DevTalk: GIL SINKS! Ideas to Stabilize the Economy and Curb Inflation

[Xenor]

I don't see how most of the things I listed would in any way impact new players. It's mostly optional content. The situation for the new players would be the same as the situation for us right now.

Once you accumulate more gil, you can participate in the side content at your own leisure.

Most of what you mentioned is content or things that make life easier for people. New players will want to be a part of this to keep interested. Your suggested gil figures are nowhere near enough to be effective unless they combine it with the changes to leves and NPCed items I mentioned.

Ideally the game servers will have more gil going out than coming in until the right amount of gil exists and then gil sinks can be reduced to a point where gil coming in is the same as gil going out. I think this is how XI's hyper inflation was dealt with but I may be wrong.

Problem now is if you change the value of gil too much people who are stockpiling it become insanely rich while people who aren't fall further behind because it will be way harder for them to close the gap. It looks like we'll have to live with the big numbers.

People in that mindset have already destroyed any utility that gil could ever have in this game. Better go just leave gil as relatively worthless and never make it a character-defining element at all.

That is, you may have 200 million gil...and who cares. Is that going to screw crafters? Man, crafters were screwed the minute the townie crafters could do nothing but sit on their rears and be fed materials to level. Crafters don't deserve millions, and the crafters with millions don't deserve to functionally have millions.

The whole system is a crock. In FFXI, gil got you a little bit of fame and a little bit of power in the early years. The mistake years. But at the end, gil didn't amount to a hill of beans unless you were in the running for a relic.

And what is a relic? A miserable pile of secrets.

Gil as a means to achieve power in a MMO is an archaic element. I know a lot of hustlin' ballers have gone about scrounging all they can for the last 6 months, but really. Gil should never really matter in this game.

But the only way to make gil worthless is to make items worthless or untradable so that you don't need much gil to buy anything. Gil is currently useless because every item is dropped/gathered/crafted like candy with the exception of +3s and certain NM drops. A healthy economy is a nice thing in an MMO so to make everything untradable or drop/made like candy would be disappointing. I want to see an economy similar to XI's early years (before the hyper inflation) where battle players can farm good mats that have value and crafters can turn them into items that have value. But the supply of those mats is just right so that crafters can't mass produce them.

Anyway about insane gil totals. The way I see it, if you have 100mil gil in XIV you would have had 10mil in XI. No one would have cared seeing a player with 10mil, you needed 100mil to impress people in that game which would be like having a billion in this game. So items that will eventually cost 30-50mil in XIV won't be seen as expensive as the price tag suggests. They'd be the 3-5mil items XI had. Expensive but affordable if you've worked for gil. The funny part is we're all faffing around selling items for 50-100k that we'd not waste our time making and selling for 5-10k in XI. Big numbers are an illusion of wealth.

I don't think the first generation of crafters had that much advantage. I was just off the top of the curve (something like the 5th 50 goldsmith) but I've made more gil in the past 2 months than I did in all the months before that. My income is higher now than it has ever been despite there being a flood of rank 50 crafters. I've not even made a crab bow yet if you think that could be why (though they're coming this week). There's that much gil on the server you can make 10mil per week with little effort. But that isn't going to last forever. Best stock up now while you can.

[Rentahamster]

Most of what you mentioned is content or things that make life easier for people. New players will want to be a part of this to keep interested.

Most of what I mentioned is just side stuff that won't make a rich person uber powerful compared to a poor player. It's mostly cosmetic.

Also, the entry to the new content I proposed hardly costs anything to start. You'd only want to spend more money once you're high rank anyway.

[Jinko]

I honestly think that they should divide everyones gill and the cost of most things by 10 as I'm not a fan of this big number economy we have right now.

Odd cause back in Alpha/beta the amount of gil we got and the cost of items was a lot less, it made no sense to increase it at the time.

I wonder what their reasoning behind it was. :S

Problem now is if you change the value of gil too much people who are stockpiling it become insanely rich while people who aren't fall further behind because it will be way harder for them to close the gap. It looks like we'll have to live with the big numbers.

Rome wasn't built in a day, you change it now to effect it further in the future,

Those people with lots of money will be rich but over time they will have to get repairs, buy new gear or make it, buy new materials for crafting, spend it on any number of the gil sinks listed in the OP.

Over time their stockpile would slowly decrease.

If I was SE I would reduce every ones giil by 10 times, if they are going to correct it they best do it now whilst they have a handful of player, sure they will piss off some people but I think its necessary.

As for the amount incoming and outgoing that is somthing for SE to fine tune over time, as I said before they should employ a professional economist to sort the issue.

[Peregrine]

If they severely restrict gathering on the next bubble so that it takes three gatherers to fuel one grinding crafter, not the other way around, than many of the crafters with 300 million gil will either not be able to ride the bubble like they did the first time or if they intend to they'll have to pay out the rear for grinding materials instead of getting them in exchange for piece of garbage synths that are only rare because the crafter is at the fringe of the bubble.

When goldsmithing unlocks, it'll either be grinding with mythril or gold. Within a week of unlocking, the server's gold will be spent, and if crafters want to get above level 54 they're going to have to finally pay the pipers hopefully.

When smithing unlocks, it's even worse. It'll be silver for 3 levels sure, but then either twice the consumption of GSM with mythril or electrum, darksteel of which I'm one of the server's biggest repository at a whopping two ores...or steel which a crafter can burn the entire server's supply of bomb ash in a day and get maybe 3/4 of a level if the tnl really does go up to 130,000 at 51.

All of the crafters and gatherers are assuming that the economics that fueled 1-50 aren't going to apply to 50-75. Gold isn't brass. Steel isn't iron. They should use what they already have as gil redistributors--materials. And then they should only raise the level cap by 5 levels every 3 weeks so certain crafters can't ride too far ahead of the bubble and thus gain monopoly. They should also either nerf a crafters' ability to marry up the quality of their materials or enhance the effect of HQ materials, because crafters don't pay enough for HQ materials, and yet bump THEIR HQs up by millions of gil if they get lucky. +3 gold ore IS lucky. It should be worth way more than NQ gold ore.

Once gil is more fairly distributed among crafters, gatherers, and battlers then prices will at least be fair and not rigged to shunt all gil to crafters eventually. Once prices are fair, then it's just a matter of setting them at what is reasonable with gil sinks versus gil presses.

[Rentahamster]

If I was SE I would reduce every ones giil by 10 times, if they are going to correct it they best do it now whilst they have a handful of player, sure they will piss off some people but I think its necessary.

You sure it's necessary? I mean, the relative wealth ratios will still be the same as it is now, just reduced by a factor of 10. YoshiP specifically said that he does not want to rollback progress in a past letter. He was talking about EXP and SP specifically, but I'd suspect that his feelings towards earned gil would be similar?

We might as well just be resigned to this current high level of gil to be the baseline, implement measures to keep it stable, and then just be resigned to this baseline as long as it can keep steady.

As for the amount incoming and outgoing that is somthing for SE to fine tune over time, as I said before they should employ a professional economist to sort the issue.

Definitely. EVE Online does this and their economy is rockin'. Square Enix needs to follow suit. Honestly, one more person on the payroll isn't gonna cost that much, and the benefits would be great.

[Bayohne]

Fret not, as the dev. team is well aware of the large, gil-laden purses of the populace. The team knows about the abundance of coinage that fills the markets, and also about the storages filled to the brim with currency! The team knows that inflation is a serious issue if left unchecked and you can bet that they have plans in place to address this in the future.

[Jinko]

You sure it's necessary? I mean, the relative wealth ratios will still be the same as it is now, just reduced by a factor of 10. YoshiP specifically said that he does not want to rollback progress in a past letter. He was talking about EXP and SP specifically, but I'd suspect that his feelings towards earned gil would be similar?

Thats the thing nobody would be losing progress as such as it would be done across the board, everyone would be treated equally and yea your right it doesn't really fix anything in itself but it would make items appear less expensive. (even though they would be the same value wise)

I guess I just don't like the fact that everything costs tens of thousands of gil, like I said before I think the prices and amount of gil they had in Alpha/Beta was better.

[Cairdeas]

Fret not, as the dev. team is well aware of the large, gil-laden purses of the populace. The team knows about the abundance of coinage that fills the markets, and also about the storages filled to the brim with currency! The team knows that inflation is a serious issue if left unchecked and you can bet that they have plans in place to address this in the future.

I vote for a Gambling System that requires huge amount of gil for chances to get non-tradable items that are usable. :P

[JayvirDeforte]

I vote for a Gambling System that requires huge amount of gil for chances to get non-tradable items that are usable. :P

^This. Let us bet on chocobo races

[KoontaKintay]

^This. Let us bet on chocobo races

i second this