Economy destined for super-inflation

[Felren]

My point is that gold being "sunk into the server" has been reduced over and over again over the years, while in the past year or so the rate that gil is "coming out of the server" has increased, so that people will have more and more gil without events to spend it on.

It's like each time someone sells something to a NPC it's the government printing more money. Each time someone spends gil to an NPC in an event its like the government burns that money. The government in this case is now printing A LOT more gil than is being burned due to lack of events that cost gil/ useful consumables or synthesis materials bought from NPC.

^
This is my topic that gil out of the server >>>> gil into the server at this point, and eventually this is going to cause huge inflation.

[MDenham]

It's a good thing ive put my wealth into Gold and Silver then.

I went one step better and started investing in bacon.

[Atomic_Skull]

Also: NPC fishing was never worth it

The real money from fishing is in food, especially PLD foods now that Voidwatch has made them relevant again.

Also, fishing 10 fish an hour is hard...? And so what if there's a 200 fish/day cap? That's still 2.1M/day on fishing alone, leaving you spare time to supplement your income in other ways too. Getting an Ebisu is not that hard and doesn't require 100 fishing. It's just tedious and expensive to invest in. But it's a good investment.

No but 100k an hour sucks compared to what I can make by fishing up materials for certain foods. I'm more limited by the demand than I am by just feeding something into an NPC, but less work for the same amount of gil = better.

[Shiyo]

Tacos or sushi? The paladins I run with always use sushi in voidwatch.

[Afania]

Tacos or sushi? The paladins I run with always use sushi in voidwatch.

Considering some VW has very high eva and not easy to cap acc, sushi is probably more beneficial for PLD actually. On the other hand Taco probably won't help that much....

[scaevola]

Abyssea and Dynamis will not cause hyper-inflation, because they are events with time limits and are thus extremely difficult to bot effectively.

[Kristal]

The only time limit in abyssea is the 120 min entry limit (which only applies to traverser stones and left-over time). Once inside, you can stay inside indefinitely by using time extensions that rain down like candy.

[scaevola]

When somebody comes up with a bot that can intelligently choose target lights and open chests without keys, we'll talk.

[Economizer]

Bots are not the sole cause of hyper-inflation.

That said, in Abyssea, all you would have to do is get a bot that understands time limits, and how to farm more time when it gets low, or alternatively, farm enough Abyssea time for it that it can stay in Abyssea for a few days everyday. I've never programmed a bot or engaged in any remotely RMT activity in Final Fantasy, but it doesn't sound stupidly hard to make a bot that is capable of fighting monsters understand how to farm cruor, buy keys, and pop chests indiscriminately for more time, even if you have to have someone cap out their lights first.

For Dynamis, all you would need to do is get enough characters on one account to 95 (easy) and have them each farm currency - shoot, even someone with around four hours a day to farm in Dynamis could easily have a second character on an account made just for farming in Dynamis to boost their currency drops, without any illegal botting.

The proc systems aren't that hard to understand, and considering what bots have been able to do in the past in Final Fantasy XI and other MMOs, and what AI bots can do in other games, I don't think it would be impossible (maybe hard, but definitely not impossible). Not only that, but FFXI runs on such low requirements that with the right software you can run multiple instances on the same machine, even without breaking the ToS by running software that interfaces with FFXI at all, or a virtual machine.

Since leveling to 95 and getting Perle, Teal, or Aurore gear isn't that hard, it wouldn't even be that hard or expensive to level and equip throw away characters, as long as they aren't required to know every spell or tank anything using Utsusemi.

The way the game is currently, it is ripe for the RMT to move back in and start plaguing the game again as we get more and more high level gear that isn't tagged R/E. So unless SE has a plan, or has been secretly fending off RMT (I haven't heard anything from the Special Taskforce lately, and I doubt SE would be quite about keeping the RMT out of sight as effectively as they have the last year or two) things could get very bad, very quickly.

I'd really like to hear more regular news about the state of the economy (inflation, deflation, expectations, actions and also, the fight against RMT) of FFXI. It would be interesting information, much like the census information (although hopefully more often).

[scaevola]

That said, in Abyssea, all you would have to do is get a bot that understands time limits, and how to farm more time when it gets low, or alternatively, farm enough Abyssea time for it that it can stay in Abyssea for a few days everyday. I've never programmed a bot or engaged in any remotely RMT activity in Final Fantasy, but it doesn't sound stupidly hard to make a bot that is capable of fighting monsters understand how to farm cruor, buy keys, and pop chests indiscriminately for more time, even if you have to have someone cap out their lights first.

Accepting for the sake of argument that such a thing would 1) be possible to code at all, and assuming it would be, that 2) someone with the expertise necessary to script such a dynamic bot would waste their time and expertise writing one for FFXI (I certainly hope they're charging for it in this scenario), the issue is that if you were farming for cruor to make money, using keys to pop chests would defeat the whole purpose. The number-guessing games would be the main issue.

I guess you could spend a few hours building time on your own to let your bot run overnight, but if you were going to bot anyway, I'd have to ask why bother doing that when you could just fishbot overnight to make as much if not more money.

This is the biggest thing that makes me skeptical about inflationary fears, actually; fishbots are common enough to have already upset the economy if such a thing were likely to happen. The biggest reason why it hasn't is that money just isn't valuable enough anymore for the vast majority of players to reward the kind of effort it would take on the part of enough players to bring a repeat of Christmas 2005.