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."