Why you need extra retainers

[GenJoe]

I hear so many complaints about how hard it is to make gil in this game and that crafting is monopolized by the 1 percenters..

Just to prove a point, and because I was tired of having to change prices every 10 minutes on high competition market, I've done a little experiment over the past few weeks and here is the result.

All low level (don't need a level 50 crafter for this)
All low competition (don't need to babysit the MB all day long)
and also low demand (not a good thing, but it is the truth)


If you want to make gil in this game and you're having trouble.. Go make an alt, play for a couple days to unlock that extra pair of retainers and put them to work. You don't need to sell anything high-end or high competition, just stock up your spare retainers with whatever you see the market has a deficit of, let it sit for a few days and it will eventually sell.

P.S. Note the price difference between rose gold nugget and steel ingot
P.P.S. This works better on low to medium pop servers where not everything on the MB is saturated, I imagine it should still work for high pop servers as well, your choice will be limited though.

[Aeyis]

Your servers market is very interesting if you can sell full stacks of HQ steel ingots and horn glues with such regularity.

Why anyone would need large amounts of those items in HQ puzzles me.

PS: Considering the amount of time required to craft that many HQ items, I think its fair to say that the complaints regarding markets being dominated by the top 1%~ arent entirely baseless.


On the plus side, its a great way to get the required amount of crafts for the luminary achievements.

[GenJoe]

Well, if you check out the steel ingot prices from 10 days before, you can see that the price fluctuates, a LOT.. But even at that low price, it's still mostly profit.
As far as why anybody needs those HQ items, I have no idea.. I just know that if I sit on it long enough, it will sell.

Thing with horn glues is.. I seem to have a monopoly on them now, I didn't force anybody out, but I guess the thought of earning a profit of 2-3k each craft (25 sec) doesn't appeal to anybody else. But that's still ~300k/hr in profit.

It's certainly not the most time efficient method to make gil, but all the crafting can be done semi-afk with macros which is what I do with a dual monitor and playing another game at the same time.. I can churn out a decent chunk of stuff to sell.

[Gamer3427]

While it's true that it'll eventually sell, this is because all of the other people selling said item have already sold theirs and now yours is all that's left on the market board. Again, yes, you do make the profit from it eventually, but it's largely based on how long it sits there and if other players decide to sell the same item. By this logic, you can put an item in your retainer for the maximum gil amount possible, and while it may take a long time, even years possibly, it will sell once no one else is selling that item....

Not really arguing with what you're saying, just pointing out a flaw with purposefully trying to make gil this way. More than likely in the time it took you to craft these items and sell them, you could have made just as much gil after costs by doing dungeons, FATES, and quests, while selling the excess items from those....

[ElHeggunte]

Your servers market is very interesting if you can sell full stacks of HQ steel ingots and horn glues with such regularity.

Why anyone would need large amounts of those items in HQ puzzles me.

Doesn't seem so unusual to me. There are plenty of reasons why someone would buy a bunch of HQ mats.

[Niqote]

Well one reason could be they are not on your server.

Masamune (A Legacy server where most people sustain themselves and ''no one'' buys RMT Gil)

Stack of Steel Ingot HQ - 34k (470k~188k for your server)
Stack of Horn Glue - 38k (280k for your server)
22 HQ Rose gold nuggets - 30k (104k for your server)
99 Granite - 10k (47k for your server)

And your prices show the Net Profit, mine are still the Gross prices.
(But when housing was introduced my server was in the most expensive bracket!)

Also... when people complain about not enough retainers, it's because they lack inventory space. It has nothing to do with Gil.

[SarcasmMisser]

Your servers market is very interesting if you can sell full stacks of HQ steel ingots and horn glues with such regularity.

Why anyone would need large amounts of those items in HQ puzzles me.

It's not regular though, that sales volume is pretty bad and we have no idea what the actual margins are. If anything he is proving a point by saying even if you do this horribly inefficient way of making money, one of many you can do without being a 4 star crafter, you will be able to make whatever you need.

Also as with above, Japanese servers actually have competitive prices since people tend to gather and craft their own stuff a lot more. The prices are closer to equilibrium, NA servers are a turkey shoot to make gil in comparison so I don't know what people are complaining about.

[Aeyis]

Doesn't seem so unusual to me. There are plenty of reasons why someone would buy a bunch of HQ mats.

Those are very large amounts tho. High level crafters dont actually need or want low level HQ mats (because they are more expensive), unless its needed for a specific 2* (for use in macros, if the price is similar enough to the NQ) or higher.
Low level crafters dont have any use for HQ items of those amounts.

As a result on my server those kind of items typically sell in stacks of up to 10, while rarely in increments of 20-40.

Also... when people complain about not enough retainers, it's because they lack inventory space. It has nothing to do with Gil.

Pretty much, yeah. Altho + 1/2 retainers can help with selling if you go through large volumes of different sizes.

[Alistaire]

Horn glue I understand. http://ffxiv.gamerescape.com/wiki/Spruce_Plywood

The ingots...I got nothin. Both available in nq form from vendors and no high level synths. Iron ingot shows up in one 1-star synth, the i55 pvp shield. Steel ingots...nothing.

Without divulging names you blocked out, is it mostly different buyers or repeat customers?

Also if you need an answer to why people want (because using the word need is silly no matter what) extra retainers, having 3 covers all 3 cities. Quite often I'll move items to the city of the lowest priced guy. No point undercutting by a small amount if you're not selling in the city with the higher chance of certain things selling.

[GenJoe]

snip

That's the common misconception.. Because how crafting is so mind numbingly boring, people overestimate the time to craft such a large amount of items.. In the span of about 3 hours, I could make 4 stacks of horn glue Which at the price I posted them, would net me over a million gil. That's not to say that it will make me 1 million gil in 4 hours.. You have to let it sit and wait for it to sell which can take a few days to a couple weeks.. So you expand this operation to 3 or 4 different itemss and maybe you can have enough workload.. It all depends on the player of course, personal preference plays a very large role in this.

With this method, you can take out the time to sell out of the equation because you don't need to babysit the items with price wars (nobody's going to undercut a hq horn glue at 3000 gil)

What you DO need, is spare retainers, because your main needs to be doing higher demand, big ticket items which is what I use my main for.

Masamune (A Legacy server where most people sustain themselves and ''no one'' buys RMT Gil)

Masamune's economy... I'm not touching that with a 40 foot pole... and I do believe some of my customers may be RMT related, can't say for certain though, when I've felt lazy I've spent stupid amounts of money on mats just because I didn't wanna make them.

Without divulging names you blocked out, is it mostly different buyers or repeat customers?

Usually, it's one person for a bout of 2-3 days then they're done.. And a new buyer will come along in a few days to a week and buy a few more stacks.
In the case of horn glues, the large stacks are 2 different people, with 1 person buying the majority.. he's probably farming chocobotail saws. But all the smaller stack sizes are different people.



Again, this method isn't for efficiency or perhaps even most money made, this is about making gil without having a 4 star crafter and without fighting the monopoly.

Reason I mentioned getting extra retainers for this isn't because of inventory management, it is because you need extra sell slots that you can sit on for days/weeks without worrying about it.. I couldn't do this on my main retainers, they have more important things to sell.