FFXIV the worst economy in any P2P MMO?

[Arkista]

SE needs to add Crafting Items to Myth Tomes that cost 200 tomes each and we need 6-9 of each. Maybe some ilvl95 Crafting gear.

[peaches]

As long as someone can make a profit (even if it's a small one), the economy is fine.

The economy becomes "broken" when one of a few things happen:

1) No one buys/sells anything (because they can make it themselves with relative ease, OR, because there is nothing worth buying because better things are more readily available via questing/dungeons)

2) People do buy/sell things, but, only at a net loss to the crafters who made the original item
.

Well, by your definition the Alchemy market is completely broken, haha. We're very close to selling items at a loss, and a lot of the times we do when people undercut an item to 1/2 of what everyone else is trying to sell it for.

[SolArisa]

miners can't make gil because of bots

Not true.

Gatherirng classes don't make gil because everything drops like crazy, and there is zero demand (except by people who are leveling crafts). It takes maybe 20 minutes to farm an entire stack of ores, resulting in up to 33 ingots for up to 33 weapons / armor / etc. Before leveling out of a zone, you will probably have over 1'000 of them. But there's no use for it, best thing you can do is carry it straight to the NPC. Not just because buying gear does not make sense, because the game is so shitty easy that you can even do the so-called high level dungeons naked if you bring a bit of skill instead - Yoshi-P even throws all the level 5-45 gear at people as quest rewards and thus floods the markets, so that only HQ has a very slight change of selling.

Forget blaming the phantom called RMT. This is bad game design, our "producer and director" is responsible, not some chinese guys who could easily be firewalled based on their IP range. And don't forget that if you can't sell ores, the RMT don't sell them either. I would not be surprised if this economy crash is something Yoshi-P is happy about, because it harms RMT.

[Moirear]

In addition to the OP's points, here's what's breaking the economy's back:

• People do not use the function to see the history of sales and undercut because they think they're setting the price too high, when there just is little demand for an item
• Housing prices are too high, so a lot of people are farming and grinding and not willing to invest/buy in anything, because they are saving up for their FC to pay the exorbitant prices for a housing plot
• Sale lists are sorted by lowest price to highest price and then alphabetically; so people will usually end up buying from anything that's higher up the list
• People are bad at math :P
• People who use their own mats and shards and don't do the math of charging for those in a finished item's price, or even for the repairs needed for their crafting equipment

[WizardShotTheFood]

• People are bad at math :P

That was really the only entry you needed there.

[Millimidget]

Though I do think it's kind of hilarious that the best way to make money is to run around in dungeons wearing trash gear, which is so counter-intuitive to how one would normally play a game it makes my heart hurt.

If by trash gear you mean gear to trash for materia, yeah that's sad. They've really screwed the pooch on that one, because people will always now resort to using dungeon finder to spiritbond gear, and any changes would either be just as beneficial to using the duty finder for that or far worse especially in terms of crafting.

I can only assume most of the whining results from being unable to easily generate 1M+ gil per day off the market. Demand is low as players leave the game, which is inevitable and better addressed aggressively than ignored. Demand is also low as players put off larger purchases in reaction to the free company housing prices, which also increases money demand, increasing supply and decreasing prices as players try to convert "wealth" (items) into currency. Within a few months the markets will settle down as players begin feeling they've approached the amount they need for personal housing, probably assuming the old 3-5x questline income blah blah nonsense.

Of course, personal housing will very likely cost more than free company housing, because there is the potential for so many more units sold and it seems they consider space a premium, players will have had months to grind daily gil fonts, and so far it's obvious that free company housing has been a bust and players would prefer to save for personal housing, which means the expected decrease in the money supply never really occurred unless those prices solely target the 0.1%.

Personally, I'm spending. Eventually, gil fonts will leave most average players richer, and I'll make my money back in a few months once I've capped crafting, and more full 50 players have left as they burn out; I'm maybe halfway there.

In the meantime, there still seem to be ways to make upwards of 50-100k an hour from crafting/gathering. I don't know what more you want.

[NefGP]

LOL miniscule?

I'd say our prices averaging 4x more than my friends' on non-legacy worlds is a lot more than "miniscule".


The CURRENT cap is 1 bil. Not the case back in 1.0, especially back before leve sharing got nerfed and people were making (combined) hundreds of thousands of gil through leve-sharing/linking per run. It was completely out of hand and is the major reason there's so much gil in circulation right now. Granted I'd wager most of those accounts aren't even active anymore but clearly a few are, and some of those guys can single-handedly buy the most expensive houses and still have plenty of gil left over. That's why the prices for the biggest plots are astronomical.


Your other points are just garbage. There's no lack of demand on Excalibur, it's just devolved to a race to the bottom. PvP items went from 40k+ down to 1k or less on day 1, and that's for HQ.... It never fails too. Any time an item spikes up a bit, people stupidly flood the market trying to cash in until it's completely devalued, and then it just rots there at rock bottom. It's a complete buyers market right now and it's annoying.


And being able to see the exact prices *is* bad. In XI you had to more or less guess when undercutting, making it a truer auction as you could potentially lowball and get an item cheaper (and this was also the only real way to call out undercutters. Now you can simply just look up the competition and forcibly lower the rates and drive others out as people are currently doing. Virtually every 2-star HQ item right now is sold at either a loss or break-even at best.


EDIT: Further proof that the demand is there and people are just being dumb, is in the sales history - turnover rates are still pretty decent on Excalibur, but prices keep dropping. Logically that doesn't make any sense, as prices should go up as demand increases but there's just an excess of supply and gil (and stupidity/recklessness) and it's destroying the market.


What we need are crafted iLv90 items to really be competitive with endgame gear using mats that have to either be farmed on DoL and/or dropped by NMs, not simply bought with tokens (to keep them rare and thus valuable) in addition to higher SB rates. The SB rate nerf was a huge mistake alongside +SB buffs and items doing virtually nothing to speed up the process (I've run around with +5 and FC buff and seen no difference whatsoever in rates.)

Having a higher SB rate means more materia being sold (which is fine given the risk of losing them being so high on forbidden melds) and more goods being sold to be converted into materia. It's win-win. And I still think Food was much more potent in 1.23 and could stand for a buff/wider variety of stat increases to make it a more appealing market. What was so bad about having +STR & Attack from meats anyway?

[Aenarion]

LOL miniscule?

I'd say our prices averaging 4x more than my friends' on non-legacy worlds is a lot more than "miniscule".

Funny, someone else posted actual numbers from his alts in legacy/non-legacy worlds, and the difference is around 20-25%, where is YOUR number?

The CURRENT cap is 1 bil. Not the case back in 1.0, especially back before leve sharing got nerfed and people were making (combined) hundreds of thousands of gil through leve-sharing/linking per run. It was completely out of hand and is the major reason there's so much gil in circulation right now.

No, get your facts straight. The gil cap back in 1.0 is 999,999,999, aka 1 billion:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...-Cap-Reduction

Originally Posted by Bayohne View Post
Q: Will you wipe gil from our characters or change the currency with the launch of ARR?

A: No, there won't be a gil wipe. However, we do currently have plans to decrease the max digit by 1 (999,999,999 > 99,999,999)

/micdrop


So no, people can't "Literally have hundreds of billions of gil", not unless they have hundreds of characters with capped gil

Your other points are just garbage. There's no lack of demand on Excalibur, it's just devolved to a race to the bottom.

Econ 101 to NefGP, Econ 101 to NefGP, you need to come back for your remedial class!

The whole reason why there CAN be a race to the bottom, is because there IS NO SUFFICIENT DEMAND TO SUPPORT THE PRICE LEVEL. This is basic middle school economy. There is no inherent monetary value to any item in the game (outside of npc vendor price), so the only real value is what the market values it at.

If there is sufficient demand, then the price will not fall. For example, PLEX in eve are sellling generally for 550-600 million isk these days, you can try to "undercut" and sell a thousand of your plex for 300 mil if you want, the market will just swallow up all your cheap plexes and the price will rebound in hours to its original price point, because there is enough demand for PLEX.

And being able to see the exact prices *is* bad. In XI you had to more or less guess when undercutting, making it a truer auction as you could potentially lowball and get an item cheaper (and this was also the only real way to call out undercutters. Now you can simply just look up the competition and forcibly lower the rates and drive others out as people are currently doing. Virtually every 2-star HQ item right now is sold at either a loss or break-even at best.

So you ARE dependent on deceiving others to make your margin, that's all that need to be said tbh. Go ahead, go to wall street and tell the NYSE that people shouldn't be able to know the exact prices when they buy and sell stocks, and see how fast they laugh your face into a psych ward.

EDIT: Further proof that the demand is there and people are just being dumb, is in the sales history - turnover rates are still pretty decent on Excalibur, but prices keep dropping. Logically that doesn't make any sense, as prices should go up as demand increases but there's just an excess of supply and gil (and stupidity/recklessness) and it's destroying the market.

Your assumptions are only logical when you ignore major tenets of economic principle, including one you managed to include in your own statement. It doesn't matter if demand increases (which it will as price drops), if supply continue to vastly outpace the demand (which they are, especially with the vast increase in philosophy tomes injection in 2.1).

L2economy, and please, never try to run your own business, or manage your own retirement.

What we need are crafted iLv90 items to really be competitive with endgame gear using mats that have to either be farmed on DoL and/or dropped by NMs, not simply bought with tokens (to keep them rare and thus valuable) in addition to higher SB rates. The SB rate nerf was a huge mistake alongside +SB buffs and items doing virtually nothing to speed up the process (I've run around with +5 and FC buff and seen no difference whatsoever in rates.)

Having a higher SB rate means more materia being sold (which is fine given the risk of losing them being so high on forbidden melds) and more goods being sold to be converted into materia. It's win-win. And I still think Food was much more potent in 1.23 and could stand for a buff/wider variety of stat increases to make it a more appealing market. What was so bad about having +STR & Attack from meats anyway?

Those were one of the few things that provided a constant demand for goods in 1.0, and it was an enormous mistake on SE's part when they removed it in ARR, and did not put in anything in its place.

[SolArisa]

Well, it has to be expected.
It's clear Yoshi is not developing a mmorpg, it's a single player theme park featuring some instanced co-op.

MMOLW4PI (Massive Multiplayer Online Lobby With 4 Player Instances).

Maybe SE should not just remove the RPG part from the title, but also the MMO. Honestly, the only thing massive about this game is the amount of shattered hopes of legacy players, and the boredom.

[FelisC]

I truly do not understand pointing to "undercutters" as the problem with an economy. I would think the suggestion above to keep prices anonymous is trolling if I haven't seen so many people espouse the same position. The fantasy that if only all sellers would collude to keep prices high that we'd have a vibrant system of exchange makes such little sense I can't believe that people take it seriously.

The fact remains that the economy is terrible because the vast majority of items have little to no value to most players. 2.1 increased supply dramatically for the few holdouts (materia, tome-crafted items) and gives me little hope that those in power can correct the problem, if they even view it as one.