How do you deal with constant undercutting?

[Liam_Harper]

I don't know, maybe it's just me. I'm not exactly drowning in gil, so every time I log in and something I thought would have sold by now didn't, and I check the history and one sold for one gil less, that's irksome.
When you have a lot of money I think you view the MB as a steady long-term source of income. When you don't, its more like "I need gil NOW"

Aye, understandable it's frustrating to lose a sale to someone else. But if the other seller wasn't a 1 gil undercutter the result would have been exactly the same, except the market board history would show an item 20% cheaper was sold instead of yours. A 1 gil undercut actually gives you a better chance to get gil quick, since there's a chance to net the sale if you're on a different market area. But a 20% undercut is guaranteed to ruin your sale.

You're nicer than I am, I will half something if I get undercut. It usually sends a signal pretty quickly :P

It's nice to imagine this, but it really doesn't.

Let's say an item is selling at 2m and has 7-8 sellers. 3-4 of those sellers might be happy making far less, but hey it's up at 2m so they'll list around that price. Then you come along and half the price to "send your message". It works on half the sellers, but a buyer doesn't come along fast enough and the other half go "oh well, a million is lots of gil!" and undercut you. The market for that item is now crashed to 1m and you haven't made your sale much faster.

I see this happen constantly.

[Nixxe]

I don't know, maybe it's just me. I'm not exactly drowning in gil, so every time I log in and something I thought would have sold by now didn't, and I check the history and one sold for one gil less, that's irksome.
When you have a lot of money I think you view the MB as a steady long-term source of income. When you don't, its more like "I need gil NOW"

I'm sure if I had a couple million I couldn't care less.

Probably because people like you decided your undercut was a jerk move and bought the more expensive item. :^)

[JonBigwood]

This has changed over time. When I needed more gil or was more centered in crafting and selling, I usually checked the retainers twice a day and lowered the price of unsold items (in expensive items by a higher amount, in cheaper by a lower one.) If some item is sold at a nice price I would make another and put it for sale. If it had taken a long time and several undercuts, I craft some other one.
In this game you don't need that much gil, so since a long time ago I craft for my personal use. Sometimes when it looks it will sell nicely and soon, I craft one item for myself and another for sale, or two for myself and one for sale (looking to sell one that sells nice and has not a lot for sale and the price is high.) I gather the mats and usually you can choose among several items to sell with similar mats. This would be items of the latest crafted tier (war/magic or hand/land.)

When I check retainers I would undercut by 1000, 500, 200 or 100 gil, depending on the item's price. If possible, list in another city as the cheapest one.
If the item is expensive and has several sellers that undercut, tipically some seller gets fed up and undercuts by a lot. Then I forget and put a reasonable price. After some time the lower ones sell and mine finally sells.

One thing I have noticed is that if I look for an item that has few sellers and sells for a high price compared to other similar items (for example a tank bracelet is much more expensive than the other bracelets of the same tier and with similar mats and few people sell it), I craft one and put it at current price, and then more people make it and sell it and eventually the price lowers a lot and finally sells for a price similar as other similar items. It is not always like that, sometimes you are lucky and your item sells before this happens, but it is likely eventually the price arrives to a normal stage. So it is a bit of a trap.

Lately I have seen that maybe top tier items don't sell at that much higher prices than previous tier, so if you craft for gil it may be more practical to sell the lower ones. If you craft for yourself you gather the mats for yourself and with the extra mats you can craft and sell items to recover the cost or to pay for the melds, so you would sell the higher tier ones.

What I don't know is how people that craft a lot and sell a lot manage their decisions. It is not the same selling a couple of things now and then than selling a lot of items. It looks more practical to get someone to ask you for the craft, give you the mats, and you charge some quantity. If you can craft hq with confidence, you save all the time of gathering and listing things on the market board. You get nice gil for the time you spend on crafting, and save all the time on gathering and updating prices on the retainers.

[JonBigwood]

I have observed a lot of times crafted items that say Obtaining Signature as the crafter. It seems if the crafter is no longer a character (deleted character, maybe changed name character?) the item will have that name. But it is a very frequent thing to see, so there is a way to have your crafted items to not show your name, but just Obtaining Signature as the crafter name. And a long time ago I searched if a character named Obtaining Signature existed, and it did not exist. Someone correct me if I am mistaken please : )

[Frizze]

I could be wrong about this, so if anyone has better info feel free to correct.

Obtaining Signature. This is used as a makers mark on crafted items when the original crafter hasnt logged on recently. I was told once that after a patch items lose their mark until the crafter logs on their character, at which point they update. So the first day or two after a patch its not at all uncommon to see a bunch of these on the boards, as the items created before the server went down all need an update. The more time that goes on between server outages the less likely an item is to keep its anonymous naming.

[Espritduo]

Obtaining Signature is also used if the item was crafted by someone on another server. You see a lot of that from people who move servers and take a lot of junk with them to offload on the new server to make money back.

[Nixxe]

And here I had always thought Obtaining Signature was just an oddly named character. I guess there is a character that actually has that name on Balmung, but they're a level 1 of every crafter, so they're definitely not the person making the high level crafts I see with that tag.

[KageTokage]

There's some kind of grand undercutting scheme going on on Cactaur, as I've noticed a multitude of low level players from the same FC as the individual who crafts all wares that are being sold by its infamous undercutter, each parked at a retainer bell in a different ARR capital city.

They just sit there targeting/untargeting the bell as long as they aren't AFK, presumably because they're cycling through their retainers to undercut/relist items as necessary.

Some crafters on the Balance discord noted seeing the exact same thing happening on Leviathan and Sargatanas and also that if the suspected bots are offline on one of the servers, it's the same case for the rest, suggesting someone is mass multi-boxing. I can only assume they're trying to run a RMT business because this seems a little too extensive for someone who simply wants to make gil.

[Thatusernameistaken]

When you see someone undercutting by a ton, they actually just handed you free gil. Buy all of what they posted for super cheap, then relist it just under what everyone else is selling for. I made almost 500k gil just today doing this. Someone undercut the Super-Ether market by a crap ton. Most were going for 5k a pop, and this guy undercut all the way down to 2k. I bought up all of his Super-Ethers for 2k and relisted them for 4,999. They sold in less than an hour, and now I'm free to list more at 5k. That's how you deal with massive undercutting.

Here is an example of someone who just gave you a bunch of free gil: https://imgur.com/a/VTGxLev Buy up all that ore and relist it for 874 and boom, the market is restored and you make a quick buck.

EDIT: As for the people complaining about those of us that undercut by 1 gil, it's actually the best thing for the market. It preserves the price of the item for everyone else, as opposed to people undercutting by, say, 500 gil, eventually crashing the market.

[Liam_Harper]

Something odd with our Rakshasa market at the moment. Half the market has been flooded by some guy with retainers with nonsense RMT names (like rtghljhyd or such). He lists about 5-10 of each gear piece at a time with 200k undercuts. All his items are made by a number of different players, which turned out with a Lodestone check to be an army of crafters with no FC, all from Carbuncle (I'm on Zodiark). He's been generating fresh supplies over the week.

Not going to call "bot" immediately, but not sure what's going on there.