How i spent and earned 12 Million gil in the markets

Preface:
This is not meant to gloat, nor is it meant to address the topic of how much more gil appears to be exiting the economy than entering it. It is simply a personal account of how i moved ridiculous amounts of gil in the first 3 weeks of this game. For those people out there who are flat broke, perhaps it will be useful. Or otherwise, feel free to discuss whatever here. It's all good.

The first few days
I entered early access with 4.3 MILLION gil...
POST EDIT: I could still have made millions of gil (albeit on a legacy server) by now if i had started with only a few thousand gil.
Even if i were level 1 in everything i could have made several hundred thousand at least by now.
But i do agree that dungeon content needs to provide more gil to players who do not want to craft and gather, so that they can repair their gear and meet other basic needs without being forced to do these other activities.

Now, back to the original post...

I saved this up during 1.0 figuring it would be useful to have a nest egg going into a completely unknown system. Going in, i decided to focus first on Mining and Botany gathering and then look at the Crafting classes. All my crafts and gathers are at level 50.

So i went ahead and started exploring the lands filling out my gathering logs. I quickly realized that gathering is much faster in ARR than it was in 1.0
I don't know exactly how much faster, but i'd guess at least 5 times faster. Never mind that i was level 50 going in, i could gather at a rate of several hundred per hour. Crazy. So decided to gather complete stacks of all sorts of items. Electrum, Cobalt, Silver, Carbonized Matter, etc.

I spent a couple days doing this and especially went hard on the Grade 3 Carbonized matter. After a couple days i'd sold over a million worth of materials. I didn't have to buy anything to do it.

This is still completely doable, i'm sure, even on non legacy worlds, although the prices may be lower, they would be across the board for everyone.
If you level up Mining or Botany, you'll have lots of gil pretty quick. If the market ever crashes, it's good to be that person who has loads of gil.

In any case, i then noticed that there's specialized gear for miner and Botanist and that i needed it + Materia to have any chance at digging up HQ unspoiled stuff like Darksteel ores and spruce logs. So, instead of crafting them like i ought to have, i bought the entire sets off AH. Only +1's, which were going for 50-100K at the time and then blew 100's of thousands of gil additionally on Materia.

I did not have to do this. In fact, i later came to the conclusion that since everyone else was also mining Darksteel like crazy, it turned out to be less profitable than the Carbonized Matter.

No one was gathering it for whatever reason and i cornered that market.
If you look through the market boards, you can always find something to corner.
Right now i'm making crazy gil off high quality Turquoise. o.O

In all, i spent a full 2 MILLION gil in a couple hours that day, and found myself down to 3 mill and change in my bank.

WEEK ONE:
Gil Spent - 2 Million
Gil Earned - 2 Million
Total Gil moved - 4 Million

September
At this point i hadn't had enough yet, and as a pure crafter gatherer, it might seem very strange that anyone would go 2 weeks without even activating the duty finder, but that's really what i did. Even today i am only up to copperbell in the story. So additionally, i'd note that these big numbers are partly a product of where i've spent my time...

I went spend crazy buying +1 Crafters iLvl55 gear and loading it up with Materia. Again, i really should have saved my gil and crafted it because i actually can, but.. well, that's my own fault. In all, i blew 4 million gil in only a couple days. Suddenly, i had only 200k left to my name.

WHAT I LEARNED is that i never needed the lvl 55+ gear to craft HQ Militia equips.
Cross class abilities are all the difference with crafting.

VERY HUGELY CRUCIALLY IMPORTANT TO ASPIRING CRAFTERS
If i had only 1 class at 50, then i could get maybe a 7-15% HQ rate on NQ materials in the Star category items.
Even by using HQ items i would still only reach 30-60% using only the abilities of one class.
The synergy between the abilities of every crafting class at a high level mixed together is the key.
With this you can HQ even star items from NQ materials 99% of the time.

It's not necessary for making gil, but the difference it makes is tremendous, so if you really want to be the best crafter you can be. Get everything to 50.

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Back to my story.
Now almost out of gil, i picked up Pick and Scythe and went on a gathering rampage. Only this time, i not only gathered, but used my Crafting classes to use the raw materials and make finished mats for final crafting. ALL HQ, things like Steel ingots, Cobalt Ingots, Darksteel nuggets and all sorts of linens and wool.

I went hard for a full week, and by the end of it, i had over 60 stacks of HQ mats in my inventory. Not all were a full 99 but most were over 50 large, so i estimate i had over 4000 mats total. All HQ. IN the last several days i started moving them all out through my retainers HARD. I crafted dozens of +1 iLvl 55 items and have sold off lots of my HQ mats. I realized through crafting that because i have all 50 crafts i can craft anything up to Lvl55 items to HQ from NQ Mats, so it's a damn fire-sale for me now.

I have since recouped all 4 Million that i spent and there's millions more incoming from the stacks of HQ mats i still have to sell.

Ultimately, i am making a bit more gil because i can craft the gathered items into their final mat stages, so having multiple classes pays, but realistically, it would still be oodles of gil for the guy who only has a pickax or scythe and some mid range gear.

4 Million Gil,

+ 4 Million Spent, + 4 Million Earned

12 Million Gil Moved so far ... and counting.

I don't know if the market is deflating,
but there's oodles of gil to be moved and i'm kinda addicted. ;)

I concur.

I entered balmund as a fresh player come 2.0, with no knowledge of the FFXIV markets nor any capital, just my experience of other MMO economies - knowing this was a legacy server and there'd be players out there with oodles of cash, I immediately looked "up" to see what could be flipped, traded and what opportunities would exist; afterall, if I can start trading with the big boys, then I stand to get into their inflated sub-economy. And indeed I have had no trouble obtaining hundreds of thousands of gil already from a standing start.

So, yeah. When I see the level 50's complaining how totally broke they are and how can they "possibly" afford a mere 5k gil to repair their gear... I'm a little miffed

thats nice for you but none of that would've been possible without that 4.3m you carried over. now do it with a new character on a non legacy server with no "help" and I'll be impressed

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Originally Posted by Kenze

thats nice for you but none of that would've been possible without that 4.3m you carried over. now do it with a new character on a non legacy server with no "help" and I'll be impressed

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Agreed, but it's just personal experience, not really intended to be a "cure-all" solution... I hope.

One can take that story and apply it to their own server of course. Scaling to whatever the economy is there. Earning just 4mil on your own server might be equivalent to earning 30mil on his. Not really an unexpected method of selling on the AH, but it's at least a little specific about the steps. Could be helpful to some people.

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Originally Posted by Welsper59

One can take that story and apply it to their own server of course. Scaling to whatever the economy is there. Earning just 4mil on your own server might be equivalent to earning 30mil on his. Not really an unexpected method of selling on the AH, but it's at least a little specific about the steps. Could be helpful to some people.

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I've noticed that even here on a Legacy server, there's plenty of market for lower level items like Iron, Brass and Silver. I'm raking in 10's of thousands of gil from those as well. I'm certain that on a non-legacy server the numbers will be smaller, but i think it should still work. If you don't mind grabbing some Miners gear and setting out, you should be able to sell what you gather to someone... and the net profits should far outweigh any repair costs.

IMO Brass Ingots are a very easy and profitable place to start.

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Originally Posted by NefarioCall

I entered early access with 4.3 MILLION gil...

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:(:( :rolleyes::rolleyes:

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Originally Posted by RyuujinZERO

I concur.

I entered balmund as a fresh player come 2.0, with no knowledge of the FFXIV markets nor any capital, just my experience of other MMO economies - knowing this was a legacy server and there'd be players out there with oodles of cash, I immediately looked "up" to see what could be flipped, traded and what opportunities would exist; afterall, if I can start trading with the big boys, then I stand to get into their inflated sub-economy. And indeed I have had no trouble obtaining hundreds of thousands of gil already from a standing start.

So, yeah. When I see the level 50's complaining how totally broke they are and how can they "possibly" afford a mere 5k gil to repair their gear... I'm a little miffed

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You are miffed because you do not understand something as simple as that not everyone is into gathering or crafting or playing with market board. People who only love playing say DOW they want a source of GIL generation which suits their game play style.

God knows how many times this has to be repeated over and over again before you people understand why these people complain regarding GIL issue. And not to mention that selling and buying does not generate gil it just moves the gil around and takes it out the game with applied taxes. This game needs a source to generate gil as well as give players freedom to play whatever way they like and still generate gil for themselves.

I hope you understand it this time because i can not be anymore clear than this.

Soooooooooo...

You came over with all gatherers and crafters at level 50.

Spent the last 4 weeks or so gathering, crafting, and playing the market.

And you're down 300k?

What am I reading.

After getting my BLM, I left him sitting at 30.

I plan to only level crafting and gathering for the next month or so. Setting myself up to be successful and to make my own gear and money is always my first priority in any MMO. Money makes everything easy, and allows me to accomplish more goals, (vanity, housing, etc), and keeps me from getting bored.

So while everybody races to get their AF gear that's not going anywhere, I'll be busy getting rich ;).

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Originally Posted by CianaIezuborn

Spent the last 4 weeks or so gathering, crafting, and playing the market.

And you're down 300k?

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It's because i went buy crazy on gear early on and also trying to Forbidden Meld materia on to stuff got pretty expensive. There was one point where i was trying to put a Grade III materia on with 24% success rate at 20k a pop and it took me literally over 30 tries. I watched my gil vanish by the 100's of thousands in a kind of ; _ ; face hour.

Personal Wealth =/= Server Economy.

I don't think this translates well on a new server considering the most you can have just completing side quests and the main story is about 300k. As there are several other posts that outline this better, there are no significant new sources of gil coming into the economy, so everyone's 300k gil is just sort of circulating around. Leves are about the only thing that generate any substantial amount of *new* money, until the daily quests are introduced at least.

To put things into perspective, I was looking up mats for crafting the green THM scepter for the Relic Reborn quest. Darksteel Nugget was 9900. The stone from WP was 17k. The two Savage Might III materias were 3k each. This stuff will continue to tank as more and more people get their jobs to 50 and flood the market with items. Early on fishing was relatively profitable, but more people have flooded the market with the more desirable items and they've undercut each other. I'm sure this is happening across the board for most gathered items.

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Originally Posted by NefarioCall

It's because i went buy crazy on gear early on and also trying to Forbidden Meld materia on to stuff got pretty expensive. There was one point where i was trying to put a Grade III materia on with 24% success rate at 20k a pop and it took me literally over 30 tries. I watched my gil vanish by the 100's of thousands in a kind of ; _ ; face hour.

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No no, I understand where all your money went. I'm just finding it humorous that you entered a market that you had every conceivable advantage in, you have less money than you started with, and it's supposed to be... helpful?

I know you'll compound your money once you clear out your stock, but right now it's basically:

Hey guys, I started with everything 50 and more money than you could make off quests in months and months and look at me now! I'm down 300k gil! Good luck!

13 million on a legacy is like 1.3 million or less on a new server (which is around 75%+ of the current players).

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Originally Posted by CianaIezuborn

I know you'll compound your money once you clear out your stock, but right now it's basically:

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I agree that gil injection needs to be sufficient to cover at the bare minimum, repair costs plus some for those who do not wish to craft or gather. I remember having the same issue in Final Fantasy XI though. For the time being i could only otherwise suggest Boar Hides or other Leather based stuff as you can use battle classes to gather them.

Largely, i'd rather get some Hides from trash mobs in a dungeon than in the Bramble Patch though, and i hope that is updated.

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Originally Posted by Nikki

You are miffed because you do not understand something as simple as that not everyone is into gathering or crafting or playing with market board. People who only love playing say DOW they want a source of GIL generation which suits their game play style.

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But that's just it!

You don't need to adapt your playstyle significantly to make gil, that is what has me miffed. People already go to vendors to sell their junk - because that is how every other MMO works.

If they went to their retainer instead of the vendor, they'd find much of that "trash" loot you obtain when questing is actually quite valuable. Throw it up, stick a price on it and hey presto, you have gold. One of my friends who is allergic to trading and crafting took my advice and started listing stuff instead of junking it and a week later he's up 80,000 gil and only level 25.

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Originally Posted by NefarioCall

Preface:

The first few days
I entered early access with 4.3 MILLION gil... I saved this up during 1.0 figuring it would be useful to have a nest egg going into a completely unknown system. Going in, i decided to focus first on Mining and Botany gathering and then look at the Crafting classes. All my crafts and gathers are at level 50.

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Stopped reading after that. Your entire "how-to" revolved around this point.

the tl;dr of this is - I had lots of money at the start, I used it to make more money.

So basically you moved 12 million through the auction house, got it. Really the title should read: "How I removed 1.2 million gil from circulation."

The market is crashing pretty hard right now, most normal gatherable mats are down to 30g, and the unspoiled node mats are 400-700g each.

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Originally Posted by RyuujinZERO

I concur.

I entered balmund as a fresh player come 2.0, with no knowledge of the FFXIV markets nor any capital, just my experience of other MMO economies - knowing this was a legacy server and there'd be players out there with oodles of cash, I immediately looked "up" to see what could be flipped, traded and what opportunities would exist; afterall, if I can start trading with the big boys, then I stand to get into their inflated sub-economy. And indeed I have had no trouble obtaining hundreds of thousands of gil already from a standing start.

So, yeah. When I see the level 50's complaining how totally broke they are and how can they "possibly" afford a mere 5k gil to repair their gear... I'm a little miffed

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Totally not what said people are talking about though, thanks for trying.

OT: I need to level my miner up desperately, just waiting for some leves to start rolling in.

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Originally Posted by Kenze

thats nice for you but none of that would've been possible without that 4.3m you carried over.

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Since there seems to be a majority here who feel this way, i'm going to respond and DISAGREE. Completely i disagree.
I could have done this without going in rich. Absolutely. Granted my Level 50 mining skill helped but i didn't need to buy anything to dig up Grade 3 Carbonized matter. That was going for 1k each on sarg and i could dig up 500 in an hour. I made a killing off it in the first week.

Also, if i had no levels whatsoever, i still could have gone just outside the city and dug up ores. By level 10 or 15 (or whatever level iron is...) i could have sold iron ores for maybe 30-50 gil each, or 4k per stack, and at those levels, repair costs are only a few gil.

Being that, i still agree that there should be more ways to inject gil into the economy for people who don't wish to gather or craft things. At least enough to get by on...

Post edit: In fact, that's a big lesson i learned by week two is that i could have done everything on the gathering, crafting and selling side that i did even if i only had a few thousand gil for repairs going on. Legitimately. If i had been level 1 this whole thing would have taken longer, but i'd still bring in all kinds of gil along the way.

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Originally Posted by RyuujinZERO

So, yeah. When I see the level 50's complaining how totally broke they are and how can they "possibly" afford a mere 5k gil to repair their gear... I'm a little miffed

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Because while you're out building an in-game trade center, most players are out leveling their classes and farming for endgame gear. Something is wrong with the economy of a game when you can reach a point that you can no longer play your main class due to having no gil. At no point should one be able to go broke just from farming dungeons and repairing gear.

Dungeon runs need to supply a semi-steady form of income to pay for the damage to your gear. I leave the money-making to the people that are interested in it. I don't want to sit around for hours playing Market Board Tycoon, I prefer to go kill something.

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Originally Posted by Raxion

Dungeon runs need to supply a semi-steady form of income to pay for the damage to your gear.

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^^This.
/10char

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Originally Posted by Nikki

snip

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"My play style", what a bunch of BS. RL is the biggest MMO, say my play style is to sit around and do nothing... and! I expect to be given cash so I can continue to do nothing(Welfare anyone?). And man taxes!!!! God forbid they ever pull money from the game to keep inflation from happening because no gil would ever leave it. What is this the current POTUS' style of print money and make it rain to fix the economy? Inflation only hurts an economy.

They are trying to keep RMTs to a minimum. If you want easy access to gil then a year or two down the road, I forsee people like you complaining about everything being so inflated. And that you have no way of getting the gil to buy the things you want.

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Originally Posted by Raxion

Dungeon runs need to supply a semi-steady form of income to pay for the damage to your gear. I leave the money-making to the people that are interested in it. I don't want to sit around for hours playing Market Board Tycoon, I prefer to go kill something.

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AK gives more than enough money to repay ur gear now, just open the chests

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Originally Posted by Kenze

thats nice for you but none of that would've been possible without that 4.3m you carried over. now do it with a new character on a non legacy server with no "help" and I'll be impressed

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Take a look around on other forums. There are a ton of people who level up goldsmithing and weaving etc from lvl 1 and have 4mil+ purely in profits since last week. It has nothing to do with how much he brought in. Anyone dedicated and smart enough can make bank.

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Originally Posted by RyuujinZERO

I concur.

I entered balmund as a fresh player come 2.0, with no knowledge of the FFXIV markets nor any capital, just my experience of other MMO economies - knowing this was a legacy server and there'd be players out there with oodles of cash, I immediately looked "up" to see what could be flipped, traded and what opportunities would exist; afterall, if I can start trading with the big boys, then I stand to get into their inflated sub-economy. And indeed I have had no trouble obtaining hundreds of thousands of gil already from a standing start.

So, yeah. When I see the level 50's complaining how totally broke they are and how can they "possibly" afford a mere 5k gil to repair their gear... I'm a little miffed

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Well, not everyone in this world enjoys mining and gathering all day long just to make a number of ingame currency. Sorry about that.

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Originally Posted by RynaultB

"My play style", what a bunch of BS. RL is the biggest MMO, say my play style is to sit around and do nothing... and! I expect to be given cash so I can continue to do nothing(Welfare anyone?). And man taxes!!!! God forbid they ever pull money from the game to keep inflation from happening because no gil would ever leave it. What is this the current POTUS' style of print money and make it rain to fix the economy? Inflation only hurts an economy.

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Well if you are doing nothing ofcourse you are not getting anything. But end game raiders actually do play a lot and end came content is quite hard. They deserve to make comfortable amount of GIL without doing something like crafting or gathering that they do not enjoy. But if you look past your own nose for a change you will understand what i am saying.I dont know how you got the idea that running end game hard mode dungeons is asking for welfare.

Stop being so loony please.

This thread is stupid.

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Originally Posted by Nikki

Well if you are doing nothing ofcourse you are not getting anything. But end game raiders actually do play a lot and end came content is quite hard. They deserve to make comfortable amount of GIL without doing something like crafting or gathering that they do not enjoy. But if you look past your own nose for a change you will understand what i am saying.I dont know how you got the idea that running end game hard mode dungeons is asking for welfare.

Stop being so loony please.

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Deserve? No one's entitled to anything. You can sell mob drops if you want to kill things. If the stuff you get just from proceeding through the story is not sustaining you, go mob farming. I saw one drop from lvl 15 monsters selling for 200/piece with a very good drop rate. That's potentially 18k in 30 minutes.

Sell your crystals. I have a bunch just from proceeding through the game, and that's in spite of trying to level several different crafting classes.

Also, this moaning and groaning about DoH/Dol is ridiculous. You can make quite a bit of gil with a very, very low level miner/botanist (lvl 5 - 10). It makes no sense for people to rake in gil for doing nothing beyond what's standard (endgame raiding is part of the normal story and is therefore, standard) and you don't even have to spend that much time gathering to have a decent amount.

re: Endgame raiders... And what's with this, and I keep seeing this in the boards, 'all you DoH/DoL' and 'all you DoW' nonsense? Our class change system is such that I imagine most people would be leveling BOTH, with an emphasis on the latter. There are plenty of "Endgame raiders" in my FC who have high-level DoH.

There's a fundamental flaw here. All of this moving of merchandise requires the money to exist in other peoples' pockets. I would have called you a genius and given you a good show of faith, but you failed to address the major issue in the game's economy: The lack of methods to generate gil from nonexistence. Everything you've said in your original post is great, but if people are trading gil between themselves instead of generating it from an NPC or quest rewards, then the flux of people depositing the gil into nonexistence via repairs or the occasional vendor purchase will cause a slow and steady decline in the market.

What's the point of having damage done to gear if the thing that's damaging it pays for the repair.....

What is curious to is the number of complaints about having to "level a gather/.crafter to be successful playing, why cant we just kill stuff?", hope people realize this works both ways, some of us have very little interest the raiding and dungeon grind yet we are forced into playing Dow/Dom to unlock basic things, forced into primal fights and dungeon runs just to experience the basic storyline, and even to unlock some essential features of the game.

So if use sandboxers/crafters are forced out of you comfort zone to be able to play, its just balance that the bloodthristy types need to touch on the gathering side of our characters

I don't understand the "there are no gil fountains" argument. Gil shouldn't be flowing from fountains. There weren't any gil fountains in FFXI either, you had to work your ass off or get lucky to make enough gil to have the best gear. This game already hands you raid quality gear for the price of equipment repairs, more or less.

I was a 1.0 player, came into the game with a very small amount of gil, but have been able to maintain a high amount since 50.

My friend started brand new a week and a half ago and instead of just rushing to 50, he took the time to work on some crafts and learn how to make money. Now he is doing very well for himself.

People who complain about gil issues are lazy.

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Originally Posted by Rythless

I don't understand the "there are no gil fountains" argument. Gil shouldn't be flowing from fountains. There weren't any gil fountains in FFXI either, you had to work your ass off or get lucky to make enough gil to have the best gear.

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What are you smoking and can I have some of it? FFXI has always had numerous exploits you could mass farm and sell to an NPC for gil. At one point it was blood from leeches, during Abyssea it was NPCing the Aurore/Perle/Teal sets.

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Originally Posted by Vinta

There's a fundamental flaw here. All of this moving of merchandise requires the money to exist in other peoples' pockets. I would have called you a genius and given you a good show of faith, but you failed to address the major issue in the game's economy: The lack of methods to generate gil from nonexistence. Everything you've said in your original post is great, but if people are trading gil between themselves instead of generating it from an NPC or quest rewards, then the flux of people depositing the gil into nonexistence via repairs or the occasional vendor purchase will cause a slow and steady decline in the market.

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The major issue you speak of is non-existent and can't be proven otherwise. All characters in the game are constantly making gil out of nowhere from leves/fates - which is not limited. I've yet to see anyone prove that the small percentage of repairs being done outweighs the 1000's bringing in gil from leves and fates. I see anecdotes from people stating: The leve/fates I do isn't enough to cover repairs - there's gil issues!!! >.< Its not just about 'you'. Its about the total economy. Anyone who states repairs (sinks) is greater than total fountains is just guessing. SE has the real numbers they will make adjustments as necessary without anyone whining about it.

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Originally Posted by Razla

Deserve? No one's entitled to anything.

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You took my post completely out of context. People who are interested in end game raiding also need a source of gil generation without having to do crafting or gathering. I didn't get a memo from SE where it said you can not play DOW / DOM classes only'...did you? because i didn't. Forcing people to gather or craft just to generate gil when they have no interest in it is just bad game design. A good MMO is all about choices.

And by the way your FC isn't some yardstick by which rest of the population should be measured. Not everyone is into gathering and crafting..period.