World Balance is doomed until ..

[Syfurion]

Invest in the ability to make them yourself, then?

I am, slowly. Crafting is incredibly dull, so it takes me a while. But I won't perpetuate the cycle once I'm there, this stuff does not have any reason to cost that much for what it is.

[Giubba]

That same chestpiece on Siren is currently up for 4.2 million, and people are actually buying it. They're still trying to charge 500k+ for HW crafted armor. I would LOVE to see these people forced to drop their prices.

Simply because in Ff14 there isn't an open market but a closed one.

Crafter make things that only other crafters have the ability to buy.
It's not something like DOH do things->DOW and DOM buy these things->DOW,DOM and DOL gather ingredients for DOH to use->go to step 1.
This process is expected to be made by 1 person so there isn't a proper economy.

[Zojha]

Crafting is incredibly dull [...]

And that is precisely the reason why so few people engage in that content and consequently why items coming from that content are so ridiculously expensive. It helps that it's not only a chore, it's also a big one, as every slightly harder recipe requires cross class abilities - Culinarian, Carpenter, Alchemist and Weaver being the most important ones. Moreover, recipes frequently require items from other crafts and gatherers, which need to be leveled as well to produce these items. And of course those are large grinds in and of themselves.

On low pop, the problem is a general one, as every market is less competitive than in needs to be to produce socially desirable results - not just crafted gear. The crafting market is just the worst because it has the highest barrier of entry - and that's due to design. Truth be told, even the dev team doesn't seem to like crafting/gathering, because their understanding of it seems to be very low and the attention it gets token at best.

[Theodric]

I am, slowly. Crafting is incredibly dull, so it takes me a while. But I won't perpetuate the cycle once I'm there, this stuff does not have any reason to cost that much for what it is.

You're paying for either a luxury and/or a convenience, though. Are some items very expensive? Definitely - especially if they're good for glamour purposes. Ultimately, though, you can get by with other items - dungeon drops, vendor purchases and so on - so there isn't necessarily a need to acquire specific pieces of gear from the market board. You could argue there's a necessity to buy high end crafted gear for progression purposes, of course, but high end raiders tend to make peace with the idea that to get ahead they need to shell out a hefty amount of gil.

[Felis]

What's your guys prices on Materia Heavens Eye VI?

It cost 1 round as a tank in Level Up roulette.
Even the poorest player can get it, if he have a tank

shared market -> price fall for materia VI -> less tanks in level up roulette (why doing roulette if you can get it cheap in the MB) -> increase of queue time -> more complain threads in the forum

[Gun-Cat]

One of the few benefits of being on Balmung is that the MB is always filled, prices are reasonable due to high competition in almost every sector. At the same time wares move fast so that you can reliably find little niches for yourself to earn some pretty cash.

So, I'd rather keep our closed economy that has no outsideinfluences due to being virtually locked.

[Kling-Klang]

I hate the idea of an global MB. GW2 had it and you could make no money with it, since everything was low priced due to too much supply.

[pushin_tin]

More precisely, it is the nature of mono- and oligopolies. Large servers like Balmung are the only ones even remotely getting close to the ideal of perfect competition where everyone is a price taker and thus the only ones where a market is even remotely allocatively efficient as per economic theory. But even there, you'll have a lot of local oligopolies because every good represents an individual market and there's just too many goods to create a full coverage with the limited retainer space. And whenever a market isn't perfectly competitive, allocation of goods will be inefficient.

And when a market is inefficient, you'd generally want the government to step in. Hence antitrust laws etc. Or in SEs case, handing out crafted glamour items via PotD hoards/retainers etc.

Found the econ major.

[Hyperia]

Opening up the marketboards into a Datacenter wide system will have a very destabilizing effect on the system. Some will be good, others will be bad. Lower prices for everybody is good for buyers but bad for stimulating crafting. Another thing we will see is that the gil farmers will be able to have their bots farm on low population servers and move money to high population servers using that system. If this happens, it will be interesting... among other things.

[SaitoHikari]

Negative, the one reason we have these people buying Gil in the first place, is because its driven by extremely high and insane prices for popular and or useful items.

They wouldn't bother buying accounts (RMT) to spam adverts and run BOT programs if it didn't make them enough money in the first place.

And on the flip-side, why would a company want to stop RMT, they have to keep buying accounts, its making them money, if they wanted an end to it they easily could, making Gil a static item like Tombstone currency would be a start, remove it from moogle mail and in-game trading, that would be a start, more can be done.

Good point with the last one, I suppose, considering I did note during my time in Leviathan that there was an army of bots that had made it far enough into the MSQ to be doing the Central Coerthas phase, which means they had bought the full game.

Even so, you have to consider the luxury items that AREN'T tied to crafting as well. Night Pegasus Whistles? Hunting Hawks before the Diadem overhaul? Anything requiring crafting mats that aren't normally obtainable through DoL/DoW classes? Those will just skyrocket even harder, thus encouraging gold buying even more. It's a hell of a feedback loop. Not to mention the actual effect it will have on each server's economy is largely unpredictable within the context of this game. Apply real world economics to a video game all you want, bots don't exist in a real life market.

It's a hell of a risk to take when there's already one solution players can already take - invest in the gatherer/crafter classes themselves. The devs shouldn't give a damn if people find them boring. I'd imagine they're actually insulted at the notion of people telling them to do something about marketboard prices by going through a huge effort to link server markets together, with reasoning that only really boils down to 'I refuse to participate in half of the content you've designed that other people are benefiting from without any issues, and I want you to create a workaround for me (while I sit here insulting the people that put in the effort to invest in those classes by calling them names such as 'greedy self-centered control freaks - your own words from page 2') even though it won't actually make the market more accessible to the majority of players since people are somehow magically forgetting the fact that the way DoH/DoL classes work is still in a closed loop that pure combat players can't participate in'.

One thing I can already see from a mile away is that such a move would absolutely crash the materia VI market. After all, there's so many more people participating in combat with zero interest in crafting and gathering. Consider the population of DPS in relation to healers and tanks, then apply that to pure combat characters VS people that have everything leveled (although I imagine the population ratio is worse than DPS in comparison to healers and tanks).

Is -possibly- cheaper prices worth killing one of the only reliable ways for those players to earn gil?