Ok...It Has To Be Said..

Look people..act like you have a brain for once. If something is a rare item, dont put it up for oh..4k..5k..NO! Rare items..or fish that take skill to catch say...Nebimonites or Black sole shouldnt be put on AH for 4k and 8k. Nebs should be about 10k and black sole about 20k. Do you people do that? NO!!! You lower the prices on AH so you get sell faster. Why? Because you're stupid, greedy, and highly impatient. WAIT YOUR DAMN TURN!! If something sells fast, such as the fish, it WONT take long for you to sell if you just put it up for a decent price. One more thing, stop blaming RMT for your own mistakes. RMT dont bring prices down. Sorry...but thats the truth. They WANT more money, therefore they will sell for higher, then u smart *** come in and bring down the prices. Yea..and you people wonder why half of the Remora server left FFXI to go play WoW -.-

Who the hell are you to decide what something is worth? Nebs @10k? I laugh. Those are retardedly easy to fish up.

Yes, RMT want money, but if undercutting is the only way to drive away the casual crafter so they can make money, they'll do it as long as they remain in the black. They only raise prices on items when they're able to control the market for it.

(I shouldn't be responding right after my all-nighter dynamis run... -_-;)

Prices do differ by server -- if you don't like your server's economy, you have the option to switch to a server that you like the economy of. (This is one place where the information here can be a deciding factor.)

I find it highly ironic that the word "greedy" was there - the fact that you're complaining about "undercutters" indicates that you're trying to milk more money out of consumers for what sales you make, which would tag you as being as "greedy", if not even more "greedy", compared to the "undercutters".

I know of a JP friend who put something up on AH at what she perceived as the current market value (i.e. based her price on the in-game final 10 sales at the time when she put the item up), only to be /tell-harassed repeatedly several days later by some English-speaking *** (and all his mules) over and over for "undercutting"... I understand the bitterness involved because you're trying to make money yourself, but actually taunting people ingame is going a bit too far IMO (that's why your *** can get banned for harassment, I'd like to hope), especially when they were just posting an item up at the current market value.

Undercutting is the entire stabilizing counter-force that maintains the FF economy. It is the reason that gil continues to be worth something 5+ years after the game was released. In most MMO's, the lack of undercutting ability causes spiraling inflation that renders the in-game currency useless after a couple years, max. That's if you're lucky -- a number of earlier MMO's lost their economies due to inflation within 6 months of release.

If you're a crafter, farm your own materials, or look for someone in your linkshell who you can partner with who can make the mats you need and split the profit. For example, Blindphleb's a Bonecrafter and I desperately needed Demon Arrowheads to get from Woodworking 60-69. I was able to buy a couple of stacks of Black Chocobo Fletchings and he provided the stacks of Demon Arrowheads. I split the profit 50/50 with him, and it totally worked out =D

You have to be really patient and tolerant with AH prices. I make quivers for gil, and it really does piss you off to see Acid Quivers go down from a solid 30-35k streak drop down to 10-12k, just because some gilseller started spamming the AH with quivers. Wait a couple days for the AH to empty out and the prices to rise again, and it'll be up again sooner or later.

@ Cymmina, you laugh at 10k for Nebs? What do u think they should be? 4k? People like that, that think everything should be nothing, are the reason why all the farmable items are going down in price, therefore making it harder and harder to actually GET good gil in this game. Another example of human stupidity ruining other's gameplay.

and yes, i understand there needs to be undercutting for the game to remain balanced...but..its gotten out of hand. 2 years ago silk thread on remora was a little over 20k. Now you are lucky to get it to sell for 4k a stack! IT's ridiculous. People need to know when to stop. Undercutting 10-15k at a time is out of the question. Just pure ignorance..all that is..

and Rikapi, I say they are greedy b/c they want their money faster than everyone else so they lower the price about 2-3k lower than everyone so they get theirs faster; therefore, they are greedy. Yes i want more money for hard work (b/c fishing things such as black sole isnt an easy thing to do) but im willing to wait for it to sell for a decent price..unlike the "greedy" players with no common sense.

Say what you want about how easy some fish are to catch, Shall Shells used to be 40k a stack... I've seen them recently as low as 5k a stack, regularly at 7k a stack. I just glanced over the price history, 2 names out of 25 didn't look like jibberish. Nebs used to be 12k-14k a stack when I started fishing, and when the guy that got me into fishing started they were 20k. Now I'm like "Hot damn!" if I can get 10k for them. I realize that the entire game economy has deflated a bit, but fish in particular aren't worth what they used to be apples to apples. Why? Because RMTs realized that they could easily make money, 100% profit, off of level 1 characters with a very minimal investment and a decent script. SE has done a better job than most credit them with dealing with the RMT botting scourge on the fishing economy, and it hiccups now and then returning to what it ought to be... But they always come back. The bannings are a temporary reprieve, there needs to be a permenant solution. the Bounty hunters were a nice shot, though ^^

As to undercutting at large, its simple supply and demand. If people are listing things faster than people are buying, people will sell lower so that people will buy their stuff. If you look at material costs vs total synth cost you'll see an interesting trend. If material costs are low, prices on the finished product are generally high, and if the materials are high, the finished product is low. I noticed this early on as a cook, where I deal in fast moving consumables. "Why does that make sense", you might ask? When There aren't many mats in stock (thus, they're more expensive as there's less supply for the demand), its because they've been bought up. They were bought up to craft. That means finished product listed. The more finished product listed, the more undercutting happens and the lower the price.... However, if the mats are high in stock (and thus low in price), that means that not many people have recently crafted the particular item, which means fewer finished products in stock which in turn means a better ratio of supply:demand which, finally, results in more gil in your pocket. Watch your items, you'll see what I mean =D

What I do is this; I look up an item that I'm considering farming/crafting/fishing, and I see how many are in stock and check the price. If there are a lot in stock, I go do something else to make money and wait for the inevitable price bungee. You want to stop undercutting? Don't list the item. Undercutting happens because people see a bunch of something in stock and panic, wanting theirs to sell. Try not to list more than 2 of a particular item at a time (excepting things like yagudo drink and moat carp that sell fast as sin in vegas) and you'll find that the price stays more stable. Its tempting to list all 8 stacks of mithkabobs I synthed at once, but I know that'll help to drive down the market. So I'll list 2-3 at a time and wait for some to sell before listing more. More than anything, crafting is about diversifying and playing the market.

Hope all that helps.

your options:

1. quit
2. change servers
3. do as Ravahan suggested

this is an age old complaint, bring it up won't fix anything. people will always undercut.

Well, it's a business trade-off, right?

I can either wait longer and get the full 15k, or I can undercut for 12k and have it sell quicker. In that case, I'm basically "paying" 3k in order to save time on the sale. It's not really greed, because I'm losing money on a single transaction.

However, depending on how valuable I consider my time to be, or how busy I am in RL, that 3k could be worth it in my mind. It could also be possible that the increased rate of sale allows me to sell enough additional product to make up the 3k I lose on each transaction.

If I can sell three items for 12k each in two days, or sell one item for 15k in the same amount of time, I come out way way ahead (to the tune of 21k) by undercutting.

Undercutters don't bother me, cause often times I find myself doing the same thing. What I consider greedy are price-gougers who charge 50-100% increase on the item in a single transaction. I wanted an item on the AH one time, and the item was selling for 20k in nearly all of the last 10 transactions, and it's a fairly decent item, about 5-10 transactions a day, so prices were pretty stable. I needed it really badly for an event later in the day, but there was only 1 on the AH. I bid up to 30k before I refused to go any higher. I don't mind bidding higher then usual AH price, I was willing to raise the price by 50%, a substantial boost from the last transaction, but I will only go so far.

But I did just wait a few hours before checking the AH again, and another person put an item up for regular AH price, and I quickly bought it. I went back the next day and looked at the AH prices, and saw that the item I was previously bidding for ended up going for 40k, a 100% increase in price, all in 1 transaction.

The next two transactions after that were both 20k.

The concept of supply and demand is all what the AH is about, but unless something game-changing happens, there shouldn't be a 100% increase on any item in a single transaction, that's the definition of greedy. And unfortunately, someone's usually desperate enough to buy the price-gouged item, and in the end the price never changes except for that one transaction, where someone was greedy and took advantage of the desperate person.

QFT

Also undercutting is easy to deal with by simply buying up all the low priced items and relisting them. I do that all the time with certain items that fluctuate a lot and often.

I don't even craft them anymore, I just resell them higher... spend 15 minutes on a short list every day and make 20-30K easy.

QFT? mkay. apparently being realistic is bad. whatever.

,,,,

She was *Agreeing* with you..

QFT, Quoted For Truth.

This may seem a glib interpretation, but this is the behaviour of a traditional capitalist economy, subject to the forces of supply and demand, and to a smaller degree the "price of money", aka inflation.

When 'undercutting' generally happens is on an item with a number of items being on sale at the same time with multiple sellers vying for the consumer. Competition in an environment where supply exceeds demand generally leads to lower prices, increased demand, and eventually equilibrium at a new, lower price. If I may play the Devil's advocate for a moment... if you don't enjoy the prospect of this economic system you may want to apply for Cuban citizenship, because this is a small scale version of how the majority of world economies operate.

Even with a veritable storm of "zomg undercutters rantrantrant" threads spewn across the internet for the last 5 years there has been little to no effect on this behaviour inherent to any free market system. If you want to have any sort of tangible impact on this you can either find a way to drive up demand [good luck with that btw] or decrease supply of lower priced items like Ladyjazz suggested above.

I'm not keen on elaborating on the "price of money" at the moment, but S/E's STFU [Special Task Force Unit] is the only way to legitimately impact the market by removing enormous amounts of currency and items from circulation, and [to a lesser extent] moderating the price of gil-sinks like taxes and NPC-bought item prices. I think almost everyone has recently reaped the benefits of prices crashing across the board whilst maintaining our bank accounts from the time of ludicrously high prices.

It seems the most vocal of observers are only on the losing end of the deal where they are either not making enough money for their own tastes, or lamenting a raise in price. You can all rest assured that everyone has run into this exact same setback in-game, or in real life, we just have the sense to realize that dwelling on, and complaining about it does little more than shorten your life span, and annoy others. [respectivley]

"I think everyone has recently reaped the benefits of prices crashing across the board whilst maintaining our bank accounts from the time of ludicrously high prices."

I think it would have been nice to have been around for the high price era to be able to benefit from the falling economy a bit. I started the game after that period of time and it's been a downhill economy ever since I started. In the process of lvling to 75 you end up loosing money. You buy a piece of equip use it for 10-20 lvls and then have to end up selling back at a loss. But hey you make due with what you have around you. You just have to be more diversified with you're AH listings -- know when to sell and when to wait out the overstock.

One thing that would be good to point out is that just because prices on items are lower, doesn't exactly mean the economy is better. It may be better for the person that sold all their gear before the prices fell to go on a break, and came back to see much cheaper prices, but may not be better for the character just starting. People also like to claim that it's just supply and demand, in my opinion the games economy is more tied to the supply of gil than the supply of a certain item on the AH. Inflation is usually caused by high rates of money supply i.e. the start of the game where people are creating gil through NPC exchange, missions, mob drops. This is usually counter-balanced by gil sinks i.e. chocobo fees, town and AH taxes, Endgame event entry, and removal of gil by the STFU. I would argue these have a bigger action on FF economy than undercutting. 6 years of crafting with few consumable markets kills both farming and crafting, dwindling server populations means lower gil supply, more endgame communities mean more money dumped into npc instead of npc's dumping money into the economy. I mean can you imagine SE thinking of doing the mog bonanza at the peak of the inflation? Undercutting might be where these factors get expressed, but I doubt it's the entire stabilizing counter-force that maintains the FF economy.

In an inflation economy, currency gets gradually less valuable. During the days of psychotic inflation, buying and holding lucrative items like k.club, p.charm, etc was a good move. Chances were, a week from now, they would be worth more.

In a deflation economy like we have, however, it's best to have the least amount of your net worth tied up in actual items/equipment possible, because every item you own is worth progressively less each day. In this case, it's better to just sit on all your gil and not play the game at all. (Which is what I've been doing the past year or so. Several hundred million gil in cash is worth a lot more now than it was a couple years ago.)

Typically in MMO's, however, companies would prefer very slight inflation economies over deflation economies, because inflation economies provide players more impetus to log in and play than deflation ones, where sitting on all your cash offline and waiting for it to appreciate can be more efficient than actually playing. Plus slight inflation economies can see much less intimidating at first for new players; prolonged deflation can cause insurmountable discrepancies in net worth between new players and veterans who have been around since before the crash.

This might be a stupid question, but for those who actually care about the in-game economy instead of ONLY increasing the worth of our characters (whether in terms of items or gil), what would be the best way to go about bettering the economy? I doubt that a few people could do anything incredibly drastic, but who knows how much it might actually help in the long run?

lol wow i thought QFT was quit f**king talking. thanks for the heads up Jhes ^^

You know, it could be worse. It could be REAL LIFE economy and it could be mortgages, bills, and food we can't all afford...
Maybe this lotto is kinda like the loleconomicstimulus. Speaking of which, good luck tomorrow guys.

Ayne: I do know that a few groups of people buy and sell items over and over to increase the price of things. I think what you're talking about is lowering? maybe i read it wrong. It's hot and my brain doesn't work as well lol.

Lol, np Littledarc--I usually use QFT when someone says something that I totally agree with, but don't want to have be redundant and say it again =P

I've also heard of that--when you use your mule and buy it from yourself to increase the price. But what I'm talking about is what can WE do, those of us who are actually aware of the economic state and want to fix things for the better? Is there some way we can sort of positively affect the economy in the long run?

Positive for who? Increasing prices for the benefit of sellers screws over the buyers, and vice versa.

IMHO the best thing we can do is adhere to the principle of Laissez-faire economics. The market will naturally self-correct to the best balance between the interests of both buyers and sellers. Any appreciable outside influence can only realistically be applied by S/E and the STFU.

It's hard to compare inflation rates in a game with the real world. Most real world economists like a low, but not too low inflation rate. These rates are based on very broad baskets of items, which are for a lack of a better term "technologically stable." It's very unlikely that computer prices make up a good indicator of the health of an economy. Everyone knows that their PC from 1986 is not going to go up in value. Also, it's unlikely that we'll discover a new vegetable deep in the Amazon or a new use for a naturally abundant metal which makes all previous foods or materials practically valueless.

I would liken our game economy more to a PC market than a regular economy, and so, I don't think the index on ffxiah.com is a good indicator of the economy health when viewed as a real world economy. It is based on a stable set of items, yet the items in the game are ever changing. For example, one can assume from the recent fluctuations that behemoth hides and/or dusk gloves are in the index. They are highly valued for their 3% Haste. If SE was to release a new hand piece equippable by all jobs and obtainable for 50k allied notes also with 3% haste, I can assure you dusk gloves and their ingredient behemoth hide would drop in price precipitously. SE has also been known to make existing items more easily obtainable which drives their prices down.

I don't think people would keep paying to play if updates didn't introduce new equipment and food which are comparable or better than current options.

I can't understand why anyone complains about the current deflation. "Oh my word, the one and only thing I like to sell fell by 5% in the last month, and the thing I've been saving up to buy fell by 10%. This is horrible!" This is a bit heartless, but I honestly feel the economy is leaps and bounds better than the era of rampant inflation.

Keep in mind that the AH was designed with rules that exert a deflationary force: progressive tax, lack of fees to bid, and winning bids going to the lowest seller not the first seller.

Aha.... that does explain things.... ^^

One thing that concerns me is the future of crafters and the market they support. The new ZNM system, while exciting, added a number of new items that have a sizable advantage over the old AH staples. These items don't involve crafters at all, which also means they don't involve anyone that helms, farms, chocobo digs, or gardens. The gear that is crafted has been crafted for years. Take Scorpion harness for instance, it used to be one of the nicest body pieces to have for many jobs. It's still nice for alot of them, but so many have been made that it isn't in the interest of the crafter to make any more unless they're trying for an HQ harness in which point their market is very small because those that would think about blowing gil on an HQ probably already have one. Now bring in an item that makes the previous crafted item obsolete and see who wants to waste the time in crafting it. Once you kill the reason for a crafter to craft you kill the reason for them to buy materials. I'm not saying we'll wake up tomorrow and see crafters not buying materials, but it's something to think about. IMO the game needs many new (new not meaning old .dats put on new stats) crafted items with good stats.

Hyper inflation is a terrible thing for an in-game economy, but one could argue that in MMO's, prolonged deflation is worse. As long as the money sinks remain fixed, they will simply serve to accelerate the deflationary force on the economy.

In a slightly inflationary economy, newer and lower-leveled players tend to have the same ability to generate large sums of cash as advanced players, given time and effort. Either through farming, crafting, or other means. Because the flow of gil is gradually increasing across the board, profit margins are higher and newer players can still "feel" that with the right combination of effort and luck, they could one day potentially pull off having the vast fortunes that older players have. Yes, your first set of armor might cost 300k instead of 3k, but it's offset by the fact the game is swimming in gil and 300k isn't very hard to come by.

In a deflationary economy, however, this isn't the case. Players who sit on "old money" progressively get more and more relatively rich through zero effort of their own. Profit margins decrease to the point it becomes practically impossible for a new player to generate the same amount of capital that older players have. Older players don't even have to do anything for it. As an example, (not to brag -- as a serious example of how it's broken), my character is sitting on about 450M gil in cash and has nothing left to buy or spend it on. Why? Simply because I haven't played seriously in over a year and a half.

450M didn't used to be that much money. (Not when your 2-hour food costs 150k a serving and the average price for a relic was 3.6 billion gil.) But now, absurd amounts of gil are concentrated in the hands of relatively few players, who get progressively richer by comparison with every passing day. And there's no longer any way, at all, for newer players to ever make that much gil in their careers. Hell, even winning the recent "mega jackpot" was less than 1/4 of that, and I was never really considered "rich" before.

Deflationary economies are depressing and frustrating for new players. This discrepancy between the veterans and new players does not go unnoticed, and directly contributes to the flow of new players slowing to a drip, then stopping entirely. (Have you tried to get a group in Valkurm recently?) And as older players drop out at the high end due to regular subscription turnover, it usually signals the gradual death of a game unless the parent company recognizes the problem and steps in.

In your opinion Jaerik what would SE need to do to put our economy in a slightly inflationary economy? Do you think the current state of the economy demands this type of attention?

"what would SE need to do to put our economy in a slightly inflationary economy?"

Adjust NPC buy-back prices as the economy requires, I'm not sure how difficult it would be to program but if SE used an Index similar to that of FFXIAH and based NPC buy-back prices based on that, the economy would experience fewer significant price spikes (up or down).

also dongs.

I want to start of by saying that I highly respect Jaerik. I have bathed in his fountain of knowledge on many an occasion. Unfortunately, I'm going to have to completely disagree with his last post.

My first contention is, where is this deflation you're deriding? Practically every item I've ever farmed hasn't changed in 6 months to a year. Some have actually gone up due to better RMT measures. Spider webs, Mythril Ores, Beehive Chips, Giant Femurs, Reraise Earrings, Glass Fibers, Ram leathers. These are all things I have farmed in the past and in many cases are the same exact price today as they were over a year ago. (Check my characters Babet and Montparnasse for evidence.) Not all items have stayed constant for sure, but there are plenty of solid farming options which are just as valuable today as they were a year ago.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I think the market indicator on this site is biased largely by equipment that is becoming progressively inferior with each patch. It's only logical that they will go down in value. If anything, this is depressing to the existing players who invested their hard earned money in an item that is now trumped by a new item or made valueless like Thief's Knife. A new player's dream would be an economy where farming ingredients are stable in price and the end result equipment are ever falling in price. That's exactly what we have now.

During inflation, I spent about 7 months spending a couple hours a day farming just to buy two items. Some days I'd earn 100k only to find out the item I'm trying to buy went up by 200k overnight. To be honest, I got these items somewhat on the downswing. I'm not sure I would've ever caught up if the great deflation didn't set in. These items now cost a combined 1.7M. Doing something as mundane as farming blood or Zitah or Ladybug Wings in East Ronfaure could net you them in just a few weeks. Sucks for me, but great for newbies.

I'm also going to have to disagree with the statement that 450M was never rich. Granted, you couldn't outright buy a relic but you could basically buy anything else in the game. I'm going to have to guess that this already put you in the top 1% of the player population. Sure that could still leave several hundred players per server richer than you many of whom may have been in your elite endgame shell, but I'm just not believing the claims of poverty. My guess is that you probably bought a lot of your equipment before the mass inflation and then profited off the inflation. I may be completely wrong.

Now to answer the question: "What could SE due to cause slight inflation?" They could introduce a economic stimulus plan in the form of free money or perhaps a (virtually) free lottery. They could lower prices of high gil sinks such as Dynamis, Limbus, or Einherjar. They could make existing items harder to get and thus more valuable. They could quit releasing updates which make old items less valuable. (I suppose I'm just being cheeky now.)