FFXIV the worst economy in any P2P MMO?

[Enfarious]

Why would a Lv15 THM WANT to buy a HQ pants that will last him all of 2-3 hours? No reason to spend gil on alt gear. There is no way a crafter should expect low level items to sell, period.

And therein lies another problem with the economy, the super casual speed leveling so that nobody needs/wants to get gear from level to level. Unlike older games where it took an hour or more a level, and how long it was really was dependent on the gear of your party, better gear meant faster leveling. In it's current state, leveling in XIV doesn't call for capping out your gear every few levels to ensure your moving at peak speeds. Even then what gear you do go after, as others have stated, will likely just be dungeon drops that are as good or better than the crafted equivs.

[Ranzan]

I seriously doubt that there will be a furniture market at all for the simple fact that it FC housing sndvit would be crazy to think a FC dont have a crafter. So really there is really no point in this economy because the game practically gives you everything. So now my question to SE is: Why even put crafting in the game if it meaningless?

P.S. bump

[Doo]

So really there is really no point in this economy because the game practically gives you everything. So now my question to SE is: Why even put crafting in the game if it meaningless?

P.S. bump

Time sink.

[Aniforani]

There are way too many pieces of material generated for them to hold any value. The only reason the market worked earlier was because people were crafting under the false belief that later they could make useful/profitable items. Now that all the people that enjoyed DoH are at cap, and most DoW/M are geared at or above the ilvl70 craft ceiling what would any of us want to buy? I could certainly see why dungeon gear needs to be the better than crafted gear, but I think a lot of that should have to do with the difficulty/rarity of the equipment. Running an easy dungeon over and over(even if there is a currency limit per week) for the best gear in game is just as silly as allowing us to craft it.

[Aniforani]

I'd love for there to be some specialization for DoL/H, there are way too many people at cap in all of both. Let us get people to be reliant on each other again. Then introduce some ability that can only be done in that chosen class. With the ability introduce new crystals/materials that DoL could mine, and make them rare, the kind of rare that doesn't see more than a few even reach AH each day. Only allow crafters to us those materials in their chosen specialized craft. Let crafters make temporary buffed or enhanced versions of current gear, perhaps something that could not be repaired or with 1 hour effects. This type of gear could be really valuable to players that have hit a roadblock, perhaps a story dungeon or Titan HM.

[Shadex]

This economy is only going to get worse too. As more and more people max out all the crafter levels no one will buy anything anymore. Any FC with a house will have multiple maxed crafters to make stuff and anyone that needs anything with just ask an FC mate or make it themselves. It's what our FC does. I say six months max and this game's economy will bottom out with the only people buying anything being absolute new players that trickle in. How could they not have seen this coming, seriously? Any MMO that has been built around every character can do everything eventually finds itself with no one needing anything. Meh, whatever DOOM! ;p

[Syrellaris]

There is one, sure fire way to solve it or at least partially and get it kicking back in order.


1) Remove Materia from soul binding gear, remove soul binding all together.
2) Add materia to crafter classes, let each crafter class make materia with mats required to be crafted by other crafter classes.
3) Add materia slots to ilvl 55, 60, 70, 80 and 90/95 and up gear.
4) add set bonusses to crafted and high lvl gear.
5) Make some of the materials required to be dropped by dungeon / raid bosses. Make the drop rate like 0.1 - 0.3% for certain items.
6) Make certain rare materials tradeable, while other rare materials are not.

This way Materia would work kind of the same as in World Of Warcraft with enchanting and enscribing. It would give people something to do and sell and people that don't want to lvl crafter classes, would have something to buy.

There are many other things, like making crafting gear a decent substitute for dark light gear, or ilvl 80 gear(with rare mats) or give crafters unique items they can make that people like to collect for vanity, mounts, minions etc.

Add in Private housing and mannequins and make certain primals soloable(very difficult) like in ff11 and have them drop unique tradeable housing materials with a very low drop rate.

Regardless, something needs to be done.

[darkstarpoet1]

it's pretty awful for sure. i won't say it's the worst, but it's up there for sure. there are ways to make gil if you and willing to take the time to research some first, but with the ease of leveling, saturated market, and the way crafted items in general are pretty worthless makes it a difficult position trying to find a spot to get into..

This economy is only going to get worse too. As more and more people max out all the crafter levels no one will buy anything anymore. Any FC with a house will have multiple maxed crafters to make stuff and anyone that needs anything with just ask an FC mate or make it themselves. It's what our FC does. I say six months max and this game's economy will bottom out with the only people buying anything being absolute new players that trickle in. How could they not have seen this coming, seriously? Any MMO that has been built around every character can do everything eventually finds itself with no one needing anything. Meh, whatever DOOM! ;p

it has nothing to do with every character can level everything. it has to do with in just a day or 2 you can start a class and level it to cap. this was started late in 1.0 when they had the moronic idea of allowing power leveling where you could pull a group of people from 1-50 in less than 6 hours and it's continued into arr. if leveling didn't take only a day or 2 to level a class to cap then not everyone would do it. for the first year there were very few people that had more than one craft capped, but when exp jumped from around 100 exp a synth to over 2k a synth people flooded the markets. a coincidence? not at all likely.

in a shorter response it doesn't matter how many classes you can play if it takes time to level them because the vast majority of people will not be willing to put in the time to do them.

[rickyguo]

So uh...Not to play devil's advocate, but outside of buying a house, what's the point of even having a lot of money in this game? There's no real "required" gold sinks.

I feel like a lot of people who complain about this, people just want to have money for the sake of having money.

That's the point

you can't have an economy if no one has the need to spend gil ever

[Hiruke]

Really need SE to put some thought into this and fix the economy. The way they set up housing is so ridiculously heavy handed. Making the biggest, best plots upwards of 300 or 600 mil (depending on which legacy server group you're on) is beyond ridiculous. Only folks who got rich in 1.0 or took advantage of those rich people in the beginning of 2.0 (selling them stuff so they could power up their crafting classes, for those who hadn't done it already)... or people who sold Titan wins or whatever... would have anywhere near enough gil to actually buy a house. It's pretty clear they want a lot of gil to exit the economy, but there's no real value to all that gil. There's no particular REASON to materia up your gear, since there's nothing much worth crafting and battle gear is easily replaced with drops/atp/atm equips, sooo. That means the further we get away from launch, the harder it is to make gil change hands at any kind of reasonable rate, meaning the super rich stay super rich, and no one else can become super rich without a ridiculous amount of effort.

That said, props to SE for almost precisely modeling the game economy after the real world economy. Got your super rich 1%, and then a bunch of poors. Because it's so great in real life, let's do it in game too.

We really need things that have value, to make gil change hands, to give gil any kind of actual value. And more gil sinks, that aren't so heavy handed as hundreds of millions of gil for a house.

Some things that would help:

1) Skill-based farming, be it gathering or battle. Crafted gear/items that are really good, that most everyone would want, but requires a high level of skill to obtain. Like in FFXI, stuff like Herald's Gaiters would sell well because obviously not everyone can down Tiamat (when it came out).
2) Make food more better, and perhaps have ingredients for good food come from hardish dungeons that don't have a lot of value other than farming the food ingredients. In FFXI, if you weren't using food, you weren't doing enough damage, or hitting anything, pretty much period. Min/maxers, ie good players, will use food, but really everyone should need to use food like all the time, which will give it constant value.
3) Could add BCNM type content to satisfy the previous two things. Would also give a reason to farm beastmen, which would dovetail nicely with doing dailies. Get coins or whatever and use them to pay for BCNM battles which are hard and drop good stuff that everyone wants.
4) Add more non-ridiculous gil sinks. Like sell some mounts for gil, or furniture, or other items that people actually want/need. You can blow small amounts of gil out of the economy often like this, because people are willing to part with small amounts more easily than hundreds of millions (especially since there's no way for an FC to make money as an FC - ie no skill based raiding for money drops -, it's all individual contributions just for the pleasure of having a house). Like, people teleport and such for small amounts of gil all the time.
5) Other consumables like medicine are in the same boat as food. There's really no particular reason to use this stuff. In FFXI they could legitimately help you clear certain content if you were having trouble, but due to the high recast and very small effects, I don't see why anyone would bother with that stuff in FFXIV. Besides, it comes from like every quest everywhere.

The problem with this game is that accessibility seems to be the only driving force behind almost any decision. Other things besides accessibility need to be considered for the game to be fun. It's accessible to be able to gather from nodes while stealthed, but it makes all gathered stuff totally worthless. No stealth and lots of aggressive mobs near nodes (at least the higher level ones, or at least blocking the way to getting to those nodes) would make stuff worth more. So would being level X for more than 10 seconds. Or if everything wasn't handed to you in quests all the time.

No matter how it's done, there needs to be serious thought on how to make things in the economy have value, rather than trying to make it all SUPER accessible to everyone can get everything with almost no effort. You know?