Housing market value & insane prices?

[MomomiMomi]

While Masamune's economy is flat on the ground, and it's very difficult to make money off the market, the server housing prices are rated in the highest tier:
http://eu.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodest...1e2bc04d014cbf

Prices have lowered since, but plot availability is depleted, apart from large plots which now range from 35,000,000 to 43,750,000

Unfortunately, I think your prices are actually appropriate. As I mentioned in my last post, although your economy makes it much harder to make gil than on ours, you have more houses sold than us. That's a little odd, don't you think? It seems to suggest that you have plenty of people who have a lot of gil. Why isn't that gil entering the economy? What exactly happened to your economy? At first I thought maybe you just had a lot of FCs owning houses, but a lot of them were personal houses. Your economy is really messed up and doesn't seem to reflect the amount of gil you have on the server.

Great, now try doing that on Masamune.

I actually really want to try this challenge. But unfortunately that means getting a new character to level 50 and other preparations that I'm not sure I want to put the effort into.

[Inzoum]

Unfortunately, I think your prices are actually appropriate. As I mentioned in my last post, although your economy makes it much harder to make gil than on ours, you have more houses sold than us. That's a little odd, don't you think? It seems to suggest that you have plenty of people who have a lot of gil. Why isn't that gil entering the economy? What exactly happened to your economy? At first I thought maybe you just had a lot of FCs owning houses, but a lot of them were personal houses. Your economy is really messed up and doesn't seem to reflect the amount of gil you have on the server.

That's an interesting point and an interesting question...

Regarding sales of houses on Masamune, the initial housing sales was quite slow. Our FC managed to finance acquisition of a medium plot on February 9, close to 2 months past the initial introduction of housing. We used regular peisteskin treasure hunts as our main financing effort, where every gil everyone earned was put in the jar. Materials from chests were either sold as-is or I would craft them into more valuable items before putting them up for sale on the market board. These collective efforts amounted to roughly 5-6 million gils on a total of 33.354.000 gil. The rest came from personal donations. Our highest donator contributed around 7 million gil of an unknown but admitedly sizeable fortune that was carried over from v1. The rest came from 45 contributors with various amounts averaging around 500k, most of whom donated a large amount of what they owned (I was second highest donator, giving 99.2% of everything I had).

Our determination was really high and we would aggressively farm all possible means to gather whatever small scraps of gil we could, averaging 300k per day collectively, which was somewhat detrimental to a healthy game style (and life habits). It nearly drove us mad, created heavy tensions among our members and has overall been a very negative experience, but thankfully our perseverence paid off.

This is the extent of effort any FC would be expected to provide to purchase a medium plot back then, though somewhat worsened by the pressure of other FCs outbidding us on plots we were aiming for. In normal conditions, I think spending 4-5 months at half the daily income would have been healthier and more enjoyable for the lot of us, but that would have been impossible with the limited number of plots available.

I expect a lot of FCs back then who were able to purchase large houses or purchase medium ahead of us either had more unusually rich members among them, or were even more hardcore and thick-skinned to endure the grueling hours of farming. The "average FC" probably sat there helpless and still doesn't have a house to this day.

The first time additional plots were added, they sold immediately to FCs who had continued saving in anticipation. Sales were MUCH faster then, and all plots, small medium and large, were sold out within hours.

I was able to purchase a small private house when subsections were introduced. I had the money to buy one when private houses were first introduced on regular plots, but was beat to it by everyone else. Subsections effectively doubled the housing availability and roughly satisfied the need then, only small plots sold within the first day, medium plots remained available for weeks after, and some large plots are still available today, but those are the only ones left, and while the current price of a Large plot roughly equates what our moderately large FC paid back in the days for a medium plot, the means to make money are just not there anymore.

At any rate, there are probably still some very rich players out there hoarding gil. My suspicion is that these fortunes are mostly carried over from v1 when exploitable gil-farming methods existed and few efforts were deployed to punish abuse. Either that or these fortunes originate from dubious RMT operations.

Being among the super-elite crafters of this server, I can confirm that maintaining this status has an incredibly high price tag. Profits made from endgame crafting recipes serve only one purpose: prepare for costly gear upgrades on next patch. It's incredibly hard to put money on the side while paving the path for new gear. In that regard, my FC members have it MUCH easier than me, since they can just come to me to get their own gear crafted and HQed at cost price with cheaper ingredients. With this cycle in place, my friends who do no crafting and no gathering and simply sell whatever they get from dungeons are generally richer than I am, marginally, but are generally more conservative in their spending habits.

Regarding new content. when new patches come out, markets are regularly emptied of everything moderately valuable in preparation for whatever recipe that might use that odd ingredient. People with money spend it all, lock the market and then overprice items by a factor of 3x to 50x. This lasts about 2 days to 2 weeks before prices normalize. Rich players who are able to sweep the market clean in anticipation will make massive fortunes on overpricing items over a short period, though only part of them will. The others will lose a fortune as they sit with a pile of unsellable overpriced items in a market that's steadily re-saturating and wrapped in an aggressive undercutting war.

Essentially, the rich get richer while the middle class gets poorer trying to follow the same scams. Poor players stay poor and cautious.

So where is all the money in the end? Dormant possibly. People know it's hard to make money, so they become cautious about spending it. They wait until prices get low. It seems to be the most prevalent approach on Masamune. Don't buy, let it sit. It's why some few people manage to profit incredibly early from new recipes, and everyone else ends up losing money over them.

It's not unusual to see items sold on the market board with prices below NPC vendor trashing.

As far as I can tell, these are fairly basic flows of offer and demand. I think if overall fewer items ended up on the market board, but players had better means to purchase them overall, the prices would be more balanced. An easy solution would be to increase the revenues from selling items to NPCs, it wouldn't affect the meta-economy of rich players' dumping practices, but would encourage people to vendor items rather than selling them on the market board, while at the same time providing the poorer players with greater income to spend on the player market

[MomomiMomi]

Thank you very much for that insight.

So where is all the money in the end? Dormant possibly. People know it's hard to make money, so they become cautious about spending it. They wait until prices get low. It seems to be the most prevalent approach on Masamune. Don't buy, let it sit. It's why some few people manage to profit incredibly early from new recipes, and everyone else ends up losing money over them.

This is about what I suspected. People are not buying, so the prices just drop. The rich can probably just wait for the prices to drop before they buy anything; I know I would. The poor have no other choice.

Still, I'm amazed at just how little buying is happening. Those 41 fat cats I mentioned are insane. We had 3 on our market board when I last checked.

I didn't mention this in my price post, but I believe I saw that you have somewhere around 100 Savage Might/Aim IV on the market. When I last checked our market, we had between 0-10 of those. Now, I can't be sure if you are somehow just producing a lot more of these items than us, or if it's just that people are buying so little. I suspect it's the latter, but perhaps because it is so difficult to make gil, people are also saturating the market in their attempt to make it. This would be quite a destructive cycle. Nobody buys, but in their desperation to make gil, they are overproducing.

I honestly can't say what kind of method could be used to help fix your server's issue. It's a rather unique situation that I don't think any of the other servers are facing; at least, I haven't heard of anything like this. I don't think I can think of a solution that wouldn't be harmful to other servers if it was applied to all servers equally.

I can also see how it would be difficult for a crafter on your server. I believe Artisan's Apron was about 150k. Ouch! With 20k per sealant, there's barely any gil to be made there. I didn't look too deep into many crafting recipes, but the few I looked at looked really bad.

As an aside, I do believe I could make somewhere around 10-20m gil on your server in a month using the same methods I used in my early days of starting on Behemoth back in July; just with some improvements with having more knowledge of the game now. So I meant it when I said I wanted to take that challenge! Unfortunately it's a JP server, or I'd seriously consider doing it, and possibly even moving there.