Suggestion: Listing Fees

[Cynica]

Good afternoon. I would like to propose a change to the market board system that I believe would improve its overall user experience and long-term stability. Most of us have felt the impact of constant undercutting. While the existing sales tax helps manage inflation, it does little to address the repetitive cycle of cancelling and relisting items simply to stay competitive. This repeated micromanagement creates a system that feels more like a chore than gameplay.

In considering why this issue is so persistent, I found myself comparing it to Final Fantasy XI’s auction house. XI had two important characteristics that limited this kind of volatility: prices were not publicly visible, and listing fees discouraged constant relisting. As a result, selling in XI rarely felt like a maintenance loop. You listed an item, walked away, and often didn’t think about it again until it sold or returned. There was no pressure to check the market every few minutes, and players were far less likely to make accidental impulse purchases at drastically inflated prices. The system also functioned without relying on external tools or market-tracking addons to make informed decisions.

With this in mind, I would like to propose shifting XIV’s tax system from a sales-time deduction to a meaningful listing fee applied at the time of posting. Introducing a real cost to each relist would make undercutting a deliberate choice rather than a reflex, and would reduce the constant volatility that leads players to monitor their retainers so frequently. Buyers would continue to benefit from full price transparency, while sellers would have a system that better respects their time.

I recognize that this would be a significant change to a system that has existed since ARR, but I believe it would lead to a more stable, less labor-intensive market board experience for the community as a whole.

[Kendall]

They have that system in-place within Final Fantasy XI Online and while it works fine to combat the listing Fee's possible abuse and waste, they opted to completely hide the Sale price altogether, so you must make a Bid usually going by the Price History of an item, repeated Bids are needed to win an item (Buy) usually as you never know if what you're bidding on is 1 Gil or 1,000.000 or more, for example.

They would need to do this here in my opinion if they used your request, if they didn't, it would be even easier to control the markets as many players would opt to not compete at all and maybe even leave items up at higher prices for longer periods of time due to the listing fee, while power-sellers and possibly Bots don't care about losing money in "fee wars" (taking down item and relisting over and over until they scare off potential competition or drain the competitions purse/wallet enough that they leave).

I would prefer the Final Fantasy XI Online Auction House over this games current Market Board setup.

Or leave it as it current is.

[UseYour]

They have that system in-place within Final Fantasy XI Online and while it works fine to combat the listing Fee's possible abuse and waste, they opted to completely hide the Sale price altogether, so you must make a Bid usually going by the Price History of an item, repeated Bids are needed to win an item (Buy) usually as you never know if what you're bidding on is 1 Gil or 1,000.000 or more, for example.

They would need to do this here in my opinion if they used your request, if they didn't, it would be even easier to control the markets as many players would opt to not compete at all and maybe even leave items up at higher prices for longer periods of time due to the listing fee, while power-sellers and possibly Bots don't care about losing money in "fee wars" (taking down item and relisting over and over until they scare off potential competition or drain the competitions purse/wallet enough that they leave).

I would prefer the Final Fantasy XI Online Auction House over this games current Market Board setup.

Or leave it as it current is.

what you seem to be describing sounds like runescapes grand exchange. Very easy to manipulate. Id buy 1 item at max price, sell it at min price, now i have my price range where i put a huge chunk of my money into buy offers and then sell everything a bit cheaper than the highest listed, even though both amounts were hidden. Made millions a day. People formed clans with hundreds of people that would buy out items for weeks and sell it extremely high also. But sometimes the leaders and higher ups already spent a week buying the item up lower price, then sell their shares halfway through the rise when their new lower members are told "to the moon you diamond fisted apes!" (yes im implying the gamestop stock situation was a common runescape pump n dump scam on IRL redditors)

While id love a fee to post things first that only solves human undercutters who value every material and time investment into their final price. How does this solve people who use multiple game accounts and third party apps to run dozens of retainers and hundreds of every max level gear and consumable posted for far less than the materials sell for? Someone who seconds after you post an item on your maxed omni-gather/crafter for 100k profit, undercuts you by 250k? Someone that intentionally loses 100k+ on each item, and has multiple of each item posted at that same price on multiple retainers all made by the same crafter, every day, month after month so nobody on that server can even sell crafted products?

How would you solve such an obvious botter and cheater issue when the devs cant/wont? How would you propose we convince the devs to be less greedy IRL so we can get greedy in-game?