The intention with “First In Last Out” was to stop sellers from undercutting each other when posting on the AH and as a result stabilize prices for products.
For those who don’t know ‘FILO’, and I’m guessing when looking at the AH, that’s a lot of you: “First in Last Out” means you can post something at the exact same price as a previous seller, but still be sure that yours will sell first.
Now, what was supposedly a good idea is backfiring imo.
The main thing people now do in the AH, is cancel/reposting all the time, just to be sure to be the first one to sell your product. For expensive items, like for instance the vessels for legendaries, people will stick to the AH and cancel/repost for hours on end…right until one of them thinks “f* all of you reposters” and then undercuts the whole bunch for drastic amounts, thinking “I can’t sit here for hours just reposting my stuff…” (because if you don’t repost you get stuck on the bottom of the pile with 0 chance to ever sell anything) “…so I’ll just post it at a ridiculously low price so no one else would think to go under that”.
Now we end up with products on the AH that are cheaper than the materials to craft them. Great for the buyers, but for those sellers who don’t have the hundreds of thousands of gold you simply cannot compete. You’ll end up having to sell things at a loss and probably withdraw from that market.
Why do people post things a such low prices?
because, like I said before, they are unable/unwilling to repost their things at regular intervals.
they are rich enough they don’t care at all. They just level their professions and are happy to get a pittance back for the products. It doesn’t affect their net worth.
What you need is a solution to stop the incessant reposting. Either, posting or cancelling should come at a cost, or there needs to be a timer that prevents cancelling for at least an hour.
To prevent people from making mistakes and not being able to cancel a post, maybe there should be an option you can set where you get an extra pop-up box to confirm your post, with an option to enable that from a certain amount.
Reposting so often also makes it more likely for people to undercut all the time. You would think not, but it happens all the time. Prices get undercut faster than with the old system.
Just today, I’ve seen rank 2 vessels go from 50k to 20k in the space of a couple of hours (and the vessels in question cost about 26k+ to make)…
That’s how markets work. The price is adjusted to what is acceptable. Also people who are relisting every hour are wasting their time. Either they’re trying to undercut in a market no one has any interest in, or they are trying to sell at the wrong time of day. Like undercutting constantly at 4am when no one is even around to buy it. Either way, it’s pointless.
I’ve heard this argument before, that undercutting is somehow an issue with the AH. But to me it all sounds like free market, more than anything else.
The price of a good or a commodity has to go up or down, that’s supply and demand. If the price of crafting materials never went down, the prices would be so prohibitively expensive nobody would be buying them. That would mean that sellers would lose-out on far more profit than lowering the price in the first place, and would create a situation that’s bad for everyone - the buyers AND the sellers.
I’m afraid you are looking to ‘fix’ something that not only every single one of us benefits from, but is absolutely crucial for a healthy economy.
Wow. I guess none of the three replies understood the topic here.
This is not about the economy of selling something cheaper than a competitor, which is absolutely fine.
It’s about how ‘FILO’ affects the economy.
It creates a culture of posting/reposting. (…and no Repentia, this is very far form useless, it is mandatory if you want to sell, especially high value items)
In the end ‘FILO’ makes it so that small entrepreneurs get cornered out of the market, exactly what Blizzard was trying to prevent, because only rich players can afford to take the losses by selling products under market value (which they clearly are if they are priced UNDER the price of the materials to craft them)
So let them sell their product. When it is gone, you will be next in line to sell. You earn more by waiting, unless you’re constantly being undercut. Which could indicate your prices are too high.
That is entirely on you. It has nothing to do with the systems that are in place for trading. Did you consider that the people undercutting you actually farmed their own mats rather than buying them, and that is why they can afford to sell cheaper? You took an uncalculated risk and it didn’t pay off.
But you don’t need to keep reposting things to get them sold? If you are constantly being ‘undercut’ (i.e. moved further back in line), then that sounds like the supply is high for a given good and a lowering of the price is in order. If the price is right, and demand matches supply, your goods should sell regardless.
The only time I can imagine you wouldn’t be able to sell your goods even if your price is right, is if someone kept on cancelling and reposting said good every single time someone else posted said good at the same price, but I’ve never heard of anyone who would do that for a good that is traded in high quantities such as crafting mats. It would be neigh impossible to do so fast enough and I can’t imagine anyone who would have the patience to do that for any considerable amount of time.
I’m very sorry, but these responses are quite off the mark.
I farm my own things, I put work in my profession. But, if you can earn more money by just farming materials and selling those on AH, than you can to create products with them…why have the profession in the first place?
What you’re saying now is that you’re fine if professions are only played by people with tons of cash, since they can afford to waste it on crafting, so hey can sell it cheap to you. How is that in any way conducive to good gameplay?
Yes, you do. In case of the vessels, they are very expensive to make, and the demand is low. So, yes, prices should be low, BUT never lower than the total price of its ingredients, that makes no sense.
If this does make sense to you, then, like I said above, you agree that professions should only be done by the people with a lot of cash, and others who don’t have that much money should just drop the profession…
Mats have often been more valuable than many of the items crafted from them throughout all the expacs in my experience. A lot of them sell cheap because it’s overproduced junk people make while leveling profs, other stuff just doesn’t have much of a market. Also sucks since they killed gems/enchants/glyphs, meaning even less worthwhile stuff to craft. But yeah, if the mats were worth 26k, shoulda sold them 26k. Just check the market beforehand.
That does make sense to me, yes. But like Repentia said above, there is no law that says the value of a crafted good has to be equal or higher than the sum of values of its materials. It is going to happen. You cannot stop it. That’s perfectly normal.
The only way to deal with it, is to avoid making such goods as you, obviously, lose money by doing so. If you have no choice but to make it regardless (such as to level your profession), you have the choice of either not crafting the item (and therefore not leveling your profession), or to simply accept that you will lose money by doing so, and hope that the money you lose now will allow you to make even more money in the future, A.K.A. - make an investment.
the intention with the FIFO (and the AH overhaul in general) was to make AH trading more convenient and accessible.
there’s no difference for the economy whether people underbid you by 1 copper or list it at the same price in a FIFO system. it just makes the AH more manageable and transparent to normal players.
if you think everyone in this thread misunderstood your point, maybe you just failed to convey it?
Prices for crafted items can often be lower than their material costs for several reasons:
People are using the crafts to level up their proffessions, and aren’t worried about making a return. They either want the achievement of maxing it out, or they want to reach max level crafts etc.
But also, material costs fluctuate. Personally I track the price of all materials and have a history of the prices since release. I can also mostly predict future price trends. I purchase a ton of materials when they fluctuate to a low price, which still allows me to profit later in the week, when the raw mats have gone up in price and the crafted item is at or below “crafting” cost.
