Quote Originally Posted by Wolfie View Post
I'm sorry but no, blind bidding didn't help at all. The buyers were smart enough to figure out that they should always underbid when they bought items.

Items that sold fast, like RR hairpins, food and arrows fluctuated heavily in price between weekdays (when there are few buyers) to the weekends (when there are a lot of buyers). The money entering and exiting the game was not significant enough to have major effects over the course of a few days or a week.

Deflation and inflation in the game will happen regardless of whether we use a blind bid, true bid, buyout, bazaars, or whatever. That is a tenet of a free market. What buyout has over blind bid is that both as a seller and as a buyer, I have to do less guesswork or homework when I want to use the market. Neither of them provide any protection against supply/demand fluctuations or against overall inflation/deflation.
Right, but you never saw the variation you see in XIV.

If this was the real world, hell yeah, I would be against blind bidding, the problem here this isnt the real world. Everyone is a seller. Everyone is a business. When you hurt people selling things in MMOs, you hurt everyone playing the game. Stable prices will help you more than hurt you.

People dont do what they do now. You rarely saw items being cut for 20k less than they are worth. Things that are overly abundant like RR hairpins, oils and powders, food, etc did see lots of variance in price, but thats because these items where so cheap to begin with. Yes, it was common to see those going for say 10k a stack on Thursday, going for 7k a stack by Saturday. Thats because those items where already a decently flooded market, and then when you have more people available to craft those items on the weekend, you flood it even further.

Thats not what we are seeing in XIV. What we are seeing is armor pieces that are going anywhere from 20k to 100k, and its not because there is hundreds of them up. When there is only say 3 of those pieces up, you see the undercutting to be very minor, but once you start having 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10+ up, people start drastically undercutting these items, driving the price down to near free. Sure, in XI you would have seen items drop a few thousand when a decent amount of the items starting going up, but never these drastic changes.

Blind is better. Sure, this current model saves you a few seconds of checking of how low you can get something for, but its also going to hurt you when trying to sell things. When you have to actually test prices to see how low you can get something for, people are more unlikely to try getting things for cheaper. The current model only helps people who dont care about trying to earn money, or buy it (not claiming anyone here is either of those people). Blind helps everyone.