FFXIV the worst economy in any P2P MMO?

SE needs to add Crafting Items to Myth Tomes that cost 200 tomes each and we need 6-9 of each. Maybe some ilvl95 Crafting gear.

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Originally Posted by OSUBuckeye4

As long as someone can make a profit (even if it's a small one), the economy is fine.

The economy becomes "broken" when one of a few things happen:

1) No one buys/sells anything (because they can make it themselves with relative ease, OR, because there is nothing worth buying because better things are more readily available via questing/dungeons)

2) People do buy/sell things, but, only at a net loss to the crafters who made the original item
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Well, by your definition the Alchemy market is completely broken, haha. We're very close to selling items at a loss, and a lot of the times we do when people undercut an item to 1/2 of what everyone else is trying to sell it for.

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Originally Posted by Synthesis

miners can't make gil because of bots

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Not true.

Gatherirng classes don't make gil because everything drops like crazy, and there is zero demand (except by people who are leveling crafts). It takes maybe 20 minutes to farm an entire stack of ores, resulting in up to 33 ingots for up to 33 weapons / armor / etc. Before leveling out of a zone, you will probably have over 1'000 of them. But there's no use for it, best thing you can do is carry it straight to the NPC. Not just because buying gear does not make sense, because the game is so shitty easy that you can even do the so-called high level dungeons naked if you bring a bit of skill instead - Yoshi-P even throws all the level 5-45 gear at people as quest rewards and thus floods the markets, so that only HQ has a very slight change of selling.

Forget blaming the phantom called RMT. This is bad game design, our "producer and director" is responsible, not some chinese guys who could easily be firewalled based on their IP range. And don't forget that if you can't sell ores, the RMT don't sell them either. I would not be surprised if this economy crash is something Yoshi-P is happy about, because it harms RMT.

In addition to the OP's points, here's what's breaking the economy's back:

• People do not use the function to see the history of sales and undercut because they think they're setting the price too high, when there just is little demand for an item
• Housing prices are too high, so a lot of people are farming and grinding and not willing to invest/buy in anything, because they are saving up for their FC to pay the exorbitant prices for a housing plot
• Sale lists are sorted by lowest price to highest price and then alphabetically; so people will usually end up buying from anything that's higher up the list
• People are bad at math :P
• People who use their own mats and shards and don't do the math of charging for those in a finished item's price, or even for the repairs needed for their crafting equipment

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Originally Posted by Moirear

• People are bad at math :P

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That was really the only entry you needed there.

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Originally Posted by Hiruke

Though I do think it's kind of hilarious that the best way to make money is to run around in dungeons wearing trash gear, which is so counter-intuitive to how one would normally play a game it makes my heart hurt.

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If by trash gear you mean gear to trash for materia, yeah that's sad. They've really screwed the pooch on that one, because people will always now resort to using dungeon finder to spiritbond gear, and any changes would either be just as beneficial to using the duty finder for that or far worse especially in terms of crafting.

I can only assume most of the whining results from being unable to easily generate 1M+ gil per day off the market. Demand is low as players leave the game, which is inevitable and better addressed aggressively than ignored. Demand is also low as players put off larger purchases in reaction to the free company housing prices, which also increases money demand, increasing supply and decreasing prices as players try to convert "wealth" (items) into currency. Within a few months the markets will settle down as players begin feeling they've approached the amount they need for personal housing, probably assuming the old 3-5x questline income blah blah nonsense.

Of course, personal housing will very likely cost more than free company housing, because there is the potential for so many more units sold and it seems they consider space a premium, players will have had months to grind daily gil fonts, and so far it's obvious that free company housing has been a bust and players would prefer to save for personal housing, which means the expected decrease in the money supply never really occurred unless those prices solely target the 0.1%.

Personally, I'm spending. Eventually, gil fonts will leave most average players richer, and I'll make my money back in a few months once I've capped crafting, and more full 50 players have left as they burn out; I'm maybe halfway there.

In the meantime, there still seem to be ways to make upwards of 50-100k an hour from crafting/gathering. I don't know what more you want.

LOL miniscule?

I'd say our prices averaging 4x more than my friends' on non-legacy worlds is a lot more than "miniscule".


The CURRENT cap is 1 bil. Not the case back in 1.0, especially back before leve sharing got nerfed and people were making (combined) hundreds of thousands of gil through leve-sharing/linking per run. It was completely out of hand and is the major reason there's so much gil in circulation right now. Granted I'd wager most of those accounts aren't even active anymore but clearly a few are, and some of those guys can single-handedly buy the most expensive houses and still have plenty of gil left over. That's why the prices for the biggest plots are astronomical.


Your other points are just garbage. There's no lack of demand on Excalibur, it's just devolved to a race to the bottom. PvP items went from 40k+ down to 1k or less on day 1, and that's for HQ.... It never fails too. Any time an item spikes up a bit, people stupidly flood the market trying to cash in until it's completely devalued, and then it just rots there at rock bottom. It's a complete buyers market right now and it's annoying.


And being able to see the exact prices *is* bad. In XI you had to more or less guess when undercutting, making it a truer auction as you could potentially lowball and get an item cheaper (and this was also the only real way to call out undercutters. Now you can simply just look up the competition and forcibly lower the rates and drive others out as people are currently doing. Virtually every 2-star HQ item right now is sold at either a loss or break-even at best.


EDIT: Further proof that the demand is there and people are just being dumb, is in the sales history - turnover rates are still pretty decent on Excalibur, but prices keep dropping. Logically that doesn't make any sense, as prices should go up as demand increases but there's just an excess of supply and gil (and stupidity/recklessness) and it's destroying the market.


What we need are crafted iLv90 items to really be competitive with endgame gear using mats that have to either be farmed on DoL and/or dropped by NMs, not simply bought with tokens (to keep them rare and thus valuable) in addition to higher SB rates. The SB rate nerf was a huge mistake alongside +SB buffs and items doing virtually nothing to speed up the process (I've run around with +5 and FC buff and seen no difference whatsoever in rates.)

Having a higher SB rate means more materia being sold (which is fine given the risk of losing them being so high on forbidden melds) and more goods being sold to be converted into materia. It's win-win. And I still think Food was much more potent in 1.23 and could stand for a buff/wider variety of stat increases to make it a more appealing market. What was so bad about having +STR & Attack from meats anyway?

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Originally Posted by NefGP

LOL miniscule?

I'd say our prices averaging 4x more than my friends' on non-legacy worlds is a lot more than "miniscule".

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Funny, someone else posted actual numbers from his alts in legacy/non-legacy worlds, and the difference is around 20-25%, where is YOUR number?

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The CURRENT cap is 1 bil. Not the case back in 1.0, especially back before leve sharing got nerfed and people were making (combined) hundreds of thousands of gil through leve-sharing/linking per run. It was completely out of hand and is the major reason there's so much gil in circulation right now.

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No, get your facts straight. The gil cap back in 1.0 is 999,999,999, aka 1 billion:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...-Cap-Reduction

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Originally Posted by Bayohne View Post
Q: Will you wipe gil from our characters or change the currency with the launch of ARR?

A: No, there won't be a gil wipe. However, we do currently have plans to decrease the max digit by 1 (999,999,999 > 99,999,999)

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/micdrop


So no, people can't "Literally have hundreds of billions of gil", not unless they have hundreds of characters with capped gil :rolleyes:

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Your other points are just garbage. There's no lack of demand on Excalibur, it's just devolved to a race to the bottom.

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Econ 101 to NefGP, Econ 101 to NefGP, you need to come back for your remedial class!

The whole reason why there CAN be a race to the bottom, is because there IS NO SUFFICIENT DEMAND TO SUPPORT THE PRICE LEVEL. This is basic middle school economy. There is no inherent monetary value to any item in the game (outside of npc vendor price), so the only real value is what the market values it at.

If there is sufficient demand, then the price will not fall. For example, PLEX in eve are sellling generally for 550-600 million isk these days, you can try to "undercut" and sell a thousand of your plex for 300 mil if you want, the market will just swallow up all your cheap plexes and the price will rebound in hours to its original price point, because there is enough demand for PLEX.

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And being able to see the exact prices *is* bad. In XI you had to more or less guess when undercutting, making it a truer auction as you could potentially lowball and get an item cheaper (and this was also the only real way to call out undercutters. Now you can simply just look up the competition and forcibly lower the rates and drive others out as people are currently doing. Virtually every 2-star HQ item right now is sold at either a loss or break-even at best.

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So you ARE dependent on deceiving others to make your margin, that's all that need to be said tbh. Go ahead, go to wall street and tell the NYSE that people shouldn't be able to know the exact prices when they buy and sell stocks, and see how fast they laugh your face into a psych ward.

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EDIT: Further proof that the demand is there and people are just being dumb, is in the sales history - turnover rates are still pretty decent on Excalibur, but prices keep dropping. Logically that doesn't make any sense, as prices should go up as demand increases but there's just an excess of supply and gil (and stupidity/recklessness) and it's destroying the market.

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Your assumptions are only logical when you ignore major tenets of economic principle, including one you managed to include in your own statement. It doesn't matter if demand increases (which it will as price drops), if supply continue to vastly outpace the demand (which they are, especially with the vast increase in philosophy tomes injection in 2.1).

L2economy, and please, never try to run your own business, or manage your own retirement.

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What we need are crafted iLv90 items to really be competitive with endgame gear using mats that have to either be farmed on DoL and/or dropped by NMs, not simply bought with tokens (to keep them rare and thus valuable) in addition to higher SB rates. The SB rate nerf was a huge mistake alongside +SB buffs and items doing virtually nothing to speed up the process (I've run around with +5 and FC buff and seen no difference whatsoever in rates.)

Having a higher SB rate means more materia being sold (which is fine given the risk of losing them being so high on forbidden melds) and more goods being sold to be converted into materia. It's win-win. And I still think Food was much more potent in 1.23 and could stand for a buff/wider variety of stat increases to make it a more appealing market. What was so bad about having +STR & Attack from meats anyway?

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Those were one of the few things that provided a constant demand for goods in 1.0, and it was an enormous mistake on SE's part when they removed it in ARR, and did not put in anything in its place.

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Originally Posted by Taruranto

Well, it has to be expected.
It's clear Yoshi is not developing a mmorpg, it's a single player theme park featuring some instanced co-op.

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MMOLW4PI (Massive Multiplayer Online Lobby With 4 Player Instances).

Maybe SE should not just remove the RPG part from the title, but also the MMO. Honestly, the only thing massive about this game is the amount of shattered hopes of legacy players, and the boredom.

I truly do not understand pointing to "undercutters" as the problem with an economy. I would think the suggestion above to keep prices anonymous is trolling if I haven't seen so many people espouse the same position. The fantasy that if only all sellers would collude to keep prices high that we'd have a vibrant system of exchange makes such little sense I can't believe that people take it seriously.

The fact remains that the economy is terrible because the vast majority of items have little to no value to most players. 2.1 increased supply dramatically for the few holdouts (materia, tome-crafted items) and gives me little hope that those in power can correct the problem, if they even view it as one.

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Originally Posted by NefGP

Your other points are just garbage. There's no lack of demand on Excalibur, it's just devolved to a race to the bottom. PvP items went from 40k+ down to 1k or less on day 1, and that's for HQ.... It never fails too. Any time an item spikes up a bit, people stupidly flood the market trying to cash in until it's completely devalued, and then it just rots there at rock bottom. It's a complete buyers market right now and it's annoying.

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The reason that people "stupidly" flood the market is because there is a massive amount of supply ready to fill any demand that appears. There is a significant lack of demand, and what little exists is being chased by a huge amount of supply. This is the reason for the race to the bottom, and it can only be solved by limiting supply or increasing demand.

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Originally Posted by FelisC

I truly do not understand pointing to "undercutters" as the problem with an economy. I would think the suggestion above to keep prices anonymous is trolling if I haven't seen so many people espouse the same position. The fantasy that if only all sellers would collude to keep prices high that we'd have a vibrant system of exchange makes such little sense I can't believe that people take it seriously.

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Couldn't agree more, but it's what happens when people start talking about things they don't really understand. The argument from those people typically boils down to "but xxxx game had this mechanic, therefore that's how things should be!" while being ignorant of all the other factors that goes into it.

Before you can have an organic market place within the game world that mimics the real ones you first need a way to destroy equipment and items in the game that players use so they are forced out of the game world. Eve Online does this via item destruction upon the death of your space ship, and the ability to loot other players cargo from the destroyed ship. SWG did it another way in that each piece of equipment had stats and durability to them, over time the durability wore down and you could repair it much like we do in FF now. But here is the part that makes them different. Each time you repaired an item in SWG the stats would decrease as would the durability. Over time of use the items would have to be destroyed or removed from service because they just didn't perform anymore in combat or general use.

For the markets to improve in anyway shape or form they would need to change everything about equipment and its mechanics, but most developers do not wish to upset their player base by removing that uber gear from their characters by either loss in pvp or over time due to wear and tear.

All MMO's with the BOP or BOE mechanic as well as the items immortal status of never wearing out will never drive a real economy no matter what they put in to help it. In the end everyone will be wearing that uber gear and will never need to buy anything else so again the market stagnates. As harsh as it sounds you need loss of player equipment to drive a market.

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Originally Posted by Relshar

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You can have a gear based MMO with a good economy without destroying a player's gear. Tera did a very good job of getting an economy that was easy to participate in and relatively stable, and looking back is a model I really like.

1: The best bind on equip gear dropped in dungeons with a lockout, and not at 100%. This was the 2nd best set of gear in the game, with the only set better being incredibly difficult to get, so there was always demand for these items.

2: Enchanting - Every worthwhile item needed to be enchanted. The higher you enchanted the item, the lower the odds of succeeding were. In order to enchant, you needed an item of the same tier to sacrifice along with a vendor bought reagent. The fodder market was the primary method for most players to make money and demand is maintained since every time someone upgrades a piece of gear, they will need a significant amount of fodder in order to get it up to +9, and many will use even more going for +12. The vendor bought reagents also acted as the games primary gold sink.

The biggest benefit of the system above is that players with near top end gear are still buying stuff from lesser geared players, so gold is actually cycling through players instead of only trickling up, or not moving at all. The biggest problem with FFXIV's economy is that there is nothing worthwhile to buy, and the economic portions of the game are easily skipp-able. I, as I'm sure many others, have never put a piece of materia in any gear outside of the quest that required it.

FFXIV could get something similar to Tera through the crafting and materia system, and it seems like that is what they were going for, but they just made it completely unnecessary since dungeon gear doesn't have any materia slots, and dungeon gear can not be converted.

Its a free market and it is players that are setting the prices. With so many people selling and many people saving for fc house then the prices will go down.

While the prices are down I am going to take advantage of it

I kind of hate the materia system. I wish it was more like FFVII's system, where you could gem stuff with whatever, and you could add/remove stuff from those slots. Have the items be either crafted or (much better yet) come from hard stuff that requires skilled players to beat (raids that have no real point other than to get materia and other money drops), and have the dungeon gear able to be slotted with materia so the stuff was actually, you know... useful. Have the materia degrade over time if you want to have a constant need to get more or whatever.

All crafted gear and materia is kind of a throwaway, a distraction from what you should really be getting. It's weird that they flubbed the opportunity to have a real dynamic here. Having people go through dungeons with trash gear so they could break it down into stuff no one should really want is super bizarre, and helps no one.

Economies depend on specialized labor. Someone else has to have something you want for a transaction to take place.

When one person can do everything- no one else has what they want or need.

No interdependence = no working economy. It's too easy to level- so everyone is everything.

Easy independence is nice... in a single player game. In an MMO easy independence leads to a silo effect.

Post 50 craft wise make it so you can only take up 1 or two crafts past that point. Make these crafts provide specific enchants to gear on a slot per slot base and allow them to be sold on the market. With the amount of class alts in this game and the.slow but gradual gains on high end gear for characters the demand will be high.

Hopefully vanity slots will help the economy a bit.
Since people will want different skins there may be more demand for it.
Now only they had made better looking gear worth keeping as a skin.

Unlike every other MMO I've played, I'm actually engaging in the crafting system in this one, entirely because I can do so much of it myself. If that option wasn't available to me, I wouldn't engage in crafting at all, either as a crafter or as a customer; I'd live off quest rewards and dungeon drops, and otherwise sit on all my gil.

Because I can "do it all," I'm actually engaging in crafting. Contrary to popular belief, this doesn't eliminate the need to purchase anything. I sometimes buy well priced gathering mats off the market boards, and I frequently search for HQ drops because farming those is time consuming. Until the introduction of gil spigots in 2.1, I tried not to spend any gil on the market board, because it was so precious. Unlike most others, I'm not panicked over housing prices, and recognize this as a great time to buy as everyone else tries to liquidate.

I don't see the advantage of a highly interdependent crafting system if the only way you can get the playerbase to engage enmasse is to literally force them to by dropping some BiS gear into a few craft classes. There's still plenty of demand out there, just not for endgame items that all the other endgame players already have. Actually, if the complaint is that there's just not enough profit to be made off endgame crafting, I really have to wonder what the hell you're doing trying to profit off of crafting when you have such a poor grasp on economics.

The best changes they could introduce right now to improve the economy would be to change how we post items, and to add a posting fee; a posting fee wouldn't really work under the current posting system, because you're actually re-posting items every time you interact with the retainer, hence why the market boards are oversaturated with a ton of overpriced junk that people just don't bother to remove from their retainers. Just changing the way in which we post items would itself be a worthwhile change, but adding a posting fee would at least help calm markets some.

Eventually, players will get over the sticker shock of company housing. They'll feel more secure about spending, and less compelled to liquidate rapidly. And they'll come to recognize that their income (sans market boards) is drastically higher.

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Originally Posted by ItzKris

Now only they had made better looking gear worth keeping as a skin.

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The best skins I've seen were dungeon pieces. Crafted gear has the same appearance as quest reward gear, which is to say quest reward gear is just NQ crafted gear.

I feel i'm playing a different game here where I'm still able to earn and sell my items but everyone else can't. Lol...

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Originally Posted by Lafiele

I feel i'm playing a different game here where I'm still able to earn and sell my items but everyone else can't. Lol...

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Seriously.

Maybe part of it is due to specific server circumstances? As far as I know, the market boards are server specific. I'm on a relatively low pop server; less motivation to liquidate due to more reasonable housing prices, and fewer players oversaturating the market or slashing prices in an attempt to liquidate probably both serve to offer me a more profitable environment, despite the decreased demand.

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Originally Posted by Millimidget

The best changes they could introduce right now to improve the economy would be to change how we post items, and to add a posting fee; a posting fee wouldn't really work under the current posting system, because you're actually re-posting items every time you interact with the retainer, hence why the market boards are oversaturated with a ton of overpriced junk that people just don't bother to remove from their retainers. Just changing the way in which we post items would itself be a worthwhile change, but adding a posting fee would at least help calm markets some.

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I doubt any changes to the way we post items would have any significant effect on the economy. No posting changes are going to change the fact that a player with a little time on their hands can go gather a thousand or two flax or electrum ore and supply an army with whatever they want to make from it, just for one example.

Even if you look to FFXI, which used both blind bids and listing/relisting fees, those aren't even close to what made items valuable. Something like copper ore wasn't shooting through the roof because of its listing methods. It was still cheap because it was very abundant, anyone could get it easily and the supply greatly outnumbered the demand (similar to nearly everything FFXIV). Only the items that were in demand and didn't drop like candy held any worth. Gold ore was a fairly rare mid level item that generally sold for a decent price. Adaman ore was very rare, used in high level crafting and required more attention to gather due to being in an area with aggressive higher level mobs that would need to be avoided while gathering, and it sold for a high price. If players could go farm hundreds of these in an hour like they can with the vast majority of FFXIV, they wouldn't have retained their value in any scenario. And the same goes for items in this game. You can't put a bandaid over the fact that the entire world is filled with materials that can be obtained far more quickly than the demand could ever catch up. This point would need to be addressed for anything to change.

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Originally Posted by Lafiele

I feel i'm playing a different game here where I'm still able to earn and sell my items but everyone else can't. Lol...

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I think most people who are complaining are simply upset they can't make millions on every craft nowadays (especially with the astronomical prices on FC Housing currently, further enhancing their complex). I don't craft often, but I can still make lots of money on smaller sales like Goldsmith jewellery, Alchemist/Culinarian consumables or gathering materials used for popular leves when I feel like it. Though Phoenix is also in the next-cheapest group of houses, so I'd imagine we kind of suck. :p

Still... I wouldn't say the economy is perfectly fine as it is, because there's still the issue of a gigantic supply versus little demand, but that would likely need a full redesign of the gathering system (or drastically increasing material requirements of crafting) and rethinking of the game's philosophies (what with Yoshida not wanting to make crafting required for end-game) to make it work. :/

allowing all the gear to be meldable, and only the crafted one to be convertible could fix a lot imho
you would still be able to beat/progress through all content just by doing dungeons, the craft would just make it a bit easier

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Originally Posted by Lafiele

I feel i'm playing a different game here where I'm still able to earn and sell my items but everyone else can't. Lol...

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it is not about can or cant, hell if you set a stack 99 of aldgoat skin for 5g each (had been this low on excalibur), you still be able to sell but you dont earn much.

I checked the market yesterday to see what was worth gathering to make money. Theres nothing. And with the limited amount of time I have to play when I get home from work, I would rather not spend it Spirit Binding for Materia aince I had already leveled my chocobo. At the current status of this economy, there is nothing more profitable thrn that. And this concerns me.

And please, you cant make me gather shards all day. Thats even worse then SB.

I agree FFXIV economy is pretty bad.

There's not much demand for gathering or crafting, so there's little profit. I can make some money at it, but it's not worth the time it takes. I can get more than enough gold for repairs from running dungeons.

Also, with the way Duty Roulette works, I don't need to buy crafted gear for alts. I'm leveling a WHM doing daily DR and Guildhests. Those usually are low level dungeons that don't need gear. I'm using level 20-30 gear at level 40+. It looks like I'll be able to get by with this gear until 50 when I can use DL/CT/etc.

Well I was starting to make gil again with SB materia but the rampant bots on our server have made even that market crash. And the worst part about it is these aren't RMT, oh no, they are real players who will tell you off when you kill their botting asses. These same douche bags are putting up stacks of materia. And what does SE do about it? Tells us that if we kill them WE are the person breaking TOS. Botting players fall under the same category as players that would AFK for entire CM runs. I have to ask WTF is SE thinking sometimes?! Botting is now a personal play style?! Are you kidding me?

There was a subtle gil sink: repair costs. It was reduced and dungeons started dropping gil.

I think it should return to what it was before.