To Yoshida: How To Further Improve the Economy

Firstly, I want to say that the last few updates have been amazing and caused the needed resurgance in not only the economy, but in the player base as a whole. Finally the potential of this game is being brought out.

With that said, I would like to help further improve the one aspect of this game, which really affects everything else around it (and that more than half of the classes are directly involved in it).

The last update introduced the materia system, revamping of the old recipes and the introduction of spiritbond. As everyone have seen, all three of these have created an expansion of the economy. Gatherers are extracting materials and selling them; crafters are buying the materials and producing items then selling them; at a lower cost (for crafters) because the threshold to extract these materials are extremely low for gatherers and thus the discount (relatively speaking) is passed onto crafters and then to actual buyers (everyone else). The effort to create these items are much lower as well, so crafters don't feel like they are wasting their time selling their product at the price margin. And finally the demand for new items by the combat classes have caused prices for roadkill items (hides, bones, crystals etc. you get from monsters) to increase because of the higher demand. And thus, the resurgence created an economic boom.

However, we may have all these new things in place, but the way they are structured will only cause this economic expansion to be temporary and the current state will once again go into decline eventually. And here is why I think that is.

1) The usage of common to rare items are tiered. This may seem farfetched to some people but if we want the game's economy to keep churning (even if ever there was a slow down in new player population), we would have to look at this at a different way.

So let's look at how materials (resources) in real life have been used over time. We've used bronze, iron or steel to make sharp spears, swords and shields back then, but as time progress we've integrated these into more sophisticated products such as copper wiring, iron bars or steel frames (perhaps in cars, houses, everyday stuff). Producers (which we can look at as crafters) don't discriminate when they want to make and sell something. To these guys, resources are just resources... they're there for us to turn into something and make money. They really aren't tiered. Even when we look at gold, people may have used them as metal for shiny jewelry but the way we use it now (along with copper, iron and steel) we use it to make more sophisticated equipment (such as wiring in space because gold is a better conductor than copper.. a far cry from it's earlier usage).

2) Secondly, because of the structure of said materials in recipe lists, this implies to gatherers and crafters that the closer you are to the max level, the more money you can make.

This maybe true for some people, but if everyone is thinking and doing this, then the "rarest" materials at the top will eventually become not rare at all. This is just the simple law of supply. Basically, the higher the price your selling the item at, the more you want to sell. But the problem with this is that, this thinking is just true for you, everyone else is thinking the same. So that everyone starts sells the items as many as possible, causing the item to be less and less rare. This means that say, if player #1 (let's call him Teimoli) wants to make lots of cash, he'll probably want to rush to the max level as fast as possible. But then Rayneheart, Erro and Sunstrider figured the same so they do it as well. What will happen is that everyone will be at the max level doing the same thing, but as more and more people join this market (market as in the number of crafters and gatherers trying to extract and create the same things), it will get harder and harder to make money just because of the simple fact that there are too many people. I mean, let's look at real examples. How many of you noticed that wind and fire crystals sell the most so you go out and farm as many as possible. Then you bring them to the wards and see that the price list is full... most at x999 selling their crystals at lower and lower prices as you go up the list. So you feel kinda disappointed but shake it off and figure just sell yours at a lower price so you can sell it fast. You may not realize this, but everyone else is doing it and it just multiplies further. You can say the same thing with other things like swords, tools, leather or iron armor. Feels frustrating because there are too many other people doing the exact same thing.

So here is my proposed solution:

Everyone expects this game to grow and get more players. More players mean, more money for SE, so to remedy the problem mentioned, why don't we create niches in the game's economy?

I would like to see lower level materials such as bronze, dodo, ash wood etc to be integrated into higher level recipes. This will cause people to sell lower level items to higher leveled crafters. And lower level items will actually be worth something instead of being left behind as you rush to max level. If some of these low leveled sellers want to pursue something higher (and have more time on their hands), they will put out the effort to get closer to the max level. But maybe the rest are content with what they have so they stay (because they have less time to spend). What we have here is a mingling of hardcore vs casual players. Hardcores will put more effort into getting max level (because for them the top level is the most rewarding), while the more casual players will stay at varying levels from 1-50 (because they are content with what they have). The point of this integration is to allow absolute freedom for players to stay or move up the levels.

What this integration also causes is to spread the amount of players at various levels, instead of everyone bottlenecking at the top. Less supply of items at the top means prices will rise at more than subsistence level. Different leveled crafters or gatherers will demand different levels of items and thus will create an ongoing demand for everything (and everyone will supply these items too), instead of rushing to the top and finding disappointment. Thus the economy is self sufficient.

The third point to this is that, if implemented correctly, a game having a complex economy such as this, will be more attractive to other players who are just in it for the money. They may be casual, or they may be hardcore, but for these people, crafting classes will be their main job or maybe not. They may just keep... let's say... lvl 25 ARM as his way of income and just go out there and kill things. They may not even level a combat class because they are content with everything.

However, let's remember that we want to keep rare items to be actually rare. And these rare gear should require actual rare materials. So crafters or gatherers at the top will feel content. Also remember to keep the recipes as simple as possible as they are now.

I hope Yoshida takes this into consideration.