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I think the main reason why the market can be so profitable is because so few people do it.
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This is absolutely the case in my experience.
Take flipping, for example.
I start flipping something, anything.
At first I'm picking it up for 25k and selling it for 300k.
Some savvy player takes notice, and bids more and sells for less.
If I engage them, the buy price keeps rising, the sell price keeps dropping, and both of us keep making less and less off each transaction.
And if more than one other person gets in the mix, the process is vastly accelerated.
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For all of 10 items per order. Then you're both out of the game until you go back to the market and repost your orders. THIS, imo, is the reason it's so profitable. There isn't NEARLY enough competition to take up the slack 24 hours a day. You don't ever need to engage the competition because their orders will go down soon enough and then you'll be next in line again. All you need is patience.
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At one point during the Luck Charm conspiracy, it turned out that [in classic Law of Unintended Consequences fashion] we had to control the price of LC's in order to free it.
So we had to drive out a couple of competitors. In a very brief period about 600 bids disappeared from the market. . . you can buy and sell a startling number of items. If you have only 8 characters, low level, with only 10 slots each, that's 8 * 10 * 10 or 800 items you can buy or sell. A little more work (and a few existing characters) and you can have 1600 items up on the market.
If you're the sort of person who discovers that profit (for 20K per item, say) and sticks with it, instead of finding things that make you 2 million per item, you can put in a tremendous amount of work and make (on, say, 500 items a day) 10 million inf a day jacking up the price of Luck Charms. Or Alchemical Silver.
... Yes, there are people who manipulate prices. Not very many prices, and not many people, and it's freaking miserable work. When the market was new, someone manipulated Demonic Blood Samples for MONTHS until they either ran out of slots, or gave up... one day bids dropped by 1000 and the price dropped by a factor of ten. Man, that guy was annoying.
If I have a point, and I'm not sure I do, it's that "don't assume nobody will do it just because it's stupid and gives low rewards."
