Please let us buy gil since it's not pay to win.

[Colt47]

They sort of ran into an issue with the economy in the game, actually. The problem I've seen is that the player base has moved heavily towards casual group content vs savage raids, ex fights, etc. This includes historic fights like Thordan and Rav. So while this has resulted in some really high prize items, it's also made other items basically impossible to acquire. On top of which, there's basically no gil sink strong enough to combat Eureka at this time. I'm pretty sure the game designers thought that materia would serve as a gil sink, but there's way more people in my own position that just sell materia to NPCs and others because they don't feel like running around to an NPC just to upgrade the quickly outdated endgame armor.

[Remedi]

They killed materia market the moment you could recycle materia, get it from eureka, get it with clusters and hunting seals and generally giving tons for free during SB levelling.
The materia market is literally crying on my server, I personally used to sell materias once now it's really not worth it, I used them to pentameld my gear and that's about it.

Frankly I never had to rely on anyone from SB launch for food/potions/craft, which honestly is a bit problematic as I said

[alimdia]

That's a nice theory, but I've seen how silly the prices have gotten on servers for things as simple as low level materials that are easier to gather, or even mid-30s greens (I checked a few minutes ago since I'm currently subbed to that game as well, and the price for a level 40 green plate piece was like 400g), because of the impact the token price has had on players trying to afford it...and that's in a game where the in-game currency is typically generated as a faster rate than what you see here (more sources that generate new gold).

Excess of currency creates inflation, not this. Things are priced as high as people are willing to pay for them, and no one is gonna pay 10x for a mat they could just gather themselves. Try to force a low level mat to a high price and watch how you're undercut back to a low price.

[Jojoya]

WoW has numerous very expensive items that are purely for vanity or minor convenience, and even uses a "Black Market AH" with rare items that sometimes come from no other source and go for hundreds of thousands of gold...

Inflation is still an issue that got and stayed worse after they released the tokens. It doesn't work nearly as well as you think it does.

Vanity items are only as good a gold sink as the appeal to the player's vanity. If only a few players have an interest in the item, then it's not effective as a gold sink.

Inflation in WoW has nothing to do with the tokens. It has to do with the huge amount of gold that can be earned from gold missions that only take a couple of minutes a day.

Tokens don't exist to curb inflation. They exist to keep players engaged in the game that struggle to earn gil/gold/whatever game currency and to fight illicit RMT currency selling (which happens because some players in need of game currency are willing to pay for it).

[Berethos]

Excess of currency creates inflation, not this. Things are priced as high as people are willing to pay for them, and no one is gonna pay 10x for a mat they could just gather themselves. Try to force a low level mat to a high price and watch how you're undercut back to a low price.

Yet certain materials and items in WoW stayed at a specific price range (despite more and more gold being brought into the economy) - based on what people were willing to play - UNTIL the token was added. As prices for that climbed, prices for the other items that had been lower also began to climb.

Maybe it was all a coincidence, though I find it unlikely that items would just happen to jump in price that much (we're talking a 10x jump or more in price) at the same time as the tokens were added after being largely steady for years.

[alimdia]

It's not a coincidence, but you're attributing it to the wrong cause. This is the reason:

that's in a game where the in-game currency is typically generated as a faster rate than what you see here (more sources that generate new gold).

If you increase the generation of gold you'll get inflation, this is why in FFXIV servers with more bot-generated gil everything is expensive, but in Balmung and JP servers everything is cheap, there's a low amount of bot-farmed gold in those servers.

There's another game called Dragon Nest where a content glitched and people could generate something like 10x more gold than normal and at no limit, a week later and the hyperinflation was visible in the market, the price of everything went up close to 10x because more gold was circulating the market.

Something like a WoW token wouldn't generate gold so the risk of inflation is near zero as long as SE keeps gil generation as it is right now.

EDIT: I also would like to mention GW2 where there's an official gold to cash currency exchange system with an algorithm that changes its price based on supply and demand, yet for all these years the economy is handled with very small amounts of gold, with the most sought items being only a couple thousands of gold and the majority of items ranging from under 1 gold to 100 gold. In GW2 the only thing that can cause inflation is scarcity of mats.

[Vstarstruck]

That's a nice theory, but I've seen how silly the prices have gotten on servers for things as simple as low level materials that are easier to gather, or even mid-30s greens (I checked a few minutes ago since I'm currently subbed to that game as well, and the price for a level 40 green plate piece was like 400g),

alimdia is correct, and also correct with the counter to this. There is some low level stuff that is simply rare so people pay a lot of gil for it, like emperor hairpin in ffxi (only that had 2 reasons for being a lot there, reason 1 it was rare plus it was still used at level 75, max level. I do not know when it got phased out exactly but ya) Low level item does not always mean cheaper.

FFXIV even does this, ever notice the effect SB had on effervesent water? It went though the roof because SB synths go though it like... water? It is crazy.

The problem with sub tokens in this game has a few problems though. 1. MB is a mess, and needing to spam undercut, 2. a lot of people have gil hoarded esp career crafters. So if sub tokens where made, hyperinflation is bound to happen because that horded gil will be circulated. I am not sure if this is an exact problem, but it runs into the next reason. 3. Housing. the shortage of housing people still try resell and hoard them under FC name, the problem may be less now, but if you suddenly have these sub tokens, I do fear insane bidding prices on reddit for second hand housing.

So I would like to see the tokens in this game, so gil is more circulated but, FFXIV's economy just has too many problems atm.

I find the term pw2 odd. I mean... what are you winning really? PvP is the only competitive game mode, and its gear is standardized.
gil in FF14 is largely worthless unless you want to buy a house.

If you really do not understand, why not read some posts explaining it? Retainers are P2W, just because you do not see it as "competitive" does not change the fact it is P2W. You are paying real money for an advantage, it is problematic people can't see this or understand. That advantage goes to career crafters and people that want to focus on making gil in the game, no matter how worthless it is to you, some people like seeing 2 + gil cap retainers.

You pay real money for more sale slots at once, 40 vs 180, 40 vs 200, 320 vs 1600, etc, the difference of paying extra and sub base is a big difference, maybe even more so then selling "PvP" potions because this ant no "5%" increase in damage, this is a 500% increase.

[Berethos]

alimdia is correct, and also correct with the counter to this.

alimdia is not correct, because alimdia is ignoring some of the additional context related to tokens in WoW.

The amount of gold that can be obtained in Legion did not increase significantly enough to account for the kind of spike in prices that many of the busier servers see. It did cause a bump, but a number of external elements (such as being able to convert the tokens to Bnet balance and thus buy other items from the company) served to increase demand for the token.

Can you guess what happened next?

Token prices went up. AH prices for many items went up (including many that, as I have noted before, had stayed steady for years despite the slower inflation caused by increased sources of gold with each expansion), despite there not being a significant change in gold sources outside the increase seen the previous year when the expansion launched (note that the spike occurred less than a year ago, while Legion launched over a year before the spike, so it wasn't a shift caused by the new expansion).

Do you really want to sit there and tell me the two aren't related? That those level 30 greens that were once 40g just happened to, in the last 6 months, jump to 400g? That it's not players trying to make enough gold to buy the tokens at the new price, leading to an economy that prices new players out of buying many items they once could? That allowing RMT has zero impact on the in-game economy?

[Vstarstruck]

alimdia is not correct, because alimdia is ignoring some of the additional context related to tokens in WoW.

The amount of gold that can be obtained in Legion did not increase significantly enough to account for the kind of spike in prices that many of the busier servers see. It did cause a bump, but a number of external elements (such as being able to convert the tokens to Bnet balance and thus buy other items from the company) served to increase demand for the token.

Can you guess what happened next?

Token prices went up. AH prices for many items went up (including many that, as I have noted before, had stayed steady for years despite the slower inflation caused by increased sources of gold with each expansion), despite there not being a significant change in gold sources outside the increase seen the previous year when the expansion launched (note that the spike occurred less than a year ago, while Legion launched over a year before the spike, so it wasn't a shift caused by the new expansion).

Do you really want to sit there and tell me the two aren't related? That those level 30 greens that were once 40g just happened to, in the last 6 months, jump to 400g? That it's not players trying to make enough gold to buy the tokens at the new price, leading to an economy that prices new players out of buying many items they once could? That allowing RMT has zero impact on the in-game economy?

This is why you are wrong:
The form of the post hoc fallacy is expressed as follows:

A occurred, then B occurred.
Therefore, A caused B.

When B is undesirable, this pattern is often combined with the formal fallacy of denying the antecedent, assuming the logical inverse holds: Avoiding A will prevent B.

that simple.

FFXIV has this problem too, gil gained is too high compared to gil sinks, that simple, if you are seeing a huge hike when they came out it is the same reason as my number 2 reason I gave for ffxiv.

Also same as FFXIV, I want to venture a guess people came back to join in new expansion. Everything skyrockets in FFXIV every time a "major" patch comes out, and things move much quicker, just on the simple fact changing supply and demand and having more gil in circulation (horded > active) FFXIV sees this effect with each major patch and your asking why you can't see such effects in wow?

Why do you think IRL money changes vale against another counties like every minute? it is the same reason, how much that currency is being demanded, relative to its supply. (Every time you convert a currency for one for another, it impacts demand a bit and the future values for one for the other)

So with that said, alimdia is correct. (though a bit off about how much inflation it will cause, it def will happen, for the reason I gave. But it has nothing to do with the token itself, but more with the problem of FFXIV's economy will show it more, just because all that horded gil will be in circulation.) So she is right about the source what causes inflation, but wrong about how much inflation you will see if these tokens released. I guarantee you inflation will be a lot worse here then wow because of the amount of gil horded because how bad the gil sinks are here. 10x would not take 6 months to happen here, it will take 6 days.

why? inactive accounts will go live in light of this news, more activity in general + the horded problem. You will see insane hyperinflation for the first few days to maybe a few weeks if they should release this. FFXIV's economy is extremely volatile, so much so it can mimic IRL stock market or currency exchanges. case and point? FFXIV's glam weekly thing. prices go though the roof on stuff it takes, esp if it is limited access mat like those limited to airships, those go though extreme high hikes if it takes something from a source like that. We are not talking 5x or 10x, we are talking 100x to 1000x overnight because of it.

[JackHatchet]

WoW has bad inflation due to old raids and those mission tables. That has absolutely nothing to do with the game token.