Relic - Opportunity for removing Gil from the system

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Originally Posted by Nyx

I cant beleive how this thread is half responses to a person who cant understand that when you buy an item off the wards you are paying the person who put it up and the gil does not disappear from the game.

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Who said this wasn't the case?

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Originally Posted by Arik

First, no need to be rude.
Second, your entire scenario supposes that once you buy the item, it has no worth.

Is this true?..... Once you buy an item, it no longer has worth?

Yes, the 2mil in Gil that you used to buy the item is no longer liquid....but it still represents 2mil in Gil. That's why you are able to sell it back for the same 2mil gil that you payed for it.

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Holy 5th grade. I'm done in this thread.

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Originally Posted by Kaizlu

The gil is "solid", it exists but in the pockets of another player. Even if you sell that piece of gear and get all your money back you aren't adding money to the economy - just moving it around players. The "real" worth and the only way to get "new" money is if you sell to NPC (since money is just being created out of nowhere and not just moving around players)

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And what happens when you blow up the item you bought?
It's effectively removed from circulation, correct?

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Originally Posted by Arik

And what happens when you blow up the item you bought?
It's effectively removed from circulation, correct?

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thats not the point

its still not gil

an item, is an item, a gil is gil


1 gil will always = 1 gil, and an item will always fluctuate on its percieved value


in truth, your item is actualy only worth as much as you can vendor it for.



If this game launched today, and you made an item worth 2mil gil, does that mean you put 2mil gil into circulation? no it does not, cuz an item is not gil.

you dont seem to understand this concept in the least

As a matter of fact, looks like it was just a bad day to post in the threads.

Later everyone, see you all in game!!

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Originally Posted by Arik

And what happens when you blow up the item you bought?
It's effectively removed from circulation, correct?

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The item is, yes. Nobody's concerned about a flood of goods into the system -- amazingly that hasn't happened yet, in large part due to the materia melding explosions. We're talking about currency inflation and how to deal with that.

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Originally Posted by Arik

And what happens when you blow up the item you bought?
It's effectively removed from circulation, correct?

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It would look ugly if I quote myself, but check my other post with the example (should be in the previous page)
Basically, while you are removing gil from your pockets, even by blowing up the gear you are just giving money to a player, and if you get the mats (and blow it up too) those items were never in circulation (or converted to gil) so they don't affect the economy (unless you actually sell something)

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Originally Posted by Arik

And what happens when you blow up the item you bought?
It's effectively removed from circulation, correct?

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It's does not matter if you have the weapon or you blow it...the 2M you paid for is in somebody else pocket....and if the same weapon as been sold several time its only the taxe that is not in the economy anymore so it's the same 2M that is going from pocket to pocket until someone keep it for good or blow it or give it dbl meld to the npc.

Disclaimer: I am not an economist, however, MMOs are hardly what I would call a normal economic system either. As such, I'm going dive in head-first into this debate armed with a cursory understanding of macroeconomics and pray I only get corrected a few times.

From a developer's standpoint, the goal should be to preserve as close to equilibrium as possible. That is, an equal flow of monies coming in and going out of the system. MMOs have a somewhat unique situation in that they are constantly minting new monies, so the flow out needs to be equal in order to curb inflation. In a generic MMO, monetary units generally come into the game through the following:

• Quests/Missions
• NPC shops
• Monster/Dungeon Drops

These three things can be further divided into two categories: static, and continuous. Quests and missions, generally, fall into the static category. Once completed, they are done. Developers can simply say y = px where p is the number of players, x is the sum amount of money made through static quests and dungeons, and y is the amount of money added to the economy.

Fundamentally, static monetary content like this is harmless, since the more players you have, the more monies you should have in circulation anyway. It is the second category, made up of the other two types that are "dangerous". That being said, with careful tuning, they can be quite predictable as well. Monsters, for instance, take a known amount of time to kill (about 10 seconds in FFXIV for farming). The amount of money produced by a given player in a given time can therefore be calculated as y = (D + M) * (T/dT) where D is the average drop worth at an NPC for a given monster, M is the average money value dropped by a given monster, T is the average amount of time the developers expect players to need to farm (this is not an actual number, but rather a metric used as a baseline for the worth of all other items) and dT which is the delta time for any one monster to be killed.

What's interesting here, is that that formula - while not precise - does show that the amount of money coming into the system is in some way proportional to the number of players active in the game (each player produces y monetary units per day).

On the other side of the coin, monies generally exit the game through the following two ways:

• Taxes
• NPC purchases

FFXIV is somewhat unusual in that very little money exits the economy through the NPC market. Ignoring NPC purchases for a moment then, we see something very interesting if we look at the way FFXIV has set up it's Taxes. Let's say that x percent of the servers economy moves through the wards in a given day (I would estimate x to be somewhere around 20%, but honestly it's not very important for the point I'm making here). If the game were to go through a massive inflation burst, the amount of money going through the market would increase, but the percent of the economy moving at any given time would stay close to the same value.

Now, given that the game takes a shaving off the top of each purchase, approximately 0.05 * x percent of the in game money gets removed per day from market taxes. This has some interesting ramifications. Consider this, the amount of money coming into the game is based on the number of players, while the amount of money going out of the game is based on the amount of money currently in the economy.

Let us say, for instance, that the game has 1x1010 (or 10 billion) gil and the dev team suddenly dropped 1,000,000,000 gil into the game randomly. And let us assume that each day 20% of the money in the game travels through the markets (5% being shaved off each time). Before the stimulus, 100,000,000 gil was being taken out of the game daily, while some large amount (we'll say for simplicity's sake that we're at equilibrium) 100,000,000 was being added. Meanwhile, after the stimulus, 110,000,000 is being removed, but only 100,000,000 is being added. The economy is slowly brought back into equilibrium after about (ugh, I don't feel like doing calculus today, so I'm going to eyeball it, sorry, if someone wants to check that actual number I would appreciate it) 30 days.

Unfortunately, they have completely shot themselves in the foot, by implementing a cap, fairly well crippling the balancing effect of the tax. When looking specifically at the issue at hand, I would say that the economy actually has a pretty decent set of checks and balances in place already, if they were to add a "constant" output flow like the one you are suggesting, it would basically lower the baseline equilibrium, but generally I think it is not needed. The cost of entry is not terribly high, and while many players have exorbitant amounts of gil, most mid-tier items are cheap enough that an entry level player could afford them with minimal work (gil from static sources such as the main quest should actually be enough to gear your first job at 50 for the most part, given just entry-level crafted gear). Most high-tier gear is from end-game events, not crafting, and top-tier crafted gear is meant to be for the extremely persistent.

Speaking as someone who will never be able to afford a Relic, I think that from a purely balance perspective, the system works well enough as is. Though I do think the taxing could use some tweeking (remove the cap really would be my only complaint).

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Originally Posted by charlemagne

Well there is some small element of a gil sink in this. We still need to buy some mats from an npc. Coke for example.

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Coke? Did you say? Nah... I must be confused... Coke? But...

Coke?

o.0

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Originally Posted by Tricksy

Coke? Did you say? Nah... I must be confused... Coke? But...

Coke?

o.0

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It's not THAT kind of Coke. This Coke is a cluster of small rocks sold by shady merchants for exorbitant prices.

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Originally Posted by Arik

Um.......if I buy a 2 mil Gil item, the 2 mil Gil that I have is now represented by that item, its just that my 2 mil in gil is no longer liquid. If I decide to sell that item once I'm done using it, barring huge inflation/deflation, I can get my 2 mil Gil back. If I try to meld that item and it blows up, that item no longer exists. My 2 mil Gil worth of participation in the economy no longer exists.

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The item blowing up does not remove gil from the economy. Let's assume that there are two things that can happen. (A) the item doesnt blow up and (B) the item blows up.
(A) You're right in thinking it's worth gil. But it isn't gil itself. If you sell it you get your gil back but that gil comes from another player it is not gil introduced into the economy.
(B) It blows up The guy you bought it from still has your gil so that gil is still in the economy. You cant get your gil back by selling it but the gil you would have got for selling it is still in the hands of the guy who would have bought it from you. The gil is still in the economy.

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Originally Posted by charlemagne

The item blowing up does not remove gil from the economy. Let's assume that there are two things that can happen. (A) the item doesnt blow up and (B) the item blows up.
(A) You're right in thinking it's worth gil. But it isn't gil itself. If you sell it you get your gil back but that gil comes from another player it is not gil introduced into the economy.
(B) It blows up The guy you bought it from still has your gil so that gil is still in the economy. You cant get your gil back by selling it but the gil you would have got for selling it is still in the hands of the guy who would have bought it from you. The gil is still in the economy.

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Its an asset. Worth gil. I dont know if I am misunderstanding you or what, but it has value represented in gil.

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Originally Posted by Powercow

It's not THAT kind of Coke. This Coke is a cluster of small rocks sold by shady merchants for exorbitant prices.

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Lol still confused? You didn't really set my mind at ease :P

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Originally Posted by Tricksy

Its an asset. Worth gil. I dont know if I am misunderstanding you or what, but it has value represented in gil.

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just because it has a value, does not mean it is gil itself though

gil is gil, items are not gil

there is only so much gil in the economy itself, and can only be added by doing something in which gil is created from an npc/quest etc etc

every time you make an item, you are not in fact making gil, you are just making something you can exchange for other peoples gil

in other words, if you make item xxx worth 2mil gil, you did not just add 2mil gil to the economy, you just made an item which can get you 2mil gil which is already in the economy


100bil gil + new item = 100bil gil still, not 100bil + value of item

its just you will now be able to snag a piece of that 100bil already there

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Originally Posted by Tricksy

Its an asset. Worth gil. I dont know if I am misunderstanding you or what, but it has value represented in gil.

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Lets assume you own a car. That car has a cash value. Lets assume you sell your car to Bob. Bob now has a car and you have Bobs cash. The cash wasn't created to buy your car it has simply moved from Bob to you. No cash has been added or removed from the economy by the sale, it has simply moved from Bob to you.

Lets assume a second case. You have a car. Your car develops a fault, catches fire and burns. You no longer have a car but you dont have less cash. Bob still has his cash, no cash has been removed from the economy.

An item has value and can be exchanged for cash. The item itself is not cash. Whatever happens to the item does not impact on the amount of cash there is. You could probably trade your car with someone for a motorbike, but if your car burned there wouldn't be fewer motorbikes in the world would there? It's exactly the same thing.

I could start talking about financial and non-financial assets and economic transactions, but it would be getting off topic and that might hurt people's brains. Instead, I'm going to keep this simple.

Tax!

Every time I buy something from the mercentile house, I pay up to an extra 4k gil, which the seller doesn't get. SE have removed that gil from the economy.

Every time I sell something in a (regular, not discounting) market ward, I only get to keep 95% of my asking price. SE keeps the rest, removing 5 gil for every 100 gil traded on the wards.

This also means that the more expensive things trade for, the more gil is lost to tax.

So if you want to remove gil from the game, ensure more gil is traded on the wards, be it more items or at more expensive prices.
Introducing the materia system did this. So did difficult-to-make items that would sell for high sums.

When I bought my Vanya Robe +1 for 2,500,000gil, SE took 125,000gil out of the system via sales tax.

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Originally Posted by TheVedis

an item, is an item, a gil is gil

1 gil will always = 1 gil

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Unless it's Gath's...

:rolleyes:

The gil sink comes from buying mats from NPCs and from market taxes.

More double meld failures = more mats that need to be purchased, and more materials (and materia) bought and sold in the markets.

Its discreet, but there is definitely a removal of gil from the game with Relics.

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Originally Posted by Zantetsuken

Unless it's Gath's...

:rolleyes:

The gil sink comes from buying mats from NPCs and from market taxes.

More double meld failures = more mats that need to be purchased, and more materials (and materia) bought and sold in the markets.

Its discreet, but there is definitely a removal of gil from the game with Relics.

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yeah, that is a true gil sink
that is gil actualy being removed from the economy

if another player gets it, its still there
if taxes get it, or an npc gets it, thats removed


people need to learn the difference

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Originally Posted by Catapult

Ah yes, but you've forgotten the most basic premise of all economies everywhere.

People will pay to be lazy.

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Quoted for Truth

i didnt read everything, but how is it that no one said anything about hamlet provisioning? this removes a LOT of gil from the economy, i have seen ppl spend 10-30m to get to top3 and several other lower amounts to get top20..

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Originally Posted by DrakoRocks

i didnt read everything, but how is it that no one said anything about hamlet provisioning? this removes a LOT of gil from the economy, i have seen ppl spend 10-30m to get to top3 and several other lower amounts to get top20..

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How does it remove a lot of gil from the economy?

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Originally Posted by DrakoRocks

i didnt read everything, but how is it that no one said anything about hamlet provisioning? this removes a LOT of gil from the economy, i have seen ppl spend 10-30m to get to top3 and several other lower amounts to get top20..

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Because it doesn't remove the gil from the game, and if you read the previous posts you'd have realized that.