Market Ward Madness

[GrimWarlock]

Selling items for 1 gil is actually selling at a loss, It's just not good business.

Using Alligator pears as an example, as these are actually listed on Ragnarok as:

Alligator pear 1 gil each, in a stack of 99, totaling 99 gil.

When these sell, a 5% tax is applied and you do not not receive the full 99 gil. These items will sell to an NPC for 1 gil each, with no tax, so you will receive the full amount and immediately.

If another player buys them, gil is merely transfered from one player to another, whereas selling to an NPC will actually bring more gil into the game!

So my question is... Why?

[Balaur]

And here I was thinking that if you go anywhere near the market wards in any town you get so much lag that crafting feels like a chore, slogging through molasses to make something, clikc on an NPC or the Bell, etc. Instead, people not realizing sell price versus consumer cost is skewed against their favor? That's just silly. Madness is forcing everyone to craft in one location in one part of the town and everyone else suffering for it. I would suggest another bell where one can craft. Maybe when housing is introduced.

[ghondon]

have you considered its possible that they dont care about 19 gil? That they would rather just make the pears accessible to players on their server? I appreciate it as a cook when i see this. If i could find them i would give them their 19 lost gil.

[SabbaNoergi]

I've seen Boar Leather listed as 0.

[Comicbookguy]

Maybe they want to help people level up crafting instead of selling to NPC?

[Vindrax]

Or if they are trying to clear inventory space on their retainer, they can just sell from their inn room instead of having to run to an NPC vendor. I've come across that in a few cases, where's I'm clearing space and I would probably just throw the items away, but it's actually easier to sell it from the retainer interface than to discard it (because for some reason you can't "discard item" you have to manually move it to your inventory, close the window, then discard).

[GrimWarlock]

One or two reasonable points raised. Selling cheap to help crafters and clearing inventory space, I think I can handle those.

[Dorin]

People just don't know how to play the market. The only tactic they know is "undercutting". Like in this example:




For some odd reason, the guy indicated by the orange arrow undercut the other guy below him. I guess he was in a hurry to sell, what doesn't make sense is that he then proceeds to undercut himself, and then more people follow and keep undercutting the undercutter (red box).

So what I did was simple, buy everything in the Green box and flip it for 380, making profit from other people's darksteel ore.

[GrimWarlock]

People just don't know how to play the market. The only tactic they know is "undercutting". Like in this example:




For some odd reason, the guy indicated by the orange arrow undercut the other guy below him. I guess he was in a hurry to sell, what doesn't make sense is that he then proceeds to undercut himself, and then more people follow and keep undercutting the undercutter (red box).

So what I did was simple, buy everything in the Green box and flip it for 380, making profit from other people's darksteel ore.

Ah, someone with business sense!

[Krisan]

have you considered its possible that they dont care about 19 gil? That they would rather just make the pears accessible to players on their server? I appreciate it as a cook when i see this. If i could find them i would give them their 19 lost gil.

Niceness doesn't make an economy, though.. If we did this in real life, our entire social structure would quite literally collapse.
While the economy ingame can't collapse in the same way, we need to either generate gil via NPC's (which brings new money into the economy and encourages us to spend more) or sell for higher - thus circulating gil in a more sensible way - as it is a lot of people are actually just slowly losing money, going back and forth until the taxes eat up the entire cost and the gil is lost forever.