Rule number one: it's all abuot money (or how I leaned to love the gil)

Let me begin with on thing:
I love Final Fantasy XIV - it is a nice game with a lot of different aspects and although different from the past iterations of the online gaming experience at Square Enix, is a wonder never the less.
I started to play long time ago, Ultima Online and straight after Lineage 2 I bought the Japanese version of FFXI - beginning really early my MMORPG addiction.

One thing always fascinated me though: the Market and Crafting and the never ending issue of Money.
Rarely games are a platform for studies or anything else but fun so it is not usual that we get someone that can study and analyze these things - it is not my field of expertise either but there are a couple of things that are overlooked in this aspect and I would like to add some insight.

I don't want to offer any solutions, I just want to rise some questions and speculations about the ingame economy and see with the community what they think about it. Everything started few years ago, when the former Minister of Greek Economy, Varoufakis, started to blog on Valve blogs regarding the internal economy (you can find the link here )

Without getting in-deep, there are some key fact that are interesting in an ingame economy:

1. The System is closed, very closed. SE is in this regard the "absolute" bank and can inflate or deflate economy in any way they want.
2. Value is arbitrary - in the sense that we don't have fixed wages and all we earn is earned through randomness (drops and crafting)
3. The nature of these economies is linked directly to the intruments we have to both creata/destroy money and create/drop the items to sell.

FFXIV is no different in this and it's weakest point is exactly the most important one from a long term point of view: Economy.
So what is wrong and why? This is the purpose of this thread.

Equilibrium: the gil vs everything else

The market is naturally thorn between demand and offer, finding an equilibrium of these is part of Square Enix job for FFXIV. The dynamic nature of this equilibrium doesn't make it less easy to investigate or achieve, it's simply the nature of this case where the income is generated mainly over the Market Board, our only instrument of earning money.
There are some interesting questions here:

Where the money comes from? This is subject to speculation. The rate of inflation we are seeing makes it almost clear that money is abundant and in some case redundant, making clear the fact that we have exploiters (RMT) that create money through ways not intended to be so, making money available more than the system can burn (a way to burn money is obviously repairs, various costs, shops, nothing that really impact our ordinary life as gamers though)
How is money handled? here is another thing. Drops are very random based, so not a reliable source of money, crafting is a key factor in this issue but at the same time it is the most problematic point for the whole system
Why Crafting is a problem? the fact is that the system has a very big weakness at the base: Gathering and Time Management. Gathering materials are very often sold out or impossible to find, especially at low level crafts, meaning that gatherers are not interested in these since the investment in time is not worth it.
Time Mangamenet is another massive issue because to craft something from "scratch" one should invest an amount of time which is not proportional to the money earned, coupled with the fact that the materials are not easy to find either - and you need to invest more time here to gather if you want to make it "even".
Crafting/Market board System, how does it affect the market? This is what fascinate me the most. Having played since 1.0, I can assure you that things are now much easier but still the amount of time and clicks to craft or to search/sell on market are a lot. In order to profit, one has obviously to invest in some analyses and data, but the wall we hit here is a big one since getting the data is cumbersome and requires again a lot of time. The Market Board client is specific in this regard, making me thing that is SE desire to keep it like that, in order to prevent some sort of market speculation. Making it so though, hinders dramatically the possibility for analysis from anyone, effectively stopping the possibility for a beginner crafter to find a spot of items to sell to a price he finds proportional to the amount of time he spends crafting. I am thinking to the competitors, of course, that in many cases revamped completely the Market System, creating easier wasy to study and analyze.

So how things are from a new player point of view? Earning money is done via questing (with minimal earn) and dungeon drops (random and not reliable). The structure of the game at the moment points toward the quick leveling (with buffs and equipment) in order for the general public to achieve the last dreaded mission cutscene, letting completely aside what is another part of gaming, the art of making money. In doing so, SE obviously declares implicitly that crafting and gathering are not meant to be ways to enjoy the game or to have fun and we can say this because what impact most these categories of players are the instruments they have to do their job which are also the more cumbersome. Let's be clear, nobody prevents you from spending hours at gathering, grinding your way to the top, the problem is that after you have done so, your willingness to indulge in low level gathering/crafting is very low, damaging even more the already fragile economy.
Did you ever tried to be a Culinarian? I think of all the disciples Culinarian is the one most hit by this trend, especially due to the fact that their recipes requires a large amount of ingredients which are nowhere to be found.
But let's go back to the new player: he did some dungeons, he beat the Missions, he has now a very nice number of Dungeons and Raids to do.
This is another key points: Raids and Dungeons are the way you go to have equipment, ideally you don't need money at all. May this be a direct strategy of SE in order to draw the attention away from Market Board? How many of you bought some vanity sets from the Market Board? Not so many I guess, the option are very few and again this is a statement. More Glamours or more Craftable equipment would mean more Market Board movements which would mean even more problems to deal because of the huge amount of gil circulating aroung.

Housing could have been a solution, instead it exacerbated the problem making even more millionaires around. The price for a house - something with an insane amount of demand and very few offers - it is obviously high, creating a one way circulation of money outside SE hands. Selling and buying Houses is of course "prohibited" beside the normal means but we all know that in reality there are people willing to buy/sell a lot for 60 milions, which again shows the fact that the economy has a large amount of gil in circulation.
Where this amount of money comes is another issue but a large part I speculate is RMT related. SE is fighting RMT quite strongly, banning and so, but these counter-measures don't work on the long run because they are immediate counter-measures. What is needed is a long term solution to give an alternative to the potential buyer to either "have fun" in making money or buying Gil directly from SE (I am thinking of Guild Wars 2 system here, where of course the balance is completely different but it shows a perfect solution where buying money is possible somehow and doesn't add inflation to the system).

Let's the repeat the obivous in a nice schematic way:
Player 1 Level up > Missions > Dungeons/Trials > Raids > next to no contact with the market, what SE seems to invest in for the moment.
Player 2 Level up > Missions > Crafting/Gathering > setting to very few recipes that sells, restricted to availability or time
Player 3 Level up > Missions > Dungeons/Trials > RMT > inflating the market with currency, buying things for higher price
Player 4 Level up > RMT > offering services to Player 3
Player 5 Level up > Fate BOT trains > possibily related to any other kind of player

The phenomeno of BOT is another fascinating one. Never in a game it has been so clear to me such a massive amount of player using BOTS to exp and level. The BOT trains are a real wonder that - I am not joking - should be studied. They also very slowly add money to the system but on the amount of gil added there should be a some calculation to do per hour... which one day someone could do ahah

So my final questions after all these consideration are:

1. Why Square Enix is not revamping Crafting, Gathering and the Market Board? There might be no interest here but these forms the basis of an healthy economy and the game is clearly keeping a distance from them.
2. RMT area reality: what will be the long term strategies to fight it? Bans are not what makes people play the game "fairly"
3. I predict a very obvious Gil Sink for the future. The money that RMT have in hand is too much and the price for 1 million is so affordable which means the demand is still high and the method to gather it's easy. At the same time more and more Dungeon with more untreadable items could be another option. Probably some very rare pet drop in order to make money move from RMT buyers to normal players.
4. What is the destiny for Disiciple of the Land/Hand? Are they an obsolete part of 1.0 which has been forgotten or will they have a more direct impact in the game?
5. How Square Enix intend to directly impact BOTs? Both crafring and levelling bot are a sour reality in this game and they must be addressed.
6. When are we hiring a real economist to study the market? :)

(I will update as more issues and ideas are gathered )

Edit your first post to bypass the character limit.

Is there an overall thesis that you are working toward in your discussion? I'm having a hard time following what specific point you are trying to make. Some of the arguments seem to work at cross purposes, such as (a) there's not a lot to spend gil on that is relevant to gameplay, which is bad and (b) having more items in demand would promote an increase in RMT activity, which is bad.

Discussing a couple of the points that you make:
Where money comes from: You argue that there is no reliable source of gil for players outside of gathering/crafting and random drops, but you forget that the game has a lot of mechanisms that give players reliable (if small) income streams. Off the top of my head: Roulette/DF in need bonuses, challenge log bonuses, gil awarded by repeatable quests, and gil dropped by enemies in dungeons are highly reliable sources of income. There are others too but they have less of an impact due to quantity (FATE gil) or because it's less likely that a large portion of the playerbase are doing them on a regular basis (levequests, Allagan currency from ventures) but those first few give everyone an income stream. You won't get rich off it, but I know of a decent number of people who will make an occasional big impulse purchase with gil they just got from playing the game because they have nothing better to do with it.

Return on investment for leveling gathering/crafting: A lot of people would argue that the initial investment does pay off in the form of increased opportunities to generate income. I don't have hard numbers for this, but there's another point here: Even if it turns out that the time investment into focusing on leveling DOH/DOL jobs (and we'll include more recent "develop your character" activities here, such as collecting scrips) never pays off, one important factor to consider here is that this is a game, and pure profit motive isn't the only kind of utility that players can seek out. Some people are after the sense of accomplishment, or the satisfaction at being self-sufficient. Some people want to be able to help out their friends. I know that I for one have all the crafting/gathering jobs where I do because of the intangibles more than because I feel like I make the most money that way.

Early game gathering/crafting: There's certainly not as much market activity here, but progression gear definitely still sells at any level. The fact that not a lot of people are focusing their efforts on the low level stuff can actually mean that there's a decent chunk of change to be made, at least on my world. I recently took an alt to level 15 on all the crafting jobs by buying mats from the housing material supplier NPC, crafting everything in the log, and selling anything that went for more than 1000 gil and the alt has over 200K now. I see HQ gear in the level 30 range listed for 10-20K all the time. Yes there are recipes (particularly for CUL) that use obscure components, some of which aren't being sold much, but in a lot of cases there's little to no demand for those. CUL in particular suffers from severe recipe bloat in the mid levels, producing food that can only compete in the markets against higher level items by being cheaper, and a lot of the time someone will only ever want to make a particular item (a) to get the recipe completion bonus or (b) if the GC wants it for the day. Having DOL jobs leveled alongside DOH jobs gives you the ability to bypass the need to find things on the MB (hence, outside utility as above.)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by PirateCat

Is there an overall thesis that you are working toward in your discussion? I'm having a hard time following what specific point you are trying to make.

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There is for the moment no specific point beside raising some questions. I intended it as a simple reflection of things I saw while playing. More substantial insight might come of course with experience :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by PirateCat

Off the top of my head: Roulette/DF in need bonuses, challenge log bonuses, gil awarded by repeatable quests, and gil dropped by enemies in dungeons are highly reliable sources of income.

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Indeed there are these methods but certainly don't make you rich in a general sense. The effect they have on the amount of gil in the system is balanced/controlled directly from SE if they want so. One point I overlooked is "making money" vs "earning money" where in making is intended as creating it from nothing like in quests or Roulettes or other ways.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by PirateCat

pure profit motive isn't the only kind of utility that players can seek out. Some people are after the sense of accomplishment, or the satisfaction at being self-sufficient.

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that is indeed a good point. my objection is simply the fact that on a person to person level you are right - a game is a game - but my fascination rises exactly from this, because if it's true that the amount of time we spend here is totally our decision, it is also true that in general this game should make money for SE and my point here is that looks like they completely abandoned the market as a mean to keep players playing - meaning they are not interested maybe in the crafter kind of players - yet they have a complicated system for crafting. It's like they have the bait for the fish but they don't want to fish ahah

Quote:

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Originally Posted by PirateCat

The fact that not a lot of people are focusing their efforts on the low level stuff can actually mean that there's a decent chunk of change to be made, at least on my world.

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That is my point too. I see a lot of ingredient for recipes at very high prices or sold out, together with the complete randomness of prices on certain obscure ingredients or recipes. In all the DOH which i levelled, the first levels I used the same method as you mentioned but I noticed that some levels of crafting are also affected by lack of material - ideally I should gather myself what I need to in order to complete my log or whatever. This is fascinating because it's obvious that my "be a crafter" thing is not supported by another "be a gatherer" thing which should be the base for a florid economy - exchange of services basically.

:)