A Realm Reborn Column: Crafting and the Economy @MMORPG.com

[indira]

keeping one craft will not change anything at all, people will just make a mule to cap the other crafts like WoW & FFXI, etc.
issue is there only 2 qualitys and a fake economy. you either have the super cheap things to sell or the one item thats gonna cost too much.
materia kinda off sets it because melding in version 1 was random, but keeping things random is just a pure time sink.
SE need to overhaul the whole crafting system or the AH will always be like it is. or in worse case FFXI if drop equip is better then crafted then you'll have a empty AH.

[katsujin]

It's actually not "alot" of data to send, 3bytes of data can store a value of over 16million. So assuming only price that would mean 30 records would equal 90bytes, Considering that 1Mb is over one million bytes. 90bytes is not that much data. There are other things to consider but I don't think adding 30 records of sales history would be difficult or affect system performance.

[Mjollnir]

It's actually not "alot" of data to send, 3bytes of data can store a value of over 16million. So assuming only price that would mean 30 records would equal 90bytes, Considering that 1Mb is over one million bytes. 90bytes is not that much data. There are other things to consider but I don't think adding 30 records of sales history would be difficult or affect system performance.

Apologies, I'm misunderstood. I meant that what we have now is 30 and that can be easily manipulated; I was calling for a complete history on re-query (best displayed as in graph-form) so that honest buyers and sellers could see when prices had been artificially inflated. That amount of data being sent out simultaneously from one server to many players would have an impact server-side. I can think of workarounds involving offline data-compilation, but that's getting a bit too deep into the technical side of the issue.

[katsujin]

@Mjollnir hahah, your courtesy has been aknowledged my friend. Yes a complete history can be troublesome, after all it is constantly growing. That is a pretty interesting Idea though, graphs and what not. I would like to see that, just purely for the aspect of seeing such a thing. I'm just imagining individual candle stick charts for each item like what is often used by technician style stock traders. I don't know if that would solve the problem at all as far as economy, but i could see where it might help to stabilize prices a bit. Either way, it would be interesting.

[Ryahl]

First of all, thanks to everyone for reading and commenting.

As to apostrophe-gate, my apologies. Editing is important and bad writing makes it hard to follow the writer's point. In this case, we clearly dropped the ball on one. That's an explanation, not a justification, the "leve's" statement needs to be corrected. If it was at EorzeaReborn, Aela or I would fix it immediately. I'll email Bill and see if we can get a quick edit-fix applied!

I'm pretty sure I have an it's/its disaster near the end of the most recent EorzeaReborn column (thirty days in the sun), but that just came off Google Docs today and I still need a bit of space away from the article before I can edit it sanely. It is hard to edit my own work right after writing (I still "hear" it the way I meant it).

On the Guild Wars 2 auction house. There are a couple of reasons for anonymity. First, it is probably necessary given their cross-server system and size of clientele at play. Second, since they post the quantity demand and value offered (e.g. 10 offers to buy at 24 copper vs. 200 offers to sell at 30 copper), user specific information is drowned out for the sake of data quality. The names in this case are less important than the numbers. You could probably still include user data in a drill-down format, though.

Personally, I like a good auction house. I liked the FFXI blind-model way back when. Given the few AH in the market at the time they made it, the FFXI AH was quite innovative. These days, I prefer the buy/sell variant (e.g. where you can list a buy order as well as a sell order) for simple efficiency sake. It's harder to manipulate the market when both buyers and sellers can enter positions.

I think the real challenge for good crafting is the quest hub. When you have to reward gear via quest, it takes away a market for the crafter/shopkeeper. While I concede the point that low levels tend to be craft barren after a few months, quest hubs run through end-game.

[Ferth]

...
I think the real challenge for good crafting is the quest hub. When you have to reward gear via quest, it takes away a market for the crafter/shopkeeper. While I concede the point that low levels tend to be craft barren after a few months, quest hubs run through end-game.

While this is true, this is what I was trying to get at with my comments on materia.

One thing we really don't know right now is how long the higher levels will take. {{Whoops, wasn't paying attention. Excerpt deleted.}}

It's entirely possible that a character at level 30 could potentially convert a given slot of armor into materia numerous times before they effectively outgrow it. If there were reason to do so, and if the person were proactive about it they could run through far more pieces of armor than the quest givers supply, which would create demand for crafted armor.

On the other end of that, were lower level materia worth pursuing and melding to gear a crafter could make a piece of armor much more valuable and beneficial to wear than the quest reward pieces.

This is a lot of supposition which depends greatly on how the materia system turns out. But I'd like to hope that since the climb to higher levels will more than likely take significantly longer than it did in 1.0 the need for materia melded gear will go up in those interim levels, giving an effective niche for both high value, high quality melded gear and lower value materia fodder.

[HamHam]

There's a lot of concern how gil buyers have a negative impact on the game's economy and rightly so. The surplus of gil only cheapens its value and makes items, gears and consumables very expensive, which hurt the player's power to buy in a consistent basis and as a result hurting the seller’s inventory, creating a stagnant economy.

The exchange of large amounts of gil between players is part of the problem. In RL large amount of money (above 10k) is reported to the IRS. Also, there's a limited amount of money a person can transfer to other ppl per day, there's no limit between accounts that are linked, only outside accounts.

This concept could be implemented in game. Where transfer of large amount of gil between players is limited per day, but there's no limit between your accounts. The account would be linked, so the limit of transfers is carry across accounts, so there's no situation where a player would have a way to have multiple opportunities to have gil transfer multiple times as in comparison with a player with just one account.

This concept could hinder or make it difficult for gil sellers and buyers to flood the market with gil and avoid inflation or slow it down.

This is only one of many methods SE could make gil selling and buying more difficult. I'm not saying this is the only method. Only suggesting this method along with other things SE is already doing to prevent the selling and buying of gil could be used to help combat it.

[Ferth]

RMT can't really be fought with inconvenience. They'll find ways to work around it. If you try to build inconvenience in the game it generally affects the playerbase more than the RMT.

[Mjollnir]

This is only one of many methods SE could make gil selling and buying more difficult. I'm not saying this is the only method. Only suggesting this method along with other things SE is already doing to prevent the selling and buying of gil could be used to help combat it.

I agree, it's a reasonable idea, if a little work-intensive. I would like to be reassured as to what the plan of action is against the existing armies of Lalafell that undoubtedly capped their gil at Cedarwood in 1.0, but I'm hoping there's an intrinsic solution implemented in ARR to prevent the recurrence.

RMT can't really be fought with inconvenience. They'll find ways to work around it. If you try to build inconvenience in the game it generally affects the playerbase more than the RMT.

True enough. From the situation above, a way I could think around it would be for the buyer to be given a reasonably obscure item to list in the AH (where there's would be the only listed) and for the seller to buy it for the agreed amount.

I can't think of a better way than the STFU micro-managing transactions though. I just wish the in-game process was as easy as:
RMT: /shout gil here bro!
Player1: /tell STFU RMT is RMT
Player2: /tell STFU RMT is RMT
<STFU enters RMT name and brings up chat log. IP banhammer>

Of course, much more stuff needs to be done too. I just wonder how high on the list of priorities this is. Perhaps it's just a natural part of an MMORPG economy that crafters just have to account for and move on!

[Ferth]

I think in FFXI's lifecycle there was a period where they were completely unprepared for it. I imagine the best wY to combat RMT is to have tracking tools implemented into the game itself so that data can be compiled on suspicious activity easier.