Market Economy is a Mess - Possible fixes

[Nathan061111]

Please SE make everything expensive...... The only sphere of life that people want things to cost more....

[tymora]

I prefer a super-deflated economy vs a super-inflated RMT economy.

[whiskeybravo]

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You're trying to superimpose the methods for analyzing a highly developed economy on to a bare bones economy. The difference in our opinion is that I try to start at the bare bones, why introduce complications that aren't present?

FF14 is an almost perfect example of Crusoe Economics.

[CatholicFan]

There will never be a viable economy with the way the game is currently set up.

People need money for:

- Repairs
- Teleports
- Crafting
- Housing

The first two can be covered with a modicum of dungeon running. The 3rd is rather self-sustainable (you can make enough money crafting to pay for your continued leveling of crafting). The last one actually hurts the economy because it causes people to save instead of spend. It's only after a house is attained that there is some slight return to the economy through the purchase of furniture, which presupposes players don't just farm/craft the furniture themselves.

The real issues in this economy is the lack of viable, long-term options for gear that can be sold. If you're doing even a modicum of raiding, ilvl 70 gear is worthless in a month or two (more likely, a few weeks). This is a two-fold issue, in that, top-tier gear is easily and quickly acquirable without market participation, and the gear necessary to achieve it requires no economic involvement, either. Thus, the primary driving force of this game (story/raid content), doesn't require anyone to ever turn to the Market Boards.

This is further complicated by the fact that the game is designed to outdate the previous-tiered content every six months. That puts a very short shelf-life on any equipment a person acquires, not to mention their interest in investing in said pieces. Even if they release gear that is currently worth farming or crafting, its viability has arguably been undercut prematurely by the game's designers. I think this is the foundation of complaints against "vertical progression"-style content. It necessitates a system where there is little incentive to participate in the economy.

As I see it, there are only a handful of ways to address this:

- Make money irrelevant by increasing players' access to it and further decreasing their reliance upon it. If everyone has nominally-easy access to money, the economy becomes a non-issue. This has the double effect of removing RMT from the game because nobody is going to spend money with them if they can so easily gain it themselves. As an example, in Star Wars: The Old Republic, a player could make several hundred-thousand credits a week, solely from clearing the repeatable daily-quests. It basically made the "economy" a completely innocuous part of the game, and there was little-to-no RMT activity observed.

- Change the game to a more "horizontal progression" system, where top-tier gear is viable until there's a level-cap raise (i.e. every year or so when an expansion hits). Make that gear a challenge to acquire, and make the stepping stone gear before it available in a wide variety of configurations. Mix up these "second best" options between crafted items and dropped items. I believe this to be a much more unlikely scenario to occur in XIV as they're already many months into development of more "vertical progression" content, and it would require a massive change in the development team's design philosophy. As an example, Final Fantasy XI had relic weapons that were viable for an extremely long period of time (multiple expansions), but many of the options below the relic-tier were obtained through the Auction House or by crafting them. The crafted gear was a viable end-game alternative, but the leveling curve on crafting required that only the really dedicated achieved top-tier crafts, but more money will flowed into the economy as people attempt to achieve said results. There needs to be more demand than supply to fuel an economy, and that is sorely lacking right now.

[kukurumei]

You're trying to superimpose the methods for analyzing a highly developed economy on to a bare bones economy. The difference in our opinion is that I try to start at the bare bones, why introduce complications that aren't present?

FF14 is an almost perfect example of Crusoe Economics.

The devil is in the details doesn't exclude the general conclusions of said tools. After all economics for those the know economics is not about laws of nature but about laws of communities/peoples. Economics is at is root social and thus apply anywhere there is people, if not exact fits.

How to gauge a healthy/unhealthy economy is not hard because at this point it isn't "the little things" it's full flow "are you blind" syndrome. I don't need a chart to tell me what's happening, I can eye ball it, how bad things are.

How to fix the economy is also similar. tools do not change, the usage and tuning of them do.

All would help ARR at this point uses creatively or crudely. There is a credit freeze that is the housing collapse. Basically if there is 1billion worth of property, you expect at least a equal amount are "frozen" by the shear fact that people are saving up to buy them. A simple example is if you want to buy a ps4 worth $400 but you make $1 a day no matter what that's $400 that will never reach the market for 400 days. that money effectively does not exist for 400 days because it's frozen. And that's was the inital volley of 2.1. A large large large portion of the gil on the server was frozen, and it's effects are readly seen.

In Macro economics the government does basically 3 things: Jobs/money injection/infrastructure.

SE needs to bascially unfreeze credit, promote the jobs(means of making gil) that was destroyed from the bubble burst, and create infrastructure (in this case the dangle carrots to make people make and spend gil again)

I prefer a super-deflated economy vs a super-inflated RMT economy.

That's social economics, the act of using economics to promote a healthy society. They don't always see eye to eye with macro economics. There are a lot of things SE can do to work the fine line.

[Aramyth]

We need more things to suck gil and items out of the game.

For example, they could make the areas near Atherytes "outposts", and each Grand Company can control these points. How you control them is based off trading items (crafted items like gear and food) to an NPC at each outpost. Certain buffs could be provided for controlling outposts like discounts at certain vendors or discounted teleport costs.

They also need to provide more crafted gear that people want to use for the long term. So they need to make it at least equivalent to dungeon gear or just make the levelling process slower.

More items need to be added for purchase with Philosophy Tomestones, like more pets and more crafted items which will cost more than the current ones. They could also add mounts, cosmetic items, food, potions and those sorts of items all which will cost a decent amount just to suck Philosophy items.

We need more a reason to use the Airship, boats and porter chocobos in order to suck gil out of the economy.

Gillsellers need to take a hike.

We need more materials to be rare to drive up the prices of armour or food.

This economy is tanking and it needs to be fixed. Crafting needs to mean something.

[Kyri]

I hate to say it but the counter actions to stop rmt hurt the player base more then anything. Crafting is useless because rmt might do it, gathering is in the same boat. I was leveling yesterday for a hour on botany I made 3000 gil at most lol. The RMT and botters are rarely stopped and found everywhere because it's their job to make gil so they find a way and se nerfs it (but yet the bot is still there, every day reported and on "busy" status) and everyone suffers. I used to love fishing. I made good money, used my alchemist to make crystals and shards to boot and crafted my culinarian off fish recipes. Now you can't do any of that minus some fish recipes for cul but who wants to do them if they aren't repeatable levs?

[Zplinter]

Gil making for me. I think that this is most likely a bit server based but here I go:
As a combat class: I go and kill the buffalos in costa and sell night milk at 500 per, or kill pterocs and sell the puk eggs for 100 per.
Gathering Classes: mining = alumen (I honestly can not gather this fast enough), Botany = HUGE list
Crafting = hard now that SE put a bunch of things I made (ingots, rivets, rings, undyed Velveteen on the npc), components still seem to sell okay. Food seems to sell consistently well too.

To say that the economy is fine and dandy would be incorrect, it is a mess. (opinion) It is a mess because some sell at a profit margin that is lower then others are willing to accept. BUT it is also a mess thanks to the Devs. They have done things "defensively" to combat Gil sellers, they did this by either upping the drop rate of certain items (fleece, etc) or making them available on npc vendors (undyed Velveteen, rivets, etc) when what the gil sells are making money on is the shard market. Gathering shards is not hard just time consuming. I do not understand why they put items where you have to be at least 25 or more on the npcs and left the shards that you have to be level 10 + 1 to get in the wild?

[odintius]

The fear of rmt abuse is strong with SE so much that really nothing can be improved until they overcome that fear which if you look at ffxi as example over 11 years they still have rmt's so going be a long wait with that track record...
Don't get me wrong rmt is a problem but it also have negitive effect on legit players with allot of their solutions to fix the rmt problem. I blame the people who buys the gil honestly they are the problem and driving the rmt market for them to even exist to begin with.

[whiskeybravo]

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Details? Like the fact specialization does not exist in ARR? Every player can max every class, and at the end of that line is no economic activity whatsoever because every player can supply for their own needs without the use of the economy. This does not reflect reality. The fact that there is no real scarcity of goods, everything is in unlimited abundance. This does not reflect reality, either. What it boils down to is every individual. What each individual prefers to do, spend an hour gathering mats vs spend an hour doing leves for gil.

The actual complaint is items are not selling for the amount of money they used to. This is just a plain fact, labeling bad or good is a personal opinion. Certainly people used to making 100k gil a day, and are now only making 20k gil a day, they think it's bad. For the person who can now buy Vanya robes for 50k instead of 200k, they view it as a good thing. At the end of the day items are still being bought and sold. The problem is being blown out of proportion (just like in real life) and calls for changes (price controls come to mind) come from the suppliers to make their business more profitable again. Same old story.

The two forces are antagonizing one another. People are selling more and more stuff to save for housing, while at the same time spending less and less to save for housing. All while SE is limiting gil making to combat RMT. Inflating the economy by pumping it with more gil isn't going to artificially stimulate demand, the only thing it could do is get people housed faster and therefore back to normal market activity. The deflation is going to continue, because after housing the money will be gone forever, unlike a real economy where it's circulated back to the banks, back to capital investments and payrolls, and eventually back to spending.