To be fair, you can never apply real world economics to an MMO market board.
Real world Economics rely on a couple key factors that do not exist in a digital game. The biggest of which is finite resources. Some resources are rarer drops in the game, but in reality are also infinite. The only finite matter in an MMO market is time. There are only so many hours in the day; so the real value of an item is how much people believe the time to gather it was worth in gil. Thus a 'market value' of an item will always crash and spike depending on who is selling and how lazy folks are. (aka how much they are willing to spend for another person's time) If one person values their time higher than another person, naturally they will be undercut and because there is only a max of 100 (if you are paying for extra retainers) or 40 for the more average player selling slots, you must make a decision of what to sell at else you have 'dead' slots. Clinging to an artificial thought of what 'something should be worth' will only result in you not selling. You have to ride the market of time value as it crashes and as it rises.
When patches are released, things sell far higher because more people are willing to be 'lazy' to finish new items, content. The prime example of this is the Belah'dian Silver, which on patch day was selling for 200-400k depending on quality, and now it sells for 20k. Another example was people selling Dungeon runs for Rogues/Ninjas folks were buying the time of other people the market was good at first with the more impatient people willing to pay 50-70k a pop, but it quickly crashed as the more patient people refused to pay absurd prices.
However, looping back to the housing topic, the housing issue is sort of an example of real world economics. The resource being traded is finite and the demand is high. The problem comes from, the price is not in control of the seller outside of the reservation fee. The price resets to full price 5-80 million regardless as to what would be considered a market price. The seller gets zero gil from that, which is where the real world similarities end. Money gain in this game is based off infinite resources, but the product being purchased is a money sink, meaning it goes down the drain. If someone could 'transfer' ownership of a house we could have an actual... housing market... but at the same time it would likely be taken over by Real-estate moguls who would ruin it anyways.
As for attempts to fix 'undercutting' markets, it actually only works partway. If someone clicks the history tab they will see a bunch of something selling at a cheaper price and maybe assume that is the 'correct' price. Also... you just bought their time, so they will sell it again at that price because it sold.
Just my 2 cents.
Real world Economics rely on a couple key factors that do not exist in a digital game. The biggest of which is finite resources. Some resources are rarer drops in the game, but in reality are also infinite. The only finite matter in an MMO market is time. There are only so many hours in the day; so the real value of an item is how much people believe the time to gather it was worth in gil. Thus a 'market value' of an item will always crash and spike depending on who is selling and how lazy folks are. (aka how much they are willing to spend for another person's time) If one person values their time higher than another person, naturally they will be undercut and because there is only a max of 100 (if you are paying for extra retainers) or 40 for the more average player selling slots, you must make a decision of what to sell at else you have 'dead' slots. Clinging to an artificial thought of what 'something should be worth' will only result in you not selling. You have to ride the market of time value as it crashes and as it rises.
When patches are released, things sell far higher because more people are willing to be 'lazy' to finish new items, content. The prime example of this is the Belah'dian Silver, which on patch day was selling for 200-400k depending on quality, and now it sells for 20k. Another example was people selling Dungeon runs for Rogues/Ninjas folks were buying the time of other people the market was good at first with the more impatient people willing to pay 50-70k a pop, but it quickly crashed as the more patient people refused to pay absurd prices.
However, looping back to the housing topic, the housing issue is sort of an example of real world economics. The resource being traded is finite and the demand is high. The problem comes from, the price is not in control of the seller outside of the reservation fee. The price resets to full price 5-80 million regardless as to what would be considered a market price. The seller gets zero gil from that, which is where the real world similarities end. Money gain in this game is based off infinite resources, but the product being purchased is a money sink, meaning it goes down the drain. If someone could 'transfer' ownership of a house we could have an actual... housing market... but at the same time it would likely be taken over by Real-estate moguls who would ruin it anyways.
As for attempts to fix 'undercutting' markets, it actually only works partway. If someone clicks the history tab they will see a bunch of something selling at a cheaper price and maybe assume that is the 'correct' price. Also... you just bought their time, so they will sell it again at that price because it sold.
Just my 2 cents.
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(We could make a shout out/thank you/recognition thread! 
)
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