Problem: Items are Worthless

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Originally Posted by Rentahamster

That sounds about right.

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It may seem that this system and the current system are 6 in one hand and half a dozen in the other as far as work to get a +3 item, but there is a very fine point to be seen, there:

In another thread I went through and figured out that currently it takes about 12 million gil and over a thousand combines to have a mathematically good chance of getting a +3 iron plate. This is just for one part of one material of one item. You could spend a billion gil to get 30 of each +3 sub item for a thermal alembic and still not end up with a +3 alembic, currently.

So, this system would virtually guarantee that, with enough effort, you can make a +3 alembic, while still having all of the other positive downstream effects on the economy.

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Originally Posted by Solipse

In another thread I went through and figured out that currently it takes about 12 million gil and over a thousand combines to have a mathematically good chance of getting a +3 iron plate.

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Or you could spend a few hours farming one from a mob... Do people seriously try to synth up Iron Plate +3s? I think I'll start farming them and listing them for 5mil each.

You completely missed the point, but ok, you do that.

Personally I dislike the concept of free land NMs for drops for gear. I can say I did mostly everything in XI that I could. Limbus, ZNMs, salvage, dyna, nyzul, einherjar etc, what to know what I did NOT do? KB, Cerb, Sky and Sea. I did a bit of sky and a bit if sea but quickly left them to the people spending hours touching themselves for a chance to claim a boss theat they might get a drop off of. There is not an item in the game that is worth a couple of hundred hours of doing nothing to get. The NMs in XI were rare, and even rarer to try to claim, and very unsatisfying when you did claim them, take mobs hp >0 before he kills you, and small drop rates when you do.

I play a game because I want to PLAY the game, not site around waiting for something to happen so I can get a chance to paly the game. hHw many hours do peopel spend running around trying to target and claim adamantoise or such? not worth it IMO. Give me content that I can play when my friends are around or with a pug liek Nyzul, or missions, or limbus or such, It is very discouraging to see people talking about free roaming buffalo and saying it is content and there are items comming from that bcause that sounds like the flawed logic that FFXI had in zilart and personally I thought XI got better with the expansions. Free roaming NMS is a throwback to what I consider bad game design and prevents your players from playing the game.

OP has a point, even in a good economy this is a problem.

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Originally Posted by Solipse

...As posted, the jist I get is "I shouldn't have to sit there for hours making an HQ item, someone else should have to spend their time so I can do it faster." - not sure trading off effort in that way is a good thing...

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I understand how you would get that from what I posted but that isn't really my intention. I did say:

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Originally Posted by moatcarp

...On the down side it means that DoL need to spam harvesting to gather HQ mats and DoW need to spam NMs to obtain HQ mats. So, it's clearly not a perfect solution...

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Basically - in order to keep HQ goods rare someone needs to sit around forever doing something and no matter how you slice it it's not fair to someone. I prefer NQ mats = NQ goods and HQ mats = HQ goods because then it means something to a DoL / DoW when they get HQ mats and it means something to a DoH when they are able to acquire HQ mats.

In the proposed solution you are putting all the power into the hands of the DoH I think. There is no incentive to pay a premium to DoL/DoW to be able to make a HQ item. I don't think that seems really fair & balanced.

On the other hand my proposal balances the distribution of power at least a little bit. DoW/DoL can obtain HQ mats but can't do anything with them - they need the DoH. On the other hand DoH can't HQ without goods from DoW/DoL.

Re: "you could code this in under a day" - I'm not sure what your experience developing is but I work day to day with code bases that are several million lines of code written over 20+ years and something I can whip up in 20 minutes in Ruby or Java might take me the better part of a week in legacy C code once I get down to putting it under unit test to make sure I don't break anything and even finding the right place to put it and tracking down what invariably does break because the code is brittle and so on. I'm not sure if you were making a serious point with this or not but I figured I'd respond.

EDIT: a couple more thoughts - maybe crafting leves could reward HQ mats sometimes. This prevents crafters from being entirely beholden to DoL/DoW (and I *only* think this is appropriate because SE has already added non-DoH methods of obtaining gear; which I think was wrong of them).

Also, I'd have to spend a lot of time getting HQ mats farming because there is no DoL that can harvest what I need for my primary craft - leather. I already spend hours farming mats.

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Originally Posted by moatcarp

Re: "you could code this in under a day" - I'm not sure what your experience developing is but I work day to day with code bases that are several million lines of code written over 20+ years and something I can whip up in 20 minutes in Ruby or Java might take me the better part of a week in legacy C code once I get down to putting it under unit test to make sure I don't break anything and even finding the right place to put it and tracking down what invariably does break because the code is brittle and so on. I'm not sure if you were making a serious point with this or not but I figured I'd respond.

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I've been involved in development for 16 years now, and have done work with just about every programming language available - except for Ruby, haven't really had time to sit down and learn it. ;)

Coding time != End to end development cycle

The coding for my solution is as easy as it comes, and I do feel pretty strongly that they could bang it out in under a day. The testing for a system like that, of course, will take much longer.

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Originally Posted by moatcarp

Basically - in order to keep HQ goods rare someone needs to sit around forever doing something and no matter how you slice it it's not fair to someone. I prefer NQ mats = NQ goods and HQ mats = HQ goods because then it means something to a DoL / DoW when they get HQ mats and it means something to a DoH when they are able to acquire HQ mats.

In the proposed solution you are putting all the power into the hands of the DoH I think. There is no incentive to pay a premium to DoL/DoW to be able to make a HQ item. I don't think that seems really fair & balanced.

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Well, to be fair, that's what those classes are for.

If you want free materials, you are forced to do DoL.
If you want free repairs and free items, you are forced to do DoH.
If you want to be able to farm mobs and get HQ drops from them, you are forced to do DoW/M

Let me first state that my opinion on this comes decided from lack-of-self-interest and more from my sense of what's right and fair. If you notice, I have no DoL jobs above R21. If this was self-interest, I would say the opposite:

I cannot support or agree with any opinion or option that would allow a DoH to completely bypass having a DoL job from gathering mats, or from supporting people with DoL jobs. If you need a hundred oak logs, you should either have to get them yourself or pay someone to get them. Not enough people do DoL, currently, however, because the reward for doing so is so small. This would add incentive for doing so.

In practice, you are not putting all of the power in the hands of a DoL, though. It's supply and demand and market equilibrium in practice - right now you are free to charge whatever you want for whatever you want. I routinely see people selling iron chain +3 for 500k - nobody buys it. You can only get as much money for something as someone else is willing to pay. If all of the DoL classes price gouge on basic materials, DoH classes will just level DoL classes and the DoL people will never, ever be able to sell anything, as the people who would consume what they're selling can do it themselves.

Thus, again, there is still incentive for selling things at a fair price. Not only that, but goods final price will invariably based off of materials prices. If the price of oak logs went up 10x through this change, then the price of final items should ideally go up 10x as well. Again, if the price of lumber goes up, the price of housing goes up, too. Believing that things will work any differently is like believing that if the price of lumber goes up, the price of housing goes down.

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Originally Posted by Linnear

Free roaming NMS is a throwback to what I consider bad game design and prevents your players from playing the game.

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You do have a point - however, this is only the case if that is the only place where these high end gear materials come from, as they are currently. If you had instanced dungeon bosses, even if they were hard and required 15 man r50 groups, that dropped similar level gear, would go a long way to not FORCING people to deal with NMs.

I think it's a bit too early in the game's lifetime to base any long term decisions off the content (or lack thereof) that we have now. There should be multiple ways to obtain good gear. Hopefully they realize that; I would be surprised if they didn't.

This is why the soulbound/bind-on-equip system from WOW works so perfectly. Once someone buys and equips an item, it's removed from the market permanently. I would wholly be in favor of a similar system for FFXIV.

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Originally Posted by Wolfie

This is why the soulbound/bind-on-equip system from WOW works so perfectly. Once someone buys and equips an item, it's removed from the market permanently. I would wholly be in favor of a similar system for FFXIV.

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That's not why WoW's economy works.

I detailed it earlier - just adding soulbound items will not help at all. The reason being is that currently, more items are produced than can be consumed. This will always be the case in a game where crafting is a major part of the basic gameplay. There needs to be a reason for items to leave the economy. If people make a thousand crab bows but only 50 of those are bought, then there's a glut in the economy and the items become worthless. Soulbinding items would only remove those 50 from the economy, the other 950 will still be there.

This is the case with literally every single piece of equipment.

The reason why WoW's economy is healthy is NOT because of soulbound items - but rather because of the ability to disenchant gear. When the market becomes glutted with cheap items, enchanters buy up all the cheap items and break them apart for enchanting materials. THAT is the entire reason wow's economy functions. The whole system is a checks-and-balances type system that prevents massive deflation.

^ Just so.