Asura Inflation - What's Going On?

I mean, at level 35 your trusts murder everything in a matter of seconds and you barely get to do anything. There's no level capped content that matters anymore. Why would PCC be worth more than 300k? Who is gearing their level 30 jobs to the teeth, and for what? To hit 1 more auto-attack against a defenseless mob being destroyed by your trusts?

I guess it could be nostalgic people who want to get back the gear their had in 2005, but practically speaking there's no reason to own one in 2024 except to *** around with.

So I can't find it sadly, it was a few years ago. I was hesitant to be more specific until I could find proof, but since I don't have it, I'll just post what I observed.

What I remember is that it was around the time of an easier ambu ~2021 (I think it was the frog) and prices on REMA mats (I think it was Alex in this case) started to drop because the market was flooded. The normal stack price prior to this was around 400k and started to dip to ~300k possibly less. This character turned around and bought them at a substantially higher price, around 500-600k and flooded the purchase history for it buying enough to cover the purchase history in game. Whatever they did was successful because it went back up to above 400k and stayed there. I only observed it based on coincidence because I was working on finishing Burtgang at the time.

When I checked their account history, it's all that character had ever done, buy that exact quantity of REMA mats and the last purchase they had made was months prior. Same quantity purchased, just months before and there were similar gaps in their purchase history. They'd buy whatever that number is, then not buy anything for months, then do it again with just REMA mats. All purchased well above market value.

While Thorny is right this isn't technically price fixing, I don't think it's that hard to grasp the idea that RMT manipulates the prices of items to prevent them falling to a less profitable level. For REMA mats in particular, they sell at a rate that it's easily obscured and not visible unless you hit it at the right time. It was interesting enough for me to screenshot their purchase history here, but I can't find it (and tbf I've swapped computers 3 times since then).

Are people really that dumb to spend that much gil on something that will be outdated in a few hours of grinding EXP?

It's not like they can't sell it back when they're done with it. Based on the trend, they stand to make money from the deal so not sure how that's dumb.

I guess? Still feels totally unnecessary, but oh well.

I don't think it's necessary either, but I also don't think 3M is a lot of money to avoid a 10 hour camp.

How do you know they're RMT?

That’s fair, I don’t, just an assumption since I doubt legitimate players have enough to sell that it would justify doing it

idk man, I've sold north of 20,000 stacks of Alexandrite

Sounds an awful lot like the mule I use to keep 60k alex on hand for buyers. Someone buys the alex, I rebuy it from nashmau. Every couple months there's not enough in nashmau, so I rebuy from AH at whatever price. Nothing in price history besides buying alex, shows 10 stacks even though it's often 150 or more. I charge a premium for alex over gil (because it's tedious), so I don't mind overpaying if necessary to ensure I keep it available.

Even if it wasn't my mule, I still don't consider it price fixing. If you send a signal that you believe an item is worth a price, and both buyers and sellers follow that signal.. it's worth that price. It sucks if you were hoping to pay less, but I don't think that makes it inherently malicious.

I'll also add that you can't fake the price without clearing stock. If there are 200 stacks up with a history of 400k, and you buy 10 stacks at 600k.. it just takes one person trying a lower price to set the price back at 400k because all those other stacks are still likely to be listed lower. If nobody considers the gil worth enough to try bidding less than AH, that says something about perceived value being in line with cost.

Not malicious but arguably shitty. Scalping IRL is shitty anyway.

Wouldn't say it's scalping, it's keeping a buffer on hand. I keep them whether the market is dry or flooded, because I'd rather be trading the buyer their 30k within minutes when they ask, that's just good service. The effect is probably not notably different than the buyer not having that option and buying gil then buying out AH themselves.

Isn't he saying that this person buys an AH history worth of mats above current price only to resell more at the new higher price? That is basically scalping.

I'm saying that I buy out the AH every couple months when I want alex on hand and there's not enough in nashmau. That results in a 10 bid history on XIAH, at a high price(because the last stacks are always marked up). So, it's not necessarily someone actually attempting to correct price, the sum of his evidence is still explained by my own mule, never mind other potential explanations.

The same goes for anyone who's trying to make a weapon fast and has gil on hand, it doesn't matter if you buy 10 stacks or 200 as long as you do it fast enough XIAH only catches the 10. So, the price history doesn't necessarily show that you raised price for a reason, even if you did.

It's not even that AH.com only catches 10 it's that the actual AH only updates every minute, it can't keep up so ah.com can't get what doesn't exist

The Ah scans every 30-60 seconds and ah.com scans every couple minutes, it's easy to miss dozens of mass sales

It's like nobody understands how the AH works...

Let's say there are 200 stacks of alex (for an example) on the AH. You buy 10 (or 25) for 600k to raise the price from 400k -> 600k.

How do you sell yours for 600k? You have to list them for 350k~380k to sell, because there are 175+ stacks listed for under 400k, so you have to undercut every single one of them or you're ***.

So you have to hope that nobody on the planet realized that alex used to be 400k yesterday and is now 600k...and your hope is that you're going to offload your THOUSANDS of alexandrite before anyone in the market undercuts you and lowers the price...

This is most evident with things that are this common, but is even true for rarer stuff like crafted items etc. Good luck trying to raise the price of Rostams by clearing the price history. You think nobody's gonna notice the same two *** sold 10 Rostam to each other in a 3 minute period? I mean...maybe you have 20 characters with unique names...even still, that's an unusual buying/selling pattern.

Price fixing is extremely rare and difficult to pull off, and you can easily get burned trying. And if you try to raise the price, chances are you're going to get undercut by either the existing listings, or someone who notices the high prices and swoops in to sell their stock. It's a very bad idea in a blind bidding system like FFXI has.

Yeah it sounds hard with SOME things like Alex, sure, but not everything.

I know someone made a bot to check bazaars in Nashmau and buy any alex under a certain price to then bazaar it for the price they wanted. This was not so much price fixing or scalping as it was denying undercutting and devaluing of mats, I suppose you could argue.

I agree that this is the way it would work in theory or for guaranteed success, however in this case, it was successful. The price jumped back up from ~300k (with a downward trend) higher and stabilized at ~400k shortly after and didn't drop again.

It really doesn't take much to keep trying this until you are successful. There wouldn't be much record or history of it since selling occurs so quickly and the history clears out, so if you fail once, trying again wouldn't cost much and probably less than it would if there was a downward trend for weeks or indefinitely.

IMO it worked because most people aren't going to keep iterating over prices for items like Alex, they are going to look at the purchase history and start at a certain point close to the price that is shown in the history then go upwards until they win the bid. You don't have to sell anything for 600k, the point is to get people to start bidding at a higher point and continue, making the assumption that's the new average. Yes one misplaced bid could break the whole thing, but that didn't happen in this case and if it did, then just try again until the pattern forms. If prices start to dip below 300k, buying at a higher price raises the starting point most people will bid at based on that history alone. You aren't trying to raise it to the point you paid, you are just trying to elevate the average to stop prices decreasing and bring it back to where it was before. People listing new stacks will also list at a higher price based on the price history. I agree it is a volatile, risky process, but it doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be cheap enough and easy enough to keep trying until it sticks

For 100% certainty, yes, you'd have to buy everything and keep the price elevated by selling on the AH, which would be impossible given the limited amount you can sell at once. That said, it doesn't have to be perfect. Maybe they got lucky and it worked in this case, but given their purchase history, I don't think it was the first time.

Alexandrite is bulky. If you have a mule with bags upgraded and nashmau access, you could theoretically buy it on that mule to make space easier. It makes no sense to assume that because a character is only buying alexandrite, and their purchases are a few months apart, that they are price fixing. If the mule only exists to price fix, it's pretty easy to recreate it with a different name each time you try to do that.

I don't get why you're so dedicated to this idea that it's intentional price manipulation, when any person buying a large amount at once is going to have that visible result (10 stacks purchased at highest price), because more than 10 stacks won't show up and buying a large amount will typically result in you paying more than going rate.

Finally, as has been said numerous times, if the market supports a price then it's just as real a price as any other. YOU want alexandrite to be 300k/stack, but someone else wants it to be 400. If they use fake history to get it there, and it stays there, then how is 400 any less real a price? There are still buyers willing to pay 400, and sellers willing to wait for buyers to pay 400. It's not any more fake than those ridiculous pink stanley cups.

It seems like too much of a coincidence.

You have a time when Alex prices were approaching a low point, the price usually hovers around 400k then is at risk (or did) drop below 300k with a downward trend. During this, a character whose only known purchase history is buying 10 REMA mats at a time at prices well above any recent price buys 10 Alex at a price nearly or exceeding double the current value, then the price jumps up. It's not just that their purchase history hadn't been active for months, the only thing they ever bought was REMA mats at a price that well exceeded any recent value for the last few years. I don't recall the other 15 entries in their profile, but they were months apart, the next batch was a group of 10 months prior, and the next 5 were again, overpaid REMA mats from months before that. It was the same thing repeated (best I could tell) 3 times in a row, separated by months.

It seems like too much of a coincidence and if you are sitting on enough Alex to sell, risking a few mil to try and manipulate the price is a small cost compared to what you'd risk if the price was reduced for a long time.

Sure, someone could have bought 60 stacks of Alex on a mule at increasing prices and only had the 10 at a higher point show up, but given that there were likely over 100 stacks on the AH at the time, it's unlikely and it's unlikely that you wouldn't see that price escalation in small increments on their purchase history and that the price would be the exact same. It's even more unlikely that the same thing happened 3 times in a row months apart and they were all at least double the value and paid the exact same amount for each one. If it were a coincidence, you'd see some break in the pattern, but it wasn't there. I find all of this too much of a coincidence and unlikely, but it could have happened, the combination of timing and purchase history seems like too much of a coincidence.


I don't necessarily disagree, but it disrupts the flow of pricing when the market is artificially inflated. We ask why inflation is happening, but if there are people preventing a price decrease on commonly purchased items that should naturally decrease in value, that would be part of it.

You can't do that, though. If they 'should naturally decrease in value' then they wouldn't sell at the list price and eventually sellers would get frustrated and reduce their price so they can sell. The very fact they are selling means there isn't a natural decrease in value. You're fixating on the mechanism via which price goes up, when the fact of any market is that an artificially high price will eventually drop.

It's not like you can monopolize these mats, everyone who does ambuscade is getting 2000 a month. The sources are far too spread out. If all of the alex put up for sale is still selling.. the price isn't supposed to be naturally decreasing.

They only buy a couple stacks because other people buy them all. Makes no sense to me to keep camping AH when can't even get them, so they go do something more productive like farm them.

I agree with this and have seen it in action plenty. I've seen blatant gilbuyer players buying things way over market value regularly without a concern to save money. When gil is so cheap and time precious, they don't care and do pay whatever to get things done quickly and with as least effort as possible.

I've sold R/Ex things to the same gilbuyers for stupid prices too. Jokingly told someone I would sell them Regal Ring for 50M the other day and they agreed (shame I don't think I can 2box it).

It's nothing people constantly have on their radar. As a seller people take note of REMA currency prices maybe once a month when they try to dump their ambu points and as a buyer when they try to build a new REMA, which is even less frequent (for most of us, just trust me on this if you think otherwise). They enter the market by checking the AH history cause thats all we got, there is no large ledger like the stock index to check where the price was a week ago.

Another suspecious example that hapened recently were the sphere prices for the crafting shields when chacharoon handed out random ones during new years event. A price drop was to be expected but iirc they tanked to around one tenth of the usual going rate within a day or two at which point some players started warning others in yell not to sell at that price.


And it's not like price manipulation hasn't happened befor. I remember how I put up some HTBF crafting material that was listed at ~100k for singles and as soon as I'd put mine up for sale the AH history got flushed and suddenly the new rate was at 10k for singles or vice versa. It happened on different occassions over a longer time period and other players who had that craft leveled reported they observed the same thing.


What does this even mean?

If multiple buyers are ok buying alex at 400k even after "someone manipulated the price", then the price is 400k. If someone tries to jack the price up further to 500k or 600k and people go "hold up, not happening" and dont bid 500+k, then eventually new supply will come in and price will drop back to 400k.

You can wind up with the dumb gilbuyers with more money than brains who will happily pay whatever it is, but theyre eventually gonna hit their 303 stacks of 99 alex and supply will catch up.

I think this happens regularly. Like if there are 200 stacks on the AH the last 20-30 will be over market value and some gilbuyers just push on through buying. This is when price goes up temporarily a lot of the time.

For Alex it's easier just to buy from bazaars next to the npc you trade to though...

If people are willing to pay 1m gil for a single beeswax, that's the real price of beeswax. The market determines all prices in ffxi. If people want to pay 100 gil for a stack of alex and others are willing to sell it, that's the price. No price is more "real" or "fake" than another, except if all the sales are among complicit buyers/sellers or a person selling to themself.

I think you'll have a very hard time proving that prices are routinely modified for any extended period of time by a single actor. And even if they were modified (up or down), if buyers continue buying and sellers continue selling, that's the price.

The price is a convergence of what sellers are willing to sell for and what buyers are willing to buy for. It's nothing more complicated than that. I can try to clear the AH history of Bztavian Stingers and sell mine for 10m/ea all I want, if (independent) buyers aren't willing to buy for 10m, it will drop down to what they're willing to pay. If I clear the AH history of Rostams and start selling them for 5m, sellers aren't going to follow suit and start listing for 5m. If they did either of these things, that's the new price, until market forces naturally cause them to go up or down from there.

Just gotta stop being butthurt that other people want to pay more than you for an item you want. They want it more than you, it's that simple

That...depends on your server. On Carbuncle one person can get MAYBE 1/4 of 1 mythic in the "bazaars" next to the NPC you trade to.



Oh, and this bazaar is fairly new, he wasn't here like a week ago. There's quite often 0 bazaars here.

People on Asura think their black market cesspool is the standard among all 16 servers.