Alternate Argument for AH...

[Misteyes]

The problem with an AH as a gil-sink is that it only removes economy from the game at the surcharge fee, and hence caps the value of items by the surcharge fee rather than the list price.

Currently, most players generate (via leves) more gil than they spend. This isn't the same as getting money from another player though crafting, since it actually adds more money to the game. When the primary source of income for most players is printing money, inflation is rampant.

Adding an auction house would result in fewer items being sold to NPC vendors (reducing the amount of money generated) while also taking a cut of the sale price (removing money from the economy). This would control inflation, but only after the list fee is removing more money than is generated by leves.

If the AH cut is 5%, then the economy will only stabilize after things are being listed for 20x their worth in generated money - This means that proletariat players whose primary income is from levequests and other money generating activities will not be able to afford anything, and meaningful income will come only from player-to-player trades.

This is all very abstract and I'm not explaining myself well; I'll try an example. Suppose that an item - we'll say a "Fried Egg" - is "worth" 5,000 generated gil. This means that in the amount of time that a player could create a Fried Egg, they could just as easily create 5,000 gil (by a levequest, behest, or dumping loot to an NPC vendor). If a player then goes to buy a fried egg on the auction house, inflation will continue until the fried egg is priced at 100,000 gil, since 5,000 gil must be taken out of the economy for every 5,000 gil worth of product that is created.

Currently, this inflation is kept in check due to the inconvenience of selling and buying. Most buyers are purely operating on generated gil, so selling at that high a value cuts out a large portion of the market. An auction house would allow much easier selling, which would accelerate inflation dramatically.

In order to actually repair the economy, the game needs some big ticket items that can only be bought from NPCs. Chocobo and Airship passes are a start, if they cost gil. Allowing players to collect and remove large sums of money from the economy will stabilize it at a lower total volume.

[Phenidate]

The problem with an AH as a gil-sink is that it only removes economy from the game at the surcharge fee, and hence caps the value of items by the surcharge fee rather than the list price.

Currently, most players generate (via leves) more gil than they spend. This isn't the same as getting money from another player though crafting, since it actually adds more money to the game. When the primary source of income for most players is printing money, inflation is rampant.

Adding an auction house would result in fewer items being sold to NPC vendors (reducing the amount of money generated) while also taking a cut of the sale price (removing money from the economy). This would control inflation, but only after the list fee is removing more money than is generated by leves.

If the AH cut is 5%, then the economy will only stabilize after things are being listed for 20x their worth in generated money - This means that proletariat players whose primary income is from levequests and other money generating activities will not be able to afford anything, and meaningful income will come only from player-to-player trades.

This is all very abstract and I'm not explaining myself well; I'll try an example. Suppose that an item - we'll say a "Fried Egg" - is "worth" 5,000 generated gil. This means that in the amount of time that a player could create a Fried Egg, they could just as easily create 5,000 gil (by a levequest, behest, or dumping loot to an NPC vendor). If a player then goes to buy a fried egg on the auction house, inflation will continue until the fried egg is priced at 100,000 gil, since 5,000 gil must be taken out of the economy for every 5,000 gil worth of product that is created.

Currently, this inflation is kept in check due to the inconvenience of selling and buying. Most buyers are purely operating on generated gil, so selling at that high a value cuts out a large portion of the market. An auction house would allow much easier selling, which would accelerate inflation dramatically.

In order to actually repair the economy, the game needs some big ticket items that can only be bought from NPCs. Chocobo and Airship passes are a start, if they cost gil. Allowing players to collect and remove large sums of money from the economy will stabilize it at a lower total volume.

Very insightful, and it looks like you have a better grasp of it than I do.

I'm wondering if SE, while reworking things under the hood, might be able to include a way to track created and removed gil. Maybe simple as tracking the amount of GIL a player has at log out a quick report of gil 'made' by leves, NPC'ed items etc, and 'released' on purchase of tickets, materia, chocobos etc... and then tally the difference at a predetermined time (i.e. every 24 hours, saw entry total of 1.8trillion, exit of 1.7, excess of .1 trillion)

Add some crazy equations I don't even want to think about right now to reasonably adjust prices of NPC services/sales to adjust how much gil needs to be taken out... I suppose the end goal would be to try and keep X amount of gil in circulation for Y players seen in the past hour.

Hopefuly what will happen is; If total amount of money generated is to high over the intended gil removal rate, bump cost of transport and services slightly across the board (small enough increments that no one service spikes too suddenly, i.e. prime-time chocobo rentals in Jeuno) but the sum increase is still size able enough everyone is accessing at least some part of the system at increased cost.

If the total amount of created gil starts to fall too much, it would go the opposite way, lowering cost of services.