The Great Depression of Eorzea

[ChameleonMS]

I have no issue with the tax being there. My issue is that the playerbase doesn't understand it. Buyers and sellers alike.
The MB should have the tax built-in to the listing price. Therefore, let's say this is the MB listing for an item:

To build on this great idea. Have two price columns. List price and purchase price. Sort the list by Purchase price for buy convenience, then by list price.

[Sibyll]

MMO economies like this have several issues:

-Everyone is selling the same thing: NQ vs HQ and cost are the only things that differentiate products. Considering that NQ is universally viewed as vendor trash, cost is the only thing you have, which is why the market board is nothing but undercutting.

-Crafted Battle Gear is inferior to Token/Raid Gear: Crafted gear can be on par if and only if you HQ and dump a lot of gil into materia. The fact that the crafted gear requires token mats adds insult to injury because the amount of tokens you'd spend on it would probably be better spent just getting the token gear.

-Mats usually sell for more than the final product: Even if I made all the materials myself, I'd be better of selling the individual materials than the end product because total profit is higher and I a wider range of people will want the mats than the specific item I was going to make.

The real world economics argument doesn't hold in MMO economies. In the real world, everyone can't make equally good products. MMO economies don't really offer the flexibility to differentiate your product from another to offer real competition. The concept of HQ and NQ wasn't a bad idea, but the way it is handled has make NQ just another form of failing the synthesis and HQing being the new normal success.

[Tarta]

The real world economics argument doesn't hold in MMO economies. In the real world, everyone can't make equally good products. MMO economies don't really offer the flexibility to differentiate your product from another to offer real competition. The concept of HQ and NQ wasn't a bad idea, but the way it is handled has make NQ just another form of failing the synthesis and HQing being the new normal success.

If I remember, Star Wars Galaxy had one of the best online economies for crafters especially because you *could* have a better made item than the other guy. Good times. Space ruined the franchise in a way, but that's the story for another day *flies away*

[Sibyll]

If I remember, Star Wars Galaxy had one of the best online economies for crafters especially because you *could* have a better made item than the other guy. Good times. Space ruined the franchise in a way, but that's the story for another day *flies away*

I've heard good things about SWG, but if I recall there was no such thing as dropped weapons and armor. It was all crafted and everything had a durability that would eventually run out. The thing is that for a crafting system like that to work the entire game needs to be designed with crafting in mind. It doesn't work in most MMOs, like WoW, where it's just thrown in as an after thought.

That being said I'd be interested to play a game with a crafting system like that, but I'm not sure how I'd feel about not having raid loot. We certainly wouldn't see something like that in ARR because their design philosophy for crafted vs raid gear. It's really difficult to make crafting a worthwhile venture when you refuse to make crafted gear anything beyond entry-level raid gear, which it isn't even good at being due to the absurd cost compared to previous tier tome gear. Crafters can't compete with the cheaper, superior alternative of Tome gear, especially when melding requires Scrouge McDuck levels of gil.