Gil is worthless.

[KisaiTenshi]

this complaint is nothing new, but neither has anything been done about it. were still 3 years on from the first set of gil sinks and people have nothing to spend there money on. i have now accumulated 300Mil, but for all the worth it has, it might as well be 300gil.

The reason it's worthless is because RMT exists. If you let players trade everything (most green gear is bind-upon-pickup, pretty much) the price inflation just escalates until the server can't deal with the numbers, and players have to resort to bartering items-for-items.

In an ideal situation, the game wouldn't have 60 different currencies. All the tokens we get from raids would not exist, the only the gear would be dropped and the dropped gear would be sold on the marketboard. But then people would never be able to obtain 90% of the gear because it comes from too-difficult-of-a-raid, and likewise can't equip stuff because of the level locks. Basically the way things work now isn't perfect, but it ensures that people have to play the raids to get the gear rather than buy it without playing it.

The worst aspects of earlier MMORPG's were always around obtaining money in the game when the game generates infinite money.

How MMORPG's "should" work, and how they "can only work" are pretty far apart.

For example, all the stuff people throw on the marketboard that are just regular monster drops. Well if you fight 100 monsters to get 100 of an item, you should get 100 items, not have it be a random drop that results in you having to fight 500 monsters. When you sell things you should be able to sell it on the market board for the price you want, or NPC it at the "present" marketboard price. Likewise NPC's should 'run out' of items if no players are selling to NPC's, and adjust their prices based on number of items remaining in the global NPC inventory. Thus ensuring that players can have something to "sink" gil into.

However MMORPG's can't work that way because players will collude and buy all the NPC inventories of items needed to craft. Thus ensuring an escalation of RMT activities.

The flip side of this is the game can't make all the mounts and fashion accessories in the game cash shop only, without having to be non-tradeables. Because if you allow people to sell cash shop items to other players, you create a back door RMT market. Ideally everything in the game should be always be found "in the game" without the cash shop. If something is an a seasonal event, then yes, that can go be in the cash shop afterwords. But those events should come back annually otherwise people get FOMO and if the items were tradeable people would hoard seasonal event items.

The problem with currencies in this game is that it's overtly complicated. "gil" is for things involving NPC's, and trash items you pick up to sell, thus crafters basically get all this stuff for next to nothing, and make a lot of money selling things that almost nobody actually "needs" since the NPC shops have the same items. If there existed a mechanism that the NPC shops selling gear actually "bought" it off players on the NPC board if it's cheaper than their own price, that would make the economy function better.

But it's far too late in the game's life to refactor gil. They would have to do what they do with tomes and require exchanging gil for new gil every expansion pack to correct for inflation, and that would result in people getting mad that their money has been devalued.