Why do people complain about undercutting?Follow

Since he doesn't actually play any more, we don't know what he knows about it. Party Finder doesn't throw you into content as soon as the party is built; you've got the luxury of time to review strategies, get to know each other, kick badly geared people who cheated to meet the iLvl requirement and/or someone who is on someone else's blacklist / someone you don't like.

You've got time to put out calls to your FC or linkshells to fill in the last healer slot. Chances are, if it's in party finder it's a farm party or someone is doing it as a learning party or clear for a friend anyway.

Party Finder is a great tool, but it is just that - a tool. Successful content clears still require knowledge, skill, and leadership. Rolling into Duty Finder is, of course, a major gamble - Party Finder greatly reduces the risk. And unlike DF, you can halt the raid and kick someone who is being a jerk / being bad, then restart.

People do like to complain. And undercutting is normal. But that doesn't mean undercutting is practiced intelligently, nor does it mean that all of the complaints are invalid.

Problem with this mentality is:

If the item costs 450k to make (which some do currently) you only want it for under market value or under for what it cost to make. For example you probably find 140k reasonable but not 500-600k, despite it being barely a profit to the crafter. Undercutting is normal, being retarded with your undercuts is not. You don't see real life business selling at insane losses to compete - Mcdonalds is cheap, food is questionable, but you don't see Burger King or In-N-Out selling for mere cents to compete with Mcdonalds.

Look at any hardware vendor, unless you're buying wholesale or in bulk, good change the XFX 7xxx GPU that goes for $220 in one location will go for the same or slightly less unless it's used. So yes, it's natural to want to buy as cheap as possible, but you also have to realize if markets continually crash out people won't make certain items anymore because it's a pure loss to them meaning no crafted item for you. It goes both ways.

(And painfully obvious you're not a crafter.)

Crystals are the ONE thing where I deliberately skip all the 1000 quantity listings from Gmgdhgfhg for 75 gil and jump to the 100 gil 100 quantity listings from FunRetainerName.

No serious crafter isn't also a gatherer. Just saying.

That's the reason why I said I didn't know what DF was. I wasn't sure if it was the list version or the queue version, but I was sure to make it clear in the post that I only take issue with queues and their place in endgame content. Other games also have both types of tools and I feel the same way about them. Again it's not specific to ARR, but MMOs in general.

The same thing exists in other games. WoW just splits a single 'raid finder' tool into premade list and auto-grouping queue types. Essentially it's the same thing with slightly different features and different names. FWIW I don't like the use of the premade grouping type of raid finder being used in WoW for heroic raid content for the same reasons I stated previously.


Game mechanics impacting the player base seems to be a recurring theme here

I was never really much of a crafter in ARR because I wasn't a fan of a system that allowed everyone the ability to complete every step of every crafting job. Does anyone know if there is any planned increase to crafting caps and if so, will they be limiting the number of crafts you can level to the new cap?

You're basically asking yourself "Should I spend the gil because I can earn it back more quickly than I could farm the materials myself, or should I farm the materials because it would take me longer to earn the gil back if I spend it on these materials".

Specialization just feels like it adds more depth and dimension to the market because you are almost forced in some cases to rely on other people. That's not to say that ARR is devoid of that completely, it's just much less prevalent because as Turin states; serious crafters are serious and probably thought out a self sufficient path. If you were serious about crafting in XI you were almost forced to find others to assist you.

XI's crafting wasn't without it's drawbacks of course, but it was beneficial in almost every craft to have at least a few friends who had specialized in something else. As poorly executed as I felt the evolith system was, synergy on it's own brought crafters of all different schools together.

From what I understand there will be new caps but I think you can still level all crafts to the cap. They are also implementing a specilization system however where you will focus on just a few crafts so I think there will be more reliance on each other in the future.

You are probably right. I don't play and even when I did I was never into crafting so I probably misunderstood what specialization was about. Thanks for clearing that up.

While this tends to be true, I know several serious crafters who only have gathering classes in the 30s (myself included). In my case, it boils down to the fact that I'm one of the few crafters in my group whereas everyone else gathers. For me, there is nearly no reason for me to gather my mats when I can put in requests to my friends and get everything at a discount. That being said, there are still times when I do go out and get the stuff that I can simply because there is a lack on the market board. For me, it's all about opportunity costs rather than actual gil expenses. If I had the time to play like I used to play XI, you better believe I'd gather all my own stuff.

As for undercutting, there is always a time and a place. If an item is gradually dropping due to people undercutting while there are no sales, that is fine. It makes sense for the price to fall if demand falls without a reduction in supply. However, it's the people who crash a market below the material cost that annoy me. When I notice it happening, I just remove my item and wait for it to recover (or I just donate my item to a friend). There are other times when I notice players instigating an undercut war so that they can buy out everyone when the price falls below the mat cost and resell everything at proper value (or even marked up). It's actually quite clever.

Honestly, I just wish people began to understand the tax system. For example, let's say you are in Limsa/Mist when you searching the MB for an expensive item. When you pull up the list, you see there is one in Gridania for 1,999,998, one in Ul'dah for 1,999,999, and then mine in Limsa for 2,000,000. Because you are in Limsa/Mist, even though the other two are listed as lower than mine, my item will be the cheapest because it will not add the 5% tax to the item (I believe in this example, the tax would be ~100k). Even though I know people tend to not know this, I always check to see if one city doesn't have an item listed before I undercut to sell. This allows me to list at the current market value while still being the cheapest item provided the buyer is in the same city as my retainer.

I'll give you that. But crafted items are not setting the prices.

You answered your own question.