Quote Originally Posted by Rentahamster View Post

With such a limited history, goods can be repeatedly bought and sold for non-market value prices on purpose by a player or group of players in order to artificially inflate the price of a particular good.

For example:

Say an Iron Axe is normally sold at the wards for about 10,000 gil. Anyone checking the price history could see that the past 20 axes have been sold for around 10,000 gil. However, I come in and repeatedly buy and sell the axe using a friend or an alt for 25,000 gil 20 times. I then list all my Iron Axes for sale at 25,000 and any new buyers and sellers looking at the price history think that the axe is worth 25,000 gil when it really isn't.

This was somewhat of a problem in FF11, and it can potentially be a problem in FF14.


This is better than the FF11 auction house because the ambiguous "auction" part of the transaction is eliminated, which cuts out another avenue for price manipulation due to customer ignorance.
There's one problem with this. When someone sells axes at 10,000 gil, that is the price the producer/supplier is willing to sell at. If there are 10 axes, and 15 people willing to purchase the axes, the price is low. Ten players will benefit from the lower price, and 5 people will lose out. Some of those 5 people may have valued those axes at a higher price, and would have been willing to pay a higher price. The supplier is the one who is ignorant of their customers, and because of this, some of the axes go to the players who 'got there first' rather than the players who valued them the most.

When a player purchases these axes and then bids the price up, they are actually ensuring that those axes first go to those players who place the highest value on them. And by doing so, actually help facilitate the economy.

In a free market, NO ABUSE CAN TAKE PLACE. Because the transactions are all voluntary, you can simply avoid purchasing. If, for example, there's only one axe available for your level and you absolutely need it to continue, then rather than being gouged, the person buying and bidding up the prices is actually helping you by ensuring that noone who places a lesser value on the axes purchases them before you. If the price is too high for anyone, then the person bidding up items might lose gil, so there is a built-in incentive to prevent that.

Price histories can be both good and bad. But they can't be abused in a free market. The good is, you can see in the past how much something was worth and you can make a decision on whether to buy now or wait. They can be bad, because it can alter the perception of some people and promote more arbitrary prices instead, as it does not reflect current circumstances of the market. An example would be, one of the main crafters of a server is very effecient at producing axes and has mass produced them at a low price for several months. Suddenly he quits, and now the only remaining crafters available cannot make the item for so low. Naturally the price should rise, but the price history would make players less likely to purchase at the new value, and would also prevent some crafters from supplying at the new value.