Visiting other worlds, economy effect?

[Mikki]

So I noticed that selling on other servers will not be permitted, however BUYING will be. I'm wondering what kind of effect this will have in the long run.

My initial thoughts were this:
1) Everyone will go to bigger servers in order to make purchases, since supply is larger there and thus prices are lower. This will leave small servers struggling, even if they were to adjust their prices since the bias will have been firmly planted that purchasing cross server is best. Even if smaller servers were to match the price, players might go to check the big server first and see it's the same price so meh. Why not just buy it there since you're already there?

2) Perhaps supply on bigger servers will dwindle and prices will increase there, due to the higher influx of players purchasing from there. This may lead to increases in prices which would make poor players unhappy. This would also create more gil on larger servers, thus further devaluing gil. At the same time, it moves gil away from smaller servers.

And,

3) Bots will ruin the economy of the entire game. Obviously my previous statement probably won't happen in this case (as far as the supply dwindling and prices increasing goes).


But maybe I'm overthinking it. Maybe most people would prefer to stay put where they are and would see purchasing on other servers to be too much of a hassle? I'm not sure. What do you guys think? Would you make the trek to a bigger server to check out prices and see if it's cheaper? Especially for big ticket items? How about for items that you buy frequently (mats, food, etc)? Would you check smaller servers?

On Zalera, the economy already feels quite dry. Things tend to be way overpriced, so I think prices could stand to drop. However, even when prices are quite low, the volume of sales still remains quite stagnant for many things. I'm concerned that this change will make it even worse for us on smaller servers and am considering if I should just jump ship and swap over to a bigger server?


What are your thoughts? Do you think this will be good for small servers? Big servers? All servers??? What are your plans?

[Gralna]

Bigger servers don't always have better prices, was talking to some of my cwls friends and apparently atm Nidhogg scales are cheaper on some of the smaller servers, due to the demand being met by what farmers they do have. As opposed to larger servers where the demand is so huge that farmers aren't anywhere close to supplying the demand.

[Mikki]

Bigger servers don't always have better prices, was talking to some of my cwls friends and apparently atm Nidhogg scales are cheaper on some of the smaller servers, due to the demand being met by what farmers they do have. As opposed to larger servers where the demand is so huge that farmers aren't anywhere close to supplying the demand.

Interesting point! But I wonder how many people will bother searching smaller servers to find out which has the best price vs just checking the bigger servers which are assumed to have the best price. Maybe some 3rd party applications might keep track of all server prices. Not sure if it's possible to do though.

[Soraki-Muppe]

This has the potential of becoming very annoying. When you put something on the MB you now compete against MB on other servers as well, and if you want to look at their prices you have to jump around among all the servers... well I guess we will need to use an external site in order to save some time on this, which will screw over console players that does not have a pc close at hand.
It would make more sense if they make the MB cross server at the same time they add this feature.

[Mikki]

This has the potential of becoming very annoying. When you put something on the MB you now compete against MB on other servers as well, and if you want to look at their prices you have to jump around among all the servers... well I guess we will need to use an external site in order to save some time on this, which will screw over console players that does not have a pc close at hand.
It would make more sense if they make the MB cross server at the same time they add this feature.

A part of me was wondering if they might add this feature to easily see MBs on other servers to the mobile app and maybe even make it exclusive to those who use the paid rather than the free version. That would be incredibly dirty but I don't think it's beneath them. :/

But I agree with you. I don't really want to server hop just to find out if I'm pricing competitively. Especially when it's unlikely people will bother coming to my small server anyway.....

[Cyreil]

I believe they are making it to where you can't even visit a bigger server if it is still listed as a congested server. So even if there is or is no tool put in place to see all the server prices together, you might not even be able to buy the from MB of bigger servers if you are not even allowed to visit them to buy from them in the first place.

[HaelseMikiro]

Considering websites are already popping up that track the marketboard prices for every server, either with afk accounts running scanners at the MB on every server or with user input from real players:
1) prices for pretty much everything will approach a competitive equilibrium, approx the same price across every world, as people world hop to buy the cheaper items, and people wishing to sell will have to lower their prices to meet the cross-world price since they aren't even guaranteed to have the forced business of the people on their own world
2) RMTs(or selling content for gil) gain business thru cross-world by purchasing low level items for very high gil prices on the MB
3) Character-creation locks on servers in the future will no longer halt RMT activities on that server
4) the economy is going to take a heavy shift towards being a buyers market as crafters now have more competition. If people think undercutting is or has been bad, stand by for a revelation into the definition
5) tendencies to buyout an entire market of 1 item to reflip for profit will probably become exceptionally rare, as the amount of effort to server hop 7 times in the hopes that you can sell it all before the market repopulates said item will become riskier and less rewarding

Fast-forward to 5.0 and we'll see a shrinking market for high-end items as dwindling profits from excessive competition drive many endgame crafters to spend their time seeking fun in other activities, meanwhile the game will introduce even more ways to earn gil, and we'll experience higher levels of inflation without any effective gil sinks, so prices will naturally go up with the gil supply, hopefully attracting more crafters again. Housing fails as a gil sink due to the finite nature of land, so the only choices SE really has to keep the economy from hyperinflating are to add new effective gil sinks, or to increase MB taxes. They can't keep the gil supply the same or lower it because number bloat makes the players think we're progressing and doing better than we used to and keeps us having 'fun'.

Honestly I feel like adding a separate 'cross-world sales tax' would be the most logical and easiest to program way to help combat plummeting prices and simultaneously remove more gil from the economy.

[Soraki-Muppe]

A part of me was wondering if they might add this feature to easily see MBs on other servers to the mobile app and maybe even make it exclusive to those who use the paid rather than the free version. That would be incredibly dirty but I don't think it's beneath them. :/

Considering what other big companies in the industry is up to right now, I can see SE thinking that something like that would fly under the radar with very little consequences.

[Musashidon]

not everyone is going to be jumping from world to world to buy stuff.

it will likely be just select few people, not only that this will give worlds that normally over supply their economy supply others as well.

people will buy from cheaper worlds just to try to make a profit on theirs as i had said there are people who aren't going to check the price of every world on their data center to get the best prices.

over all yes at first things are going to heavily change due to all items that are rare getting mixed together because players are going to try to make a profit from it but after it all settles down things will be all good and prices all around will be steady and chances are a bit lower than they have been.

[KageTokage]

over all yes at first things are going to heavily change due to all items that are rare getting mixed together because players are going to try to make a profit from it but after it all settles down things will be all good and prices all around will be steady and chances are a bit lower than they have been.

This would be true if not for the fact that the bot farmers have already tanked the prices on most crafted items to unreasonable lows that legit crafters often don't even want to bother with due to how low the time/effort to profit ratio is. Some of the dedicated crafters on my server actually left because of how bad it had gotten in regards to the crafted gear (The 4.2 gear was going for only 150K a piece at one point due a certain player aggressively undercutting everything using a MB bot).

There's also the problem that the owners of said bots who oft possess several billion gil could realistically monopolize their data center's entire stock of certain rarer items for kicks if they wanted to. I've already seen some of them buying out the server's entire stock of certain grade VI materias to artificially manipulate the prices.