Visiting other worlds, economy effect?

[Musashidon]

This would be true if not for the fact.

i am not getting what you are saying exactly.

as it will go this way. with the new supply and demand, prices are going to be vastly different as say one server has more crafters or as you said a bot who will over supply and people will buy up all the goods and spread them around the servers.

afterwards things will settle down as people get with the flow, no matter what after the mass majority who buy these rare items at their normal high price the prices drop that is just normal. (crafted gear in general more than things like mounts and such)

[KageTokage]

I really doubt that the prices on consumables like infusions are going to ever "normalize" and go back up to amounts that are actually reasonable for the time/mat expenditure when you have bot FCs with multiple ALCs and gatherers constantly churning them out like a factory.

As far as things with less demand like crafted gear go, they might be able to sell for a good price initially, but the prices are going to tank a lot faster with the markets being flooded by bots.

[JunseiKei]

~snip~

What are your thoughts? Do you think this will be good for small servers? Big servers? All servers??? What are your plans?

While people could potentially swap to a cheap server and buy things, people from the server that had their cheap items bought up can also do this. It sounds like it should balance out the game's economy as a whole. Players on lower populations have the option to got to a high population server and buy up large quantities of items that possibly aren't being supplied on their server.

I'm kind of looking forward to this change. On Cactuar, there's this FC that has a pretty firm grip on the potion market and sells them dirt cheap. Person gathers ~20 hours a day. People will eventually buy out all of their pots and possibly force the potion prices to raise because others are able to break into the market. Or they'll somehow keep up with demand and utterly crash potions across the Aether data center. Either way, it's something I'm very interested in seeing how it plays out.

[Musashidon]

I really doubt that the prices on consumables like infusions are going to ever "normalize" and go back up to amounts that are actually reasonable for the time/mat expenditure when you have bot FCs with multiple ALCs and gatherers constantly churning them out like a factory.

As far as things with less demand like crafted gear go, they might be able to sell for a good price initially, but the prices are going to tank a lot faster with the markets being flooded by bots.

ah then the disagreement is what each of us think reasonable price is. which is completely fair.

now i will say when i say normalize i don't mean high or low price wise i just mean stable. cause once again whats a fair price is different to everyone.

[KageTokage]

While people could potentially swap to a cheap server and buy things, people from the server that had their cheap items bought up can also do this. It sounds like it should balance out the game's economy as a whole. Players on lower populations have the option to got to a high population server and buy up large quantities of items that possibly aren't being supplied on their server.

I'm kind of looking forward to this change. On Cactuar, there's this FC that has a pretty firm grip on the potion market and sells them dirt cheap. Person gathers ~20 hours a day. People will eventually buy out all of their pots and possibly force the potion prices to raise because others are able to break into the market. Or they'll somehow keep up with demand and utterly crash potions across the Aether data center. Either way, it's something I'm very interested in seeing how it plays out.

I noticed that one of the highest ranked FCs among all the servers currently is on Gilgamesh and it's just a team of four ALC bots (They were originally top but now a FC on Zeromus with even more ALC bots overtook them, which also rules out the "Bots aren't an issue on JP servers" belief for why SE never seems to do anything about them).

We're going to be on the same data center, so our resident infusion spammers are going to potentially have a lot of competition it seems, though whether that's for better or worse indeed remains to be seen.

ah then the disagreement is what each of us think reasonable price is. which is completely fair.

now i will say when i say normalize i don't mean high or low price wise i just mean stable. cause once again whats a fair price is different to everyone.

My personal definition of a reasonable price is "Equal to or greater then the current value of the mats needed to make the item".

A single aethersand costs more then what three infusions are going for on my server and this has mostly held true for as long the infusion spammers have been active on my server

[XiXiQ]

I suspect it will even out and the prices will normalise across servers eventually. Tonberry is huge and the prices are generally very deflated (it wasn't common for people to transfer here just to buy things like the nightmare mount then go back and sell for 10-20x the price). I am expecting this particular server's marketboard to get raped, frankly, but it should end up better off overall.

[LalaRu]

So I noticed that selling on other servers will not be permitted, however BUYING will be. ...

I just predict hordes of players from 'rich' servers going shopping on the underdeveloped servers. Skyrocket' Item prices incoming.

[Liam_Harper]

It could give the bots far better selling power, especially since bots are only banned in waves.

For example, a bot establishes on Zodiark and lists a few thousand potions and food at ridiculously low prices. It gets known around within a few days that Zodiark is the place to go to stock up on raid consumables. The bot now has the entire data centre as their market and can make a ton of gil before the next banwave. Banwave hits, bot establishes on a new realm, rinse and repeat.

Meanwhile, everyone else on the data centre selling consumables legitimatly is affected.

Bots have been rampant lately, even moving onto endgame gear markets. Considering the issues Enix have in handling them, I'm baffled why they'd offer them such an advantage.

[Vnolan]

1. RMT activity goes way up. Limited to one server before, interested parties can be on any of eight servers
2. Because of the increased competition, gil prices will drop. This will allow more players to take part in buying. Sellers won't be affected because the alternative is no money
3. Good for buyers, bad for sellers. Sellers have to sell more to make the same amount of gil. Sellers that use bots won't be affected because they don't spend time gathering or crafting. Some legit sellers will determine the effort isn't worth the gil made and will drop out. Prices on some items might bounce back with fewer sellers, but a larger percentage of goods will have been acquired through illegitimate means. You could also have players starting to use bots for the first time as a means to stay competitive

On the face of it, another poorly though out decision by SE. They prevented players from accessing gathering nodes, Jumbo cactpot, tournaments and retainers, so it shouldn't be too hard to prevent access to the MB.

especially since bots are only banned in waves.

ahahahahaha...no. You're thinking of gibberish-named bots. Player bots operate much longer and in some cases aren't dealt with at all. Remember: Punishment for first-time botting is a three-day suspension if caught

[Melichoir]

So I noticed that selling on other servers will not be permitted, however BUYING will be. I'm wondering what kind of effect this will have in the long run.

My initial thoughts were this:
1) Everyone will go to bigger servers in order to make purchases, since supply is larger there and thus prices are lower. This will leave small servers struggling, even if they were to adjust their prices since the bias will have been firmly planted that purchasing cross server is best. Even if smaller servers were to match the price, players might go to check the big server first and see it's the same price so meh. Why not just buy it there since you're already there?

As some people pointed out, bigger servers does not mean cheaper because its not a simple matter of supply and demand. There is also the matter of how much money is floating around the economy as well. Supposing that both a big and small server have the exact same supply of a product, the bigger server may still charge more simply because the average income of a large server player is higher. That is to say a large server player may have 20 million gil, while a small player server may only have 2 million. This will affect pricing because on small servers you need to price for what people can afford as well, not just on the supply of things.

This then leads to something people will point out : Well big server people will buy from small server people, jacking up pricing and pricing out small server people from their own markets.

This probably wont happen long term. You can think of the big server people as investors bringing in more capital to small servers who are offering a service. When this occurs, the people selling products will get more money. They will then spend that money themselves on similarly priced things wherever they can find them. This spreads the wealth over time causing the average of player's pocket books to increase overtime so long as theyre participating in the market. No one will really be "priced out" in the long term so long as theyre playing the market game with everyone else. Youll see some wonky market pricing in the short term as the influx of gil will probably cause a "Gil-Rush" scenario, but as that goes on things will normalize.

It is also worth noting, btw, that pricing may also drop overall. If smaller servers have a cheaper product than the larger servers, people will buy from smaller servers, thus increasing competition. The only great issue I can see is that anyone using the MB system will not be able to see price points of other servers, and may get shafted in inadvertently if theyre not price checking themselves against other servers where things arent selling because people are shopping around on other servers and you have no real way to compare prices efficiently.

2) Perhaps supply on bigger servers will dwindle and prices will increase there, due to the higher influx of players purchasing from there. This may lead to increases in prices which would make poor players unhappy. This would also create more gil on larger servers, thus further devaluing gil. At the same time, it moves gil away from smaller servers.

As mentioned above, this likely isnt going to happen in this fashion. Youll start seeing more homogenization of the average gil a player has over time after the proposed changes. This is also in part due to the fact that there is no real reason to hang onto gil. Unlike the real world, its harder to use Gil to make more Gil due to not having things like lending institutions and interest. You can buy and resell, but that method is fairly risky unless theres a huge margin of difference (i.e. someone is undercutting a huge amount.)

3) Bots will ruin the economy of the entire game. Obviously my previous statement probably won't happen in this case (as far as the supply dwindling and prices increasing goes).

Bots probably wont have as big an impact as proposed. Or rather, theyre probably going to have the same level of impact as is now. Bots who farm mats, btw, are almost a necessary evil. If anyone is directly pushing the price down due to supply, its bots. For the individual this can suck, but for the player base broadly, its creating an indirect discount at the expense of people who buy GIL with cash. Im not saying that unrestricted botting is good, but rather its one of those wierd nuances where if you were to remove 100% of the bots from the game overnight, there would be a huge economic impact that everyone would feel instantly and may even permanently damage the game economy. It's why there is a strong likelyhood MMO companies arent hyper vigilant on botting when it comes to harvesting mats. They do it when it becomes a problem or enough complaints lodged, but theyre not likely investing a huge amount of time to kill RMT sellers off completely.