Please tell me how to destroy your marketing niche.Follow

I'm sorry, but I keep seeing threads that start with:

"How can I make money crafting?"
"What makes good money in CraftX?"
"What can I farm for really good money?"
"etc, etc"

Let's assume, for a moment, that I've found a nice little niche market...say, some mob in some out of the way spot, who's unstackable drop can be synthed in the field to be some other item, which stacked 12 deep sells for 20-40 grand.

Costs you a bit of time and a small amount of money (-1/-2 k per stack generaly) to make, and sells 2-4 per day (unless someone's on a skillup kick, in which case you can go through a dozen stacks in a day), and nets anywhere from 40k to 160k (avg being about 60k) a day.

One day's farming/synthing gives you enough (skillup binges not withstanding) to sell for 3-4 days maintaining a steady income.

Given the kinds of foods certain high-level jobs use, 60k/day is enough to keep yourself fed for a few hours, and put a little in the "bank" for that "really neat epeen upgrade" you've been looking at.

Then, someone asks how they can make money, and you post that mob/synth/gil-per-day total on a crafting forum, and all of a sudden, a few hundred stacks of whatever it is show up on the AH.

Prices plumet, your steady income is gone, and eventually the stuff climbs back up from 500/stack (slightly below cost to make not counting time) to around 10k/stack.

Shortly there-after, those people are back on the trade forums, asking for another handout, and wondering why all these rude and meanie-weanie people won't help them.

People constantly ask on these forums "How do you make your money?" when really, what they are asking you to do is to destroy that market...even if they don't realize it.

Most markets, especially unregulated ones, are based on supply and demand...if there is more supply than demand, and quality is identical, then prices go down...if there is more demand than supply, and quality is identical, then prices will go up until prices reach a point where competician is attracted, where upon supply increases bringing prices down.

External control mechanisms include a government that "forces" certain prices, and monopolies that will prevent others from selling "thier" products.

Since in FFXI we can't go shoot someone on the streets of Jeuno, or toss a bomb into their Rent-a-Room to stop them from crafting in an area, to maintain a monopoly you have to either absolutely control a key component, or to put the finished goods up for a price -no- honest dealer can match, driving them out of business.

This is how RMT normally does it, but they aren't the only ones to "kill" a money-maker...in this game, far more important than a SH+1, is the gil to buy it.

For those who don't buy their gil, they -must- have some other way to get it...for many, that's BCNMs, but if you don't have "the right job/gear" don't bother, your seals are "worthless" because no one will go with you.

For those people, its farming and crafting...since that doesn't need 2-5 other people of the exactly correct setup and piles of seals normally only found on career soloists.

When you post on the trade forums, about how this "sells 2-3 per day" item (be it a single item dropped or something crafted) can bring in 50k/sale, you've just destroyed that market.

It only sells for 50k/each because only a few go up each day...if it's something anyone with a L30 job could concieveably get with an under60 craft, then the day after you post it, a hundred will be up on the AH.

What's more, the AH isn't "first listed, first sold" it's "cheapest list goes first"...so if you want -your- 2-3 to sell, you need to put them up for less than everyone else.

So, the more are up at any one time, the lower you ask to insure yours goes out first.

Since everyone knows this, people don't bid "history+1" blindly (unless there is a desperate need for "the last one on the shelf"), instead, they bid lower, and work their way up to the sale, lowering the history, and showing people what asking price -they- have to undercut the next time.

Now, if the item sells 10 every 2 hours (since the history only shows 10 items, that's all you can tell), having 100+ items up isn't a big deal, you know yours will go out soon enough, so you don't massively undercut.

But when there are only 2-3 sales/day, and 100+ items, knowing that its "cheapest in, first out", and further knowing that everyone -else- knows that, most people will start -massively- underbidding, causing prices to crash with a horrible shattering sound.

The only way to keep your money-makers intact, is to treat them like the old guilds used to treat thier secrets...as exactly that.

"Three people can keep a secret only when two of them are dead."

Trade secrets were passed down from Master to Apprentice, and no one "outside" was let in on those secrets...blabber-mouths wound up in a lot of trouble, or dead.

If you -really- want to make money, and not just "be given a handout" then go to the Auction House, and look for what sells quickly...then look to see which of those you can find/make reasonably.

Put small quantities of a -couple- of those items up (so as to not make the established crafters/farmers worried enough about you to force prices down to drive you out) and see how it goes.

When you have a few decent money makers, look into occasional "bonus" items for "extra" gil...or get in the habit of saving your money to build up to whatever item you are looking for.

A lot of people still see high levels of crafting as a way to make millions of gil per synth, and expect to make a dozen such synths each day...it doesn't work like that anymore.

The reason people paid millions of gil per synth was, plain and simply put, there were so few people synthing that item that they could charge whatever they wanted.

Some cases, the items -in- those synths were really hard to get (Venomous Claw, Damascus Ingot, etc) and while the synth itself wasn't that hard, the ingredients went for millions.

In this "Barely acceptable means 99.999% of the Best Possible" world, HQ items (requiring massive luck, super high skill, or both) still cost millions...but the NQ items are tossed on the trash pile, price wise, because so many people are making them trying for that mega-cash result, that the "failures" are glutting the market.

Thus, power-crafting (often with bought gil, but in many cases a lucky BCNM or NM drop also supplies the money) to get CraftX up to where you can start (hopefully) HQ'ing "Money-Making Synth Y" achieves nothing but throwing the market on skillup goods into a tizzy.

If you -really- want to make steady income, check the AH's (even the smaller ones are good, if you stick to what the guilds in those areas require) and find markets of things the higher level crafters don't want to waste time making for themselves.

(or in some cases, -can't- make for themselves, because they can't us an "Iron Ingot +1" which they get half the time because the synth -they- want to do only accepts a normal ingot...and yes, I know there's no such synth as a +1 ingot, I'm making an example)

Take -that- synth, and find a way to make it cost-effectively, and put a -few- up at a time.

The key to making money in FFXI is (buying gil or getting stupidly lucky aside) =PATIENCE=.

This isn't WoW, the game isn't structured for and has in fact evolved for much of it's life away from "casual gaming"...if you play FFXI, you play for a "long haul" or you play one of the solo jobs (the later of which is becoming something of a trend, actually).

Find a few sources of money, spread your investements (of time, gil, etc) out, and pull in steady, reliable income...if you need 100k/half-hour for food, and also want gear costing 10M gil/piece, then you need to get into one of the big, money making linkshells that only does billion-gil items and serve your "slave labor" time until you can start getting a slice of the pie.

Otherwise, either buy gil, or do your <expletive removed> homework and find your own money makers...if you must have a billion gil by noon tomorrow or you will never see your moogle again...well, report the moogle-nappers to the STFU and hope they can help.

But please stop coming here and saying "Please, they said they would kill my moogle if I couldn't come up with a billion gil...please, please, tell me your crafting secrets so I too can make the obscene fortunes needed to look like all the other epeens on the /seacom list."

Honestly, it's not -that- hard to look for what is selling, heck, there's even a really cool site that shows the main auction house for each server, that you can use to do your research.

Final Fantasy XI Auction House Online

Combine that with some reading of various crafting guides, monster databases, and a bit of brain-sweat, and you can find all the money sources you need...hopefully w/o killing everyone elses money sources.


Galantdramon
------------
Sensubean on Midgardsormr

Agreed.

Very good post, rate up.

Bookmarked for all those stupid XYZ questions =)

/clap

Unfortunately, the people the OP is talking about will most likely over look this and skip to the threads that look like they give info on easy money.

The internet has always been a source for all kinds of information. Unfortunately, the people who are too stupid/lazy to find a way to make gil
are smart enough to look it up on the internet.

Oh the irony...

No worries there, next time a thread like that appears, we'll make sure they see this post.

I have a couple of niche synths that I don't really tell anyone about. They're the kind of thing that a lot of people can't do because they require not only mid-high level main craft skill, but 'above average' subcraft skill. Nevertheless, there are a few people on my server who are notorious for glomming on to good niche synths and driving them into the ground simply because they can. I used to share my crafting tips; I don't anymore.

The nice thing about leveling a 'lowbie' job (42 BST atm) is that I'm spending next to nothing in the leveling process (low consumable cost, gear flipped to AH once it's outdated). I'm used to leveling jobs like RNG and NIN, where gil doesn't sit in your coffers for very long. As a result of my current trend towards, "Spend little because it hurts to earn it back," my gil reserves are slowly on the rise.

Very slowly.

If I had to fund a job that was leveling quickly and had some pricey items to make it the way I want it, I'd be screwed. I'd be spending more time than I want to just trying to keep up with the cost of leveling my job, and that tends to ruin the game.

As a result, when I come across an under-acknowledged niche synth that gives me an occasional boost from time to time without having to spend hours/week making it happen, I'm all over it (and I'm doing my best to keep my mouth shut about it).

It's nothing personal; I don't withold information to be a jerk. I wish everyone who plays success and enjoyment, but they won't do it at my expense if I can help it.

I too used to be concerned about other non-RMT crafters flooding the markets with the same things I am making, or farming the same things I am farming. But after watching those same people in Jeuno being spoon fed information on what to farm or how to synth, and then seeing them complain about that taking up too much time or being too tedious, I stopped being concerned about it.

It is my opinion, based on watching reactions of people who ask for easy ways to make gil, that those whose who ask how to make gil will in most cases not follow through with suggestions given to them. If I had to guess, I'd think they are more likely to go out and buy gil instead of earning it in-game. The ffxiah.com site gives you easy access to recipes and predicted revenue, but it stil requires crafting which *a lot* of players don't want to bother with. They'd rather buy gil or beg friends for it instead of work in-game for it.

And when they buy gil, they contribute to a messed up economy, just as they would if they invaded your special niche and forced you to stop selling due to their low prices. It seems like a no-win situation. :-)

Edited, Mar 2nd 2007 6:24am by goobysmootcher

I use FFXIAH so that when someone asks one of these 'how do I make money' questions I search for someone I hate and tell them to make what they're selling.

More seriously though, with whatever flaws it has FFXIAH has made it much harder to get a big profit synth and protect it. Crafting is becoming a lot like various other forms of raising gil in that time in = money out, with the amount you get out mostly dependant on how much time you're putting in.

FFXIAH is the reason I use multiple mules to sell things. You can be a tricky little thing with it: most people will only know one of your aliases, instead of all of them.

Now I understand why I saw coin cookies on ah...hehe.

I really oughta visit forums more, I didn't even know ffxiah had the crafters page thingy up. I agree that it's fairly useless, but whatever works.

Good luck selling them coin cookies :D

Vendor prices have been available here and at other FFXI-related sites for quite some time. Chances are if someone knows about and uses ffxiah.com, they also use other FFXI sites for information. I don't see adding the vendor prices to ffxi's pages as being harmful in anyway. It just saves people the extra step of looking elsewhere for the vendor prices. There will always be a lot of people who pay top dollar at the AH for things they can get cheaply at a vendor. Those folks just don't mind wasting their gil.

no no No No NO.

If they do that. Then the market will surely CRASH.

Part of the market is being able to outsmart it and the competitors.

You can get the information online through the sites doing some research, its not hard. But if you put up all the keys in box showing the EXACT Profit margins, then everyone flocks to it and start unravelling the foundations of the Economy.

Its already happening even if some us notice the FFAH site is sometimes off.

It is he purpose of this site that has made things both easier and harder because people have things just handed to them with info which has been the reason for the decay of the Server Economy.

The Website still is proving a hinderince to legit and smart marketers but granted, we still got some advantage being that the website doesn't take note of other factors to what IS IT that makes a PROFIT.

I'm not going to list them because some of it was already talked about. But I hope to god they dont make it any MORE EASIER. Otherwise every player will be stuck trying to sell the sames for the very same value.

Of course, the other thing FFXIAH doesn't take into account is AH's other than Jueno. If you're doing smithing & GS work, there's really no need to sell any where but Bastok for a lot of it (except for HQ weapons and the like), and the prices on a lot of that are much different.

If you haven't got back to FFXIAH recently, they are now accepting registrations starting Mar 14, such features as how to list your bazaar stuff online and so on.

Direct from the FFXIAH blog:

Fixed.

FFXIAH made it too easy for you ; ).

You can become a member of FFXIAH.com (for FREE) and set your viewable history from 1 (or Zero can't remember) all the way to 255. So now for free your competitors see almost nothing of what you do!

Also, the new WANT / BAZAAR is awesome since way more people can see what weird crafting items I have from skilling up. It really makes it easy to trade supplies/crafted items with others. Chains of any type are very hard to sell - slow and expensive. They don't desynth, but now people can get them from me sooooo cheaply they buy from me directly, and I make more than seling to an NPC!

Everyone wins that way.

Also, currently the NPCs listed are not categorized as Guild/Standard/Regional so the lazy still can't tell what's up with making a profit synth.

I foresee a slight problem with that depending on how it is done. If paying users have access to more information than non paying users, its an unfair advantage only a few steps removed from direct real money trade the way we know it now.