A Better Economy, Lets Collaborate!

The Economic Problem:

-Gil Sinks
1) Markets - 5% tax on sales AND 5% on purchases = 10% on all transactions
2) Travel - Teleport, Chocobo, Airship
3) Repairs - Heavy Repairs at lvl 50 on high end gear

-The Why
All MMO's need a gil sink method to stabilize inflation. How this is achieved varies from mmo. If they didnt exist it would not be long before currency would devalue quickly. This may not harm long term, steady players but for any new players coming into the economy, it would be very burdensome. IE: i am a new player and cant afford the 100k ring with my measly 230 gil per quest.

-Crafting Conundrum
1) Almost all gear can be bought from a vendor at all levels, for way less than we can produce it considering cost\time\profit.
2) Quests give out gear on almost 75% of them, leading to a massive massive flood of items.
3) No real way to compete with Instances\Raids for top quality gear

-Gathering Dilemma
1) My hard work yields me very little in the way of compensation
2) It doesnt sell, why is their 100+ stacks getting cheaper every 30s?

Speculation time. As the game has gone on you have seen a very large Bell curve in production of gatherables\mats\quest given items and even crafted items. 1 day its fine you sell your crafted item for 5k, the next day the curve hits you and it plummets from the hundreds of people gathering and crafting all at the same level. How will the markets fair after this bell curve moves over it? From what i have seen it stabilizes at a very low point, at which its not worth touching.

-Fixes
1) Remove the majority of items given from quest rewards. This will hinder and slow quick progression on brand new servers as no one will be able to craft all levels of gear from day 1, but it is the only way for long term sustainability to a crafting profession.
2) Increase the Gil reward for quests, dungeons, Fate's, to make up for not giving items
3) Drastically increase the vendor prices on gear. Like 5x what they currently are. The market should be the first place you go for all gear needs.
4) Increase the amount of materials needed for crafting to make DOL items desirable
5) Decrease costs of repair by implementing ways for the crafting community to satisfy this need (much has been said in other topics)

Im Eloc and i approve this message!

Reduce item stacks. When you have 500 of something just makes it feel less valuable because its a bulk item. It would also help the market. No more odd stack sizes. 1 or 12.

Reduce the amount you get when gathering.

Make more items with unique stats that cannot be got from dungeons. Even if i could get something with has a 1% chance of "blah" i would have more of a chance to buy it from a crafter. Right now its +1 more of whatever. They should probably make stats more noticeable too. Like with the 500 of something, 1 is just insignificant.

/discuss

what can help improve the economy of the game long term?

I don't think reducing the amount of items you gather would solve anything. All it would do is force us to spend more time gathering. For example, if I know I only need 100 copper ore, I'll gather then move on to another item I need. Just because they're easy to get doesn't mean I'm gonna collect 500 when only 100 is needed.

I agree with most of the other ideas, like not making gear and other items so easily accessible from vendors. We need our crafts to have a purpose.

Also by putting more money in the hands of players from quests, dungeons, leves, and other things, us that do take up craft skills will have more sales due to people having money to buy gear and other stuff. And the people that don't want to craft will be happier as well. Ofc this would need to be carefully balanced as again not to make things too easy for them, some work should be required. I'm not sure how to balance this properly without impacting inflation too much, but it's apparent that a lot of the FATE chasers are broke. Maybe it's their fault, but if they had a tad bit more money, they might buy some stuff from the market boards instead of foolishly choosing to be horribly under-geared for content because of their lack of patience. I guess we'll see how the reduced repair costs will work out.

I think the best solution would be to incorporate some of the bigger money sinks in obtaining crafted items on the market. Make people have to rely on these gear/items to be efficient rather then having them handed to them so easily like they are now. I still believe people are expecting too much of this game to be hand fed to them on a silver platter.

Where did you get information on the total amount of gil in circulation?

I suspect with all the fate grinding that gil is increasing on all servers, sans perhaps a legacy server. But even on a legacy server, maybe SE wants more gil to continue to be removed from the game, perhaps there is more than they want at the moment.

It's all speculation though, you can't say anything either way without having hard data on the amount of gil the other players in the game possess.

They don't need to remove gear from quests. It's a good way for people to obtain gear and not worry about making money to buy said gear. Just make the crafted gear much better than what you get from quests. People can get stick with the quest items but will have lower dps, stats etc which will make story progression slower or go for crafted gear with much better stats and go through the game faster.

Also make some of the high level crafted gear as good or almost as good as the drops from end-game dungeons. You don't need to have a complete crafted set that's better than end game... just parts... boots... gloves... a helmet to complement the rest of the gear obtained through the dungeons. So someone who wants the very best gear in the game will need to obtain every piece from end-game plus those very high level crafts. Also make it that those crafted items use rare materials only obtainable through end-game content.