Problem: Items are Worthless

[Solipse]

[Deleted response to Peregrine - there is valid discussion later in this thread, please keep reading.]

[Haru]

This happens in every MMO, it's a by product of people wanting the best items and flooding the market to make them.

You cannot avoid it and never will unless there is influx of demand, as weapons do not break they will always be available..

Today there are 200 +1 bows
Tomorrow there are 300 +1 bows
Next Week 3000 +1 bows..

To bad there are only 2000 players so the demand for this is now worthless..



EDIT: What about making the repair materials cost a working bow..
NQ bow can use a normal item (say crab shell)
+1 requires 1 NQ bow
+2 requires 2 NQ bows
+3 requires 3 NQ bows

Silly idea but this would reduce your so called flooding.. Although it wont fix the prices I imagine they would stay low.

Real life economis mean that if you have a house for every person there would be no housing market.

[Amineri]

This happens in every MMO, it's a by product of people wanting the best items and flooding the market to make them.

You cannot avoid it and never will unless there is influx of demand, as weapons do not break they will always be available..

Today there are 200 +1 bows
Tomorrow there are 300 +1 bows
Next Week 3000 +1 bows..

To bad there are only 2000 players so the demand for this is now worthless..



EDIT: What about making the repair materials cost a working bow..
NQ bow can use a normal item (say crab shell)
+1 requires 1 NQ bow
+2 requires 2 NQ bows
+3 requires 3 NQ bows

Silly idea but this would reduce your so called flooding.. Although it wont fix the prices I imagine they would stay low.

Real life economis mean that if you have a house for every person there would be no housing market.

It's a novel idea! I never call an idea silly, because often the "silly" ideas serve as the basis for other ideas.

Two issues I see with your proposed system:
1) You would be making the repair material a non-stacking item. I think this would further kill a lot of peoples inventories. Requiring three inventory slots worth of items (i.e. 3 NQ bows) to perform one repair might result in some foaming at the mouth.
2) These bows would STILL be created faster than used for repairing. To balance the supply / consumption, I think that items would have to degrade much more quickly then they do now -- and SE already (a) reduced durability drop rate (b) changed damaged % to 35% from 50%.

This is the same reason why having items degrade and be destroyed to remove them from the game won't work. Items just can't degrade fast enough to balance the supply. One crafter can easily turn out 6 bows in one hour (counting time spent making subcomponents). To balance this, 6 bows would have to degrade to the point of breaking in that same hour. I think this would cause people to riot in the streets

Ultimately, some other form of excess item removal has to be introduced. Currently the options are (a) destroy (b) sell to NPC.

Realistic (to my mind) options that I've seen floated include (a) de-synthesis (b) using items to create materia.

De-synthesis creates another source of materials flowing into the system, and so would have to be balanced against gathering and combat drops, making it tricker.

My current best hope is for Materia-creation. Something along the lines of:
Item A + Item B + ... + Item X + Gathered Catalyst ~> Materia
Could use multiple of the same item, of various combinations of items. Depending on the items used, the type of Materia created is different.

Even this system will saturate eventually, once all the Materia that people want has been created, unless there is a form of consumable materia, thus creating continual demand for new Materia. Perhaps special-ability Materia like a summon spell is consumed upon use, while other forms aren't, or something along those lines.

[Scarface]

mad???????

[Peregrine]

Already done, son. Did quite well. Gonna have to do more than throw misunderstood economic buzzwords around to get your pyramid scheme off the ground. You only propose this idea because you're too lazy to gather and want a system that makes you competitive again. When you can mash together all the trash that you make and make the best bow with it, you don't have to have any quality as a crafter whatsoever. All you have to have is skills that play to your talents. Mindless grinding and bubble riding.

Within two months your ancient crab bows will be junk too because of overproduction. With no real rate-limiting step you're only stalling the problem so you can make more money off it like you did in October "when the economy was good." You mean when the economy played to players like you who rode bubbles. Now you're a common R50 with no HQ support. No wonder you think the economy is bad now.

Hypocritical of you to not want the HQ conversion rates touched (because you don't have any) and yet want to be able to make Crab Bows +4 out of all the spam trash you have lying around. Gee, that's not going to make HQ weapons easy when any lazy crafter can just spam their way to HQ+4 with NQ products they find lying around town.

[Nomiro]

In another game which focuses on a player driven economy, they fix this problem by making it so "gear" just leaves the system.

Fusing together big items to make bigger items is just extending the same broken run for gear and does nothing for low level gear which is just as effected by the "unbreakability" of gear. Why not just remove the repair option and simply let gear fall apart?

This would stop the deflation of prices.
This would make NQ gear viable in the markets.
This would put more emphasis on wearing job/rank appropriate gear.

*edit*

Solipse, if someone in this thread is calling you dumb and lazy and not addressing your idea, you should probably just ignore them +^_^+

[Solipse]

Solipse, if someone in this thread is calling you dumb and lazy and not addressing your idea, you should probably just ignore them +^_^+

Hah, yeah, I just found out about the ignore feature.

Well, the problem with having gear unrepairable is that you somewhat penalize people for spending great amounts of time creating a very powerful item. If you spent 10 days worth of farming to gather up all +3 mats for a champion's lance, and it broke after using it for a week, I'd say that that would be pretty unfair. Not only that, but as I said, a system that allows for items to leave the economy should be a reward for sacrificing those items. Causing items to be unrepairable and having them break into uselessness only further penalizes people for playing the game - something that many, many sites and people complain about (ie, the fatigue system penalizes people for playing the game).

In the above case, I'd make the point that lower ranked weapons being cheap and unsellable isn't _really_ a problem - at low ranks gear should be cheap. You shouldn't have to spend 250k on a willow wand +1. If nobody bothered combining lower rank stuff and prices bottomed out, and you have some r50 crafter undercutting an r25 conjurer who's trying to resell his outranked gear, well, that crafter's a jerk... but that's something that is endemic to the free market economy; just think of Walmart as the r50 crafter.

The other thing to consider is that this sort of system doesn't have to be the sole way to have gear leaving the economy. You can have ten different (and creatively rewarding) ways to have gear leave the economy.

Example: Add another elaborate system where combining different kinds of items from the craft allows the crafter to create some special higher tiered material. IE, a culinarian combining a bowl of soup, a sandwich and a salad can get some new meal, or a goldsmith combining a silver ring, an electrum ring and a gold ring can get some gold alloy ingot or a couple nuggets. This one is far more complex and would take much longer development wise, but implementing the original suggestion in this post would not preclude them from working on some kind of system like this longer term.

[Rentahamster]

What if we tweaked the durability and repair system a little in order to get rid of the glut of NQ items?

Something like this:


Repair mechanic is basically the same as it is now - using repair mats to repair items and what not however much you like. However there is an additional counter added to the durability gauge.

It has a counter of, say, 5. Whenever you use up the equivalent of 100% of the durability of an item, the counter decreases by 1. Once the counter reaches 0, you cannot repair the item with just the normal repair mat anymore. You need to get the same item and infuse it with your own item to fully repair it and reset the counter back to 5.

This would give a reason for someone with a +3 crab bow to buy a NQ crab bow eventually after using it for a long time. Going from a counter of 5 all the way down to 0 would take a while, too. I don't want this to be a common thing one has to do as it would get annoying.

For items that are already rare, like the Barbarian's Bardiche or Champion's Lance, I'd just make the infusable item be something else, like a Bronze bardiche or Banneret Lance.

[moatcarp]

I think there is a disconnect with regard to item value in the game.

I know a few people who were just starting out and they can't buy the gear they need for "reasonable" prices (reasonable being in quotes because to a new player reasonable is completely different scale than reasonable to someone who has at least one job 30+).

I can't find low rank weapons for sale for < 50k usually. Sometimes you'll find one for 20k or 30k. A lot of the time I can't find the item I want for sale at all. These reasons were why I voted against having gear with level restrictions on the poll (if you can't find something for sale and you can't afford what is for sale then you can't use anything). On the other hand you have people complaining that items are worthless.

I've tried to sell a number of items and it seems like finished goods sell much slower than raw materials and intermediary components.

A lot of this thread is about how items get over produced and undercut and sell for next to nothing. I don't think that is true in general. I think it's only true for a certain set of items. Probably only the high rank items that people are going to try to HQ.

I think that they probably added gear rewards from side-quests as a gear source because of the problems I listed above & crafters failing to provide reasonably priced gear of lower ranks. I think that having non-crafter sources of gear will just make gear more worthless.

I don't think I have any particularly good solutions but it seems like the bulk of this thread is focusing only on one tiny part of the worthless gear problem and failing to recognize lower rank gear where the game is totally different. If there are too many crab bows but only a few low rank bows up - why not make the low rank bows for profit?

I think crafters would be more willing to supply non-sp-giving items to the market if the synth game scaled like combat did. Meaning - on my 50 gladiator I can hit a marmot once and do well more than its' full HP. Why can't a rank 50 crafter "1-shot" rank 1 synths? The last time I tried a low rank synth on my crafting jobs (in the low 30s) it still took me several actions to complete it. I don't want to waste that much time to produce something for gil I don't really need. If it was fast then I might.

EDIT: I realize that hasty hands = 1-shotting synths but I don't really count that because of what it does to the quality of the synth and that it has a chance to fail. There is *no way* my 50 glad will ever fail to kill a rank 1 marmot. If HH has even a %0.001 chance to fail it's not the same.

[Xenor]

I've always thought the solution to over-production is to have some mats be rare. Take the Scorpion Harness in FFXI from 2004. The price of the NQ of that remained stable for years because one of its mats was a claw that had a limited supply from an NM and later a BCNM. This meant you couldn't spam Scorpion Harnesses for HQs in the same way you can a Crab Bow in XIV.

Now what if they did the same with the crab shell component of the crab bow? What if the supply of these crab shells was limited to 2 per day per server? You'd have an NM crab that DoW/Ms could make money off killing, the crab shell would go on the market and crafters would buy it. Since there's only 2 per day and they're likely to stay at a high price, you can't spam hundreds of crab bows until you get a +3. NQs enter the market at a slower rate so their price stays higher for longer too. By the time the NQ market is flooded there is a new bow available that is better than crab bow.

Take the Dodore Doublet, there's a reason they cost 15 million on my server three months after it was implemented. It's because the supply of Dodore Wings is incredibly low, and while that's changing it's because the drop rate is not rare enough to handle multiple linkshells farming it every day. The weapon heads dropped from the goblin and buffalo NMs seem to be rarer and I have never seen any of these weapons for sale. They will enter the market when everyone who wants them in the linkshells farming them has them. Those prices will stay high because the supply is low.

I'm definitely not saying every piece of end-game gear should have a component that can only be obtained via an NM, the crab bow is just one example. The game could have a component only obtained via instances or via a rare drop in a gathering node or multiple sources.

For gathering, let me obtain a superior quality gold ore and break that down into 4 superior quality gold (or electrum) nuggets that can then be used to make end-game items. But have that ore so rare that I'm only likely to obtain about 1 per week. Tough shit if I don't get one in my gathering session, I can buy one someone else got during theirs if I want to synth with it that badly.

It's all about limiting the supply.

The economy will never be fixed for anything currently in the game, that's all trash and it will stay that way. Drop rates and item sources need looking at before the rank cap is increased and I do hope the gold nugget recipe is not going to be 4x gold ore/sand or we'll have the market flooded with gold mats right from the start, unlike darksteel and ebony logs which were removed from the game and will be fresh when the cap is raised. I hope the gold recipe requires an additional mat that can only be obtained from grade 6 nodes. Not because I think every crafter should be a gatherer but to keep the supply down.