Get Your Gil-Sinks Straight

[Cycloptichorn]

Repairs cost nothing if you farm the dark matter also .

Weeelllll... that's not really the right way to look at it. Repairs that use up dark matter DO cost you something: they cost you the commodity (dark matter) and the time it took to farm the dark matter. You can make a great argument that the second one was merely a byproduct of your rank-up process for farming, and that's fair. But as for the first one, if you repair the grade-5 weapon, that's 3.5k or more of commodities you no longer have, which must be counted as a cost.

[MariyaShidou]

OK, you got 50k full repair, that's telling me you're using lvl 41-50 gear. That's not a new player. A new player wouldn't start at lvl 41+. A full gear repair for under lvl 1-10 is 1000 gil, and 5000 gil for lvl 11-20. Under lvl 25 you pay 2,500 gil for airship and you get a quest at lvl 15 that give you one free pass from either Grid or Ul'dah to LL (Not including return fair). You're comparing maximum amount you need to pay, and make that as a threat against newbie...

[DoctorMog]

Sell relics from a vendor for 250 mil each.

Problem solved.

[Alhanelem]

Prices will eventually come down because no one but a select few will be able to buy stuff if sinks are taking too much money out.

That said, it's hard to argue that the game has enough sinks. I'm really not very concerned right now. Very few other than repairs and NPC vendors are absolutely needed by everyone, and repairs are cheaper than they've ever been. The airship costs a fairly significant amount but you don't have to use that. The market fees are very low compared to many games I've played.

I know they did decrease the production of gil from guildleves both by reducing the amounts and by making marks more common. That being said, The OP is massively exaggerating the problem, if there is one at all.

[LoydTallister]

I don't think that this currently is an issue. Gear is now extremely easy to make yourself with some low level crafting. Then there is the ability to farm money easy enough. I can't remember the last time I sold a average monster drop in the wards. You get so much money just selling loot to an NPC that you can easily afford repairs. Then crafting is such a good way to make money as well. I really don't see the problem here, you just need to put in a little more effort.

[Chardrizard]

money is extremely easy to make with this new crafting adjustments because mats are always on demands.

[Evenstar]

Level 23 ARC, started over after 1.19 hit. I am fully decked in lv 22 gear, got all DoW and DoM classes to 10, leveled some DoL and DoH classes also. Used the market wards to sell stuff and I have around 250.000 gil left.

Didn't do anything special. Just GC quests, leves, sidequests and so on .... so what the hell is the problem?

[MariyaShidou]

Level 23 ARC, started over after 1.19 hit. I am fully decked in lv 22 gear, got all DoW and DoM classes to 10, leveled some DoL and DoH classes also. Used the market wards to sell stuff and I have around 250.000 gil left.

Didn't do anything special. Just GC quests, leves, sidequests and so on .... so what the hell is the problem?

To be fair, you started over, you have knowledge that a new player doesn't. Still, there are new low level sidequests that involves running around that give you 10k gil, and other sidequests give equipments straight away.

[Evenstar]

To be fair, you started over, you have knowledge that a new player doesn't. Still, there are new low level sidequests that involves running around that give you 10k gil, and other sidequests give equipments straight away.

Fair enough, but I did not play for almost 6 months, so I really needed time to get used to things again.

I simply do not think that the money sinks in this game are that bad, it is actually one of the few things that is not wrong with this game. It is perfectly balanced.

[Platinumstorm]

I'll try to run down a list of the problems I see with the economy:

#1. Trillions of gil exist and can't happily be removed.

Believe it or not, prices for items are probably pretty low. Within the first week players were multi millionaires, and within the first month many players had well over 50 million gil, if not 100 gil. From personal experience, and my basement was flooded the first week of the game launch so I didn't have a lot of time to play, I ended up with around 7 million gil.

This money becomes "inactive" when players quit the game, but it never disappears. Most of the money in this game is likely "inactive", but the ultra-wealthy players are present in the game, and they compose the crafting community [for reference, I probaby sit somewhere in the top 5% of player wealth with 20+ million gil], but the range of wealth is very dramatic. The wealthiest crafters are likely weavers, leatherworkers, and armorsmiths.

Why are weavers, leatherworkers, and armorsmiths the wealthiest, and why does this matter?
These classes have the highest amount of recipes available in their crafting pool. Each person in the game likely needs something from these players, and when they do need to get armor, they need multiple pieces, which allows these classes to accumulate wealth quickly because of multiple sales to one individual. Compared to a carpenter, weavers have over 4x the amount of recipes available to them. This creates a broad spectrum and lack of competition with others for weavers, whereas all of the carpenters in the game are stuffed into 1/4 the size of potential recipes to make. The result of this is that weaver items will not fall in price as quickly as carpenter items because there is less competition per item, assuming an equal number of carpenters/weavers active at a given time.

As armorcrafting classes amass wealth, they expect to be able to earn relatively more wealth per synthesis. One negative effect of this are the limited slots on retainers. Each player has 20 easily accessible retainer selling positions, but as armorcrafting classes want more for each item sold, it becomes less lucrative to craft lower level items without charging a significant amount of gil for each item. With that in mind, and because so few players are entering the economy [I.E. new players] the lower level economies fail to develop well.

Gil sinks in the game can't work, for the most part

Because gil sinks can never take out more money than they put into the economy in order to foster a "game environment", the issue of inflation is never addressed by Square. All gil sinks can do is slow inflation without forcing a group of players against a wall they feel they cannot progress beyond.

There are solutions:

Because so much gil exists on inactive accounts, and because new players have been unfairly penalized on the new guildleve reward system [which generated all of the excess gil in the first place], there exists an economy with insanely low demand, but insanely large amounts of gil in the economy.

What we're seeing are actually prices that are being held in check by a lack of demand, and are actually lower than what gil availability would suggest.

A solution to permanently fix the economy is to piss off many of players; here's how.

Tiered wealth reevaluations:
Square decides a total gil worth value in the game. From this value players are classified based on their percentile rating. A person in the 99th percentile would therefore have more wealth than all but one percent of all players for holdings of wealth.

From this, Square decides a value for the top 1% of players to hold in wealth. While some players within this 1% will gain and lose positioning, they will remain in the top 1% of player held wealth. Arbitrarily I will throw out 10 million gil for the top 1%.

The top 2% is then evaluated and handed out another amount of gil, and so forth and so forth.

When all is said in done everyone who has participated in the economy keeps their relative position of wealth [the forums become insanely angry], and several people quit the game.

On the positive side, the economy is then fixed based on the new standards of rewards/vendor prices, and the majority of people who will play this game [hint, they haven't played the game yet] are going to have a better experience as a result, and the players who began building wealth after the reward changes are no longer penalized for picking a bad time.

A half-solution
If enough players enter the game, over time the established crafters will be out competed by the emerging crafters. This wouldn't be a full solution, and a disparity will always exist with the pre-levereward adjustments and every other crafter. These crafters will always have power over any emerging crafter, and will likely always be the richest in the game because of the resources allowing them to exploit new items within each patch.

This is up to the whim of the potential player base, as Square cannot control the variables associated with it, and this option means the economy continues to function with a long term wound in it.

1/8th of a solution
Square grants free levels to players who willingly submit quantities of gil to an NPC. This is an optional solution, which is a plus [although purists will be enraged, and also feel like players were leveling up multiple classes just by making money and advancing with one class], but has significant shortcomings in that it doesn't affect wealth that is inactive within the community [IE, inactive accounts]. This means that this solution will never fully address the economic problem, as it relies on player knowledge to find such a benefit, and it's also dependent upon the will of players to turn their income in [and now after the power leveling of this patch, there would be less incentive for it]. As a result, this solution has many shortfalls.

Solution for the lower level economy:

This is the easiest; Increase retainer bazaar slot limits significantly - up to 100 items.