FFXIV the worst economy in any P2P MMO?

[FelisC]

Your other points are just garbage. There's no lack of demand on Excalibur, it's just devolved to a race to the bottom. PvP items went from 40k+ down to 1k or less on day 1, and that's for HQ.... It never fails too. Any time an item spikes up a bit, people stupidly flood the market trying to cash in until it's completely devalued, and then it just rots there at rock bottom. It's a complete buyers market right now and it's annoying.

The reason that people "stupidly" flood the market is because there is a massive amount of supply ready to fill any demand that appears. There is a significant lack of demand, and what little exists is being chased by a huge amount of supply. This is the reason for the race to the bottom, and it can only be solved by limiting supply or increasing demand.

[Aenarion]

I truly do not understand pointing to "undercutters" as the problem with an economy. I would think the suggestion above to keep prices anonymous is trolling if I haven't seen so many people espouse the same position. The fantasy that if only all sellers would collude to keep prices high that we'd have a vibrant system of exchange makes such little sense I can't believe that people take it seriously.

Couldn't agree more, but it's what happens when people start talking about things they don't really understand. The argument from those people typically boils down to "but xxxx game had this mechanic, therefore that's how things should be!" while being ignorant of all the other factors that goes into it.

[Relshar]

Before you can have an organic market place within the game world that mimics the real ones you first need a way to destroy equipment and items in the game that players use so they are forced out of the game world. Eve Online does this via item destruction upon the death of your space ship, and the ability to loot other players cargo from the destroyed ship. SWG did it another way in that each piece of equipment had stats and durability to them, over time the durability wore down and you could repair it much like we do in FF now. But here is the part that makes them different. Each time you repaired an item in SWG the stats would decrease as would the durability. Over time of use the items would have to be destroyed or removed from service because they just didn't perform anymore in combat or general use.

[Relshar]

For the markets to improve in anyway shape or form they would need to change everything about equipment and its mechanics, but most developers do not wish to upset their player base by removing that uber gear from their characters by either loss in pvp or over time due to wear and tear.

All MMO's with the BOP or BOE mechanic as well as the items immortal status of never wearing out will never drive a real economy no matter what they put in to help it. In the end everyone will be wearing that uber gear and will never need to buy anything else so again the market stagnates. As harsh as it sounds you need loss of player equipment to drive a market.

[dejavutwo]

...

You can have a gear based MMO with a good economy without destroying a player's gear. Tera did a very good job of getting an economy that was easy to participate in and relatively stable, and looking back is a model I really like.

1: The best bind on equip gear dropped in dungeons with a lockout, and not at 100%. This was the 2nd best set of gear in the game, with the only set better being incredibly difficult to get, so there was always demand for these items.

2: Enchanting - Every worthwhile item needed to be enchanted. The higher you enchanted the item, the lower the odds of succeeding were. In order to enchant, you needed an item of the same tier to sacrifice along with a vendor bought reagent. The fodder market was the primary method for most players to make money and demand is maintained since every time someone upgrades a piece of gear, they will need a significant amount of fodder in order to get it up to +9, and many will use even more going for +12. The vendor bought reagents also acted as the games primary gold sink.

The biggest benefit of the system above is that players with near top end gear are still buying stuff from lesser geared players, so gold is actually cycling through players instead of only trickling up, or not moving at all. The biggest problem with FFXIV's economy is that there is nothing worthwhile to buy, and the economic portions of the game are easily skipp-able. I, as I'm sure many others, have never put a piece of materia in any gear outside of the quest that required it.

FFXIV could get something similar to Tera through the crafting and materia system, and it seems like that is what they were going for, but they just made it completely unnecessary since dungeon gear doesn't have any materia slots, and dungeon gear can not be converted.

[myahele]

Its a free market and it is players that are setting the prices. With so many people selling and many people saving for fc house then the prices will go down.

While the prices are down I am going to take advantage of it

[Hiruke]

I kind of hate the materia system. I wish it was more like FFVII's system, where you could gem stuff with whatever, and you could add/remove stuff from those slots. Have the items be either crafted or (much better yet) come from hard stuff that requires skilled players to beat (raids that have no real point other than to get materia and other money drops), and have the dungeon gear able to be slotted with materia so the stuff was actually, you know... useful. Have the materia degrade over time if you want to have a constant need to get more or whatever.

All crafted gear and materia is kind of a throwaway, a distraction from what you should really be getting. It's weird that they flubbed the opportunity to have a real dynamic here. Having people go through dungeons with trash gear so they could break it down into stuff no one should really want is super bizarre, and helps no one.

[ApolloGenX]

Economies depend on specialized labor. Someone else has to have something you want for a transaction to take place.

When one person can do everything- no one else has what they want or need.

No interdependence = no working economy. It's too easy to level- so everyone is everything.

Easy independence is nice... in a single player game. In an MMO easy independence leads to a silo effect.

[allluckys]

Post 50 craft wise make it so you can only take up 1 or two crafts past that point. Make these crafts provide specific enchants to gear on a slot per slot base and allow them to be sold on the market. With the amount of class alts in this game and the.slow but gradual gains on high end gear for characters the demand will be high.

[ItzKris]

Hopefully vanity slots will help the economy a bit.
Since people will want different skins there may be more demand for it.
Now only they had made better looking gear worth keeping as a skin.