The Current Ecnomical State of ARR

[Melondra]

Here are some interesting web post that should be a interesting read.

http://ffxivrealm.com/threads/frustr...ds.9332/page-2

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/g...omy-Issue.html

http://http://na.finalfantasyxiv.com...1/blog/722028/
http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/67805...eborn/68710117
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...n-House-system

This thread is now open to suggestions. I Have put together a few post from other major game sites who have done a review on The Current Economy of ARR.

What do like about the current system? What don't you like about the current system? IS the current market-board system viable in this games economy? What would you have done differently? This is just to gage the viewpoints of the player-base in Realm reborn community. Please check out the above links also from different game sites who have done a review on this games current economic structure.


This next article comes from Reddit and make some very good valid points. https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...emand_and_the/

[Chiami]

I love the crafting & gathering system (main class: omnicrafter XD) of FFXIV, considering it one of the nicest I have seen so far. And I love "marketboarding".

But unfortunately at the current state I think the system is massively flawed because of 2 reasons (one hopefully find a fix semi-soon):



1) SE is doing very little (or the wrong things) against cartels, bots and the like. A bunch of people (maybe even with bots) create tons of stuff, put it on the MB really low-priced and at worst make sure they fill up the 100 hits you can have for an item -- there you are, they rule the market. Just as bots ruling the markets of certain items obtained by gathering. And even after it is claimed officially from time to time so-and-so many folks were banned for doing such -- you still see exactly the same bots being active. Which makes me think SE has no real interest in fighting anything harming the "Eorzean economy" -- bots pay subscription fees, too, and most players only want to battle -- the economy is totally irrelevant to 80%+ of the player base. SE is not in the business of making all gamers happy, they are in the business of selling subscription fees at low cost. So don't see this fixed any time soon...

2) Low demand thanks to SE handing out all decent gear for free (well, leveling quests and drops) or only for tomes and the like. Crafting (and gathering to supply crafting) outside crafting for yourself and other crafters & gatherers only creates glamour right now and leveling equipment for additional classes (furniture is also a no-seller for the most part, given housing is still so ridiculously scarce and so expensive only wealthy, self-sufficient crafters & FCs can afford it). Considering the amount of crafters out there vs. the amount of demand for the only things that DO actually sell, it is no surprise things are not working well. And by handing out HQ crafted items via quests in HW things actually got even worse, as crafters were the sole source at least for that pre-Heavensward -- now folks just sell their unwanted HQ gear from quests, ruining even that market.

I understand that SE wants to make FFXIV as simple & easy for causal gamers as possible, so throwing tons of "leveling gear freebies" at them is just "good business" for SE. But not allowing any kind of crafted battle gear to be really in well-priced demand beyond a bit of leveling stuff is not helping that approach, it is just harming those who love crafting (& gathering) in this game. Other games offer both approaches and do very well with this: Get great gear as loot from battle, or sell loot, make money and use that money to buy great gear from the crafting folks (or other people's loot).

SE has announced the upcoming patch will include crafted gear that is actually useful in battle (endgame-y), which would be wonderful if this holds true and
a) is gear that can be crafted without being decked out in tier V-pentamelded ilvl 170 gear (all the better given tier V isn't even really in the game yet, and yes I am a bit sarcastic here, given some past experiences) ... and ...

b) does not require mats which are so insanely rare and/or time-consuming to get that prices HAVE to be so high that hardly anyone is buying because few can afford such at all. What is going on with the mats for ilvl 170 crafting/gathering gear is a prime example of that, 40-60k for one piece of mat (justly priced at current time-investment, I say) and thanks to tons of mats like that needed the sheer costs of making that gear in the range of several 100k (so finished product accordingly worth even more, millions if HQ and risky to HQ, as star-crafting tends to be...) ... nope, that is not how you create demand.

So it would be good if SE tones down some of the insane requirements/costs of existing endgame-gear for gathering/crafting and offers us crafted battle gear at reasonable costs in terms of mats/time required. High, but not so high only very few can afford. Rather so that the time-investment to make gil for such gear and the time-investment to farm tomes, raid for drops etc. is more or less on par (which does have to include the profit for the one crafting, in relation to time-investment, level and difficulty of the crafting).

We will see what the upcoming patch will bring... because if this is fixed a real system of battle + gathering + crafting feeding each happily and decently on the MB would be awesome.

[Alexander_Dragonfang]

HQ item rewards for the 50-60 leveling main and sidequest was a mistake. An item might be worth 100k but anyone without a clue and having got it for free (no materials gathered or bought) can undercut that item basically as he pleases, and when you repeat it, suddenly a ton of gearpieces in the markets and filled with quest HQ items and prices are lower in some cases, than even level 30-40 items. Terrible call.

Something that has been bothering me about the economy is the correct decision of not allowing crafters to not make BiS gear, thus, making players to go and do content, yet allow without punish at all for particular groups of people to sell that content and even BiS drops after a few weeks. Best part is that most of these buyers are crafters, basically getting BiS, achievements and progress through content using gil... Which was what the first idea was supposed to prevent!

[ChameleonMS]

...the correct decision of not allowing crafters to not make BiS gear...

I agree that a crafter should not be allowed to make BiS but currently crafters cannot even make entry level gear for Raids.
The best stuff we could make in 3.0 was i170 (mats for this gear are stupid rare) and you needed to be minimum i190 to have a chance a clearing AS1.
In 3.1, they bumped up the crafters to i185, still below the minimum threshold and gate locked the gear behind specialists.

A single crafter cannot iLvl jump a newbie, forcing that newbie to the MB, which should be good for the economy except that newbies do not have the Gil required to afford this gear. Just leaving the items to sit on the MB for long, long periods of time. Any crafter see this trend very soon and says to himself, forget bothering to make that ever again; which cause scarcity of the items driving the prices higher and perpetuates this problem.

[aesteval]

The biggest issue right now is rarity of mats and the sheer quantity required to do anything. There's little immediate value when supply is so badly constrained and requirements inflated.

[Warlyx]

the main issue that FFXIV faces is that there is little to no way to gain gil outside playing the MB , in almost every other game u can go kill a bunch of mobs and vendor all that and get some money , u cant do that in FFXIV because almost all the items u gain are worth 1-10 gil.

I can understand why they did that ....but in the end u fix a issue and create another one , isnt hard to gain gil? nop , even if u dont craft or gather... but if u dont do that u have to work x100 harder than in any other game.

the only thing that cost gil atm is glamour, pets , relic quest items , and raid consumables ...the question is what is optional and what really isnt? and how to fix that w/o breaking anything in the process....

p.d Doesnt help that crafters and gatheres have been treated like trash this expansion...is almost like SE doesnt want ppl to craft / gather...

[-BlueGreen-]

the main issue that FFXIV faces is that there is little to no way to gain gil outside playing the MB , in almost every other game u can go kill a bunch of mobs and vendor all that and get some money , u cant do that in FFXIV because almost all the items u gain are worth 1-10 gil.

If you simply approach this like other games, then I can see how you'd think there's a problem with earning gil in the first place. You're overlooking the challenge log and levequests. With rather minimal effort, you can easily generate more than enough gil to satisfy repair and teleport costs. Leve allowances can even be banked such that casuals can do all their farming on a single day each week if they choose to do so. On top of that, gil practically rains on you during higher level dungeon runs (from what I hear, this is one of the main ways bots farm gil). Honestly, I'd even venture to say that it's a little too easy to earn gil using these methods (especially the dungeon route given the BLM bot spam waves I've seen around).

I do agree there are problems with the server economies, though. From a smaller server perspective, I don't see >100 slot problem on most items unless they're trash items to begin with (100 slots for 1 gil animal skins, lol). I have noticed that it feels like crafters are shrinking in numbers causing lower supply/competition. I've noticed more often lately that when I go to sell leftovers or things I simply don't need anymore, that prices are pretty crazy high, even on things that should be crazy common (1.2k each for HQ brass ingots, for instance). By the time you get into the specialist-only stuff the prices easily get out of reach of anyone relying almost exclusively on the income streams I mentioned at the beginning (good luck on that anima weapon). For the few people who do seem to be bothering with specialization, they seem to be doing it to hoard gil like mad (for what purpose?).

My thoughts on what they could do is re-evaluate what they actually think the average player earns in a week gil-wise after accounting for repairs/teleports and such. Then, figure out what they can do to bring prices down to more reasonable levels for things they expect most players to try to do. For example, the costs of land fall outside of this since the amount of plots is far fewer than the amount of players, but crafted items for anima weapons are basically unlimited meaning that most players could be expected to go for that (multiple times, even). 10-20mil total for anima weapon items is unacceptable... that's more than I paid for my small house! It's like saying that there should be more houses than anima weapons in the game.

They need crafting to be more appealing to more people to increase the supply and competition. The specialization system, and especially gating recipes behind specialization, isn't helping. For starters, I'd recommend one of these options:

Option 1
-Remove specialist requirements from recipes and do not ever require specialist for any recipe again.
-Make specialist accessible at level 30 instead of 50, and give much better skill rewards for specialization so that true specialists focusing on only a few crafting classes are able to get by more easily without cross class skills.

Option 2
Remove the limit on how many specialist stones you can have. Sure, still give 3 freebies from that quest, but if you buy more with red scripts make it so that you don't give up existing ones and that you simply add to your collection of specializations making it possible to specialize in all 8 at once. Honestly I prefer option 1 because option 2 is more inconvenient and would make specialization have practically no meaning to omnicrafters and doesn't help non-omnicrafters as much. Granted, option 1 would take more effort for them to implement, so option 2 could be seen as the lazy/cheap way out.

Would this be enough to fix the problem? My instinct is that it would help, but not nearly enough. Crafting has trouble attracting people to begin with due to the lack of action in it compared to dungeons. Simply put, almost no amount of goodies will attract some people. Others might be on the fence with crafting, interested, but not able to see the point or rewards for bothering with it. As is, if you don't happen to care much about glamours or housing, there's not much attractive about crafting, especially after 3.0 content.

I agree, we don't need crafted BiS gear. I could only imagine the problems that would cause.
On the other hand, entry-level raid gear might be an interesting option, especially if it's side-by-side with tomestone/dungeon gear that have different stat combinations. It would give more gear options to players while also creating demand for crafted goods that also happen to be somewhat capped in terms of price by having to compete with gear obtained by other means.

[Tint]

text

you say "current state" but your links are years old. most of them from 2013, right after the release of the game. i don't think those links have anything to do with the actual current economical state of the game.

[Pence]

1) SE is doing very little....words

You can't ban someone on first report - you want them to continue operating, finding a source or buyers. In the long run the same people doing the bad are actually doing some good.

[Knahli]

I saw three characters(obviously the same person) who have their own little FC containing just the three of them that have clearly been botting on Coerthas Central Highlands for what has at the very least been a year and a half now. I reported all of them with a very comprehensive and detailed report each time at least six times over the course of those 1.5 years+ when I encountered them, always in the same spots, and yet they were always there when I returned. Always the exact same players, farming the Ornerys and spiritbonding crafting gear. Admittedly, it was quite frustrating to find them each time.