If I could get the Bards of Gridania to play something a little more Sicilian, please?
Ahh... thank you, family.
Our story starts with a squeaky clean Gridanian boy, level 15 botanist. They were different times. Marjoram for the quest could be gathered in the Central Shroud, just a half-step out of Gridania. But that half-step was perilous, and it was not uncommon to see the lad running around screaming as the diremites chased a poor gatherer who had not yet learned "Sneak". Most importantly, the Marjoram needed to be HQ, adding to the challenge, at least for someone doing it at-level.
The thought occurred, "Maybe I could just buy the last sprig from the marketboard?" A quick look at the market board showed that sprigs of this herb were selling for thousands of gil each.
!!!, to borrow a fishing expression.
And this part of our story is not an uncommon one. We've all come across discoveries on the market board. And we either cry about the injustice, and shell out the money. Or we get into the market, as I did.
Folks, in the heyday, I regularly sold bunches of ten sprigs at 4000 gil each. A 40,000 gil sale for something I could gather in the hundreds and drop in a single stack. And it sold, sometimes several times in a day. Good slot efficiency, and unimaginably low effort. It would have been similarly low effort for the buyers to walk over to the Central Shroud, but they instead chose a convenience fee.
There were a lot of different mistakes made in this particular market:
People might sell a stack of 99 of them and "undercut" me, by selling for less. But people were buying ten, and the larger stack cost more. This bothered me not at all, and I sold right underneath them, even though they thought they were in the best sales spot. People who just buy and sell on the MB, and rarely gather and craft may just not have an understanding of what people *actually* need?
Sometimes HQ marjoram would show up for 1 gil. I loved this. And there are people who *really* don't understand markets who hate it. To steal an actual factual quote I heard from another player the other day: "I don't mind when people undercut me by like 1 gil, it's when they drop the price all the way down to 1 gil that I hate it."
"That's when you buy."
I'm not generally a buy and resell person, but ridiculous prices make this an easy choice. I'd snap these up and always make sure that my stacks of ten were the least expensive way to get ten sprigs of HQ marjoram. My single stack would grow at times - it's very easy to clean out a board when the prices are low. And the gil rolled in.
Until. . . Cl_____ B__.
I couldn't bring myself to drop his name in here. lol. But, even though he was my sworn enemy on the MB, it really would have been a respectful inclusion. Like Zenos finally finding his challenge in the WoL, I *loved* this battle. All of these unworthy foes trying to find a corner in this market, but he was one who finally had fighting spirit. One who thought he could win.
Cl. B. came in and started selling for 3000 gil a sprig, sometimes 2000. This is not low enough to make it an easy buy out. And he sold smartly in stacks of ten. I put up with temporary intrusions like this sometimes, but. . . he stayed. He came in . . . and decided to dictate a new price. In my market.
Of course, I couldn't have known the name of this mysterious seller. Only retainers are listed on the marketboard, giving people a measure of privacy. Or the illusion of privacy, perhaps. Curious, in the middle of a particularly contentious price-dropping day, I put a stack of 50 marjoram in for like... 800 gil each. Snapped right up by mister Cl____ B___.
And stop and think about the math of that - a 40,000 gil stack. Absolutely no use to the people who just want to have their ten sprigs and leave. I was leaving the bait specifically for my foe. A foe who believed that he could sell those 800 gil sprigs for profit. Who believed his life in this market would last for 5 more stacks of sales.
The real battle had begun.
I dropped another stack in there at 800 gil per sprig - 50 sprigs - 40,000 gil. He bought it. I did it again, and it sat. . . I was asking him a few questions. "Are you making something with a lot of marjoram sir?" "Do you think I might actually run out of marjoram??" "How much gil do you want to spend buying my marjoram? Is infinity enough?"
To see it play out on the Market Board was fun, but one day, I was at the market board in Limsa (we all make mistakes. This Gridanian boy had fallen far.) and this massive shadow came over me. I swiveled the camera and saw this big old Roe standing right behind me, eyeing the market board.
It was him! Cl____ B__!!!.
Thankfully our characters can't start sweating, but I imagined mine panicking a little bit. I finished things up and dashed away. But, having found his regular market board spot, I thought that this battle needed to be spiced up a little. During the next day, several strangers approached Cl___ B__ in game and offered him a sprig of HQ marjoram in trade.
He had been marked for market board death by the Marjoram Mafia.
My stacks of marjoram were all but endless. I did turn it into something where he was logging in each day to buy a bunch of marjoram that he would never be able to sell. As I had the stacks selling to him, I also threw in cheap stacks of 10 sprigs each to ensure that the sales to *actual* buyers were providing no interesting profit. Just absolutely burned the market down. And eventually... my foe decided that this was not worth his time/effort/gil/well-being and moved on to other markets.
In the real world, this is called "dumping" and is a particularly vile practice that leads to monopolies. Flood the market with cheap goods until you own the market. Then set the price back to the price you want. This was the LB3 I used on the final boss in this board.
And all of this is in the past, as HQ marjoram no longer exists. Maybe a sprig on an alt somewhere, but they may even have cleared those out of our accounts.
As noted in my previous post. . . I'm not proud of this. But. . . maybe a little proud. Okay, it was a hoot. :D If the gil sink mount on my other character could have had sprigs of HQ marjoram toppling off of the side, rather than gil, I'd have been so happy. Fellow FC members were grinding away on endgame crafts (which, please understand, I was able to do just fine) and would sometimes ask with a laugh about how marjoram sales were. The mythology that real money is only to be made in endgame crafting and gathering? That's a myth I'm happy to support if it continues to keep my markets less cluttered.
Besides, that myth is keeping people safe... from the Marjoram Mafia. ;)
Week 23 updates: 26.2 million gil (woot!) including over 5 million in the last week (on two retainers, selling ARR and HW items), all classes to 63, and some are hitting 64. My WAR at 67 has cashed in the first MSQ at level 66. 20 mounts, 93 minions, 125 orchestrion rolls, 146 triple triad cards. Sightseeing log done in the Ruby Sea where I can fly. Tribal quests are still coming along slowly. Almost all of the A and B hunts completed for HW.
And I've caught 53 big fish. Something that I double-weave into my rotation, I suppose. Next post ought to be on fishing.
