Gearbinding - can we get rid of it?

[Felis]

Yes, that would indeed fix the problem (though I'd argue that if they did that, there's no longer a need for equipment to be lost if a meld fails). The current issue is that the top of the line gear in the game has no crafting element. If the BiS gear required melds, that would add a much larger drain of items to the economy.

Yes, it would be good if we can at least meld dungeon gears over ilevel 60. Maybe with a lower success chance than normal gear to make it not overpowered.

[Nekodar]

Incredibly stupid thought. Would heavier taxes prevent undercutting? Like lets say you put a stack of items on the market board that has a market value of lets say 100gil, and someone puts a new item for 50gil. That 50gil item would be taxed heavily, leading to an end price of maybe 150 gil that the purchaser has to pay, and only a 50 gil profit for the crafter.

I am a computer scientist, i don't pretend to fathom how economics work, but from an outside looking in perspective, wouldn't this solve the undercutting issue?

(Though I'm still a fan of removing all items after 10-15 from NPC vendors)

Something that would help a little against undercutting is charging a fee directly when putting up an item instead of removing that fee from what you get when the item is sold.
As it is now, you could look at the market board and as soon as someone undercuts you, you change price on your own sales to undercut again without the change costing anything.

[NoloeTazier]

Undercutting exists because of the layout of the sales side of the Market Board. Even if you were to price your goods as the same as everyone else, for example something cost 1000 gil and everyone prices such...the person more likely to sell their goods is the one who has the alphabetized advantage i.e. their retainer name comes first in the alphabet which puts them at the top of the list which means people can click on it and buy it without scrolling. If you're a Z retainer vs an A you're simply screwed. I do see people post "yeah well I decide to buy from the person who didn't undercut," yes well that's a rare thing and good on you for taking time to make a purchase, most people are not going to take more than a few seconds to buy the cheapest of an item. Yes there becomes a major problem when people do undercut by huge amounts but you can't blame people for wanting items to sell in such a crap market. They sell their items and move on to sell more, quicker it sells is the best. It means an item isn't taking up a slot of the 20 and they can get the gil and put up a new item for sell.

I hated the system in 1.0 when my gear blew up with failed materia melds, but now that the system is gone and I look back on it. It was a great system to keep the market alive, people needing gear and materia for melds. But with SE having poor stat caps on items with materia melds and their purposeful: dungeon gear > crafted gear even with penta melds even with a loss of the gear/materia system like 1.0 it wouldn't matter. The appeal of that 1.0 system was that you could make crafted gear better with the right melds. And honestly this is a system I think we need back. Darksteel/Vanya/Gryphonskin/etc are ALREADY practically dungeon drops...you farm the tomestones that way and despite it being ilvl 70, the HQ versions even without melds are better than the Darklight versions. If we're just gonna go down this road of crafted gear being 100% obsolete and the only materia market being invested in being DoH/DoL which aren't really going to have a place in endgame...then it's broken and just needs to be outright removed. No one is "filling" needs with crafted gear and materia in lower levels, the dungeons are easy enough to go into at level and gear gear for your level just in that dungeon. With the removal of open world grinding for exp, this also hurts the materia market and the community...proof is in the toxicity that exists when people see players spiritbonding in LotA. For me I don't mind people doing it..but when it's a player who is clearly slacking and sitting back, making everyone else do all the work as their spiritbond bars tick up it becomes a problem (course players not spiritbonding do this as well) -- a problem that already exists with the design of LotA is how tanks can be lazy in most fights (i.e. clicking towers on Behemoth, letting hands grab them on Acheron..I'm a main Paladin and it makes tanks look bad) so combine that with spiritbonding and helping the alliance none then yeah toxicity. /rant off

"Because everyone can be all lvl 50 DoH/DoL." Funny thing is this quote didn't apply in 1.0, the market worked because of the materia market...this in a game where the leves GAVE you the shards and mats to craft the items and turn in then GAVE you a reward of things like flax and snurble tuft and yet people bought the materials to craft and grind through for exp. What happened in 2.0 was just the items were and still are too readily available. The RNG hit-or-miss minigames for DoL became 100% never without fail gathering attempts that allow you to look at the picture of the item you want and gather it. Unspoiled nodes are a nice way of limiting the amount of an item that can be gathered but the nodes pop on the hour...Oh let's not forget to mention the fact that now maps drop various materials upon a win and many of these items are HQ versions of unspoiled node items and you can get upwards of 4 (don't quote me on this) from 1 map. Then we have the addition of Beastmen tribe NPCs that sell crafted materials and further reduces the reason to buy from the market or instead kills the price of the items because the NPCs sell for dirt cheap and don't need to factor in a shard price.

So problems all around but what we have is "working as intended."

[LineageRazor]

Folks often say, "Crafting is so easy, everyone can level crafts and craft their own gear - so there's no market!" Except, I know for a fact that this isn't true. Easy or not, a LOT of folks simply don't like crafting. There IS a potential market for crafted items - folks that like to craft spend a lot of time crafting, and folks that don't like to craft spend the same time doing Leves and FATEs and stuff for gil to buy stuff from the crafter. In theory.

In practice, the game throws so much gear at you, and you can do so much with vastly underleveled gear, that folks simply don't bother. The markets are flooded with cheap low-level NQ gear that drops from Leves and job quests, and the stat differences between that and HQ gear are small enough that the incentive to buy the better piece is low. To make things worse, low level dungeons drop gear for their level range that outshines even HQ gear assuming you don't socket materia. Between cheap NQs and plentiful Aetherial gear, there's barely a market for the crafted stuff.

Now, the OP wants to sell his crafted gear when he's done with it? Might just as well remove crafting from the game entirely.

Seriously, I'm not even sure WHY he wants to sell it. Even the most sought-after, premium pieces of iLvl 70 crafted gear are AFFORDABLE, even to a casual player, in a reasonable amount of time. In FFXI, pieces of gear like the Scorpion Harness or Noble's Tunic required weeks or months of grinding gil to be able to afford them. High-tier equipment in FFXIV can be bought in just days. I'm a fairly casual player, and even I could afford to buy a Vanya Robe of Casting, blow my nose in it, and toss it aside.

[Marxam]

@OP; the problem is not that gear binding is useless, it's that materia can only be put in crafted equipment and even then you would need to spend millions just getting the perfect penta-meld to do just a bit more damage than dungeon gear. IMO its almost not worth it other than bragging rights.

"If it don't make dollars, it don't make sense" DJ Quik.

[Awaterujin]

They could add a third tier to the melding system, that has a pretty low chance, that can add one materia to non-materia gear, and takes a materia and some crafted item, preferably using potash or other philo mats, since those are starting to flood the market.

People can customize their gear, philo isn't worthless, and crafters can help with the BiS gear, but not provide it entirely.

[Foo01]

The whole notion that stuff is cheap because there is more supply than demand means a bad economy is FALSE notion. Look at the real world, do you want an economy that creates vast disparity between rich and poor so that there are vast majoirty of poor and desperate people and select few with all the wealth? Or do want an economy where goods are readily available and vast majority of the people can have access to vast majority of goods? Seriously as much as I don't like Walmart selling out the U.S. to China and its labor relations, I can NOT fault Walmart for doing a fantastic job at making things cheaper for everyone, and they do well and the economy does as well. It is actually a very healthy economy when people can afford to get the stuff they need and want. The economy in game is actually very healthy. And to that end the market boards could be more efficient.

Two added side benefit of having things widely available are
1. It reduces the need or incentive to go RMT
2. Makes it much harder for flipper to take advantage of the other players mistakes.

Both of which helps the player base.

[Foo01]

Similar to real life, items need a sink and way for them to disappear. Gear binding after use, means you can NOT sell used items. In real life, stuff that gets used break down and eventually become tossed out and exit the economy, or they are consumed like food products, soaps, paints, etc. So with gear binding all this means you can't have used item market, and I doubt people are too upset if they don't have to deal with the used item dealers (think used car dealers.) So getting rid of gear binding will mean your stuff can't be repaired forever and needs to wear out. Between that and gear binding, I think player will be happier to deal with gear-binding because they choose when the items exit the economy.