DevTalk: GIL SINKS! Ideas to Stabilize the Economy and Curb Inflation

[Peregrine]

The economy will be messed up whether they add gil sinks or not but adding them is the first step to fixing the problem. If you only have 10 million or less now you're pretty much on the poverty line. Any worthwhile gear that is added will be starting at prices of 30 million minimum. I could throw that kind of gil at something and barely notice it gone. So could many people and it's going to cause massive inflation of any rare items once they're added. The only rare items we have now are +3s of end-game gear. Unless you're playing the gil game you'll be out of luck when it comes to the best of the best gear.

People get rich through being mostly sellers. People stay poor through being mostly buyers. It's a player mindset and the only way the distribution of gil will be evened out is if buyers start selling more and sellers start buying more. The buyers probably don't craft much so give them NMs to hunt for drops they can sell to people like me who hate solo NM camping. The rich are getting richer and the poor getting poorer because there's nothing for the rich to buy and the poor are too lazy/have nothing to sell.

Gil sinks will just lower the overall amount of gil on the server, which is good because rich people will reach a point where they have more money going out than coming in while the poor people will have roughly the same going in and out.

People in that mindset have already destroyed any utility that gil could ever have in this game. Better go just leave gil as relatively worthless and never make it a character-defining element at all.

That is, you may have 200 million gil...and who cares. Is that going to screw crafters? Man, crafters were screwed the minute the townie crafters could do nothing but sit on their rears and be fed materials to level. Crafters don't deserve millions, and the crafters with millions don't deserve to functionally have millions.

The whole system is a crock. In FFXI, gil got you a little bit of fame and a little bit of power in the early years. The mistake years. But at the end, gil didn't amount to a hill of beans unless you were in the running for a relic.

And what is a relic? A miserable pile of secrets.

Gil as a means to achieve power in a MMO is an archaic element. I know a lot of hustlin' ballers have gone about scrounging all they can for the last 6 months, but really. Gil should never really matter in this game.

[Xenor]

I don't see how most of the things I listed would in any way impact new players. It's mostly optional content. The situation for the new players would be the same as the situation for us right now.

Once you accumulate more gil, you can participate in the side content at your own leisure.

Most of what you mentioned is content or things that make life easier for people. New players will want to be a part of this to keep interested. Your suggested gil figures are nowhere near enough to be effective unless they combine it with the changes to leves and NPCed items I mentioned.

Ideally the game servers will have more gil going out than coming in until the right amount of gil exists and then gil sinks can be reduced to a point where gil coming in is the same as gil going out. I think this is how XI's hyper inflation was dealt with but I may be wrong.

Problem now is if you change the value of gil too much people who are stockpiling it become insanely rich while people who aren't fall further behind because it will be way harder for them to close the gap. It looks like we'll have to live with the big numbers.

People in that mindset have already destroyed any utility that gil could ever have in this game. Better go just leave gil as relatively worthless and never make it a character-defining element at all.

That is, you may have 200 million gil...and who cares. Is that going to screw crafters? Man, crafters were screwed the minute the townie crafters could do nothing but sit on their rears and be fed materials to level. Crafters don't deserve millions, and the crafters with millions don't deserve to functionally have millions.

The whole system is a crock. In FFXI, gil got you a little bit of fame and a little bit of power in the early years. The mistake years. But at the end, gil didn't amount to a hill of beans unless you were in the running for a relic.

And what is a relic? A miserable pile of secrets.

Gil as a means to achieve power in a MMO is an archaic element. I know a lot of hustlin' ballers have gone about scrounging all they can for the last 6 months, but really. Gil should never really matter in this game.

But the only way to make gil worthless is to make items worthless or untradable so that you don't need much gil to buy anything. Gil is currently useless because every item is dropped/gathered/crafted like candy with the exception of +3s and certain NM drops. A healthy economy is a nice thing in an MMO so to make everything untradable or drop/made like candy would be disappointing. I want to see an economy similar to XI's early years (before the hyper inflation) where battle players can farm good mats that have value and crafters can turn them into items that have value. But the supply of those mats is just right so that crafters can't mass produce them.

Anyway about insane gil totals. The way I see it, if you have 100mil gil in XIV you would have had 10mil in XI. No one would have cared seeing a player with 10mil, you needed 100mil to impress people in that game which would be like having a billion in this game. So items that will eventually cost 30-50mil in XIV won't be seen as expensive as the price tag suggests. They'd be the 3-5mil items XI had. Expensive but affordable if you've worked for gil. The funny part is we're all faffing around selling items for 50-100k that we'd not waste our time making and selling for 5-10k in XI. Big numbers are an illusion of wealth.

I don't think the first generation of crafters had that much advantage. I was just off the top of the curve (something like the 5th 50 goldsmith) but I've made more gil in the past 2 months than I did in all the months before that. My income is higher now than it has ever been despite there being a flood of rank 50 crafters. I've not even made a crab bow yet if you think that could be why (though they're coming this week). There's that much gil on the server you can make 10mil per week with little effort. But that isn't going to last forever. Best stock up now while you can.

[Rentahamster]

Most of what you mentioned is content or things that make life easier for people. New players will want to be a part of this to keep interested.

Most of what I mentioned is just side stuff that won't make a rich person uber powerful compared to a poor player. It's mostly cosmetic.

Also, the entry to the new content I proposed hardly costs anything to start. You'd only want to spend more money once you're high rank anyway.