Aggressive Gold Sinks

[MoroMurasaki]

Like, to say this is to help the little guys is kinda silly.

They are non-essential items, nothing here is needed for anything but vanity/status. It doesn't hurt anyone to not have them or have to wait for them because you get no actual benefit from having them. I thought this was exceedingly clear from the original post and subsequent explanatory posts but I guess not?

Taking gil out of the game will lower prices on the MB because everyone will have something they're striving for so those crafting and gathering moguls will keep selling their wares instead of realizing they're sitting on 700m gil and there is no where else for them to go with it barring the occasional 20m top at the launch of an expansion/patch.

I think this is a wonderful idea with far-reaching benefits and frankly I think it's been well explained. I'd wager the naysayers either still don't understand somehow or feel that they will never have that much gil so they don't want other people to have shiny things they can't have. While I don't expect to break into that gillionaire market myself I see no downside of other people who have invested the time and energy to do so having some pretty trophies for their efforts.

[Zojha]

I think this is a wonderful idea with far-reaching benefits and frankly I think it's been well explained. I'd wager the naysayers either still don't understand somehow[...]

Or maybe they just have a higher understanding of economy.

It starts with the very basic question: Why do prices go up if there is more money around?
The answer is: Because people are able and willing to buy at a higher price.

That means that people need to buy items in order for them to affect prices. If people don't actually pay higher prices - for example because they aren't buying the items in the first place, which is common among self-sufficient people - then the effect the dead gil has on the prices is nil. If you aren't willing to buy an item at all, having more money isn't going to make you willing to pay a higher price for it and thus, prices may even fall in spite of inflation. Just look at all those items going for 1 gil on the market board, they are the best example. In spite of having the money, nobody is willing to pay much for them, so prices are down. And they stay down, for years on end, even though the monetary supply keeps rising.

What exactly do those super rich people buy to affect prices so much? I can tell you: Not much, or else they wouldn't be rich. They are largely self-sufficient and make their items themselves and make items for others on top of it, which causes money to accumulate at them. That's why they are irrelevant for pricing and sinking their gil is pointless as well. The gil sinks actually need to compromise people's ability or will to buy stuff to affect pricing, i.e. hit those who aren't self-sufficient and have so little money that they need to think twice about a purchase. Cruel, but that's how it is.

What is very relevant to pricing is competition on the market. To drive down prices, you want more people selling any given item to drive price competition via undercutting to lower prices. How? SE likes to make items obtainable via other means, like putting them into retainer ventures or hoards. That always causes prices to decrease dramatically, so long as the content is relevant. You can also make them obtainable from a vendor, tomes or whathaveyou, you can make the recipes easier, the mats more abundant or whatever. This is what you really need to do if you want to lower prices substantially.
Balmung's market board is a great example of that, much as crafters around the globe hate it for its undercutting tendencies.

[kikix12]

Taking gil out of the game will lower prices on the MB because everyone will have something they're striving for so those crafting and gathering moguls will keep selling their wares instead of realizing they're sitting on 700m gil and there is no where else for them to go with it barring the occasional 20m top at the launch of an expansion/patch.

It won't. That's the point. These items are valuable and they would be bought, but they are also one-time use. If someone did reach a cap reasonably quickly in the first place, they will reach that cap reasonably quickly anyway.
And to begin with, people that reached the cap and no longer are involved with the market board (since they don't need anything there) in no way affect the prices in the first place. Quite the opposite. If they will suddenly lose half of that money, you will ADD their gil to the gil in circulation as they will try to get back to the cap. As long as their capped gil is not used though, they are a non-issue. That's why new items like glamour and orchestrion rolls will start high, until those moguls buy them, but then go down in price drastically. Since those rich people will no longer buy them...cause they have it already and their gil is no longer circulating.

And you seem to have ignored what I said as well. Putting things with such massive prices will lead to promoting gil-buying, and that will increase the bots and the gil generated. It will backfire, since it's a band-aid used on a chest-wide cut. The problem is not with lack of large expenses. The problem is with lack of constant expenses, and the cheaper those constant expenses will be the more people will use them. An army of people buying cheap stuff will remove more gil than a handful of people buying expensive stuff. That's part of the reason why a successful subscription game like WoW or Final Fantasy XIV still have a place in the world.


Things offered need to be consumables. A potion that restores 50TP with a price of 20 000 gil and 10sec cooldown will remove more gil in few days than a mount that costs 750mil will in few months. After all, it would need to be used only 37500 times to pay for the price of one such mount. With 10 000 players, that's 3,75 use per player. And that quota may be done in less than an hour. Heck, the rich players themselves may "eat" through dozens of them in a single run of whatever content they prefer.

Want something that doesn't give any sort of advantage (even though it cannot be called advantage, if it is easily accessible)?! A potion that removes death penalty and, if it does, restores 20% of HP, MP and TP. Since every content can be finished without anyone ever dying, it would only make mistakes less punishing, rather than give actual advantage. If your group is not up to par against the enemy, this won't help you. But if it is, it'll lessen the pressure a bit. And it will still see frequent use. Have it sell for 50 000-100 000gil and the rich players will use it on every death, while the poorer will use it in harder content when they see a chance of victory. But it will be used.
Alternatively, in a similar notion, they can sell a potion that revives characters, similar to Phoenix Feather in Palace of the Dead. It would save the healers mana they shouldn't have needed to use, but at the cost of the DPS's stopping their attacks, so not like it's completely free either. Or, just save the healers mana if it was the healer using it. But keep it limited to one per battle per player (no need to limit their inventory), and more deaths will still force use of revival spells.


Think about it. Teleportation and repair costs are "small", but they are used constantly by everyone in the game. There are hundredths of millions of gil sunk every single day. And they have no visible effect on the market. Do you really think that one-time expenses of few hundred gil would have any more than a two-three day long effect?! The one that does not understand the system is you, not the nay-sayers (though some of the nay-sayers don't understand the system either, to be fair, thinking that removal of gold doesn't drop the prices even if it's large and constant).

[Anarnee]

They are non-essential items, nothing here is needed for anything but vanity/status. It doesn't hurt anyone to not have them or have to wait for them because you get no actual benefit from having them. I thought this was exceedingly clear from the original post and subsequent explanatory posts but I guess not?

Except the stuff on the MB is optional too. Like... There is literally nothing on the MB that you NEED to play the game. The only thing this would do is take dev time away from creating items that we all can enjoy, and funnel it into something that only a handful of individuals can enjoy.

And where if I really like an item that is hard to get right now, I could raise 10mil in a little while, but now if there is an item that I like it would be 200mil.

I understand the OP, I still say it makes no sense.

[MoroMurasaki]

Except the stuff on the MB is optional too. Like... There is literally nothing on the MB that you NEED to play the game. The only thing this would do is take dev time away from creating items that we all can enjoy, and funnel it into something that only a handful of individuals can enjoy.

And where if I really like an item that is hard to get right now, I could raise 10mil in a little while, but now if there is an item that I like it would be 200mil.

I understand the OP, I still say it makes no sense.

There are things people go to the market board for because they can't get them any other way. I would love for you to show me a crafter that didn't purchase gear or mats during the leveling process, I'm quite confident they don't exist.


Your speculation as to the number of people enjoying the proposed items is 100% irrelevant because you have no statistics on the number of players who have the requisite resources.

Your concern about liking an item and not being able to get it is similarly pointless - there is nothing stopping you from spending your time playing aimed towards a new goal. If you don't enjoy that kind of play then you don't get that item. This is no different than being unable to have the Alte Roite mount as a non-raider or unable to get PvP rewards as someone who doesn't PvP.... nothing is stopping you from doing those things just like nothing is stopping you from amassing a fortune and spending it on a sparkly pink kitten minion that flies by farting rainbows.

[Anarnee]

Your speculation as to the number of people enjoying the proposed items is 100% irrelevant because you have no statistics on the number of players who have the requisite resources.

If my speculation is irrelevant then so are your concerns about there being to much gil in the economy, as I'm not seeing any hard statistics from you, op or anyone that is for this idea. This is all just speculation about the state of the economy, and my opinion as to why it shouldn't be a thing is just as valid as your opinions on why it should be.

The difference in this and getting stuff from other content is if I want to I can easily put a group together to farm those items and work towards it much more easily.

Having a handful of sparklies will not do anything to the people that already amassed a fortune, but it will mean that people that would like those items will potentially be 100x hard to work towards than they would have been if they were just another crafted item.

Also, as I said you don't NEED to buy anything off the MB, not gear or mats. It is completely possible to do it solely by making and gathering everything yourself, buying things on the MB is a convenience, so people do it, that does not equate to being able not to do it.

If SE thought that one time lavish purchases were a good idea I imagine they'd have kept the old housing prices.

[Vhailor]

If my speculation is irrelevant then so are your concerns about there being to much gil in the economy, as I'm not seeing any hard statistics from you, op or anyone that is for this idea. This is all just speculation about the state of the economy, and my opinion as to why it shouldn't be a thing is just as valid as your opinions on why it should be.

That's not entirely true. Hard statistics aren't necessary in a case like this; one simple observation is: nobody ever lacks money for the essentials. No player has to pause their progress and focus on farming Gil in order to progress, repair gear, or regain the ability to Teleport freely. That means that simple every-day activities, on the whole, bring in more money than players need - which means that the economy is constantly gaining Gil. Whether or not you think it's a problem right now, an imbalanced system will create a problem eventually, and SE should act to introduce more Gil sinks to remedy the problem.

The difference in this and getting stuff from other content is if I want to I can easily put a group together to farm those items and work towards it much more easily.

Having a handful of sparklies will not do anything to the people that already amassed a fortune, but it will mean that people that would like those items will potentially be 100x hard to work towards than they would have been if they were just another crafted item.

I agree with the sentiment here, though SE is clearly willing to gate sparklies behind things that significant number of players find objectionable. The entire Mog Station is an exercise in this; want one of a variety of sparklies? Go spend extra money. It's not fair, but it's the way it is. I do agree with you, though.

If SE thought that one time lavish purchases were a good idea I imagine they'd have kept the old housing prices.

I agree, and I share your sentiment here as well. One-time lavish purchases aren't a good direction to go in.

[BillyKaplan]

No player has to pause their progress and focus on farming Gil in order to progress, repair gear, or regain the ability to Teleport freely.

I'd like to know what you're basing that on because I'm one of those players who occasionally gets that happening to them on my alts. Between repair and teleportation those things can add up and not all my alts are job/story potions with a starting fortune of 300k.

[Anarnee]

snip

I don't think that we should be struggling to pay for the basic features of the game though. Things like repairs, and teleporting. Those were things that were a problem in 1.0 and we see how that went. People couldn't afford to do some of the harder fights because of the repair costs. No one should lack money for essentials. This is a game. I shouldn't be fretting about if I should run another dungeon or not because I might not make enough back to be able to repair.

I don't know about anyone else, but despite the "influx" of gil, supposedly chasing away all the crafters because they're completely capped on gil, and have nothing else to do, the prices for new sparkly items on my server have pretty much remained at a pretty steady constant for the years I've been playing. The only time that I see it effected is at the very tail end of a patch before a new patch, because a lot of people are taking a break before the new patch. This is always a good time to make a little more on items. Other than that First week the items up for 20mil, and the next week it's down to 10mil, before long, it's half that. If it were a problem, there would be some shift in prices somewhere.

I'm just really not convinced that it's necessary to worry about, and I'm sure if it does become a problem SE will think up a better solution. They've been adding a lot of little things here and there through the patches to sink other forms of currency into, like MGP and especially GC credits, which for a long time I felt was lacking use.

One would think if the main currency in the game were in trouble they're definitely add things to rectify it.

I do appreciate your thoughts on it though.