Quote Originally Posted by JackDaniels View Post
If you have not noticed, everything in the AH costs 4-40k with exception to really rare HQ lv86+ equipment (and mats) which can run for 400k-4M.

New people such as myself (i only have 15 days playtime on this character, my old character is forever lost) are totally effing screwed. I was lucky enough to get a flame gem somehow, idr, (most vets in my ls were surprised themselves), which got me 2.5m in the AH. I bought two pieces of armor, a crummy dagger, and some gobbie bag upgrades. Your perception of how the market in FFXI is now compared to pre-abyssea is a little skewed.

Either way, as analhyme stated, the gil prizes = gil raised/winners. It makes sense to charge for the lottery, but the rewards are pretty laugh worthy when you've spent hundreds of thousands on this lottery over the years only to get statues. Now, if I could vendor statues in for 10-50k each, then I'd be really interested.
Because there totally isn't rare EX equipment you can get everywhere fairly easily until you get to being capable of attacking things in your abyssea parties. Nope No-siree. Square enix definitely didn't sprinkle basic useful gear all over the place. And they definitely dont give you money for mission completion, basic GOV fights that you should be doing, or any of the random quests spread about that people have been doing since day one. It's totally harder now.
This in the off chance you haven't figured it out already is sarcasm.
The only thing harder nowadays is trying to convert cruor into gil since that would normaly have easily geared up people into decent stuff.