Thread: Am I the only one who feels like the market board needs a revamp?

I don't think making buying less convenient would be a desirable solution to undercutting, even if it achieves the goals you've set forth. The 1.0 market was terrible even at the end when it worked basically like you describe here.

If undercutting is a problem (and I'm not willing to declare that it is), the simple solution is to add a listing fee to items. Or perhaps a system where the tax on an item (and therefore its listed sale price) decreases over time the item remains listed at one price. Or a more eBay-like system where you specify the price to list at as well as the lowest price you're willing to sell for, and it automatically matches any undercutting until it reaches that price.

I think adding a listing fee would help quite a bit in reducing the undercutting wars that go on. I would also love to see a buy / sell orders added.

Originally Posted by Skivvy

I think adding a listing fee would help quite a bit in reducing the undercutting wars that go on. I would also love to see a buy / sell orders added.

That listing fee doesn't really solve the problem, it just front-loads the costs.

Actual auction sites have "buy now" and "auction bids", and in both cases, the listing fee is undermined by undercutting, and dinging the seller twice with fees. The only real solution to market manipulation is to make items unable to be re-priced once listed, limiting how long items can be listed, and not allowing items to be pulled once listed.

If you put that item up for 99999gil, it stays up for 99999gil for 7 days, and costs you 2000 gil (2%) to list each time. So if the item is a hot seller, it doesn't matter what the front-loaded cost is. If the item is just being dumped on the market to be sold whenever, the item's value disintegrates over time, and that would see most items desynth'd instead of sold because the raw materials are worth more than the item.

If an item fails to sell, no refund. It's also an annoyingly awful system if players aren't constantly logged in to list items when the previous ones expire, and punishes new players heavily.

Really this is how I'd re-engineer the market system, and no I don't think it's superior, just different:

a) All NPC's who sell items, sell player items that are priced below their own items. Thus players always get the best value item from NPC's. If they are directly sold items they deal with, they will buy them back for the NPC sell price (10%).
b) All vendor trash, NPC's put everything on the market if they don't normally deal with that item. Thus players can always get dumped vendor trash items from NPC's at cost if nobody is asking for them.
c) Designated "Market" Retainer is setup as an actual shop trader, with "Buy for X, Sell for Y, Stack Size, Price, Limit", so players who want certain items can say "I will pay 2 gil for (item)" and the retainer will buy that item from all NPC's with it as vendor trash or other Retainers selling the item for the 2 gil Buy price or lower until the Limit is met.

This allows for the following scenarios:

Player wants a 99 silver ore, they go to the market and get both the NPC's who have been sold silver ore and the retainers who are selling silver ore. If there isn't a good price the player wants, they can go mine their own silver ore, and then sell the remains on the market for the current best price, or if they don't want to deal with it they can sell it to the first NPC vendor they come across who will sell it to whatever retainer is looking to buy it.

Player made one too many i3xx signed gear items, so they put the extra one on the market. Every NPC that sells gear will have it listed in their "available limited gear" which the NPC gets a commission for selling if not bought directly from the retainer.

To buy directly from the retainer with no fees, the player must actually go to the housing area with the retainer to get the item. They can also buy it off the marketboard and only incur the "market transfer" fee if they're not in that city at the time. The seller still pays the tax depending on the city their housing area belongs to.

"Shortage" situations may (intentionally) show up where no NPC has the item (nothing traded in to the GC for seals/experience either), few retainers are selling the item, but many are buying, thus players who play DoL/DoH would be encouraged to go gather or produce those materials, and NPC's will act as a broker between the player buying and the player selling until the price stabilizes . "Glut" situations will also show up when too many retainers are selling and none are buying the item, thus in these situations the NPC's will treat being sold those items as vendor trash and only give players 10% of the item's value until all the underpriced items are gone.

Anyway, basically what I'm suggesting is something that eliminates under-price and over-price and market manipulations from being possible by making the NPC's remove undervalued and dumped items from the market, and by allowing retainers to buy items for the value that players want. You know instead of hiring a moogle via the app.

Downsides? Well someone with enough money could buy out the NPC's entire vendor trash inventory and then re-price it higher by invoking a shortage and buying everything that players try to fill the shortage with. Bots/RMT would have a field day by buying out all the crystals and re-selling them. The answer to both of these situations is a little more involved, where items purchased from the market can't be re-sold (becomes market-untradeable, can still be sold to a NPC for 10% of it's value) without being desynthed/crafted into something else.

Like the existing system works and is generally fair to buyers, but is really obnoxious to deal with if you're trying to sell items and just want to "Get rid of it" rather than fight someone under-pricing things, or just dumping their item for 1gil. I see the "1gil" thing quite a bit on dungeon trash items, where one day the item is 1000gil, the next day it's 1gil because they didn't bother to look at the current price. Like the easiest thing SE could do to make selling less lazy is by making the default price whatever the current best price is and not the NPC vendor trash price.

Originally Posted by SinisterJoints

not a listing fee, a relisting fee. So say you list your item, costs nothing. If you pull it off early (however many day/days or hours even would be fine) you pay a fee. You could literally set it at 12 hours and it would fix a lot of the issues/wars

The way that would probably work in this game would be to have it done this way:

"Place items on market? (Items will not be available until listing ends) Y/N"
The seller gets a list of items they can place on the market from their retainer, chocobo inventory and current inventory/armory with a "sell quantity for value" with the default value the current best offer.
So let's say the seller lists 20 items (the max currently)
"Items will be on the market until (YYYY/MM/DD), no changes to prices will be permitted during this time, removing an item early will incur a fee. Confirm Y/N?"
Seller confirms.

Now if the seller changed their mind 5 minutes after listing the item because they made a pricing error, they have to withdraw the item, taking a fee hit as if the item had been sold, because that is what they are doing, they're "buying it back" from the market. Once a non-stackable item is returned to the players inventory it gets a "market penalty" flag. Stackable items render all items of the same name with the penalty. So items that are "market penalized" are the same as market prohibited until the original listing time expires or 12 hours pass, whichever is sooner.

Originally Posted by KisaiTenshi

The way that would probably work in this game would be to have it done this way:

"Place items on market? (Items will not be available until listing ends) Y/N"
The seller gets a list of items they can place on the market from their retainer, chocobo inventory and current inventory/armory with a "sell quantity for value" with the default value the current best offer.
So let's say the seller lists 20 items (the max currently)
"Items will be on the market until (YYYY/MM/DD), no changes to prices will be permitted during this time, removing an item early will incur a fee. Confirm Y/N?"
Seller confirms.

Now if the seller changed their mind 5 minutes after listing the item because they made a pricing error, they have to withdraw the item, taking a fee hit as if the item had been sold, because that is what they are doing, they're "buying it back" from the market. Once a non-stackable item is returned to the players inventory it gets a "market penalty" flag. Stackable items render all items of the same name with the penalty. So items that are "market penalized" are the same as market prohibited until the original listing time expires or 12 hours pass, whichever is sooner.

tricky part would be getting the the timer just right. Honestly the 12 hours sounds about right IMO, maybe even 24

I don't mind bazaars and the like, but the 1.2x system got old quick when you had to spend a couple minutes going somewhere to get one item then somewhere else to get another. If you needed to buy a lot of stuff it quickly became a drag.

People will probably figure out a way around it by having a third party site and/or data collection plugin that parses the information anyway and uploads it somewhere or a place where players can just put what they are selling and for what price so others can use the website's search to find things defeating the entire purpose of hiding the prices.

Don't underestimate the power of laziness.