Visiting other worlds, economy effect?

[HaelseMikiro]

Considering websites are already popping up that track the marketboard prices for every server, either with afk accounts running scanners at the MB on every server or with user input from real players:
1) prices for pretty much everything will approach a competitive equilibrium, approx the same price across every world, as people world hop to buy the cheaper items, and people wishing to sell will have to lower their prices to meet the cross-world price since they aren't even guaranteed to have the forced business of the people on their own world
2) RMTs(or selling content for gil) gain business thru cross-world by purchasing low level items for very high gil prices on the MB
3) Character-creation locks on servers in the future will no longer halt RMT activities on that server
4) the economy is going to take a heavy shift towards being a buyers market as crafters now have more competition. If people think undercutting is or has been bad, stand by for a revelation into the definition
5) tendencies to buyout an entire market of 1 item to reflip for profit will probably become exceptionally rare, as the amount of effort to server hop 7 times in the hopes that you can sell it all before the market repopulates said item will become riskier and less rewarding

Fast-forward to 5.0 and we'll see a shrinking market for high-end items as dwindling profits from excessive competition drive many endgame crafters to spend their time seeking fun in other activities, meanwhile the game will introduce even more ways to earn gil, and we'll experience higher levels of inflation without any effective gil sinks, so prices will naturally go up with the gil supply, hopefully attracting more crafters again. Housing fails as a gil sink due to the finite nature of land, so the only choices SE really has to keep the economy from hyperinflating are to add new effective gil sinks, or to increase MB taxes. They can't keep the gil supply the same or lower it because number bloat makes the players think we're progressing and doing better than we used to and keeps us having 'fun'.

Honestly I feel like adding a separate 'cross-world sales tax' would be the most logical and easiest to program way to help combat plummeting prices and simultaneously remove more gil from the economy.

[Iscah]

2) RMTs(or selling content for gil) gain business thru cross-world by purchasing low level items for very high gil prices on the MB.

I can't see this being a huge problem? The bots won't earn money any faster, and marketboard tax will mean that selling cross-world will deduct a portion of that money from them with each transaction. (Unless they fail to make, say, Limsa@Typhon not detectably a different location to Limsa@Tonberry... but there are still seller fees draining some of the money, just not the buyer fees at the other end.)



Anyway, I'm looking forward to the legal version of this: being able to pass money from my main character to my perpetually-poor alts.