Undercutters.

[Balkin]

Just thought I'd kick the dead horse a few times to see if it was maybe still breathing a little bit. LOL

I hereby invoke the statue upon myself!



(URL if the image doesn't work)

Dead Horse Statue


Why the heck can't Trade Skillers match the lowest price in the Bazaar and call it good? I've been making and selling Kaladim Constitutionals and Grobb Liquidized Meat for a LONG time now. There's a core of us doing so, and we kind of agreed on some minimum prices without actually talking to one another. Mostly it's been 20pp for KC's and 5pp for Grobbs. Sometimes someone would come in and undercut, but they don't stick around for long, so it's been no big deal. Usually no more than five people selling either type of brew.

Now we've got 6 - 10 people selling both in the bazaar almost constantly! The new comers ALL average 15-18pp for KC's in the bazaar, and it's constant! Not that that's not a great profit margin, because it is, but how hard would it be to match prices with others so we can all share the profit?

Grobb's are a joke anymore as well. For a while when I logged in, I'd just match whoever was lowest at that time, and never went lower than 5pp. Guess what. Yup, bunch of new sellers all undercutting down to 3pp each now! SO annoying... LOL Going to have to talk to them. I started undercutting them to give them a taste of their own medicine, but they just keep going lower and lower. How dumb is that? Both me undercutting, and them going even lower? ROFL

Don't they understand? I mean, I can sell Grobb's for 1pp 2gp and make a tiny bit of profit. If that's what I've got to do to either convince them to match everyone else so we can all share the profit, or drive them OUT of the market, I just might. Everyone who's selling loses when we have price wars. Just match the lowest price dang it! Geez...

Hmmm... now I'm wondering if I should even bother posting this, as it seems to polarize into two camps anyway. The "Match and be happy" and "Must have lowest price" camps. Ah well, let the arguments flow. A Jedi must feel the farce FLOW through him...

[Groghe]

Following your line of thought would have kept the price of MTPs at 100pp each on my server since that was the "accepted" market price when I started baking.

[Hibashira]

You are assuming everyone has the same goals. They don't. There are enough people that just want to get rid of things quickly. Who knows why? May be to get back more bank space for all I care. That's what you get for selling something on the skillup path. Just ask all the Othmir Fur Cap people.

[Kakg]

Had the same problem recently with Corking Devices.

No-one had made any for ages on our server so I figured there was a market gap I could fill. Well, I busted a gut to get my gnome above it's trivial. Made two corkers, sold them in bazaar for 3 times the cost of making them - superb. Same again the second night.

The third night made another two. But next morning I find that two other tinkers had cottoned on to the gap and were undercutting me by 10% and 20%. So I shrug and match the lowest.......... It's been a week now and we've dropped to below half what I was charging originally.

Luckily the demand has slackened and none of us have sold any so I'm staying out of that market for a while in the hope the others will get bored and move on to the next big thing. Or else start to get smart and raise their prices again to a level where its worth my time doing them

[Niellya]

You can probably thank your nifty new Tradeskill UI for the influx of new tradeskillers out to make a quick profit.

[Sulkano]

Anytime there is money to be made folks are gonna jump in on the action...its just the way it is, the way its always been. Give it a few months and see who is still standing and who was a flash in the pan

[Taadieri]

Actually, Kakg's experience is a common one for me. Since the large numbers of tradeskillers have made sizeable profits hard to find, and since I am not yet elemental flagged to make the best-selling gear, I do a lot less tradeskilling than I used to.

So my usual practice is to watch for items that have been good sellers in the past that I haven't seen listed in the bazaar for a week or more, then make a couple. Typically, I can sell them quickly, but by the time I make more, someone else has seen mine, realized they were missing a possible market and jumped in to compete. If they match my price, I leave mine alone. If they undercut me, I drop my price as low as necessary to sell all the ones I have made and then stop making them for a while.

This makes my sales somewhat sporadic. I can sometimes make 50-100k in a couple days, then not sell anything at all for weeks.

[Aandaie]

The bazaar is a free market, so there is free market competition. That is the way it is, by definition. Frankly I don't understand even asking questions about it.

I always sell items like bone chips and spiderling silks cheaper than other vendors. I do it so that people buy my bone chips and spiderling silks instead of someone elses. So I'd do the same thing If I was selling tradeskill stuff. There is not a tradeskill "guild", nor any reason to be in one in game, so you are not going to have set price limits. That is the way it is.

In an mmorpg which allows players the freedom to choose,
the answer to any question like this is "because they can." Its the price of mmorpg freedom.

[Angelsyn]

I buy up cheap bricks/blocks of Velium when I see 'em and chisel 'em down.

Then I sell the pieces for 55p each, where most people are selling for 60-70p each.

Often I get bought out by one of those higher-priced sellers, but I don't care... I've made the level of profit I set out to make.

I'm also starting to make Blessed Full Mithril. For a long time, there were three or four people making this and hammering each other's prices. Now, they're gone and it's usually only myself or one other person selling... with the occassional person selling a piece they've upgraded from.

To the guy with the Corking Devices... just set 'em aside and come back later. When I was selling Collapsed (whatever)s for a friend, I almost never backed down on my prices. Even if someone undercut me, I didn't back down and often got sales anyway when the other seller(s) weren't around. Now, Collapsed kits are back up in price a bit because the undercutters aren't in business anymore.

[Balkin]

Heh, I know it's useless to rant about this. Not like anything is going to change, but hey, this is Primal Scream.

Gotta grumble every once in a while right?

[Koru]

Collapsed are easier to make a profit with though due to their lore status. It's a lot harder to load up your trader with 8 collapsed sewing kits to dump on the market - thankfully. As to corking devices, yeah, I've also seen people who seem to be trying to dump items as fast as they can on that front. I wait them out if they have 3 or less items. Since they're used in trophy for the cheapest trade to GM they sell at a rather steady pace.

Now GLMs and MTPs are another matter. Waiting out someone who obviously just finished skilling up on either and has 1000+ items to sell can take a while. Same for the trader who seems to have as unlimited a supply as I do but only puts up 200 at a time like I do, yet needs to have the lowest price at all times for some reason. If the price isn't too below acceptable profits I will match their price. If they go lower I may match again just to see them make even less profit and decide not to bother with a specific product any more.

My main selling products I have almost no competition in, so when it comes to picnics and brews I don't mind taking a lesser profit for a short while to make my point to the perpetual undercutter. Just as the free market of EQ allows them to sell at any price they want it allows me to sell at any price I want, and I admit I do get a small mean grin when I see half the other traders move their prices down to match ours after I start my 'chicken match'. Usually I prefer to pick a reasonable price and keep my wares at that price no matter what. But sometimes I feel too mischievous and I've just got to bring the market down a bit for the wares dumper. I figure in the long run it's good for the traders to get rid of Mr 'Xpp 9gp, 9sp, 9cp', and in the short run it's good for the buyers.

[Kirstin Thornhill]

I went from 202 baking to 250 baking in about three days, long before the new UI, on MTPs.

I have roughly 1800 MTPs left after giving them away to friends and guildies. They are packed on a mule, and I will eventually eat them all. No way will I sell them at the super low bazaar prices...

When I run out, I will get another character to 250 baking...

[bearcaller]

A lot of people (myself included) don't have a second account that we can keep a dedicated trader in the bazaar 24/7. This means that I want to sell stuff FAST. Undercutting is one way of doing that. The only problems with undercutting that I have are when someone places an item only 1cp less than the next highest--thats just annoying and makes me not buy from that person, ever. Or, when someone is deliberately dumping on the market killing it completely. This happened on SolRo with solstice robes the last few weeks. The market had been down to the 350-400pp range for sometime but then someone came in with 30+ at 150 and bottomed it out. Thats not just undercutting, thats collapsing what little of the market there was left.

[Hilbur]

I do alot of LDoN and I keep the temper components unless someone in my group asks for them in which case I happily share with them. After awhile I go on a smithing spree and make up a bunch of armor. I tend to sell it at 10 to 20pp more then it cost me to make the armor. I see others selling the same armor for 50 to 100pp more then me. So am I undercutting them? No. I am setting what I consider a resonable price for the item. I don't even take into consideration what they value their item at. My stuff tends to sell quickly and I can turn that money around to help me finance more smithing work.

I will admit to one thing that bugs the living bejesus out of me though. Spider and spiderling silks for 10+pp a pop and leather padding for 40+ apiece. Come on. The mobs that drop this stuff are easy kills for lvl 30s. And the combine to make leather padding is what 50 triv or so. I know there was a guy in our bazaar on Drinal that was doing some kinda macro searching/buying because everytime I logged on and put up spider silks for 3pp each he was on me in seconds buying the entire load. Last time I saw he had 583 spider silks priced at 15pp each.

[Unidin]

Dont like the price on silks then dont buy em. I willingly pay 10pp a silk to help with my tailoring because I dont feel like farming them. I'd much rather spend a day in solro getting experience and then sell ornate.