Market Wards Suggestion

[Xoo]

Coglin, it's not about people undercutting - it's about people working/manipulating the seller list in order to get their names highest on the list regardless of price.

[Era]

The economy of MMOs is something I have a lot of fun and spend a majority of my time playing around with. OP brings up one of the most common complaints about the current market wards and how items are displayed when doing an item search. One of the biggest problems, that was mentioned, was that only a set amount of items are shown (the cheapest) and this pushes the HQ items/equipment with materia off the page due to them being priced higher BUT for a legitimate reason: higher quality.

I do understand where OP is coming from, but as someone else said, it's a free market. Anytime someone brings up the fact that they were undercut they're usually upset that someone else is willing to sell the same item at a lower price thus they wont be making the same profit they are used to or thought they would make.

Saying that the current way the items are listed is the cause for "rampant undercutting" and abuse is where I disagree. While it is a free market, besides the HQ items mentioned above, NQ items are all exactly the same, thus selling items tends to rely less on building a dedicated consumer base and more with selling the items consistently and evolving with the very fragile economic environment.

Undercutting may seem unusually rampant but I believe this is due to the average player having only 20 slots to try and sell items on the market at a given time. With a system like this I personally like to list items that sell within a decent amount of time so that I can continue to sell new items and adapt with price changes. This being said, if an item that normally sells at a certain price is suddenly being heavily undercut I can assume that this item is suffering from either increasing supply or decreasing demand, or worst case scenario: both. Due to the fact that I am trying to sell a lot more items than the 20 slots given to us, it might be fiscally prudent to simply settle for the new "low" price and move on to another item.

Now what I described above is an over-analyzed version of supply and demand as I've experienced it in this specific game. I did this to provide a possible reasoning behind what OP and others may describe as undercutting for the simple sake of being first on the list, aka:

it's about people working/manipulating the seller list in order to get their names highest on the list regardless of price.

-Xoo

I don't even understand what the point of doing that (disregarding price and just aiming for the top of the list) would be since if you are disregarding the price then there's no point in being high on the list, i.e. you wouldn't be making enough of a profit to continue doing it. So, rather than this, I think some of these reactions are people experiencing the fast paced economy that FFXIV has cultivated.

I'm not sure if that helps explain anything, but I hope it at least provides some kind of reasoning as to why it happens and even though this is just my personal experience, it explains a situation where your items might be undercut but not while disregarding the price, but rather "cutting your losses" so to speak to move on to other stock.