Please implement a listing fee!

[synaesthetic]

The economic issues are something all of us are familiar with and the causes are not quite as obvious as people would think. Yes, part of the issue why everything is so worthless is because everything is worthless. Relic weapons, dungeon drops, raid loot and token gear (darklight and AF2) are equal to/better than five-melded two-star crafted gear.

People get the crafted stuff made to gear alt jobs, or to fill spots when stuff doesn't drop, or to make minor tweaks to their attributes--I recently had our company crafter make me a pair of rose gold earrings, which I melded to replace darklight and gain a modest boost of critical hit rating and determination.

The philosophy tome materials are so cheap now because the roulette and LotA are flooding people with philosophy tomes they have no real use for. Most people either have all the darklight gear they'd ever want and/or have no interest in buying more. These tomes would otherwise go to waste, so people use them to buy potash, coke and animal fat, then put that stuff up on the market boards. The supply far, far outstrips the demand and thus the prices plummet.

There aren't many worthwhile things to sell on the market and what good markets there are quickly are crashed by a combination of a design flaw in the system (I'll explain this later), the concerted efforts of Real-Money Traders (RMT) to intentionally sink any given market and the sheer ignorance of players who do not understand economics and just want to get money ASAP.

Why the RMTs want to crash markets should be obvious, and it is twofold. They play the market, methodically undercutting in order to bring the average prices down very, very low, and then they buy up all of the supply and re-list it for a profit. This also has the added effect of creating more customers for the RMTs themselves--if nobody can make money off the market, then more people will be more likely to convert real money into fake money.

The real problem--and why all of these things save for the "worthwhile" issue can happen at all--is that the market board system has a serious fundamental design flaw:

There are no listing fees.

It really is that simple. The market system charges a tax after a sale is made to function as a currency sink, but the system does not charge you to list an item and you are only charged if your item sells. Worse still, the system allows you to freely alter the price of your item without removing it and re-listing!

This system is broken and it should be clear as to why. Without listing fees, when a new seller posts an item, it's very easy to undercut them. This leads to rampant, unchecked undercutting--and most players aren't especially smart about undercutting and tend to slice off huge chunks of their buy prices in order to sell as quickly as they can.

Fixing the economy completely would require making trade goods that were actually worthwhile, of course, but listing fees would go a long, long way to stabilizing the economy and allowing players to make money (assuming they had something worth selling).

The revised system would work like this:
- When a player lists an item on the market board, they would be charged a fee equal to 2% of the list price. This fee is non-refundable, regardless of whether the item sells or not.
- When a player adjusts the price of an item on the market board, they would be charged an additional fee equal to 2% of the new list price. As before, this would be non-refundable.
- When the item sells, the appropriate tax (less the amount of the listing fee) would be deducted from the amount earned.
- Currency entering the system would be adjusted to compensate.

Two percent isn't a whole lot, but it adds up, especially for those people who undercut their items multiple times per day. By charging that fee, players would be loathe to change the price of their item more than a few times at most. The markets would stabilize as a result. Additionally, the RMTs would find their efforts to crash the market stymied. Further additionally, this would be a far more effective currency sink than those hilariously stratospheric Free Company housing prices! Consider just how many transactions take place on the market boards on a daily basis... then compare that to how many plots have actually been purchased.

[Ildur]

I agree with this. The only reason I can think for Squee to design the market board like this is if they wanted for it to be 'nice' to the player. Or perhaps they were...I don't know. Something? I know Squee has some kind of logic but it's sometimes very weird and not very well put, like in this matter.

[Naunet]

The only difficulty with this is a listing fee punishes poor individuals who want to try and sell the big bank items and barely effects those who are already absurdly wealthy. I feel like this would have had to have been implemented from the start to really work properly, as you've already got a select few on each server with more gil than they know what to do with.

I do agree that it's a great way to make people think more about removing an item and relisting it to adjust the price, though.

[DBthaONE]

I don't like this at all, for a few reasons:

1. Undercutting is a word that is being applied in a bad way. Undercutting is what happens when there's competition. If all sellers explicitly or implicitly agreed upon a common price this would price fixing. That is bad.

2. The listing fee you propose would only be a tax. Taxes are in turn passed to the consumer. They don't affect the seller. Hurting consumers is worse on the market than sellers since the padded price would discourage buyers, especially those buying goods they don't need.

3. It punishes sellers who don't have Gil to sell the product also. Sure that'll lower the number of sellers, which could increase selling prices, but remember most of these sellers have to buy goods to make their ware. If they decide that they'll incur more cost they may not buy or produce goods. That is bad for the market as a whole.

The issue of RMTs and bots is a valid issue. It's using the game in an unintended manner.

[synaesthetic]

1. Undercutting is a word that is being applied in a bad way. Undercutting is what happens when there's competition. If all sellers explicitly or implicitly agreed upon a common price this would price fixing. That is bad.

This is not a real economy. NPC prices do not auto-adjust for the value of gil, and as a result, prices need to stabilize at a certain point. They're just in a mad race to the bottom. Currently, all trade goods are completely worthless with very few exceptions. Two-star gear goes for peanuts these days. Food is pretty much a dead market since it persists through death now. It's impossible to use the market to make any money, in relation to NPC prices.

I would agree with you if NPCs sold nothing, though. If FC housing was free, if all items had to be gathered, crafted or found as drops and there were no vendors in the game, then I would agree with you. But because NPC prices do not scale down, the market has become pointless. There needs to be some way of forcibly ensuring market stability and listing fees would go a long way to combat this rampant devaluation.

[Thunderz]

The market has too many sellers (Offer) is through the roof.

There needs to be a way to discourage people to change their listing every 3mins and this would be a great way of interrupting this bad behavior

This will help stabilize prices on the wards and actually make crafting enjoyable again (anything that goes from 100k down to 30k in a span of 1hr is just plain retarded)

When anything sells at cost or at a loss there is a serious problem and this would at least solve the abuse of undercutting

[DBthaONE]

That is not a real economy. That is true. Real economies have taxes, wages, overheads, etc. However items are devalued because they have lost their value. It sounds redundant, I know, but understand demand is down and supply is up. To get people to buy goods that they may not need, you need to lower the price if you want to sell anything.

I bought Titan's Heart for 9k. That is a ridiculously low price. However I did not need it, and still do not. If the price was the 50k like others I just wouldn't buy it. I bet that seller is happy they got some money for that. I bet other sellers are not. Those unhappy sellers wouldn't have gotten my money anyway. They can get another person's money, but if they can't maybe they should lower their prices as well.

If there were no vendors in this game, crafting would be more important than the main story itself. Never has that happened in a final fantasy game.

[synaesthetic]

Right, I understand that, but my point is as the value of goods further plummets, all of the NPC prices are effectively rising because our ability to make gil has been severely hampered. For purchasing things off the market boards, this isn't a bad thing since it's generally stayed proportional, but for buying a Free Company house this is an absurd nightmare. My company has been putting money away for months and we still can't even afford the smallest and cheapest of houses. And now it's become so difficult to make any money at all that I wouldn't be surprised if we never saved enough.

If the NPC value of gil matched the player value of gil, this wouldn't be a problem. But it doesn't, so the more deflation we get, the more NPC prices effectively rise.

[DBthaONE]

I think if NPC buy price was better we'd both be in agreement. I'm referring to the amount of Gil given for selling an item to NPC vendors. It wouldn't be that bad if market prices were down. My rose gold circlet HQ sells to vendors for 237 Gil, which is entirely too low. If this was the point you were making then im shorty for repeating you, but I'm not to sure what you mean otherwise.

[synaesthetic]

The point I'm trying to make is that as the value of gil goes down (due to undercutting, oversupply and under-demand, etc) the average amount of money a player can make per week goes down. However, the prices that NPCs sell things for (repairs, teleports, FC housing) does not adjust with it. So basically what the rampant undercutting is doing is hurting everyone who repairs their gear at an NPC, who uses the aetherytes to teleport, who buys dyes and low-level materials and especially hurts those Free Companies trying to buy a house.

If all of the NPC sell prices were to scale with the relative value of gil based on the market boards, then there'd be no problem. Of course this doesn't happen (it would be far too easy to exploit if it did), so the absurd undercutting and deflation is actively hurting everyone by effectively making everything sold by NPCs cost more.