The utility of items and Soulbinding

[BillyBones]

I'm not going to bash the game. Its not bad but not groundbreaking either, its a decent game. There are, however, a few things that do annoy me very much.
Inb4: Go play another game, the game is 3 months old blah blah, I know.
Inb4 Nr.2: Second post is going to be some totally irrelevant comment getting 20 likes.

In particular, I would like to talk about the purpose of money and items in this game and about soulbinding.

Personally, I love making money on MMOs. Selling and buying stuff, working hard to be able to afford all the cool items you want, being wealthier than everyone else, showing off even. For me its a huge and very important part of the MMO experience. Unfortunately, in FF14, it is not existant at all. Everything in this game is just too common and cheap. I admit, I'm a huge hoarder in MMOs. I put everything to my bank and feel horrible if I have to throw something away. So I started to hoard stuff in FF14 too. I went on crafting, gathering, fighting and eventually both my retainters and my inventory were filled. The much dreaded moment was there, I had to delete things. So I started checking prices of my items on AH to decide what is to be deleted and what not. Surprisingly, all items I typed in AH were worth.. nothing at all. So I kept deleting more and more stuff. In the end both my retainers were left completely empty, only my inventory had some items left. That's right, I deleted 99% of my items because they were worth crap. Hundreds of items, 350 slots of my retainers were completely and utterly useless. Now IF I ever needed them again for crafting or whatever reasons, I could just go to the AH and buy them again for the same cheap price or mine/gather them myself if I feel like it. And I certainly won't check all my retainers 350 slots to find some item that is worth 100 gil.
My point here is that SE totally went for QUANTITY of items other than QUALITY. And yes, it does bother me. And I'm not even going to talk about the bots and RMTs screwing the markets and undercutting, there are enough topics here about that.

I've been playing since launch and I never needed money for anything other than teleport, repair and other cheap things. I have never been in that situation where I thought "Wow, that's a nice item, I totally want it! But its so expensive, I need more cash!". Have you? I doubt that, since there are no items that are rare or hard to get in this game. Sure, there are the primal materials, but I've already got them and besides, their droprate is going to be higher with 2.1.

You can also use your money to get the lvl70HQ set, which is only marginally better than darklight and still inferior to Af+1 or allagan. Even if you decide to get the HQ set, you won't be able to get rid of it once you get something better. Which brings me to my next point - Soulbinding.

The HQ sets, darklight, primal weapons, everything you ever used will be left to rot in your inventory forever. Its either delete them or let them clutter your space. Now wouldn't it be cool if you could sell all that stuff to other people and get some cash for it? Cash you could USE to buy your own upgrades? Sure it would, for me at least. But no, in this game literally EVERYTHING is soulbound. Even stuff you didn't use or equip. You get a primal weapon or a drop from a chest, and you can't even sell or trade it? That's ridiculous, how does it even make sense?


TL;DR The economy in this game sucks. I'll go get a nice cup of hot tea to calm down. Thanks for your attention.

[Mcshiggs]

The ilvl 70 hq accessories can be on par ore maybe better in some cases than the allegan, and you can spiritbind it and turn it into materia, right now coil is the only place to bond it, but in the future there will be more places. Also this game is like everyother one, learn the tricks learn what sells, and do that if you want money, I can farm up 20-30 raptor skins, take them to mordhona then hq them for leves, get 1500 gil and 48 raptorskins for 15 hq leather, easy money. Again in the future you will be able to display old weapons and gear in your house, and I imagine there will be some sort of trade in in the future for things like darklight gear for gc seals or some type of tombstone. In the 1.0 primal weapons were like they are now, once you get it, it's yours, but after a while they made them convertable and some materia only came from primal weapons, right now with people still gearing up and all that I can see how they don't do this, people would farm them and folks would have even more trouble getting thier first one when they get a fresh job to 50, but I can see this changing in the future with more primals released, older ones becoming convertable and all.

Go back and read old interviews with the production team, they didn't want money to be the factor to how successful you can be in the game, alot of will be for vanity, housing stuff like that, they wanted you to be able to gear up without having to depend on farming millions of gil to be able to be geared enough for the next tier of content, now if you do have the gils, you can take the shorcuts like quintuple melded hq gryphonskin rings for your tank. You also have 40 slots you can sell items in, you don't have to make a fortune with each item, you can sell cheap 1k rings all day long for spiritbonding and as long as you keep refreshing your supply, the gil won't stop coming in.

The type of market system you seem to want is clearly straight from XI, and wow was that bad. It was great if you were there in the beginning and on top of everything from the get-go, but if you started playing 4 years after release, you were screwed if you wanted anything nice, you had you choice of either hunting some nm competing with 50 others for a chance at loot, or farming freaking bee hive chips or something for a week to be able to afford a pair of boots. They want people to be able to start one, two, three years from now and be able to catch up to others in a reasonable amount of time, and not be held back because of the economy. XI saw this, so they started making many, I think even most things untradeable, you could mule them or use them, but once you got it, there is no more selling it, so if your wife wants to borrow your gears for her undergeared tank for her raid, she's out of luck and has to go get it herself now.

[Meleena]

Buy titan wins

[KraggyKor]

I love this game doesn't force me to grind gil in order to be able to play, love that crafters don't have a strangle-hold over me, love the fact that 'playing the AH' is largely impossible, I despise those that do and wish items bought of the AH aren't re-listable.

[Axidrain]

the thing about trading high end dungeon gear for gil is. well. u know where im going with this

[diulalasing]

hmmmm, tea