Item Binding

[valetarkus]

Not quite sure how I feel about this. I don't like how this will kill recycling my gear but it is good news for crafters to make more money (hopefully).

[Valmonte]

For the "People won't buy gear since they can't resell it a few levels later" argument:

People already don't bother with updating their gear before 50, with the majority not spending money on melds even if they upgrade equipment regularly during their leveling, with some extreme cases where people will use the Lv25 GC set all the way to cap.

in 1.0 gear sets would go 5,10,15,25(Rare/ex),35(Rare/Ex),42,50. there was a giant gap where no gear needed to be purchased at all, that itself wasn't so bad until they did the major gear mat changes and stuff. the real issue was and still is too much gear is just being handed out.

[Mychael]

It's an aspect of the game I don't like, but not one that'll ruin the whole game for me. I don't even mind the binding so much as that they're using SOULBIND to manage it.

I realize that the idea is to remove money from circulation. This method will succeed, but it has many negative consequences. Soulbind will affect every single piece of gear, not just selected pieces, so it affects gear that, to be fair, SHOULD be sellable after use.

What do I mean?

• The materia system allows for ever-better pieces to be created. Bound, you cannot continually upgrade to these better pieces without losing. For the consumer, this creates a dilemma: while the triple-melded bow you see now is fantastic, you know that a better one could show up at any time. If you buy it now, you no longer have the assurance that if you find a better one, you can still buy it.
• The materia system creates one-of-a-kind pieces. If you replace a great piece with an insanely good one, that doesn't take away from the rarity of whatever you started with, but that piece is officially lost to the world. This makes rare melds even rarer.
• Rare drops/crafts. Before I start, I know that most rare drops will be untradeable. Nonetheless, some pieces are so rare that even IF they are sellable after wear, there should never be a surplus--HQ crafts, for example, or rare drops from timed open world HNMs (e.g. Herald's Gaiters). This will make these pieces even harder to acquire, but I admit my bigger fear is that SE intends to completely do away with such impossible-to-get pieces.

And some reasons that binding makes me sad in the first place...

• There will be no more, "Well, I'll buy XXX to use until someone sells a YYY."
• A linkshell can no longer keep a bank of items for members to use.
• You can no longer lend your friend gear for hard battles. In XI, I lent a lot of my gear to people who were facing Maat for their first time.
• You are unable to "try" new equipment. If you are unsure which of two weapons will be better, there is no more "test it out," as you are stuck with whichever you try first.

Just some thoughts.

[CoDeWa]

The binding will make it more likely that crafters will be able to continue to make profit from low level crafting. When an item becomes bound it makes it so that item cannot be sold or traded, decreasing the amount of items in circulation. This makes it necessary for crafters to continue making low level gear. The real competition will be the ease of crafting in the game. Since crafting is so simple and doesn't require farming or hassles with inventory space most people will have multiple crafts at level 10-20 fairly quickly. That is going to be what impacts the low level market the most.

[Nayito]

There is good arguments on both sides, and since i haven't played a many MMOs i can't coment on if this is good or bad so i'll just coment on what i read.

I see some saying that crafting will become useles, and i have to agree there, though it'll depend on how good the dungeon, rare/ex, droped gear is. Anyone that plays XI today will tell you that crafring has become useless to the point that farming for mats has become pointless.
Now in XIV 1.0 there were slots that you had to fill them with crafted gear, cause the rare/ex wasn't very good. E.G if you were a THM/BLM you were better of with a crafted/melded head piece than anything else, same was for the legs, there was no good leg piece (except for DL?). If that continues, there might be a spot for crafters, but let me put a situation.
Lets say i don't like to craft, i just like to fight. As it's been stablisshed, we'll be doing a lot of quests to lvl. So we'll have more gear that we can use, no point for crafters there. I got to lvl 50 i got my AF (that for most ppl will be enough for endgame), so no room for crafters there. I got a little money i deside to spend on a melded gear, double meld will be easy to get so there'll be cheap, so i get a triple meld. I'm happy with it and i do some endgame. Some times passes and my triple meld is starting to get old, i'm wanting something with more power. I got the money so i wanna get a quad meld, but wait, there is a problem, what do i do with my triple meld? i can't resell it, i can't give it away to a friend (wich defeats the idea that Yoshi-P had by giving us PLing, to help a friend get tough to play at the same lvl), i can't even pass it to a character in my own account. All i can do i sell it to NPC for set price by SE(a price that does not reflect the value of the item) or i can turn it into materia (a Materia that would be a the very best 1/2 of the value of the materias in it, not to mention the tries it took to make). Now i'll wonder if it is worth it? or my the next time i wanna buy something if it's woth pay X amount for something that i'm gonna get X/10 to 30 or more. That will end up lowering the price of everything crafter/melded because ppl won't be buying that much.
Now crafter's only source of real income will be expendables (Stalone, Schwarzenegger, Jet Lee, ETC), but wait, there's no more arrows, there'll be no bullets, there will be no thrown weapons. Only food and pots, so yay for alchemists and cooks, the rest will make do.


Now the other thing i see is that SE is sending mixed messages with this. In 1 side we have items that once used in battle/craft/gather won't be able to be traded/sold in AH. And on the other we have the Free Companies that will have a commun storage for players put and take out items. So if i take something from the FC's storage is mine for ever? IDK how will this work. This will be a great tool for an ass to grab items that were ment for everyone and steal them or make a simple mistake and screw someone else who might need said item.


And i see ppl saying "we need to destroy items" and where up to some extend this is true, this is bound in the premiss that no new players will come in and old players go. There will always be recicle of players, old players that leave and don't get rid of their things in case they wanna come back, and there'll be always new players looking for gear.
For the destruction of items, i propose 2 Ideas
1) In the real world when you buy something used, you know it's used, and for that you pay less than the same thing new. So i say, put a counter on the pieces, so every time you sell/trade it, it goes down and when it gets to 0 it turns into a Materia. you also have the option to make it into a materia before of cource. the higher the number the more it'll cost, but you'll still have a chance to resell it or give it away when you are done with it, but you'll be more causious to lend it though.
2) As someone said back there about a pirate game that has perma-break of gear. That but you are able to sell it, lend, and give it away. the perma-break bar would have to be quite long but it'll eventually take all the gears out of the game.


That's what i think on the matter, and as a final word i'd like to ask anyone who knows of examples of games where they have this binding gear thing and have a succesfull market for crafter gear and related items (ingredients for said gears) and if you are againt it, provide some examples where the market isn't successfull.





P.S: Sorry for the wall of text XD

[Xenor]

Welcome to the world of MMOs, where you buy what do you NEED, without thinking "oh ill sell it back"
FFXI-XIV were the only MMOs without this feature. You'll get used to it

To me it sounds like other MMOs implemented it as a bandaid for failing economies because they couldn't think of a better way of taking items out of the game. (Or simply copying WoW) Just because something is common doesn't mean it's the best system.

Imagine in real life if you spent £10000 on a brand new car and two years later you wanted a better one and had to throw that car on the scrap heap because you can't re-sell it. You would think twice before burning £10k in future. The same will happen in the game, people won't be willing to pay what items are worth when there is no re-sale value.

Where BoE can be good is mass produced tripe that isn't worth much to begin with, but that's why materia was implemented. Gear is already flowing out of the economy via materia, all BoE will do is put people off buying melded equipment. Self-sufficiency is looking like the way forward.

[Reika]

To me it sounds like other MMOs implemented it as a bandaid for failing economies because they couldn't think of a better way of taking items out of the game. (Or simply copying WoW) Just because something is common doesn't mean it's the best system.

Imagine in real life if you spent £10000 on a brand new car and two years later you wanted a better one and had to throw that car on the scrap heap because you can't re-sell it. You would think twice before burning £10k in future. The same will happen in the game, people won't be willing to pay what items are worth when there is no re-sale value.

Where BoE can be good is mass produced tripe that isn't worth much to begin with, but that's why materia was implemented. Gear is already flowing out of the economy via materia, all BoE will do is put people off buying melded equipment. Self-sufficiency is looking like the way forward.

How does one determine if an economy is failing in an MMO?

[Xenor]

How does one determine if an economy is failing in an MMO?

When supply is a lot higher than demand for the items people want.
When there is no profit left in the majority of crafted items.

I'd say those are the two biggest factors. At the end of the day it all boils down to an over-supply of items in the economy, hence why MMO makers come up with methods to reduce the supply. Problem is there is only an over-supply at the low end. There's no over-supply at the high end (triple melds) so fixing the low end with BoE hurts the high end. Materia creation solves that problem, people destroy their cheap crap and there's a market for the high end stuff. If materia isn't taking enough items out of the supply chain then the system needs tweaking. Make spiritbonding faster.

As a crafter I like to make the high end stuff and sell for nice profit. But with BoE I fear no one will want to buy it. I sure as hell wouldn't pay top gil for a triple melded weapon until I get my relic, I'd make do with a cheap double meld or even a single. If I could sell that triple meld back for a small loss then it's a worthy investment. So what happens to the triple melds then? The prices fall until people are willing to lose that much money on the item, which may well be below the cost of producing it. Once the crafter learns this they will stop producing triple melds for anyone but themselves. It was already hard enough to sell double melded equipment in 1.0 for a profit, I had items sat on my retainer for most of 2012 before I finally decided to hell with it and blew them up by attempting triples.

[Breg]

There are several items I dislike about this change.

Firstly, when I decide to play a new class, I buy new gear every few levels to continue to be useful in a party. By the time I get to the highest level, I usually accumulate over 40 pieces of gear which I may never use again. Previously I was able to sell it all back, but now, with this change, reduced space, and inability to move items to my secondary characters, I could be forced to throw items away. You can argue that they could be broken up into materia and sold, but realistically, low level materia was already inexpensive to start with, and now I fear lesser number of players would even consider upgrading something that will be discarded.

Secondly, there were good reasons to be able to trade gear in FFXI and FFXIV. I used to loan gear to good friends during long absences. I was able to quickly trade that one piece of gear in an instance to a party member so we can get that extra sliver of a chance for success. I could give my gear to a friend that claimed they could do better playing my class, and this was a good way to shut them up lol.

Final Fantasy is the only game I know that allows players to trade or sell back some used gear. It is changes like this that scare me into thinking that my favorite online game is moving in a direction of a lot of cookie cutter MMOs coming out in the last 10 years.

As far as crafting goes, I never had trouble being fairly compensated for making items in FFXI or FFIV, even when compared to other MMOs like Aion or SWTOR. I don’t think this change will affect crafting as much as some people believe.

Since this is my first time posting, it is only appropriate to praise development team for the good job done so far. From what I have seen, the game is 180 degrees from what it was a couple of years back. You guys are the originators, so keep up the good work.

[Kerwin]

I hate gear binding. Will not agree with this idea what so ever... Depending on how drastic the changes are, It might change the way I look at this game for good.