Aggressive Gold Sinks

[kikix12]

Stop using this flawed logic to try to justify your arguments on why they make certain design choices that don't fit in your scope of what you want from the game.

This is true...but...we're talking about glamour/mounts/minions here. If the department responsible for these things have a constant stream of work for making these items for the sake of an NPC that gates them behind a wall of gil, we'll get them work less on those that are gotten through dungeons, raids, trials and similar more accessible content. And all that for a system that's flawed from the beginning and is asking for promoting gold-sellers, cause you know, the average player will never get that amount of gil without buying it. And people will be more inclined to do that, unlike now, when there is not that much content that is really costly to the point of being unachievable for the random guy.

[MoroMurasaki]

Like, to say this is to help the little guys is kinda silly.

They are non-essential items, nothing here is needed for anything but vanity/status. It doesn't hurt anyone to not have them or have to wait for them because you get no actual benefit from having them. I thought this was exceedingly clear from the original post and subsequent explanatory posts but I guess not?

Taking gil out of the game will lower prices on the MB because everyone will have something they're striving for so those crafting and gathering moguls will keep selling their wares instead of realizing they're sitting on 700m gil and there is no where else for them to go with it barring the occasional 20m top at the launch of an expansion/patch.

I think this is a wonderful idea with far-reaching benefits and frankly I think it's been well explained. I'd wager the naysayers either still don't understand somehow or feel that they will never have that much gil so they don't want other people to have shiny things they can't have. While I don't expect to break into that gillionaire market myself I see no downside of other people who have invested the time and energy to do so having some pretty trophies for their efforts.

[Tyrn]

Personally I'd like to see another sink from the market board in the form of an upfront fee (% of asking price just like the sales tax) paid whenever you put something up for sale or change the price within xy hours of the last time you changed the price. I'm sure there's some issues with this but ideally I see this mostly affecting people with many high cost items items who routinely change their prices to force poorer players out of certain markets to gain monopolies, people who usually don't put too much effort into making gil and just put stuff up and forget about it until it eventually sells wouldn't notice much of a change. As an additional benefit it might serve to make the economy in the game slightly less volatile

[AxlStream]

I do agree this game needs a gil sink somewhere. As a player without a way to make much gil easely, the prices on the MB do take advantage of the fact that players have no use for their currency.

[RLofOBFL]

I ...sort of agree? I think they need to add more "affordable" gil sinks. Stuff for 1 to 10 mil. Once you move past crafted gear and the two new glamours they add once every 4 months, you just sit there with money and nothing to do with it. It kinda sucks.

[Zojha]

I think this is a wonderful idea with far-reaching benefits and frankly I think it's been well explained. I'd wager the naysayers either still don't understand somehow[...]

Or maybe they just have a higher understanding of economy.

It starts with the very basic question: Why do prices go up if there is more money around?
The answer is: Because people are able and willing to buy at a higher price.

That means that people need to buy items in order for them to affect prices. If people don't actually pay higher prices - for example because they aren't buying the items in the first place, which is common among self-sufficient people - then the effect the dead gil has on the prices is nil. If you aren't willing to buy an item at all, having more money isn't going to make you willing to pay a higher price for it and thus, prices may even fall in spite of inflation. Just look at all those items going for 1 gil on the market board, they are the best example. In spite of having the money, nobody is willing to pay much for them, so prices are down. And they stay down, for years on end, even though the monetary supply keeps rising.

What exactly do those super rich people buy to affect prices so much? I can tell you: Not much, or else they wouldn't be rich. They are largely self-sufficient and make their items themselves and make items for others on top of it, which causes money to accumulate at them. That's why they are irrelevant for pricing and sinking their gil is pointless as well. The gil sinks actually need to compromise people's ability or will to buy stuff to affect pricing, i.e. hit those who aren't self-sufficient and have so little money that they need to think twice about a purchase. Cruel, but that's how it is.

What is very relevant to pricing is competition on the market. To drive down prices, you want more people selling any given item to drive price competition via undercutting to lower prices. How? SE likes to make items obtainable via other means, like putting them into retainer ventures or hoards. That always causes prices to decrease dramatically, so long as the content is relevant. You can also make them obtainable from a vendor, tomes or whathaveyou, you can make the recipes easier, the mats more abundant or whatever. This is what you really need to do if you want to lower prices substantially.
Balmung's market board is a great example of that, much as crafters around the globe hate it for its undercutting tendencies.

[kikix12]

Taking gil out of the game will lower prices on the MB because everyone will have something they're striving for so those crafting and gathering moguls will keep selling their wares instead of realizing they're sitting on 700m gil and there is no where else for them to go with it barring the occasional 20m top at the launch of an expansion/patch.

It won't. That's the point. These items are valuable and they would be bought, but they are also one-time use. If someone did reach a cap reasonably quickly in the first place, they will reach that cap reasonably quickly anyway.
And to begin with, people that reached the cap and no longer are involved with the market board (since they don't need anything there) in no way affect the prices in the first place. Quite the opposite. If they will suddenly lose half of that money, you will ADD their gil to the gil in circulation as they will try to get back to the cap. As long as their capped gil is not used though, they are a non-issue. That's why new items like glamour and orchestrion rolls will start high, until those moguls buy them, but then go down in price drastically. Since those rich people will no longer buy them...cause they have it already and their gil is no longer circulating.

And you seem to have ignored what I said as well. Putting things with such massive prices will lead to promoting gil-buying, and that will increase the bots and the gil generated. It will backfire, since it's a band-aid used on a chest-wide cut. The problem is not with lack of large expenses. The problem is with lack of constant expenses, and the cheaper those constant expenses will be the more people will use them. An army of people buying cheap stuff will remove more gil than a handful of people buying expensive stuff. That's part of the reason why a successful subscription game like WoW or Final Fantasy XIV still have a place in the world.


Things offered need to be consumables. A potion that restores 50TP with a price of 20 000 gil and 10sec cooldown will remove more gil in few days than a mount that costs 750mil will in few months. After all, it would need to be used only 37500 times to pay for the price of one such mount. With 10 000 players, that's 3,75 use per player. And that quota may be done in less than an hour. Heck, the rich players themselves may "eat" through dozens of them in a single run of whatever content they prefer.

Want something that doesn't give any sort of advantage (even though it cannot be called advantage, if it is easily accessible)?! A potion that removes death penalty and, if it does, restores 20% of HP, MP and TP. Since every content can be finished without anyone ever dying, it would only make mistakes less punishing, rather than give actual advantage. If your group is not up to par against the enemy, this won't help you. But if it is, it'll lessen the pressure a bit. And it will still see frequent use. Have it sell for 50 000-100 000gil and the rich players will use it on every death, while the poorer will use it in harder content when they see a chance of victory. But it will be used.
Alternatively, in a similar notion, they can sell a potion that revives characters, similar to Phoenix Feather in Palace of the Dead. It would save the healers mana they shouldn't have needed to use, but at the cost of the DPS's stopping their attacks, so not like it's completely free either. Or, just save the healers mana if it was the healer using it. But keep it limited to one per battle per player (no need to limit their inventory), and more deaths will still force use of revival spells.


Think about it. Teleportation and repair costs are "small", but they are used constantly by everyone in the game. There are hundredths of millions of gil sunk every single day. And they have no visible effect on the market. Do you really think that one-time expenses of few hundred gil would have any more than a two-three day long effect?! The one that does not understand the system is you, not the nay-sayers (though some of the nay-sayers don't understand the system either, to be fair, thinking that removal of gold doesn't drop the prices even if it's large and constant).

[Aylis]

People really need to stop waxing hyperbole with this statement. I keep seeing the whole "They shouldn't implement X because I don't feel the game needs it/want it myself because it would cost dev time/resources/a raid tier and their time would be better spent in some other area of the game." regurgitated constantly on these forums.

Except never did I once say it /shouldn't/ be implemented. I feel it should be implemented. I said it needs to be implemented in a way that doesn't need /continual/ development attention patch after patch after patch. We all know the dev team is very small after all. If something needs constant attention, then yeah. With a small team, other things do have to get cut out.

[Kazrah]

If you have that much money, that's not really SE's fault for not creating extreme gil sinks, but rather the fault of the rich player who can't think of more inventive ways of spending it.

Charities, free prize games, stuff along those lines. Also by sharing your wealth, you advertise to gil spammers that their business is not necessary on your server.

[Rufalus]

Without having access to the data I would have to guess that the total amount of gil in circulation rises quite rapidly in large part to RMT bots farming but also normal player activity, and only a relatively small portion of the earnings being deducted on things like housing, repairs, market tax. Yeah I can agree with having some more sinks, some expensive optional vanity items perhaps, just to slow down reaching a point of there being far too much gil per world.