Overflowing stupidity

[Wulfies]

The ability to see how much items are listed for is killing crafting. In FFXI you bid based on past sells, here every idiot undercuts every item that has any volume of sales until they are losing money on each synth. I ask why?

Hi,

I think the way the system is currently designed allows for more transparency within the economy and that is a good thing. You are going to have under-cutters in this system but you will have them in your bid system in FFXI as well. To demonstrate, lets use the following example (please note the numbers are exaggerated to show variance but the concepts behind still remain). Since we are using FFXI as an example, I'll use an item from that game (Krakken Club). Lets have 4 sellers named Larry, Curly, Mo, and Fred (Fred will play the part of the evil under-cutter). Based on the system can see that the Krakken Club is being sold for at a consistent basis of say 1mm gil the last 8 times. So, lets remove the "veil" and show the prices of our four sellers:

Larry - 1,000,000.00
Curly - 1,010,000.00
Mo - 995,000.00
Fred - 600,000.00

Now, I was going to buy a Krakken Club. I won't assume that the going rate is 1mm (maybe it is just me, but I will put in a bid at 500k, i will not "win" so I will up the bid to 650k. Now, lo-and-behold, I just won a Krakken Club for 650k (I am happy and I go about my merry way telling my friends to search and try to bid in that price range). Word will spread to Larry, Curly, and Mo and they will panic and reduce their price because they want their Krakken Club to sell.

Now, Fred has jsut de-valued the Krakken Club by 35%. By making the market system a blind bidding you really have not reduced the undercutting. That will always be there regardless of what you try.

This rampant undercutting is just a SYMPTOM of the underlying problem which is the rampant botting (both mob bots like the ones that farm fleece and Diremite Webs and the mining/logging bots). This is the real problem and until this is resolved the market is FUBAR'd.

There are things that have never made sense to me like this: peacock ore selling for 25k each, you need 9 for an ingot as well as a rose gold nugget. Now the nugget is going to cost you about 2k with all nq mats(gold ore was about 400-500 each) so we're at about 227k for this rose gold ingot in cost, nq sells for 200k hq for 250k. I love the logic that on an nq you deserve to lose money and on hq you deserve roughly 10% profit. The market is broken, I was making base relics and we were all doing well at about 20k-30k profit with materia melded in an hq, now we lose money or break even because about 2 people keep it crashed. Nobody cares that the leather workers are charging 100k for that base relic.

Crafters should be able to make 10% on nq's and 25% on harder hq's. You gotta pay to be lazy.

Here I think you are making one huge assumption. The assumption is that you are buying everything from the market boards. For me at least I run out and gather/kill most of the raw mats. So all that is lost for me is the time spent doing this process. To which, if I feel my time that I took to gather these mats is worth 200k, who is to question that?

An example, I tried to make a Weaver AF cap fr the first time (I failed because I didn't realize I needed more durability than I had for careful synthts, so that's all my fault). I went out and farmed the fleece for the woolen cloth, harvested the Crawler Cocoons for the Twinthread, and Logged the trees for my Chocobo Feather. Now if I had succeeded, I can/will sell that for what ever I feel and if I am strapped for cash, i will "fire sale" that crap stuff off.