Overflowing stupidity

[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.