Destroying Server Economies

[TwistedTea]

Great.. you have Max level crafters quickly.. for.. what?
So.. the price of the harvestable crafting mats becomes generally near Vendor sell prices (if you see someone selling items below vendor prices you should buy them and vendor them for a profit!). And all the crafters out there can now craft items for reasonable mat prices and charge for the HQrotation/time it takes alone.

I really am not on board with the idea that gathering classes are just made to rake in money for putting in time and cycling nodes.

Because some people enjoy crafting/gathering and playing the Market Board?

These are aspects of the FFXIV; FFXIV's market boards are supposed to be player-run economies.

There was a huge ruckus(still ongoing?) about Blue Mage being a limited job.

For me as a crafter/gatherer botters limit how I go about crafting/gathering and interact with the Market Board; for example, gathering niche items, which botters haven't figured out yet/not competing with bots on many items because it is futile,flipping bot listed items,etc.

Also, I already pointed out legitimate crafters/gatherers already switch to flipping when faced with bots. But it becomes harder to flip when bots drive down the price of a whole swathe of items.

RMT is not our problem, it's Squeenix's. It affects individual , rule abiding players very little.

I disagree, it affects server economies and by extension players because RMT generally inflates prices. Combined with bots driving down gil income for legitimate players. After a while, it becomes very difficult to afford certain items as a non-botter. I have seen this happen in other MMOs.

Driven out... to.. what? Not craft anymore because it's not profitable? Stop the goal of having a huge pile of gil.. for.. reasons?

Again, it has been pointed out in this thread multiple times, having gil can bypass tedious grinds. E.g. gearing up for raiding/iLvl requirements without having to go through the tomestone route. Gil is the currency of convenience and time.

[supergiz]

I'd like to hope, but I seriously doubt it if they can't even tell that someone who literally never logs off and is always crafting and/or gathering is botting.

What if they took a system like those mining minigames in the gold saucer. I imagine it's pretty dang hard to bot those successfully. Even harder if they combined it with timed nodes. Just add something very active on high value rare nodes that makes it very difficult if not impossible to bot.

[Lersayil]

...
I disagree, it affects server economies and by extension players because RMT generally inflates prices. Combined with bots driving down gil income for legitimate players. After a while, it becomes very difficult to afford certain items as a non-botter. I have seen this happen in other MMOs.
...

While true the key word on this is "generally". We've had bot issues for a while now, but the prices seem to go down and not up. I would guess that either they are not RMT bots, or not enough people buy Gil from them? (the caveat being: for the moment. Sure, if people start buying more Gil from illegitimate sources it would go downhill fast)

Anywho... you know what else inflates prices? Monopolies, cornered markets, MB flippers and a bubble of hyper-wealthy crafters, forming a market of their own, practically excluding the rest of the playersbase. And contrary to the RMT case, we have examples a plenty in-game for this case.

[Jaywalker]

I'm not really up on the crafting and gathering game, but I grind out all my gil doing dungeons, hunts, stuff like that. It can take a while to earn and don't think I've ever had more than the 400,000 gil range. Most of my world's market board gets unbelievably expensive and it can be near impossible to get stuff.

I was just able to get a glamour I've really wanted using the world transfer system. Still had to grind for it, but I got it. My home world originally had a way pricier one and then that got snapped up before I could get near it.

Idk if this offers any perspective, but for me at least the world visit system has been a relief. I wouldn't necessarily feel the need to world hop scouring for the lowest price if I had millions of gil and this was just a drop in the bucket so to speak. It's just if there's something very specific I'm looking for and struggling to afford.

[Viralomg]

lol @ people not realizing capitalism is the real enemy.

[Krotoan]

Because some people enjoy crafting/gathering and playing the Market Board?

These are aspects of the FFXIV; FFXIV's market boards are supposed to be player-run economies.

I have my doubts about most of the people who set prices actually enjoying crafting, but that's gonna be a pretty subjective argument.
There is a player run economy, it runs on things that are not easily bottable. Things that aren't a pure time to dollar ratio. That's all bots can do. You find complicated crafts that require skill and adjustment as they develop and those will be the markets to "run".

There was a huge ruckus(still ongoing?) about Blue Mage being a limited job.

.. uh? Non sequitur?

For me as a crafter/gatherer botters limit how I go about crafting/gathering and interact with the Market Board; for example, gathering niche items, which botters haven't figured out yet/not competing with bots on many items because it is futile,flipping bot listed items,etc.

Also, I already pointed out legitimate crafters/gatherers already switch to flipping when faced with bots. But it becomes harder to flip when bots drive down the price of a whole swathe of items.

Sounds like you're still running markets. Same bots as always. In fact now you can take advantage of bot deflated markets on other servers to profit back on your home server. There aren't MORE bots just because the servers are accessible now.

I disagree, it affects server economies and by extension players because RMT generally inflates prices. Combined with bots driving down gil income for legitimate players. After a while, it becomes very difficult to afford certain items as a non-botter. I have seen this happen in other MMOs.

I thought the problem was the bots made it difficult to profit? Are the items cheap or are they expensive? The nodes don't run out of stuff, you can get the mats you can make the items and sell them for profit. Bots have been around since 1.0, not a new problem and they definitely haven't killed the economy.

Again, it has been pointed out in this thread multiple times, having gil can bypass tedious grinds. E.g. gearing up for raiding/iLvl requirements without having to go through the tomestone route. Gil is the currency of convenience and time.

Gearing up through crafting is it's own route. Buying all your gear is a shortcut, but not necessarily one I think they intended to be an "out" from grinding tomestones. .. and I also thought all the crafted items were going to be worthless to sell since the bots were going to undercut to hell? The money income will ebb and flow, but so will board prices. As they always have.

[Maneesha]

What if they took a system like those mining minigames in the gold saucer. I imagine it's pretty dang hard to bot those successfully. Even harder if they combined it with timed nodes. Just add something very active on high value rare nodes that makes it very difficult if not impossible to bot.

it is not hard, they simply do this 24/7 with a huge amount of bots and don't care about how much they get, they will simply always do 1 run and never go into "all in/double the amount"(or come up with a script that helps helps them get the most amount possible) like in the gold saucer games and still accumulate enough over time to drive the prices down. this would just make it harder on normal players. even if bots have to sell to npc, its still lucrative for them, ofc they sell on the mb because it works and they can get more gil faster.

ppl saying rmt doesn't effect normal players... why do you think publisher/developer are constantly battling them and banning them, because its healthy for the game economy and normal players aren't affected?

as to destroying the economy, i don't think it will really be destroyed or as bad as some imagine it to be. it always sux when the prices drop for what ever reason, but it also means that crafters will be able to also get some stuff much cheaper and wont need to invest the time to gather it themselves.

i must say i find it a bit amusing that non crafters/gatherers are so happy about dropping prices, even thou it also means they will make less of a profit from their own things they try to sell on the mb and will even need more time to accumulate the needed gil to afford the really rare stuff which is expensive on all servers (rare glamour,furniture,mounts, etc).
also the fact that a lot of ppl care so much about the economy on other servers, especially if they don't even play on those servers.

[TwistedTea]

Anywho... you know what else inflates prices? Monopolies, cornered markets, MB flippers and a bubble of hyper-wealthy crafters, forming a market of their own, practically excluding the rest of the playersbase. And contrary to the RMT case, we have examples a plenty in-game for this case.

Agree with you,which is why I like the concept of World Visit balancing out Market Boards out across the data center in theory.

If bots were not an issue, I'm all for breaking up monopolies/cornered markets. MB flippers are limited by how long an item remains at a certain price/price range.

But many of those hyper-wealthy crafters/flippers do bot,at least from what I've observed on Balmung.

In essence,in one of the possible worst case scenarios, if botting remains unchecked, those who accumulated their gil wealth through dodgy methods will become grandfathered into that wealth.

When the only competition on market board pricing is between bot retainers, legitimate players will earn less and have less spending power. It will become a monopoly of botters instead. This can already be observed in the food/potions/crafted gear market of several servers.

[Neoyoshi]

People are actually buying my fish now that have been sitting on my Fish retainers for... lord the twelve knows how long.

Yay for destruction!

[Krotoan]

ppl saying rmt doesn't effect normal players... why do you think publisher/developer are constantly battling them and banning them, because its healthy for the game economy and normal players aren't affected?

Because companies don't want other companies profiting off their investments without a share.