My way to Fix the Markets/Economy

[Wulfies]

So everyone is complaining on how the markets have crapped crashed and singing the chorus to that REM song "It’s the end of the world as we know it". So I thought about how we can fix this. I have seen posts that complain about this, that, and the other. These posts just seem to be addressing the SYMPTOMS not the real underlying problem (at-least in my eyes).

The way I see it, it’s not a matter of the Market Boards/Undercutting/taxes/fees, but more of over-supply and no demand. I hope to address this in my solution below that will benefit the entire community in general.

• The first thing I would do is to revert back to the old v 1.0 style of materia melding. By that I mean, once you get past the "safe" 100% chance of success, if you failed you lost the item you were melding, catalyst, the materia you were melding, and the materia that was already attached. Here is my example from empircial evidence. I burned through about 30+ Woolen Gaskins just to get 1 HQ one that had 3 Materia IVs attached. So what does that equal 30 Pairs of pants and about 61 materia catalysts and about 61 materia IVs. Now that is just for a tri-melded item, look at the costs of doing a 4-meld or 5-meld. People who had that were either rich or un-godly lucky. So doing this will help de-saturate the current market because, using my example, more Woolen Gaskins will be bought (crafters will be happy), a crap-ton a-lot of materia will be bought up (DoW/DoM will be happy), more catalysts will be bought up (DoL will be happy, and as a side bonus, more people will be SBing rather than F.A.T.E. grinding.

• Second thing I would do is have the creation of "super" materia levels. Let us call level 2 "Shiny", Level 3 "Focused", and Level 4 "Bad-Ass". I want this, because as of right now, once you meld materia to gear it would be stupid for you to convert them since you are getting basically a crappy materia for something that might have 5 materia melded. So the theory behind this would be, to create "Shiny" materia, you need to convert an item which has materia attached. The more materia and higher the materia grade you have the better the "shiny" Materia you receive in return. "Shiny" materia would have better stats then regular materia. Now to create "Focused" materia, you need to convert an item that has "shiny" materia. For "Bad-Ass" you need gear converted with "Focused" Materia.

Now, to combat the people that will say there are caps on gear, we allow “Shiny”, “Focused”, and “Bad-Ass” to go over cap. Say “Shiny” is +50% over cap, “Focused” +100% over cap, and “Bad-Ass” removal of any cap.

I still want Tiers like they have now but I want to add Levels. Again this will only benefit because you will be burning though catalyst/materia/gear and making everyone work to get this and it would be fun.

Thoughts and Constructive criticism would be greatly appreciated and welcomed

[Xystic]

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...t-please-read.

[Visgoroth1987]

I agree - there is too much of an influx of items, and not enough demand to keep items selling and prices at a fair rate. I am on excalibur sitting at about 3mil and I think our highest selling item (pie or vit materia) is at 40k? I am clueless as to how to make money at the moment. It would be nice if they introduced new items and made it harder to get certain ones to drive prices back up.
Also I feel like RMT also holds a vast majority of our gil.

[tymora]

#1 won't work because dungeon gear is readily accessible. If it breaks, it just makes crafted items even more useless. Just penalizes crafters even more.
#2 is ok. Don't mind having it around.

[CurrySonic]

Make fun end game crafting quests or things to do.

My example would be a party craft project quest. You supply your own materials to make something for an npc or a new party crafting minigame. At the end you get rewarded based on quality (just an example).

This will increase transactions/unit time or "Amount Gil Traded"/unit time (Basically increasing the economic) because you have to supply your own materials to get a reward or participate in a fun activity. FFXIV has such a fun and unique crafting minigame/system they really should do some FUN endgame stuff with it!

[Wulfies]

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...t-please-read.

Hi Xystic - I am going to have to disagree with some of your post in the link. You are using "Gil in Cirulation" as just the amount that is spent on the MBs. You are not taking into account the money earned through quests and the likes (which I will grant you are small a this time) and money spent on porting/repairs/MB Fees. I believe you are trying to bleed-in "buying power" of the gil along with the "raw transactional gil" changing hands.

To use your example, lets say that 100mm is changing hands each day, we do not know if that is 2 transaction for 50mm or if its 1,000 transactions at 100k. Market implications are significantly different depending on transactional volume. You are right, we as players, do not readily have this information available in an instant, but it is avail through transactional history, its just a pain to gather that type of data in a meaningful fashion. I am sure once they unlock the XML coding we will have people that will try to pull real-time data from the different boards to websites and the likes.

As I have stated above SE has implemented what I call "gil sinks" to effectively pull gil out of the market permanently. I have posted this in several posts, so here they are:


1) if you came over from 1.0 you lost 90% of the gil stored (my tens of millions of gil went to just millions of gil)
2) selling drops from a lvl 50 mob/gathering spot will only get you 10-12 gil at the max. Same with the high end crafting gear (i have yet to see anything crafter made that sells for over 800 gil)
3) Repair costs (till they "fixed/reduced" the rates) were just a way to suck money out of the economy.
4) Teleports! good god the amount of gil it takes to go rom Uldah to Gridana or Uldah to Limsa let alone anywhere to Mor Dhona or Coerthas. (but now they have implemented "Reduced Rates" FC "buffs" to try and dull the pain)
5) Housing - Pricing for this is outlandishly expensive to have at least for the moment and that in 3 months 80% of the FCs will have a "small" house. At least we can be thankful that this isn't as bad as I thought it would be (buying the plot, building the house, and then paying a monthly "rental fees" to keep the house cause that would be just crazy talk)
6) The 5% sales tax put at the end of the transaction to the seller for the "privilege" to sell their wares on the market.
7) the 5% on what I* call "shipping & handling" tax to the buyer because they are buying an item that is being sold in a different city.


Now given the fact that SE is making such a concerted effort to bleed money out of the market we can only assume that we will have market deflation and your "buying-power" of gil will increase. If there is market deflation you will see the "Gil in Circulation" drop but that does not necessarily mean that "the market is struggling"

[Wulfies]

#1 won't work because dungeon gear is readily accessible. If it breaks, it just makes crafted items even more useless. Just penalizes crafters even more.
#2 is ok. Don't mind having it around.

Hi, would you mind explaining what "it" is in your rebuttal to my first post? I haven't had my daily cup of coffee yet and its not that clear to me.

The goal of 1 and 2 is to apply more demand since SE's supply-side economic strategy is blowing up in their faces if they wanted to keep crafting as a viable option in the game. I am probably wrong to think that Yoshi P. wants crafting in the game. After all, it was Tanaka that started by saying that the game will work fine even if you didn't want to do the "smash/boom" type MMO experience.

[Xystic]

Hi Xystic - I am going to have to disagree with some of your post in the link.

Silly thing is, I'm only arguing one point in that entire thread. You can only disagree with all of it or agree with it. You can't say some of it.

All I'm saying is people need to present the gil in circulation numbers in order to support that the economy is doing good or bad.

You can't say, some of it. That is logically flawed.

You are using "Gil in Cirulation" as just the amount that is spent on the MBs. You are not taking into account the money earned through quests and the likes (which I will grant you are small a this time) and money spent on porting/repairs/MB Fees.

Everything has already been accounted for.

If people spend too much porting/repairing/MB fees, they will have less to spend or will be deterred to spend what they have left on the MB. Which will be reflected in the gil in circulation numbers.

If people earn a ton of gil and now have more to spend or earn too little gil from gil generation and have too little to spend, it will be reflected in the gil in circulation numbers.

If people are hoarding gil and not spending, it will be reflected in the gil in circulation numbers.

That's why gil in circulation should be presented as evidence of a struggling economy or booming economy because it accounts everything in to the equation.

[Wulfies]

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...t-please-read.

Silly thing is, I'm only arguing one point in that entire thread. You can only disagree with all of it or agree with it. You can't say some of it.

Silly thing, if you just put a link to a post with nothing else, its hard to understand what you are trying to provide feedback to...

All I'm saying is people need to present the gil in circulation numbers in order to support that the economy is doing good or bad.

Ahhh....now there we go, that is what you are asking....You can present gil circulation, below I argued how it is avail, while not in a form that you can grab at a whim, but still information is there for the taking if you should so want:

You are right, we as players, do not readily have this information available in an instant, but it is avail through transactional history, its just a pain to gather that type of data in a meaningful fashion. I am sure once they unlock the XML coding we will have people that will try to pull real-time data from the different boards to websites and the likes.

Gil in Circulation - Is the total amount of gil being spent everyday. Not the overall amount of gil a server has.

Everything has already been accounted for.

If people spend too much porting/repairing/MB fees, they will have less to spend or will be deterred to spend what they have left on the MB. Which will be reflected in the gil in circulation numbers.

If people earn a ton of gil and now have more to spend or earn too little gil from gil generation and have too little to spend, it will be reflected in the gil in circulation numbers.

If people are hoarding gil and not spending, it will be reflected in the gil in circulation numbers.

That's why gil in circulation should be presented as evidence of a struggling economy or booming economy because it accounts everything in to the equation.

You are defining "Gil in Circulation" as the total gil being spent over whatever time frame you want. You have to include the Fees imposed by SE, since that is money being taken off the table and out of circulation/spent. Money spent on the boards can be likened to a pseudo discretionary funds. You have to pay for repairs (by buying the dark matter or having repair merchant repair it.) You have to pay the tax when you sell stuff on the MBs but you don't have to buy the Rose Gold Ingot that Joe Schmo is selling for 1 gil...


With all that beig said, I go back to my original post first couple of sentences:

So everyone is complaining on how the markets have crapped crashed and singing the chorus to that REM song "It’s the end of the world as we know it". So I thought about how we can fix this. I have seen posts that complain about this, that, and the other. These posts just seem to be addressing the SYMPTOMS not the real underlying problem (at-least in my eyes).

The way I see it, it’s not a matter of the Market Boards/Undercutting/taxes/fees, but more of over-supply and no demand. I hope to address this in my solution below that will benefit the entire community in general.

It not a matter of gil circulation (which i have provided a way of attaining above) but more of everyone and their grandma now has a pocket crafter job(s) that is/are 50 (which is really easy to attain now.) We have a HUGE in-flux of crafted gear due to SE's supply-side economic policies they have implemented. My solution helps alleviate this in a form. I see this as only a good thing because this will only further increase, as you put it, "Gil in Circulation"

I see this as a good thing....maybe its just me

[Xystic]

Ahhh....now there we go, that is what you are asking....You can present gil circulation, below I argued how it is avail, while not in a form that you can grab at a whim, but still information is there for the taking if you should so want.

That's not presenting the information. When we have graduates present their thesis, they do not come up and tell us, Birds fly, the information is out there if you so want it. To support your argument, that's your job to present the information, to lay claim that birds fly or in this case the economy has many underlying problems, you need to present us that information that shows us, the community, your findings are indeed supported. Telling me the information is out there but not telling me what that information indicates the economy is going in is, awkward. Then without even looking or presenting the information, you have concluded, the economy has many underlying problems, with zero evidence and at the same time have proposed ways to address an issue we haven't even confirmed yet.

Which leaves the community at the same spot. We have no evidence currently PRESENTED to prove such claims.

You are defining "Gil in Circulation" as the total gil being spent over whatever time frame you want. You have to include the Fees imposed by SE, since that is money being taken off the table and out of circulation/spent. Money spent on the boards can be likened to a pseudo discretionary funds. You have to pay for repairs (by buying the dark matter or having repair merchant repair it.) You have to pay the tax when you sell stuff on the MBs but you don't have to buy the Rose Gold Ingot that Joe Schmo is selling for 1 gil...

Everything is accounted for in the gil in circulation numbers. It is not at the beginning or initial part of the equation. It is the product of the entire equation. Each one of those factors help determine the product of the equation. If you are failing to see this logic then I feel should not advance this concept any further. This is just the basics and you are struggling to understand that gil in circulation is the product of the entire equation, which means everything has already been factored in. Cause if they weren't, it wouldn't be the gil in circulation.