Do the developers even care about the market board, and its problems?

[Eye_Gore]

I love the items where, say 20 are listed and when you look at them each one is just 1 gil less than the other.

[Eagleheart]

I love the items where, say 20 are listed and when you look at them each one is just 1 gil less than the other.

Yep.

Certain folks in this thread would have us believe that's free market capitalism at work there, when (>.>) really it's not a question of acceptable profit margins, but just one guy with more time on his hands protecting his niche by dropping the price by 1/5,000th or less several times per hour.

Don't feed me this "acceptable profit" BS, people, it's laughable.

[Tiggy]

They could always just change the market board to the way FFXI's auction house was. You could only see the last price someone paid for the item rather than what people are actually selling it for. Never really saw undercutting in it or at least the undercutting wasn't nearly as aggressive as it is in this.

I do think this is something they got right in XI. I've never been a fan of the WoW style market board.

[Issac]

I do think this is something they got right in XI. I've never been a fan of the WoW style market board.

I miss XI's AH as well. It just seemed right.

[kidvideo]

Wild cards in searches would be useful... such as using an asterisk : *mythril. Good search practice would also have an automatic wildcard at the end of any search, without a player using the asterisk .

As for undercutting your sell price... I doubt that's bots. I personally weigh the pros & cons of item value vs inventory space. If I want something to move, I'll lower the price as often as I need to.

What I don't get is people selling things for less than what an NPC merchant will buy them for...

[DragonFlyy]

Many other MMOs have listing fees and they still have undercutting problems. It won't solve anything.

I agree with the search though.

[therpgfanatic]

What you want in essence is to get rid of *bots* that doesnt allow you to put up overpriced stuff so that you can monopolize the market at your whim, bots in essence keep you on your toes...you kind of selfish arent you ? Market has its own laws that depends on demand and offer in between lays your profit...up to you to calculate it and decide how far you can lower your prices to still be a winner.


Mei

No, what I want is for items obtained by level 40+ gathers and dropped by monsters to not be worth 1 gil on the market board.

It's not normal in an MMO for the vast majority of items to be worth practically nothing, especially when it comes to crafting resources. There are usually mechanics like listing prices to prevent such things, and the NPC purchase prices are usually not extremely low so as to encourage players to sell them higher than what NPC vendors will buy them for.

Listing prices stabilize the market prices because you don't generally have a million people selling the same item; you may have 30-100 people selling individual type of items per server, at any particular type. It's the same folks constantly relisting the item, and while legit players may not use bots there are indeed people using bots. As soon as someone undercuts them, the bot undercuts because it is constantly checking the prices to ensure their items are the first result.

Also. FF XIV is not a "free economy". In a free economy the seller has to consider the cost of obtaining / manufacturing the item or they suffer a loss. Suffering a loss means they go bankrupt and starve to death. That is one of the many factors involved in a free market that allows such a market to work. There is no mechanic like starvation in the game to ensure people set their prices appropriately, which is why the developers of this video game need to implement limits to ensure the market is stable.

tl:dr FF XIV is not real life, it's a video game. The market needs to be balanced the same way a boss encounter is. The developers are not giving the market the same degree of attention, which is why it is unbalanced.

PS: IF I had my way, MMOs would divide items into value tiers, and players would be restricted on how much they can sell an item for.

Example: Materia IV would only be able to be listed between 5,000 and 10,000 gil, and you couldn't go below or higher than the max / min value.

This makes the market much easier to balance for the developer and allows for accurate prediction of player wealth acquisition, which can then be used to determine the prices of drains like housing and repairs. And while it is limiting, it's done for the same reason you can't use every skill in every Job; to ensure a quality experience for the majority of players IRL.

"Free markets" in MMOs are pure chaos because they aren't real free markets. There are none of the same factors that cause sellers to self-regulate prices.

[Xystic]

Many other MMOs have listing fees and they still have undercutting problems. It won't solve anything.

That is exactly correct.

Also this belongs in the markets thread.

Everyone knows there should be a listing fee for having retainers sell items on the market board.

This has been discussed many times over many other MMOs. Listing fees do nothing of any sort to stop the initial undercutting. People will always undercut you on their first listing. So if we place in a listing fee, people's goods are now stuck on the market boards because relisting will cause a loss. Much higher skilled merchants will take it one step further and will use listing fees to monopolize markets.

You have equal footing against me on the market boards in this game. It allows the average skilled merchant to make money off the market boards without being cornered. In games like World of Warcraft, many markets were cornered by a few individuals. The average skill merchant now relists at a loss or sits and waits on it to hopefully sell in listing fee systems.

However, you already notice people undercut as quick as you readjust your prices. This is how fast we can restock our goods as well, meaning, your item your sitting on, may never sell. This forces you to relist at a loss or leaving the market altogether.

In this current market, the average/casual/low commodity merchant gets to be on equal footing for every single item they sell against a higher skilled/commodity merchant because they can freely relist without being cornered with listing fees.

However because you get equality, you now have a much more competitive market but overall, average/casual/low commodity merchants, now make a lot more gil than they use to in other systems like listing fees where a majority of the market was controlled by players like me.

[Memex]

I love the items where, say 20 are listed and when you look at them each one is just 1 gil less than the other.

I go out of my way to buy the original priced item if I see this happening if I want to buy an undercut item I want to save considerable gil and 1 gil less will just annoy me enough to ignore that listing

[therpgfanatic]

This has been discussed many times over many other MMOs. Listing fees do nothing of any sort to stop the initial undercutting. People will always undercut you on their first listing. So if we place in a listing fee, people's goods are now stuck on the market boards because relisting will cause a loss. Much higher skilled merchants will take it one step further and will use listing fees to monopolize markets.

"This has been discussed in other games" is a crappy argument. The objective isn't to stop a handful of casuals from undercutting.

The objective is to stop botters and hardcore players from camping the marketboard to *constantly* undercut and eventually crash the market with prices at 1 gil. Because it eats up all their gil to constantly relist, so they will let the items sit and get bought in the next hour. The prices will stabilize within 100 gil of one another, as new items get bought up, making the more expensive items the only ones which remain.

This works because people are not listing 1,000+ listings of an item at once. For many item types like ores and crystals, there is only about 30-40 listings at any particular time because players are constantly buying these items and thus removing the listing from the market board. That is why prices can stabilize, but not if the market has crashed because those 30-40 players all listed their items rock bottom while trying to become the first search result.

Furthermore with listing fees you wouldn't see people listing items at 1 gil because they can't. Plus the listing fee ensures that players sell items a high enough price point that the player turns a profit from at least the listing fee.

You're hating this suggestion without fully understanding the mechanics through which it works. You don't see markets crashing in WoW because of the listing fees for the auction houses.

I'm sure that as a player of MMOs that Yoshi has experienced these things for himself in other games and can see why listing fees need to be added, if he'd just take the time to examine the issue.

So my complaint isn't that the dev team doesn't know there is a problem or are incapable of fixing them. My question is if they care at all about addressing the issues. The simple fact that the 'Free Search' function was made so quickly that it only searches for exact results and not for word matches indicates they haven't spent any time polishing the marketboards. I'd like them to revisit it, since it is an incredibly important part of the player experience and it is extremely subpar compared to the rest of the game.