Quote Originally Posted by Gillionaire View Post
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Couldn't you argue part of the reason why a hand full of people can control the market so easily is because of less market activity overall than in other MMOs, especially in terms of high-end gear?

I say this because nearly every other MMO I've played (WoW, Rift and the like) has prevents people from having all crafters on one toon and I am certain that people devoted to crafting had alts for the other crafts. Trading between your own characters was trivial. However, I recall in those games nearly every craft had some form of consumable that was desired by raiders. WoW had different armor buffs that had to be reapplied every time a piece of gear was upgrade, potions, gem socketing and food. Rift had similar stuff and runes you could apply to weapons for different effects as well as armor crafted from dungeon drops that were on par with raid loot.

Here the only consumables are made by Culinarian and Alchemist, and potions aren't used by most because of how expensive it can get. Gear isn't on par with raid gear, with the exception of accessories. My point is that when you have a more active economy via consumables it becomes more difficult for a single person to control every aspect of it due to the large demand, opening the market for others. Arguably the only aspect of FFXIVs market that fits this is Materia and that's heavily RNG based and not even crafting really.