Visiting other worlds, economy effect?

[Musashidon]

EDIT: If you didn’t watch the livestream yourself, how can you be sure that one person’s translation is correct? It would make ZERO sense to be able to purchase items from a different server but not sell. Those 2 goes together.

i can look for it in a minute but these two actually dont go together.

to sell items you have to use your retainer which you can't use summoning bells on other worlds.

while it was said you can use the MB directly meaning you can buy but not sell.

but i will look into it for the exact thing.

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/threads/379384

here is the digest in the video it is said by yoshi p and his official translator at 44:30

[Asunna]

Thank you!!!! <3

[Beckett]

I don't believe this will heavily (if at all) effect day-to-day transactions. Very few people will bother visiting another world to buy a stack of logs. It will definitely have an impact on big ticket items, like the /shiver emote, as people will be more than willing to travel between worlds to save a few million gil.

On the other hand, this also means more potential buyers. I've often searched for things on the MB that haven't been listed in days, weeks or months. I would gladly buy them if they were available, but since they aren't, I'm SOL. With the World Visit system, now I can visit your server and give my money to you!

Yea people underestimating how lazy players can be. Seen people selling npc goods on MB for double/triple the cost no problem.

And on the flip side, people will put things up on the marketboard for far less than they could get for selling it to an NPC, because they never bothered to learn that the default price listing is the NPC price, and that there is another option literally in the same menu that lets them sell an item directly to their retainers instead of putting it on the MB.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

But it's already the case within a server. And sometimes it's not so much of a bad thing to maintain some balance, not necessarily putting everything overpriced.
I'm keen to believe FFXIV's economy is mostly balancing itself quite smoothly, and opening acces to other worlds would introduce a larger scale balance, and maybe end up with some kind of data center-wide MB.

Except that isn't what's happening. As Kage mentioned previously, you have a series of botters destroying markets because they're able to list things at incredibly low prices since they aren't putting in any effort to actually make the items. With people able to visit other servers come 5.0, this will only prompt more activity for botters. I'd have far less an issue if prices were cut down due to player driven competition. After all, that is what a free market should accomplish. When it's a bot program SE refuses to do a damn thing about however, it's more than a little frustrating.

Not to sound too melodramatic, but if the bot problem persists unabided, it could very easily result in end game crafting no longer being a thing. There just wouldn't be a point putting all that effort into crafting when you can buy things dirt cheap. Will that happen? I certainly hope not. But SE has to actually give a damn about botters to help mitigate things.

[KageTokage]

I tried to sell mainstream items on Cactaur for a time, but between an annoying undercutting bot constantly stealing sales of crafted gear and the food/infusion markets being totally flooded by crafting bots, I got sick of it and gave up pretty quickly.

I found a niche selling obscure glam gear not many people bother making, but that market quickly became competitive likely because other people decided to back out from selling the high demand items like I did.

[Kaoru_Nagisa]

Honestly so long as Balmung's market balances out so crafters can actually make a reasonable amount of money for things they make, I'm all for it.

Yeah we're a buyer's market and that's great for poor people. But the problem is, a lot of crafters also tend to be poor people because we are simply so bloated with more supply than there is demand. As a nearing-omnicrafter, I would seriously like to be able to make more money than what is possible now outside of the highest end gear or glam/housing items. If that means prices get driven up, I'll see it as a necessary evil.

[alimdia]

Honestly so long as Balmung's market balances out so crafters can actually make a reasonable amount of money for things they make, I'm all for it.

Yeah we're a buyer's market and that's great for poor people. But the problem is, a lot of crafters also tend to be poor people because we are simply so bloated with more supply than there is demand. As a nearing-omnicrafter, I would seriously like to be able to make more money than what is possible now outside of the highest end gear or glam/housing items. If that means prices get driven up, I'll see it as a necessary evil.

We'll see, the thing with Balmung is that while you make less per item, you also sell items much more often than a smaller server. If tomorrow Balmung prices were to match a smaller server due to the influx of world visitors you'd be making far more gil than someone in a small server. If a weapon is 400k in balmung but sells often and 1m in a small server but rarely sells, now I have to lower my price to 400k to match Balmung, but this won't really make more buyers magically appear, people already know balmung has the lowest prices and will go straight there, you'll be selling dozens by the time I sell 1-2.

Smaller servers and servers unaffected by botting will be hit the hardest here.

[Final-Fantasy]

So I noticed that selling on other servers will not be permitted, however BUYING will be. I'm wondering what kind of effect this will have in the long run.

My initial thoughts were this:
1) Everyone will go to bigger servers in order to make purchases, since supply is larger there and thus prices are lower. This will leave small servers struggling, even if they were to adjust their prices since the bias will have been firmly planted that purchasing cross server is best. Even if smaller servers were to match the price, players might go to check the big server first and see it's the same price so meh. Why not just buy it there since you're already there?

2) Perhaps supply on bigger servers will dwindle and prices will increase there, due to the higher influx of players purchasing from there. This may lead to increases in prices which would make poor players unhappy. This would also create more gil on larger servers, thus further devaluing gil. At the same time, it moves gil away from smaller servers.

And,

3) Bots will ruin the economy of the entire game. Obviously my previous statement probably won't happen in this case (as far as the supply dwindling and prices increasing goes).


But maybe I'm overthinking it. Maybe most people would prefer to stay put where they are and would see purchasing on other servers to be too much of a hassle? I'm not sure. What do you guys think? Would you make the trek to a bigger server to check out prices and see if it's cheaper? Especially for big ticket items? How about for items that you buy frequently (mats, food, etc)? Would you check smaller servers?

On Zalera, the economy already feels quite dry. Things tend to be way overpriced, so I think prices could stand to drop. However, even when prices are quite low, the volume of sales still remains quite stagnant for many things. I'm concerned that this change will make it even worse for us on smaller servers and am considering if I should just jump ship and swap over to a bigger server?


What are your thoughts? Do you think this will be good for small servers? Big servers? All servers??? What are your plans?

Well, see this is never a bad thing, more competition is good for everyone. Supply and demand will determine prices across the datacenter. I had hoped that they would added a cross-world market board, and they did look at this, but instead we get to buy directly at each worlds market board, which is great. One reason this is great is, on one world you might never see an item for sale, but its available on another, now we can finally get said item, or offer something that someone can't find on their world.
The economy is not moderated, so it can never be free of exploitation, Just imagine if in real life you could print real money to buy whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted it.

[KageTokage]

I'm not sure you can even call it "competition" when these bots are often running literally 24/7 and churning out crafts/gathering the whole time. Not even the most hardcore, dedicated of crafters could keep up with them since they actually need sleep and stuff like that.

Don't underestimate the sheer scale of their operations, either, as I've seen organized FCs that are packing over a dozen of them.

Overall, all I can see happening is legitimate crafters getting utterly screwed over by the price "balancing" and the vast majority of populace won't actually care because they're consumers, not producers, which lamentably lowers the chances of SE ever considering this a serious issue

[Final-Fantasy]

And how do you know they aren't legitimate players that enjoy making Gil, just because you sell cheap, doesn't mean you don't make a fortune in time.
For example, i often find things to make and sell because only one or two people are making an item, but they want to extort a huge gain, i will then make some and sell for 70% less, i still make a nice profit.