The Devs have no idea what they are doing with FFXIV’s crafting and economics..

[Jojoya]

Yes facts good point I'm always poor, I can't buy MB too much price........

So why are you always poor in a game that's throwing gil at you for doing almost any content other than PvP or Gold Saucer?

It's not unlike real life. If you work (do content), you get paid. If you hang out at the neighborhood park (Limsa Aetheryte) doing nothing but watching people, you don't.

I've got an alt isolated on another data center. She's hit 80 on her combat job but hasn't finished Stormblood MSQ yet. I've earned about 10 million gil on her, primarily from selling quest rewards she doesn't need and items brought back from retainer ventures on the MB. I did end up spending a lot of that on gear as she was leveling (no access to the right tomestone vendors because she was behind her level on MSQ) but she's still got over 3 million gil right now. If I was playing her more often, she'd have even more.

Probably the best way to make gil if you're not a hardcore crafter is to join treasure map parties. I can clear 200k gil alone in a 2 hour party, and that's not including the value of all the item drops I also get.

I love it when people who don't know a thing about what goes on internally say "the developers dont know the thing they do as a profession." /s

But economics isn't their profession. Game design is.

Several years ago, WoW players questioned the Blizzard dev team about why the in-game economies were such a mess. The response from Tom Chilton (the Game Director at the time) was no one on the dev team had taken more than a basic economics course in school so they didn't really know anything about it. They just designed systems to let players trade things around then left it up to players to work out the economics on their own.

It's pretty much the same here, with the big difference between FFXIV and WoW being that we have a limited number of MB listings per character where AH listings in WoW are unlimited. It stifles competition in FFXIV, which allows sellers to drive up prices due to limited availability.

But you also see player lack of economics knowledge displayed on the MB as well. All those bat fangs for 2 gil using up a listing spot instead of the player choosing to sell more valuable items. Things listed below the sell to vendor price when the player could just vendor them and make more gil.