Allow percentage-based undercutting

[Limiana]

This commit adds configuation option to undercut certain percent from item's price rather than fixed amount

[chalkos]

Thanks for taking the time contributing, and I even think that this was a suggested feature at some point. But I just don't see any situation in which undercutting by a percentage is better than undercutting by a fixed value.

What problem would you say gets fixed by having the option to undercut by a %?

[Limiana]

Say you have a collection of items which are of a very different value: 5k gil, 20k gil, 100k gil You want them to go relatively fast so you'd undercut by more price than just 1 gil, but by how much? Would you set undercut by 1k gil it would be fine for 5k gil item but for 100k item it will barely be a discount. Would you set undercut by 10k gil, it will be good for 100k gil item, but way too much for 20k item and especially 5k item. Percentage-based undercut solves that problem: say you select 10% undercut and it's a good discount for all price categories. Facing this situation regularly when selling retainers stuff from ventures

[chalkos]

But if it's not selling, because people decided to drop their profits by 10% by following your price drop, and undercut you by 1gil, and then you repost it, with a 10% undercut again. That just put your 100k item at 81k instead of the "nice 10% discounted price"

How long until you're selling that 100k item at 25k? Well that would be 13 reposts later.

I really dislike this kind of behaviour when trying to sell items. But that does give the opportunity for your competition to farm you out for profit when you undercut by a lot. Which is fun to do...

And since marketbuddy has a bunch of options already that may or may not be useful for everybody, I guess adding one more is fine. I'll assume people know what they are doing when they enable such option :)

I'll take a look at the code proper and include it in the next release or the one after

[Limiana]

If it's still not selling for that price maybe the price was a bit too high to begin with... if that makes sense. I'm usually not playing undercut wars as well; I'm visiting sell list usually when a character's inventory is filled which happens couple times per week so I prefer to just give a decent discount once instead of 1 gil drop and if it sells for that price within few days - good, if not I can discount it again few days later

I did some experiments in past also with 1 gil drop and 10% gil drop, the results were approximately with 1 gil drop maybe 5-6 items would be gone from the list within 3 days, with 10% drop petty much whole list is gone within the same amount of time

[chalkos]

I do agree with you that things sell better/faster if they are cheaper, but depending on the item people might just be buying yours and reposting it higher for a profit. Might even do that across realms, I've earned sizeable amounts just by hopping to a server where people have been posting things cheaper and cheaper, buying it all and selling it back on my home world for profit.

But ultimately I'll add this to give more options to people using the plugin. If it's a useful option or a quick way to give up a % of your profits, that's for each user to decide