Quote Originally Posted by Mikita View Post
You're right that new players may have a harder time. I still remember my first 3 weeks in Eorzea. First MMO ever. Not knowing anyone or anything about Final Fantasy "ways". It was a bit difficult and I made a lot of mistakes, including mistakes with items and gil -- like buying and selling everything at NPCs because I didn't know about the market wards, etc.

That said:

- New players should be using gear that only takes Grade 1 or Grade 2 material to repair, which shouldn't cost them very much to get fixed.

- The Repair NPC also doesn't charge very much for low level item repairs. I used them a lot when I first started and didn't know anyone on my server. They will only repair to 75% and the cost is high, but it's still a viable option if you don't have the time to seek repairs from other players.

- If you use appropriately ranked gear, the degradation isn't all that fast (IMO -- my gear goes down maybe 2 to 10% after a few hours of battles) and you should be able to accumulate a decent amount of gil before repairs do become necessary.

- It is an MMO and I think they intentionally build in benefits for interacting with other players. It's not absolutely necessary, but there are definitely benefits to playing nice with other people.
Sounds like a self contradiction with the part about repair costs. They don't charge much because of the gear level, but the amount being charged for the gear at that level is still a substantial amount of the appropriately ranked players money. The best gil sink is one that people don't pay attention to and utilize out of habit. If people notice that they are losing a huge chunk of cash going to a npc, that isn't a good gil sink.

Gear is something else, though, and really they have to find some way to make the pricing for items scale better for appropriate ranks. I've seen rank 20 leather armor that sells for far more than rank 30 leather armor, yet the game still seems to expect people to wear armor of the appropriate rank. Once they get around to fixing the AH system in this game it probably wont be as much of an issue, but right now the marketing ward system is just painful to look at or use.