Please implement a listing fee!

[synaesthetic]

Let's say you've got 10 items up for 5000 gil each. Someone comes in and puts up another item for 4000 gil, undercutting the other 10 sellers. If the other 10 sellers want to undercut, they'll have to pay again to do so. Some probably will do it, but others may not because they'd be losing money in fees as well as the lower sale price. Let's say 3 people undercut the 4000 price to 3800. Then some buyers come along and snap up the 3800 items and the 4000 items. The remaining 7 listed items are all still 5000, and thus anyone else who puts something up will either put it up for 5000 to match the current price, or they'll undercut, but the rate at which they do is slowed.

In the current system what happens is that one person who lists for 4000, all 10 of their competitors come back and undercut because it doesn't cost them anything to do so. The average price falls to below 4000 and now anyone who lists anything will do so at the lower price, causing the average price to fall even more. Undercutting once upon initial listing is far less likely to crash the market than being able to freely undercut an infinite number of times.

Does this leave the market open to being cornered by people who have either lots of gil or lots of stock or both? Sure it does. But so does the current market. Free listing doesn't stop this from happening, because it happens all the time.

Will listing fees alone fix the economy? Of course not. People need items worth selling and right now everything is worthless. SE desperately needs to change things so that people have something of value to sell, but even if they do that, with no listing fees, the market is extremely vulnerable to being crashed intentionally by market flooding RMTs and botters. It'd be a far greater risk to try and crash the market by flooding it with massively undercut items if you were being charged every time you do it.