Get Your Gil-Sinks Straight

Please excuse the frequently salty language of a true-blooded, from-beta, frustrated citizen of Limsa Lominsa

I'm getting kind of tired of the general idea that Eorzea's gil-sinks need to be expensive for a while so we can drain out all the excess gil from people who lucked out early on. Do you think the rich are going to blow their money because airships and repairs cost a decent chunk of change?

Half-laughing/half-surprised
No, they *** won't.
If you knew you had enough money now for a relic in 2015, would you go hog wild on dark matter and fast travel because you had the means to the end? *** no you wouldn't.
Stop punishing the middle class.

We don't need a few expensive, obligatory gil-sinks. We need a metric-***-ton of optional ones that are related to bonus content. "Hardcores" have to do and have everything, and they have to have it first or their *** doesn't look as big when they hang a fanciful and elaborate picture frame around it and give it a nice shave.

Make doing and having everything more expensive,
don't make the things everyone has no choice but to take part in more expensive.

This trend worries me. New players may be able to get by on repairs and travel by doing their leves, but how are they supposed to save up for anything to take pride in? Or how are they to save up for the obscenely priced low-tier gear in the wards, for that matter? Achievement isn't about getting by on your grind, it's about having nice things to show for it.

These quick-fixes, IMHO, are going nowhere.

OP to be updated if discussion yields better points. For the love of the Twelve, if you quote this, just quote the parts of it relevant to your reply.

I made a thread similar to this but was mainly focused on the armor/weapon aspect of the game. People in the MW either sell for shit tones of gil or they don't even make the weapons at all. The only other place to get them is from vendors but they are just as or even more ridiculous at pricing them than those in the MW. As if anyone would pay that much for a level 10-20 gear. lol

The prices on the wards will, over the next month, drop precipitously as competition begins to re-assert itself and as people who were previously making due with gimped high-level stuff sort out their mid-level gear. Give it a few weeks and see if the items aren't a lot more affordable.

I do agree with the OP, however - give us LS houses that cost a mint, and upgrades to them that also cost a mint. Great gil-sink.

The gil sinks don't really seem to be that bad. We still have anima and one doesn't need to repair often unless they die often. How much are the gil sinks costing you?

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Originally Posted by FNXIV

How much are the gil sinks costing you?

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Me, personally? I blew through about 100k in the one day I logged in for Foundation Day.

50k - Full gear repair
10k - 2 airship rides (one to test it, one to avoid hassle on quests)
1k - Chocobo Rental to get to newb (but not n00b) who needed help.
15k - Repair of weapon, shield, and rings after helping lower rank player defeat Toto-Rak to get his chocobo
35k - Replenish lost dark matter surplus.

Honestly, I cannot STAND gear damage. The whole system is a ham-handed justification of giving crafters their own exp-able classes. If it wasn't part of the "But the rich need to be taxed with gil-sinks!" system and the cost similar to, twelve help me, WoW (where you can throw 1/10th of the average participant profit of a raid at an NPC and walk away fully repaired) I'd be much more okay with it as a gil-sink.

Still, I took a decent bank hit just to do a holiday quest and help a lower level player (who made it a little more worth my while for thanking me up and down for throwing him like 15 new items that were his level, lol)

Dark Matter isn't a sink per se. It's a usable item and a commodity. You can make a profit off of it easily...

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Originally Posted by Cycloptichorn

Dark Matter isn't a sink per se. It's a usable item and a commodity. You can make a profit off of it easily...

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Aye. I keep some spares on me just in case I need field repairs at the dungeon, but I usually just put up 5k and bazaar it. Can you believe I was EXCITED for the dark matter system because I was sick of every repair costing me 4~5k? I laugh lamentingly at my previous naivete.

Repairs today are VERY cheap and convenient compared to the beginning of the game. My Iron haubergeon back in the day used to cost nearly 100k to repair at the NPC to 75%.... now 5k to 99%. How can you complain about this?

I cannot believe that in the time it takes you to take your gear down from 100 to 1% you haven't found drops worth 50k.

Maybe you don't even know the value of the drops you get from even the lowest level monsters? Pretty much Any +3 mats will sell for a good chunk(20-50k each) even if it may seem like "common" or "worthless" to you. So find out what stuff is worth before you vendor it and you will find yourself making a profit, even after you factor in repairs.

With regards to high prices on low level gear, or simply not enough low level gear going around, in my opinion this is subject to very limited selling slots (20). Crafters cannot afford to waste those slots to sell an armor that will make them 5k profit. If SE were to increase selling slots on retainers to say, 50 each, then surely most people would struggle to keep 100 high level armors to sell, and they can fill in the gaps with other stuff such as low level gear.

And finally regarding Airship fees, they are level based so if it's costing you 5k then you have a LV50 Class. If 5k really bothers you then you can use your own (free) chocobo, airships are a commodity, not mandatory at all, and 5k to a LV50 character... come on, read the above paragraph about monster drops.

I wanted to ask about this too -

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50k - Full gear repair
10k - 2 airship rides (one to test it, one to avoid hassle on quests)
1k - Chocobo Rental to get to newb (but not n00b) who needed help.
15k - Repair of weapon, shield, and rings after helping lower rank player defeat Toto-Rak to get his chocobo

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Unless you died in toto-rak a few times - which frankly seems doubtful - why did you have to repair your rings and weapon? You just paid to repair them a minute ago, and they certainly couldn't have been down to zero yet.

Seriously !!

Its not hard to make money in this game, do yourself a favour and pick up a craft, if not well then its your own fault if you have no money.

It's like someone saying they hate being poor in the real world even though they refuse to work.

Repairs cost nothing if you farm the dark matter also :D.

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Repairs cost nothing if you farm the dark matter also .

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Weeelllll... that's not really the right way to look at it. Repairs that use up dark matter DO cost you something: they cost you the commodity (dark matter) and the time it took to farm the dark matter. You can make a great argument that the second one was merely a byproduct of your rank-up process for farming, and that's fair. But as for the first one, if you repair the grade-5 weapon, that's 3.5k or more of commodities you no longer have, which must be counted as a cost.

OK, you got 50k full repair, that's telling me you're using lvl 41-50 gear. That's not a new player. A new player wouldn't start at lvl 41+. A full gear repair for under lvl 1-10 is 1000 gil, and 5000 gil for lvl 11-20. Under lvl 25 you pay 2,500 gil for airship and you get a quest at lvl 15 that give you one free pass from either Grid or Ul'dah to LL (Not including return fair). You're comparing maximum amount you need to pay, and make that as a threat against newbie...

Sell relics from a vendor for 250 mil each.

Problem solved.

Prices will eventually come down because no one but a select few will be able to buy stuff if sinks are taking too much money out.

That said, it's hard to argue that the game has enough sinks. I'm really not very concerned right now. Very few other than repairs and NPC vendors are absolutely needed by everyone, and repairs are cheaper than they've ever been. The airship costs a fairly significant amount but you don't have to use that. The market fees are very low compared to many games I've played.

I know they did decrease the production of gil from guildleves both by reducing the amounts and by making marks more common. That being said, The OP is massively exaggerating the problem, if there is one at all.

I don't think that this currently is an issue. Gear is now extremely easy to make yourself with some low level crafting. Then there is the ability to farm money easy enough. I can't remember the last time I sold a average monster drop in the wards. You get so much money just selling loot to an NPC that you can easily afford repairs. Then crafting is such a good way to make money as well. I really don't see the problem here, you just need to put in a little more effort.

money is extremely easy to make with this new crafting adjustments because mats are always on demands.

Level 23 ARC, started over after 1.19 hit. I am fully decked in lv 22 gear, got all DoW and DoM classes to 10, leveled some DoL and DoH classes also. Used the market wards to sell stuff and I have around 250.000 gil left.

Didn't do anything special. Just GC quests, leves, sidequests and so on .... so what the hell is the problem?

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Originally Posted by Evenstar

Level 23 ARC, started over after 1.19 hit. I am fully decked in lv 22 gear, got all DoW and DoM classes to 10, leveled some DoL and DoH classes also. Used the market wards to sell stuff and I have around 250.000 gil left.

Didn't do anything special. Just GC quests, leves, sidequests and so on .... so what the hell is the problem?

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To be fair, you started over, you have knowledge that a new player doesn't. Still, there are new low level sidequests that involves running around that give you 10k gil, and other sidequests give equipments straight away.

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Originally Posted by MariyaShidou

To be fair, you started over, you have knowledge that a new player doesn't. Still, there are new low level sidequests that involves running around that give you 10k gil, and other sidequests give equipments straight away.

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Fair enough, but I did not play for almost 6 months, so I really needed time to get used to things again.

I simply do not think that the money sinks in this game are that bad, it is actually one of the few things that is not wrong with this game. It is perfectly balanced.

I'll try to run down a list of the problems I see with the economy:

#1. Trillions of gil exist and can't happily be removed.

Believe it or not, prices for items are probably pretty low. Within the first week players were multi millionaires, and within the first month many players had well over 50 million gil, if not 100 gil. From personal experience, and my basement was flooded the first week of the game launch so I didn't have a lot of time to play, I ended up with around 7 million gil.

This money becomes "inactive" when players quit the game, but it never disappears. Most of the money in this game is likely "inactive", but the ultra-wealthy players are present in the game, and they compose the crafting community [for reference, I probaby sit somewhere in the top 5% of player wealth with 20+ million gil], but the range of wealth is very dramatic. The wealthiest crafters are likely weavers, leatherworkers, and armorsmiths.

Why are weavers, leatherworkers, and armorsmiths the wealthiest, and why does this matter?
These classes have the highest amount of recipes available in their crafting pool. Each person in the game likely needs something from these players, and when they do need to get armor, they need multiple pieces, which allows these classes to accumulate wealth quickly because of multiple sales to one individual. Compared to a carpenter, weavers have over 4x the amount of recipes available to them. This creates a broad spectrum and lack of competition with others for weavers, whereas all of the carpenters in the game are stuffed into 1/4 the size of potential recipes to make. The result of this is that weaver items will not fall in price as quickly as carpenter items because there is less competition per item, assuming an equal number of carpenters/weavers active at a given time.

As armorcrafting classes amass wealth, they expect to be able to earn relatively more wealth per synthesis. One negative effect of this are the limited slots on retainers. Each player has 20 easily accessible retainer selling positions, but as armorcrafting classes want more for each item sold, it becomes less lucrative to craft lower level items without charging a significant amount of gil for each item. With that in mind, and because so few players are entering the economy [I.E. new players] the lower level economies fail to develop well.

Gil sinks in the game can't work, for the most part

Because gil sinks can never take out more money than they put into the economy in order to foster a "game environment", the issue of inflation is never addressed by Square. All gil sinks can do is slow inflation without forcing a group of players against a wall they feel they cannot progress beyond.

There are solutions:

Because so much gil exists on inactive accounts, and because new players have been unfairly penalized on the new guildleve reward system [which generated all of the excess gil in the first place], there exists an economy with insanely low demand, but insanely large amounts of gil in the economy.

What we're seeing are actually prices that are being held in check by a lack of demand, and are actually lower than what gil availability would suggest.

A solution to permanently fix the economy is to piss off many of players; here's how.

Tiered wealth reevaluations:
Square decides a total gil worth value in the game. From this value players are classified based on their percentile rating. A person in the 99th percentile would therefore have more wealth than all but one percent of all players for holdings of wealth.

From this, Square decides a value for the top 1% of players to hold in wealth. While some players within this 1% will gain and lose positioning, they will remain in the top 1% of player held wealth. Arbitrarily I will throw out 10 million gil for the top 1%.

The top 2% is then evaluated and handed out another amount of gil, and so forth and so forth.

When all is said in done everyone who has participated in the economy keeps their relative position of wealth [the forums become insanely angry], and several people quit the game.

On the positive side, the economy is then fixed based on the new standards of rewards/vendor prices, and the majority of people who will play this game [hint, they haven't played the game yet] are going to have a better experience as a result, and the players who began building wealth after the reward changes are no longer penalized for picking a bad time.

A half-solution
If enough players enter the game, over time the established crafters will be out competed by the emerging crafters. This wouldn't be a full solution, and a disparity will always exist with the pre-levereward adjustments and every other crafter. These crafters will always have power over any emerging crafter, and will likely always be the richest in the game because of the resources allowing them to exploit new items within each patch.

This is up to the whim of the potential player base, as Square cannot control the variables associated with it, and this option means the economy continues to function with a long term wound in it.

1/8th of a solution
Square grants free levels to players who willingly submit quantities of gil to an NPC. This is an optional solution, which is a plus [although purists will be enraged, and also feel like players were leveling up multiple classes just by making money and advancing with one class], but has significant shortcomings in that it doesn't affect wealth that is inactive within the community [IE, inactive accounts]. This means that this solution will never fully address the economic problem, as it relies on player knowledge to find such a benefit, and it's also dependent upon the will of players to turn their income in [and now after the power leveling of this patch, there would be less incentive for it]. As a result, this solution has many shortfalls.

Solution for the lower level economy:

This is the easiest; Increase retainer bazaar slot limits significantly - up to 100 items.

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Originally Posted by Chardrizard

money is extremely easy to make with this new crafting adjustments because mats are always on demands.

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This doesn't produce gil, it makes gil changes hansd. The only things that produce gil are treasure chests and quest/levequest/behest rewards. I think beastmen and NMs drop some money too, not entirely sure there though.

It does destroys gil because the gears that people buys are gone from materia process.

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Originally Posted by Chardrizard

It does destroys gil because the gears that people buys are gone from materia process.

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It doesn't, the gears are 90% crafted, 8% drop and 2% bought from NPC. Only buying gears from NPC remove gil from the game.

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Originally Posted by Chardrizard

It does destroys gil because the gears that people buys are gone from materia process.

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Right, gil sinks destroy gil, but never at a rate in which players cannot earn more than they spend. If players are left with no purchasing power then they feel as if they cannot progress.

I agree with... most of this. Inflation will continue for as long as more money enters the economy than exits it, especially now that goods exit the economy (by being turned into materia), while money still largely does not. The only variable sink in the game is the market-tax, which means that the economy will balance when the following is true:

Money generated (Drops, Chests, Leves) = Money destroyed (Airship fees, Workshop fees, Chocobo rental, market tax).

Or, more particularly.
Market Tax (10% of player-to-player transactions) = (Drops+Chests+Leves) - (Airship+Worshop+Chocobo Rental).

With leves still (at the high levels) generating orders of magnitude more money than the fixed gilsinks are taking out, the one variable gilsink in the game will only take out money when items are priced so high (or change hands so quickly) that the player economy moves ten times as much gil every day as is generated.

The fixed gilsinks are also a regressive tax; they charge the poor a greater portion of their income than they charge the wealthy. Someone with an L50 DoH job is not going to care about the cost of the airship, but someone who's highest job is R15 sure as heck is. Even though they're paying half as much for it, that half as much makes up a much larger portion of their income than the artisans, which further decreases their purchasing power.

To some degree, that's okay, but it becomes a problem when my friend who I just introduced to the game hit L20 and we hit the market wards to look for gear for him, only to find that a single piece of appropriate gear for L20 would cost more than he had made in his entire time playing the game (doing levequests with me on a lowbie job to join him).

There are no luxuries for the super rich to spend their money on (unless airships are a luxury, but if they are, they're a pretty important one). Anything that the super rich want to buy comes from the same supply as what the poor do. Since, when leveling a new class, you still have access to all the money from your old class, this leads to L20 gear being priced well above what your average L20 can pay.

I disagree with anything that forcefully takes money out of people's hands, however. The best system, in my opinion, would be to give the super rich something else to spend their money on, such as faster chocobos, player housing, more inventory space, more retainers. Large opportunities were missed when the inventory space was increased from 100 to 200 for free, and another opportunity was missed when materia catalysts were gathered by DoH rather than sold by NPCs. Since the sinks I propose are pure luxury, they will not tax the poor at all unless the poor decide that they are more important than basic equipment.

"Inactive" gil as the poster on Page 2 mentioned doesn't actually matter until it becomes active again, at which point it will be subject to all the same sinks.

gona have to agree with the op shit is to expensive not every player has 10-15 hours a day to play so yea lower the prices and add more bazzar slots on retainers and hey what was wrong with airship prices from xi NOTHING ok SE lets stop acting like all players are rich some of us just dont have the time to be able to afford 500k for a r20 armor piece or the paitence to put up with elitest attitudes like the ones posted in respons to the op

I'm not too worried about gil sinks right now because prices of things were just recently changed, and I trust SE will keep an eye on it like they said they would, and adjust if necessary.

I'm not rich but I don't consider myself poor either. I get by well enough, so I haven't experienced any issues with prices yet. May I ask, Anonymoose, what gil sinks specifically do you think are too expensive? What kinds of things would you like to see more expensive? Also, do you more often use dark matter (buying it I mean), or repair NPCs? (I apologize if you may have answered some of these questions already and I missed them.)
I'm just curious, but it's probably good for SE to hear this too.

As for market wards gear, I've been hearing a lot of complaints about the price of low level gear.. If people are really having a hard time affording them it would make sense that not too many sell (unless it's higher level players buying for newbs), so I can see the prices dropping a bit, in time. I've gotten quite a bit of gear from leves, so at least there's that in the meantime. It doesn't help a ton but, it still helps.

For me, I think repairing gear costs me more than anything else, but again, I'm not hurting for money at the moment.

If it's a problem, I wonder if at PS3 release costs will be lowered for new players.

In the future I would like to see more gil sinks. Not necessarily expensive.. just more. I still worry about more money going into the game than being taken out.

With patch 1.19a, they are reducing the prices of the low level weapons and tools by a TON, so yeah.. The tools especially, they only cost a little more than what it would cost if you made them yourself.

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Originally Posted by MariyaShidou

OK, you got 50k full repair, that's telling me you're using lvl 41-50 gear. That's not a new player. A new player wouldn't start at lvl 41+. A full gear repair for under lvl 1-10 is 1000 gil, and 5000 gil for lvl 11-20. Under lvl 25 you pay 2,500 gil for airship and you get a quest at lvl 15 that give you one free pass from either Grid or Ul'dah to LL (Not including return fair). You're comparing maximum amount you need to pay, and make that as a threat against newbie...

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Wow good point

All of the gil sinks you mentioned in your OP were not added till the cap hit level 75.

Oh, my. So much to respond to throughout the day @.@ I'll get one out of the way now, though. Moral of the story? Don't post n' sleep.

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Originally Posted by Nabiri

May I ask, Anonymoose, what gil sinks specifically do you think are too expensive? What kinds of things would you like to see more expensive? Also, do you more often use dark matter (buying it I mean), or repair NPCs? .

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For me specifically, it's not so much one in particular or the other - just the general trend. 5K for an airship ride isn't unreasonable, but it sure is a lot more than I was expecting. Someday, I'd really like to see the return of the "make your money back if you're willing to pay attention" quest from FFXI. For instance, if you chose to take the scenic route on the airship (as opposed to instant travel), I'd LOVE if a player was given the opportunity to chance getting the 5K back.

I could continue to bitch about ~50k for a full repair, but what I'm really saying is "I think Gear Damage is a terrible mechanic aimed specifically at making people feel like making crafts classes instead of bonus abilities was a legitimate idea." ... and that's my own bias to bear, lol.

I use the repair NPC unless I'm in town or at the dungeon - I keep a spare stack of dark matter on me for just such an occasion that LS is around to help out. College has killed the entirety of my free time, so in reality every time I log in I'm losing cash without gaining any back just because I can only log in for the short time it takes to hang out with friends and DO something. (Which only deepens my rage at gear damage as a gil-sink, but again, my bias.)

What gil-sinks would I like to see? I'm not so sure! Like was just said, most of XI's gil-sinks were added to post-75 endgame itself, but by then I was buying so much food/medicine that I didn't need the sink to begin with ><

Personally, I think vendors are the best source of gil-sinks - vital minor items for common synthesis that are just slightly more expensive than you'd find in the wards just so impatient people (who tend to have more money) just pop in and buy a sh!t ton. In the words of my linkshell's #1 crafter (currently with a purse of 500m): "I'll probably just grind on those from the NPC. They're only a mil' a stack." It's all about tapping into the wallets of people who play all day and just keep repeating to themselves "Time is money! Time is money! {buys in bulk}"

The NPC prices in Eorzea are pretty goofy, as is, but Team Yoshi-P seems to be keeping a close eye on it.