Problem: Items are Worthless

[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.

[moatcarp]

Actually thinking about this some more I think I'm aware of 4 solutions people have proposed roughly characterized as:
1 - Korean MMO style: NQ item synthed with % chance to break -> +1 synthed with % chance to break -> +2 ...
2 - Alternate take on 1: multiple NQ => +1.
3 - +1 mats = +1 finished product; HQ mats need to be rare.
4 - Some items require rare mats and can't be spammed for HQ; leave the rest as they are.

I think in different ways all three of them, at their root, are attempting to:
A - Limit the impact on the market of flooding NQs to obtain HQs.
B - Maintain HQ gear position as being "better than the norm" instead of "Oh, everyone has HQ everything".
C - Potentially also address the "gear never leaves the economy" issue.

I don't know all the ramifications of each approach but I think what I like best is a take on #3/#4 where you also make gear attune when durability drops below 100% the first time.

This would solve the gear never leaves the economy problem (it leaves as soon as someone uses it), maintains HQ as being not the norm due to rarity of HQ materials, throwing in #4 you get some gear that just doesn't HQ often because the HQ mat drops really rarely.

It also limits the amount of time I need to sit there as a crafter and spam synths to HQ junk components and prevents the disappointment of synthing all HQ mats and getting a NQ result.

On the down side it means that DoL need to spam harvesting to gather HQ mats and DoW need to spam NMs to obtain HQ mats. So, it's clearly not a perfect solution. I think I prefer it though. I haven't been able to fully think through all the ramifications though so maybe I'm missing a huge down side.

[Solipse]

I don't know all the ramifications of each approach but I think what I like best is a take on #3/#4 where you also make gear attune when durability drops below 100% the first time.

Some thoughts:

1) This would require one fundamental change that would throw the entire crafting system into disarray : you wouldn't be able to HQ an item off NQ mats. If that isn't changed, then this solution doesn't address any of the base issues, and you still need an addition of a process for gear to leave the economy.

2) If #1 is implemented AND HQ item rarity is increased, think of what that is going to do to DoL classes - if they have to gather 50 oak logs before they get an HQ log, you are placing an incredible burden on them in the form of time spent just to get a HQ *part*. If this took 2 hours on average per part, then making a +1 or +2 item would conceivably force 10 hours of gathering - is that fair? As posted, the jist I get is "I shouldn't have to sit there for hours making an HQ item, someone else should have to spend their time so I can do it faster." - not sure trading off effort in that way is a good thing.

3) This is a fairly complex solution; it is hard enough to be exact with the ramifications of even my proposed 1-shot solution in the OP. When you start adding in a 4, 5 or 6 variable equation, you end up with a chaos-theory like effect; you cannot tell if you've covered anything, and even one missed part of the equation can throw it all out of whack. Solutions should be simple in design and effect.

Take the Dodore Doublet, there's a reason they cost 15 million on my server three months after it was implemented.

The problem is, doublets are 5m on Figaro now. We have 7 or 8 linkshells capable of killing Dodore and he (and every other NM) is farmed 24/7. Buffalo horns are down to 500k. From what I've read, many of the NMs in 11 were *rare*. NMs in 14 are *not* rare, just the opposite. It's easy to get the ones you want, in many cases they will spawn in less than an hour's time.

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.

It feels like this kind of solution is imposing a penalty on people for playing, though. If I have to spend 200h to do or make anything worthwhile, even once, then what is the point in playing at all? That is one of the major gripes with the game so far from all of those MMO sites, and I think they're absolutely correct.

Playing an MMO shouldn't be about 'I do nothing for 90% of the time', but rather should be about making small steps toward some goal. Playing solely out of the RNG waiting for a +3 item to drop from a node because a) That's the only way you can make NQ and b) That's the only thing that you can get that's worthwhile - that's not really fun, and that's not really progress.

For 14 to really catch on, it needs to be much more lighthearted in scope. Instead of filling up a player's time with 90% junk actions, I believe pretty strongly that the game needs to overwhelm the player with microscopically scoped things that can each become a building block toward some greater goal.

The original solution goes a very long way toward helping _every_ class.

For DoL and DoM/W classes, materials gained from killing monsters, any materials, will be worthwhile. It will be worth holding on to more than just your HQ items. If I can make 512 crab bows, and combine those into 64 likely-higher quality bows (64 synths of 8 bows), combine those into 8 even higher quality and combine THOSE into 1 final product, that will take a HUGE amount of materials. It will give DoW classes a reason to go out and spend hours farming megalocrabs and slugs. It will give DoL classes a reason to go out and farm iron ore and oak logs. All of those items will sell well, especially when, in order to do 512 total synths, I need 512 of each sub item.

For people thinking that allowing items combined in this fashion will simply overwhelm the market with HQ items and make them so common, really think about it for a second.

Right now, every crafter and their mother is pumping out HQ bows by gathering HQ materials and synthing as many in a row as they can. Right *NOW* HQ items are overwhelming the market; It will not be long before HQ items are just as worthless as NQ items ... and this is how the game is *now*. While they do this, however, they further destroy the market on almost every other material, including the gathered and killed for materials : Why bother buying NQ crab shells and red coral to make crab bows? I can buy an NQ crab bow for less than I can buy just those two mats, let alone iron, oak, sinews, etc. Is that a healthy economy? It's like charging 10x current value for the materials to build a home, but charging 10% of the current value for the home itself.

In the system I proposed, because you actually add an incentive to MAKE NQ items (as in, that's actually the goal), you ensure that the market itself stays healthy because those NQ sub items are continually being consumed. Further, look at what it takes to do the massive synthfest I linked above:

512 red coral, 512 green megalocrab shells, 471 iron nugget, 43 bronze wire, 43 bronze nugget, 1536 antelope sinew, 86 ahriman wings, 142 buffalo hide, 1024 aldgoat horns, 256 oak logs, 43 marmot pelts, 43 biast scales, 512 hippogryph sinews, 6144 earth shards, 512 wind crystals, 2009 wind shards, 86 fire crystals, 3072 lightning shards and whatever crystals the 512 synths of each bow require.

It is not as simple an operation as it sounds on paper. It's actually a lot of work - and will keep crafters busy assembling large amounts of mats to do these kinds of synths. That is a LOOOOTTTTT of materials. Consider for a moment how many different economies, classes and sub economies this will both fix and create.

1) Crystal prices become worthwhile again (good, because lots of crystals would be created by people mat farming - mat farming being something that does NOT really occur, now).
2) NQ item markets will increase.

3) +1 item markets will increase by a factor of 800+% (or more, due to saved time) over NQ markets.
4) +2 item markets will increase by a factor of 800+% (or more, due to saved time) over +1 markets.
5) +3 item markets will increase by a factor of 800+% (or more, due to saved time) over +2 markets.

Let me explain before I go further: If each +3 item you get from a monster/node is roughly worth 512 NQ item synths, then it will be worth much more than 512x an NQ item. Consider what I pasted above was required to make 512 crab bows. Many millions of gil and thousands of hours of combined energy. How much would you pay to NOT have to sink that much energy into making a +3 bow? If that item in NQ form normally sold for 10k, I don't think it would be unusual for the +3 version of it to sell for 1 million. Crafters will make a lot of money selling HQ items from this, and HQ prices will go through the roof, but gatherers and combat classes will make a lot of money selling HQ sub parts. All you have to do, then, to earn the 40-50m that a +3 crab bow would require, is farm some monster/node for sp that drops in-demand HQ parts. You earn SP, you get materials, you make oodles of money (remember that the NQ items are very valuable, too) selling to crafters, you buy your bow. THAT is a healthy economy. I do work, someone benefits from my work, I make money from that benefit, I find someone who has done work I will benefit from, I pay them with the money I made from doing my work. That's free market/capitalism at its finest.

6) You keep a constant churn on materials - that is, if I go out and farm iron ore for a full day, the thousands of NQ ore I get are not going to sit on my retainer for weeks. They will sell quickly, enabling me to go out and get more ore the next day. If you incentivize buying NQ materials to make HQ mats, then you incentivize people actually BUYING NQ materials. This is a real market repercussion. We're back to talking about supply and demand, here.

In other words, you accomplish what the game's point was in the first place with this crafter->gatherer->combat class setup: One group of classes produces goods that another group of classes needs, who in turns supplies them with the things they need. Right now, very few people need very few of the items that any one class produces. 90% of the materials that ANY class produces is utter junk and vendor fodder. That is not a healthy economy.

7) And finally, you don't need to introduce any artificial time sinks that will turn people off. Nothing above is mandatory. You don't have to participate in it if you don't want to. If you just want to make your NQ item and get to playing, you don't have to spend hours/days making it because materials are super rare. NQ materials would be commonly farmed and commonly available. You can buy them up, making your one synth and get going. Enough people would involve themselves in the 512->64->8->1 synth chain to support it (really, all it takes is a dozen crafters using it to make it economically worthwhile) that every single crafter isn't going to have to be involved with it.

In before TL;DR

[Solipse]

Also, the code for this system would be something that could be added in under a day, something like in the combine function (written in PHP because I'm not sure what language 14 is written in, and PHP is the easiest one to illustrate the idea in):

$item_ids = array();
for($i=0; $i<8; $i++) if( $in_synthbox_item->id > 0 ) array_push($item_ids, $in_synthbox_item->id );
if(count($item_ids) < 2)
  $offer_item_combine=0
else
{
  $offer_item_combine=1
  for($i=1; $i<count($item_ids); $i++)
    if($item_ids[$i] != $item_ids[$i-1]) $offer_item_combine=0;
}

OR:

$total_combines=0;
$combine_test=0;
$offer_item_combine=1;

for($i=0; $i<8; $i++)
  if( ( $curid = $in_synthbox_item->id[$i] ) > 0 )
  {
    $total_combines++;
    if( $combine_test > 0 )
      $offer_item_combine = ( $offer_item_combine > 0 && $combine_test == $curid ? 1 : 0 );
    else
      $combine_test=$curid;
  }
if($total_combines < 2) $offer_item_combine=0;

At the end, if $offer_item_combine is 1, then the item ids of all items in the synth box are identical, and an additional recipe is added to the recipes list -> an "upgrade" to the items in the box. From there, everything else should work properly; that is to say, the qualities of the items added in this way are added up, multiplied by some factor, and averaged out.

An easy way to figure out the result is just to do an instant combine, sort of like hasty hand. On success you upgrade the average quality of the items by 1, on failure you've damaged the components of all of the items trying to pull them apart and end up with a bunch of junk.

Less items combined = higher failure chance since you have less items to take apart and less room for error, so:
Success chance = 32 + ( 8 * number of items ) - The highest success chance is 96%, there should always be a chance of failure.

The total quality level value is, for each item, add the following: 0 for NQ, 1 for +1, 2 for +2, 3 for +3 (Only viable if ancient items are added).
So for a synth with 6 +2 items and 2 +1 items, we would get a value of 1.75 for total quality level.

If the synth is a success, +1 is added to this number, bringing us up to 2.75.

If the result is a decimal, we figure out:
$quality_increase_chance = ( ( $total_quality - rounddown($total_quality) ) * 100 )

In this case:
$quality_increase_chance = ( ( 2.75 - 2 ) * 100 )
$quality_increase_chance = ( .75 * 100 )
$quality_increase_chance = 75

if ( random(100) <= $quality_increase_chance ) you increase the quality by 1 HQ tier. If not, you get the lower tier. So in the case above, we have a 75% chance to get a +3 item and a 25% chance to get a +2 item.

Again, this may seem easy to get a +3 weapon, but you'd have to do 512 synths (more +1's made lowers this number, but a failure in a higher tier combine would set you back a hundred or more synths).

[Rentahamster]

Again, this may seem easy to get a +3 weapon, but you'd have to do 512 synths (likely a bit less because of +1 items made) in order to get a +3 weapon.

That sounds about right.