sometimes it's just people adding additional business to the economy. As a hypothetical (using totally made up prices) I go to look for Iron ingots, 10 stacks are listing 10,000g which is a price that I decide there is just no way I'm ever going to pay for whatever reason, and 1 stack is listed at 5k which I think is reasonable, the person selling at that price isn't stealing your business because I wasn't ever going to buy your product anyways. People seem to act like everytime they are undercut by a large amount that they are somehow losing a potential sale. Same w/ a 2 star item, if everyone values it at 500k, which i don't want to pay, and 1 person decides they are willing to take the cut for whatever reason, and sells it for 100k, I might buy it. I get my item, they get the money they wanted, you haven't lost a sale.

[Wulfies]

Simple solution is simple:

Charge listing fees.

No, seriously. Most MMOs require that you pay a listing fee (usually some small percentage of the item's list price) in order to place it up on the market. Do this whenever an item is listed and whenever the item's price is changed and you'll see the rampant undercutting grind to a rapid halt. The markets will stabilize very quickly and people might actually be able to make a decent profit from gathering and crafting.

They already have a tax system. See my quote regarding changing taxes on how SE is slowly shrinking the amount of gil to prevent market inflation (this is from a thread regarding changing taxes which i am not for):

SE has already implemented some seriously, imho crappy, ways to significantly destroy gil.

1) if you came over form 1.0 you lost 90% of the gil stored (my tens of millions of gil went to just millions of gil)
2) selling drops from a lvl 50 mob/gathering spot will only get you 10-12 gil at the max. Same with the high end crafting gear (i have yet to see anything crafter made that sells for over 100 gil)
3) Repair costs (till they "fixed/reduced" the rates) were just a way to suck money out of the economy.
4) Teleports! good god the amount of gil it takes to go rom Uldah to Gridana or Uldah to Limsa let alone anywhere to Mor Dhona or Coerthas.
5) Foreth-coming Housing - thankfully its not a buy the house (millions of gil just for the house w/o furniture) and have to pay a monthly rent cause that would be crazy talk.
6) tax on selling 5% is fine as is. With the Market Boards, there is no money being created in game, all we have is just money changing hands, less the fees of course.

To top that off look at how you make gil:

1) side quests (which to my knowledge can only be completed once) and even then, I finished a lvl 45 side quest and walked away with less than 700 gil.
2) leve quests, (now i have only experience from a few crafting and mostly gathering) give small rewards as well (eg. lvl 35 gathering/crafting leves give from 300-600). For crafters that barely would cover the costs of the materials.


Based on this, I think they are set on destroying money quickly.

@Alzelia - Very Well said. People do expect obscene profits when selling their crap stuff on the MB and when they have to lower their price to compete they get worked up with "rage" and say the market system is broken. People feel that they are entitled to sell their gear for max profits but will only buy at the lowest price. This will never work

Next I wish to cover the "I farmed all the mats, when I sold whatever item it was pure profit." While this is technically true, it ignores a concept in economics called an opportunity cost. Yes a person who did this made gil, but they also lost the gil they could have made. For example, and I'm just making up these numbers, but lets say it takes 5 minutes to farm the shards for a single synth, and 5 minutes to farm a different material, lets say fleece, for a single synth. If fleece sells for 500 gil and shards sell for 50, it makes more sense to farm the fleece for 10 minutes and buy the shards off the market. You would net 450 gil from that.

I've been trying to say this in most of my posts, there is more to selling than just at what price your object is selling for currently on the market. Some people do not seem to understand this.

It is the crafter's responsibility to find markets which are or are not profitable. When I decide on a market to sell stuff I look not only at the going prices for the product(s) I will be making but also at the history to see how fast said product is moving.

Well, now that I coverd those issues, let me tell you guys what the REAL problem with the economy is, and why 1.0 had a much healthier economy that 2.0. I will give you a hint, its not gil sellers, housing prices, botters, undercutters, or stupidity of the people who play ffxiv. The problem is the lack of gear and/or item sinks. The biggest gear sink in ffxiv right now is materia. Materia as it is now is nothing like the gear/material sink it was in 1.0. To those who didn't play 1.0, back then, if you failed a meld, you lost EVERYTHING, you lost the gear, the materia, and the catalyst. In order to get all 5 slots melded, you HAD to succeed on your first try EACH time. I blew up 50 HQ gryophonskin tunics in 1.0 just to have 1 of them left at the end with a triple meld.

Oh the amount of Raptorskin Satchel Purses I had to burn through to get myself a tri-meld plus all those materia. Also you forgot that there were certain materia that could only fit into certain spots and certain catalysts worked on certain materia. That was fun trying to match up and kept people buying loads of gear.

[Zourin]

Lets take steel. Prices on my server had stabilized pre 2.1 to a gentle fluctuation between 200-250 a bar. Surprisingly enough, the Amal'ja have a price point of 258, so either floor or ceiling, you would think that the price would generally centralize around this number to maximize profits.. High qualities sold well in modest quantities, being significantly more time consuming to craft, assuming you didn't quicksynth thousands of ingots.

Only instead the price crashed to 100-110. Apparently, everyone clamoring for gil over the housing fiasco did exactly that. Thousands of metal ingots flooding the market. Thousands of ores flooding the market. HQ cobalt and mythril ores going for 30 gil. bomb ash for 40gil. 20's of thousands of shards driving some flavors below the 10gil waterline. Darksteel Ore plummeting to 200 apeice. Gold ore doing the same. Other goldsmithing ingredients that were 'trash' to begin with saw an influx of oversupply.

The only person making money I know of right now is the guy with 16 retainers all selling 20 different ingredient/component/etc at a time in stacks of 1, and almost never leaves town.

Ores down, ingots down, plates & rivets. Equipment always was pretty terrible. Given these are my primary markets, I've had little choice but to abandon the boards entirely and go straight to the gil faucet for the scant few drops I can coax from the stone walls of the dungeon finder. I would make more gil running a dungeon than synthing over such small profit margins and losing most of it to repairs.

[HEC]

... synthing over such small profit margins and losing most of it to repairs.

In regards of repairs:

- if you craft lower recepies - use alternative gear sets without materia in and then convert it after binding
- don't use a full set if it's not needed to finish the craft
- do repairs yourself and only when it's at 0% - it will drop the cost of repairs to 1/3 - 1/4 if you'll purchase dark matter from NPC or you can even use extra GC seals to purchas dark matter (now a little better since 2.1 when they've dropped the "cost" of the dark matter in seals)

[Asteldian]

I am more bothered by the fact you can see what the item has previously been selling for. I have no issue with competing with current sales - smart players don't bother undercutting because they know their item will still sell (particularly for popular items). I have seen material selling from 40k down to 15k and still selling again regularly at 35k (by selling I mean ACTUALLY being bought) so the undercutters ultimately missed out on a lot of money trying to deflate the market costs. If someone undercuts too much I buy it and resell it.

[Fiosha_Maureiba]

I am more bothered by the fact you can see what the item has previously been selling for. I have no issue with competing with current sales - smart players don't bother undercutting because they know their item will still sell (particularly for popular items). I have seen material selling from 40k down to 15k and still selling again regularly at 35k (by selling I mean ACTUALLY being bought) so the undercutters ultimately missed out on a lot of money trying to deflate the market costs. If someone undercuts too much I buy it and resell it.

For finished products, I would have to disagree. Two star accessories that used to sell dropped from 1+ million to 100k. Other two star gear similiar in the 700k range. I watched over a 1.5 month as people undercut me on those specific items until the patch came and now it's unrealistic to keep the items up there.

It's smarter to cut your losses as the markets change. Maybe if I had eight retainers, I may leave items up, but my inventory space / retainer included, is crying in the meantime.

[Asteldian]

2* recipes are an exception. Their cost was always going to drop significantly as time went on because less and less people need the tomes so just blow them on ingredients. Add in 2.1 giving more tomes more easily plus treasure hunts and the ingredient costs drop and therefore so does the gear

[Xystic]

2* recipes are an exception. Their cost was always going to drop significantly as time went on because less and less people need the tomes so just blow them on ingredients. Add in 2.1 giving more tomes more easily plus treasure hunts and the ingredient costs drop and therefore so does the gear

This is fairly true. We speculated on day 1 that 2 star items would drop significantly over time. The reason why they were so profitable was because 2 star crafters were scarce at the initial start of the game. Players monopolized on such facts and did anywhere from a 1000% to 3000% mark up for their services. In any MMO, early game mark-up of goods, results in easy gil and its very easy to execute by any level of marketer.

The time of early markup on monopolized crafts are gone. We are at the point where true MMO marketers will only continue to be well off at this point and further on.