Quote Originally Posted by Sylve View Post
I still maintain that crafters should simply not have bought the Philo materials for that much. By being the only ones demanding, you do have control over the price point. A vocal boycott of MB Philo Mats would have driven down the cost of materials and end product considerably. Which would allow you to sell on volume instead of making bank on a single item once in a while.
By this logic, players wanting high level equipment could have also boycotted that equipment, which would drive the prices of that equipment down very quickly, and cause crafters to not want to bother buying philo materials to make them any more. Then the people selling philo materials would lower the prices because crafters would no longer be buying them.

You seem to have this unrealistic expectation that it's the crafter's job to collectively control what prices are, but that is just not how the market works at all. For tome sellers, other tome sellers are their competition, and for players buying high level equipment, other people buying high level equipment is their competition. The same goes for crafters. You aren't going to see some mass collusion going on between every crafter on the server any more than you'd see it with any other group, because if anyone did try to start something like that, the rest of the crafters would just pass them by. What you're suggesting would just never, ever realistically happen in a free market with so many competing individuals.