FIX the AUCTION HOUSE!!!!

[seraf]

There's undercutting like this in every MMORPG that I have ever played. There's no way to simply get rid of it.

[Aunalise]

One tweak: I think there should be a min sell-tax. Why? Sellers of single sub 10-20g items don't pay any taxes due to rounding. (I presume you essentially sell for free at up to 10 or 20g?) I just don't 'get' the people who waste time and retainer slots on selling 1g items for 1g on retainer, when you can get 1g for each item immediately at any vendor. But then I see stacks of 2-7g items for 1g, so, paying a tax on top of charging only 1g (price of stack will be more than 10 or 20g). They are getting <1g/item! And they could have gotten 2 or more gil at any vendor.

Anyway, the MB is fine. Prices since patch have plummeted because of rogues & ninja's doing LOTS of dungeons & quests. Thus huge supply, & sellers who round down a thousand = dropping prices. This is a buying opportunity. Go buy cheap & wait a bit, & when prices rise again, start selling these items back.

[Arrak]

I really like Runescape's system where you put up xx amount of items, and when people buy, they can select a quantity and it'll pull from all of the listed items, not just one person. This way you don't have to decide whether you want to sell one or a stack and people aren't forced to buy 99 of something.

[chitokai]

good luck on this ever stopping, as long as we can see what items are being sold at someone will always undercut someone else

[Aunalise]

Gil-selling isn't linked to underselling. RMT doesn't add gil to FF, and adding gil would tend to have a price-raising effect anyway. It's gil-sources that create gil into the game. Item drops don't do it at all until the item is sold to a vendor. Even crafting and selling doesn't create gil into the game. Only selling it to a vendor does.

It is probably all the quest, dungeon, and fate gil-rewards that are the biggest sources of new gil. Selling a new item to another player creates no new gil. Each market transaction is actually a gil-destroyer. And crafters are just gil-accumulators. Forget the real money in RMT. All that happens on the server is that a crafter's gil is transferred a couple of times to end up in another account.

Prices are going down because free-drops have outstripped current demand. And the price of a free-drop that exists in massive quantities should be near zero anyway. Eventually, it will level out again near some equilibrium, until a new big patch.

[Kewitt]

It's Not broken, And doesn't need to be fixed.

It's working as intended.
If people are undercutting your price, it means you are to greedy and market is correcting itself.

3,000 g -- imanidiot <--- This one is yours.
4,999 g -- iunderstandbasicmath
5,000 g -- idontundercutbythousands
5,001 g -- ilikemakingmoney
5,100 g -- ironicretainername#5

In this case.. undercutting buy 1 is pointless.

You need to undercut by the tax so your item is cheapest regradless of tax. So it selll 1st. ya that may not be 2k but still 4700 wouldn't be a bad undercut.

[Shioban]

You need to undercut by the tax so your item is cheapest regradless of tax. So it selll 1st. ya that may not be 2k but still 4700 wouldn't be a bad undercut.

No, you're missing the point.

When you list your price for 1G or less, it becomes the top listing.
People will look at a list such as this, and go "I want X Quantity of these", therefore will always purchase the cheapest one closest to that quantity;

The retainer with the lowest price, will always appear first, even if that's by 1G.

THAT'S the reason undercutting exists, taxes play no part in it.

[mbncd]

No, you're missing the point.

[Snip]

The retainer with the lowest price, will always appear first, even if that's by 1G.

THAT'S the reason undercutting exists, taxes play no part in it.

Actually I think you're missing their point.

You're assuming there that the buyer is either brainless or ignorant or unable to read. Being at the top of the list does not automatically equate to the best price. Unless the buyer is in the city that the selling retainer is stationed in, the buyer has to pay a 5% international buying tax.

In your image example there, if the buyer is in Limsa (a very popular purchasing location due to the close aetheryte proximity to the market, I believe the closest in the game, all others require zoning at least once to get to their markets too) any of those 50k items will actually cost 52.5k, unless they travel to the other city. As such, you don't have to just be cheaper than the other places on the list, you have to be cheaper by 5% of the international sellers too, just as the person you were quoting said. If you put that item up for sale in Limsa for 52k you'd still be 500 gil cheaper than buying internationally if the buyer is in Limsa too.

[Lukha]

If I'm undercutting you, you're probably listing your items for too much. I consider how much it cast me to make, and then I look at how much it's been selling for. If you're trying to sell for 50k, but none have sold for more than 40k, I'm not going to take a chance on inflating the price; inventory space is precious when you enjoy both crafting and glamours. If its been undercut to a point where I'm losing gil, I'll pull my items and try again later... the market usually stabilizes itself.

[Wildsprite]

this is a market board, it is similar to going to a market place like Amazon.com. though it is a bit different in that everyone has the same items to sell.

I still prefer the AH of FFXI where you have to bid, why is this you ask. well it is simple when the market has a lot of items up you only see the last 10 or so items that sold so you have a rough estimate of how much to bid. this is good because people have a much harder time undercutting others as most will bid very close to the last 10 that were put up.

the way the AH worked was simple
1 person puts their item up for 1k
1 person puts theirs up for 999 gil
someone bids 1k
the item for 999 gil is sold first for 1k<--yeah doesnt seem fair does it? but think about this the 1k item will still sell for 1k and not have a butload of items undercutting
taxes if any were all on the seller not the buyer.

as for the higher priced items that were up for way more then their worth. those people usually didn't/don't want to sell their items. they just want/ed inventory space but put it up for a price they were willing to part with it for. afterall if some nut was willing to pay several miliion for something only worth a few hundred thousand why not let em have it.

yes the AH system is a guessing game. but it is that way with any online AH(actual auctions not these fake buy it now things). and with the AH you had to have patience to sell some items as well which many people just don't seem to have.