Open Suggestions for increasing trade

[CurrySonic]

Opportunities to make gil are low and feels like its getting lower. In addition there are less active buyers. The overall loss of demand has caused goods to be worth next to nothing.

I would like to stress that undercutting is not the problem. It is the process in which the price of a good shifts so that the supply equals the new demand. As demand decreases the price of the supplied good will also decrease. When demand is increasing you'll find undercutters to miss-out because, for example even if you set the prices to 5% higher than the lowest price it will still sell as there are more buyers than sellers. Since our pool of buyers/transactions is shrinking, sellers undercut to "catch" the few buyers available.

People just don't buy as much as they used to, and there are not as much people anymore. Yet there are more lv 50 crafters/gatheres/producers. Our marketplace is simply facing a lack of trade/buyers.

So dear readers, how do we make it so people will buy more stuff?

[CurrySonic]

My suggestion:
1. No more omnicrafting. With ilvl 90 crafted gear coming, please make it so our characters can only specialize in one or two craft classes for 3 star crafts.
2. Useful craftable consumables.
3. New recipes use existing gathered/crafted components. We have tons of gathered items available useful for only 1 recipe, most only have a transaction every 3 days. (Ex. Dart Frog)
4. Some sort of Crafting Dailies Hand-In.... But in a more fun and rewarding way than our chore-like leves.

[Vespar]

Excuse me while I ramble to get these thoughts out, who knows maybe it will help SE at some point. Anyways here goes...

@OP, While I understand your view on undercutting. The real problem is that there is too much supply and not enough demand. It takes maybe 10 minutes or less to gather a stack of nearly any material on a high level gatherer. It seems like once I put that stack on the market for the same price as the person ahead of me, I sit there for the next few days watching people undercut my matched price and "re-matching" theirs just so it will hopefully sell.

SE has some serious restructuring to do on the market boards and supply and demand. The Economy is pretty messed up right now and with how much everything else costs to get such as housing or vendor item prices, the amount of gil being made from general gil sources is no where near enough to meet OUR demands. I hated world of warcraft, but I think SE should look to that game for tips on how to let us generate income, they have a really good auction design and gear sells for a fairly decent amount (or atleast it did when I played Wow, may have changed now though).

Anywho, as far as RMT go, we can't just take away gil making sources purely because they'll abuse it. Like I said in a previous post on another thread, gathered materials once had a sell price higher than 1 gil to vendor, much like fish do, and yes RMT may have used that for gil. But they'll do ANYTHING for gil, so no gil making source is safe. So what do you do? Take out money entirely!? Close off all gil making sources!? No, you remove the RMT aggressively. Use any means to eradicate them. SE has done a great job removing RMT thus far but I think they can still improve and streamline their processes. (but thats a point for another thread) Back to what I was saying, I hope they'll consider bringing back the original sell pricing for gathered items so folks who don't craft have some means of making gil besides quests, dailies and praying their stuff sells at the market. (and Yes I know treasure maps are good too, but I believe most FC's use it to make money for housing/furniture, so at the moment its not a major source of personal income for many)

[Sparky]

The 'too much supply and not enough demand' is definitely what I think is going on.

There is not enough Gil in circulation. People have been saying this would happen for months, but the introduction of housing has sped up the process. Whatever Gil is in players' hands is being saved for housing. Can anyone seriously say that there's no link between the housing being introduced and the crash in prices?

Blame the lack of profitability in the markets on what you will; RMT, Undercutting, multi crafting. They are just convenient diversions from the real issue, and that is there still aren't enough Gil sources to supply the kind of prices that people want to charge for their wares. For so long as people cannot reconcile what they earn with what they spend, then it is only going to get worse.

[Axlle10]

SE has already stated that the economy is not their top priority. prices will be sky high on new crafts coming off of patch 2.2. Then when it gets closer to 2.3 they will be dirt cheap much like they are now. This is what they expected 2.1-2.2 to be, and it is what 2.2-2.3 will be.

Sadly i don't find much use for making gil these days. If you think about it what is really the only thing to spend gil on. Houses, thats it. gear can be easily obtained now and with 2.2 caps being removed i70 goes straight out the window basically. Unless they make some of the gear BiS for i90s this gear will not sell for crap anyways, except to the soft-core players that cant complete some coils.

[Vespar]

There is plenty to spend gil on. Not everyone crafts, so alot of people still require gil for materia, low-level gear, food and consumables, etc. If you do craft, alot of folks still require gil to buy certain mats they themselves may not be able to get, also, repairs at 50 take their toll.
For example, I have about 50k and after buying food for coil runs and repairs (sometimes in excess of 1k), I find my 50k now dwindling to 45k, and I expect that will eventually fall to 40k and so on. I have gathering classes but since I'm ALWAYS undercut I cant seem to make enough money to reconcile what I must spend, so it is becoming a vicious cycle with no gain.

[itschowda]

My suggestion:
1. No more omnicrafting. With ilvl 90 crafted gear coming, please make it so our characters can only specialize in one or two craft classes for 3 star crafts.
2. Useful craftable consumables.

#1. Agreed. I do like the crafting system where mastering all crafts can make you a master craftsman/woman, but at the same time it makes it so that everyone that put in the time can make everything. Maybe it should be made that you choose a specialty, then some really good recipes are unlocked for that specialty.

#2. Agreed. Alchemy right now feels pretty useless other than the cross-class skills obtained. There might be one or two recipes that high end guilds use (like Mega-Vit potions), but that's about it. For Culinarians, we don't have the stats yet to maximize on the high level food's potential stat gains.

[itschowda]

My suggestion:
3. New recipes use existing gathered/crafted components. We have tons of gathered items available useful for only 1 recipe, most only have a transaction every 3 days. (Ex. Dart Frog)
4. Some sort of Crafting Dailies Hand-In.... But in a more fun and rewarding way than our chore-like leves.

#3. The difficult part is that good gear is easily obtained through dungeons of all levels. If the restrictions on materia melding were lifted a little, demand for crafted gear with melding would increase. Maybe adding recipes that use materia could be good as well.

#4. Technically they exist already in the Grand Company Provisioning missions. The problem is that you are rewarded only with GC seals and experience, which in turn are relatively useless at the higher levels. It would be nice if there were level 50 leves that required non-star level 46+ items that reward a decent amount of gil.

[Sparky]

When you think about how things work in the real world, it sort of doesn't make sense the way things are at the moment. We are experiencing what you might call a 'Square Enix enforced recession'.

In this game, any and all Gil that you spend (aside from face to face trades with other players) includes a percentage of Gil that is destroyed by the mechanics of the game. If you buy an item from a vendor for example, then 100% of that Gil is destroyed, never to re-enter the economy ever again. If you spend Gil on the marketplace, up to 10% of the trade goes towards tax. Again, the Gil is destroyed and will never re-enter the economy.

This directly contradicts what we know is true about real world economics. Shopkeepers sell items but they buy stock, therefore the money keeps moving along, however NPC vendors are just an exit point for Gil. Governments tax sales in the real world, so while they stockpile currency, the currency still exists and can still be spent. In this game, all tax revenues are destroyed.

This causes a significant problem. In order for the economy to remain functional, the sum of all Gill spent received and kept by players must equal the sum of all Gil both in circulation, and entering the game, be that through quests, sales to vendor, or new players etc. I can guarantee that when the new players stop coming (they are already slowing down), then the economy will crash unless SE think up ways of balancing the Gil leaving the game with the Gil entering the game. And to cap it all off, players are expected to save millions of Gil for housing, if they want a house. So players who do have Gil are not spending it.

I liken the current flow of Gil to a swimming pool with a massive hole in it. If the pool is losing 1000 litres an hour, then a simple hosepipe isn't going to stop it from drying out. You could chuck in an extra bucket or two of water (new players and their Gil), but ultimately the pool will still be empty in a week or two.

So SE do not want massive stockpiles of Gil, and I understand that. However, they can not then justify extortionately large prices for housing because it is causing a detrimental effect to the economy. The very mechanism that would allow people to stockpile Gil is unfortunately the very mechanism that is needed to keep the economy alive. The game needs more Gil fountains to balance out the Gil sinks. In the real world, people can earn money to spend by doing their respective jobs, but in this game the only realistic way to 'earn' Gil is to craft and sell. Imagine a world where everyone was a shopkeeper! Yes that is ridiculous isn't it?

[itschowda]

In this game, any and all Gil that you spend (aside from face to face trades with other players) includes a percentage of Gil that is destroyed by the mechanics of the game. If you buy an item from a vendor for example, then 100% of that Gil is destroyed, never to re-enter the economy ever again. If you spend Gil on the marketplace, up to 10% of the trade goes towards tax. Again, the Gil is destroyed and will never re-enter the economy.

If you're comparing the game to real-world economy, then you might be forgetting about the minting process within the game. Gil is minted when you vendor trash something, kill mobs in higher level dungeons (AK for example), participating in a fate, completing quests, the list goes on. The high housing prices aren't exactly a detrimental effect on the economy, they're just a way to remove stockpiled money that had no intention of re-entering the economy anyways.