Quote Originally Posted by CookiesNCreams View Post
Also, I believe you aren’t understanding something very simple, OP. As someone who has crafted since 2.x Artisans, and has accumulated billions of Gil over the years, I can safely say that the lowering of prices has absolutely nothing to do with increased competition.

It has to do with the value of two things. Mats, and difficulty of said craft. As of 5.0, mats are extremely easy to get. There is no “challenge” to earning them compared to HW and ARR mats. Difficulty of crafting has been nerfed ever since the addition of Prudent Touch. So that devalues your time as a crafter, thus devaluing everything you make to around 200,000 gil or less. Mostly less. Whereas in ARR and HW, it was more like 600,000.

You are focusing your attention on the wrong thing. You should be complaining about the overall difficulty, not the amount of competition.
I agree that the lack of difficulty is an issue, but there's simply no way that this change didn't have a drastic impact on prices on many realms. Bigger realms won't notice much of a change to be sure because they're already fairly well stocked and have a lot of competition, but they will absolutely drag down the prices of the other realms on their data center (or in the case of Balmung, glamour gear, and Crystal, maybe drag them up) because prices varied wildly based on population, especially on more expensive luxury items, and people will absolutely server hop to save a few hundred thousand gild. To be sure each realm will maintain some individuality to their pricing, as the populations on the realms are different and the world visit system is mildly inconvenient, which means players won't likely hop for a 5 gil discount, but the prices data center wide are generally going to be much closer together across the board than they were previously.