Destroying Server Economies

[Seraphor]

Not only that. People on the smaller worlds would have to server hop all the time to adjust their prices if they want to sell something. Sounds extremly annoying.

Yes, server hopping all the time will be extremely annoying, which is why it won't matter all that much.
People are already too lazy to teleport to the same city as the seller to avoid the marketboard tax, they're not going to server hop to get something slightly cheaper.

This will only affect those rare, expensive items that people would usually be waiting for a price reduction before purchasing anyway.

e.g. "Oh, that item I wanted is up for sale at 300k… that’s too much, I’ll wait until it’s cheaper.”
“Oh, that item I wanted is up for sale at 300k… that’s too much, I’ll try another sever.”
Either way, that item isn’t selling for 300k.

[LalaRu]

Not only that. People on the smaller worlds would have to server hop all the time to adjust their prices if they want to sell something. Sounds extremly annoying.

Well, if you are listing items for millions Gil, it is worth the time. I'd sure won't jump to see if my batch of ten 15 Gil items is sold at 14 there.

[Enla]

Wait a minute, this actually brings to mind some bigger problems. Since people will be flocking to the big market servers like balmung for lower prices, doesn't that make it harder for those on smaller servers to now sell their goods? Everyone will be hopping to the big servers to buy their stuff there, meanwhile the crafters on the smaller servers are sorta SOL and just have to hope and pray someone randomly sees their item on their smaller server and buys it.

That's not exactly fair, and sort of sets a bad precedent for the future economy of ffxiv.

You're forgetting one thing. Most people are lazy.

I make most of my gil, for example, reselling vendor items here on Balmung. You would not believe how much money I can make because someone cannot be bothered to look up which vendor has the item and then port to their location. Not even SE adding the vendor price to item descriptions has stopped this and any attempts within the wider community to get people to save gil and use the vendors always loses traction within a few months. So honestly speaking I can't see this becoming a huge issue in the long term. Yes, some people will definitely seek out the cheapest server while the larger data center economy equalizes. But the average player? I can see them doing it for a week out of curiosity then inevitably buying something from their home marketboard because it's quicker before that once again becomes the norm.

Also even if this does happen, which again I very much doubt, it just means servers will need to adapt and for a standard pricing scale to be set across all the servers on a data center. I'd give it a few months before most servers have near identical market boards for most of the easily moved items.

[Derio]

This is if people can even get into Balmung with the world visit system.

Prices will normalize but not overnight. I suspect prices to be rather wonky until at least 5.1 or 5.2 release

[Aryalandi]

Someone sneezing too hard is enough to destabilize the economy for weeks on most servers, any time someone new pops up with something to sell it immediately turns into a war over who can sell their silver ore 1 gil lower than everyone else that eventually tanks the whole market

Honestly what you should be thinking about if you're a merchant is how to take advantage, the prices on a lot of very expensive things could possibly tank for awhile, but then they will go back up as people settle into the new system, at which point you can make a killing selling it all back to others, that's business.

I'm not ashamed to say I've made characters on different servers entirely for the sake of buying things there for up to half the price or more compared to others because honestly I don't want to spend more than I have to

I've also made characters on stupidly overpriced servers for the sake of crafting and selling a ton of stuff to make gil which I then took with me via server transfers >.> not having to do either of those things will be nice, as will being able to buy things for a fair price.

It could also go in an entirely different direction though where the sudden burst of people switching between servers to buy things causes the prices to skyrocket to keep up with the demand, then it will steadily decline.

Either way it won't take long for things to settle down

Fieldcraft Demateria III's used to sell for up to 100k each in minutes, now you're lucky to get 30k for them and it's not even really worth selling anymore, the market will always be that way

[hydralus]

I don't much enjoy when game companies alter server economies but I've honestly found gil near useless and so easy to obtain it's almost impossible to become poor.

[rance-sama]

Capitalism, ho!

[KageTokage]

That isn't called "destroying economies" it's called bringing them into parity.

You see, before, some servers had absolutely ridiculous prices on things. Now this will force those people who charge ridiculous amounts to lower their prices to compete.

And really, that's the thing. They're bringing competition to the economies, which is actually very healthy for the economies, not destructive.

I'd agree more with this if not for the fact that most server economies are heavily influenced by bot farmers who oft sell at price points so low as to scarcely be profitable for legitimate players to imitate.

These guys oft exist strictly to craft/gather and aren't actually putting any time or effort into the process so all they care about is pushing sales as quickly as possible.

As much as I hate to let them have their way, there really isn't any point to trying to sell stuff on the MB if I can make just as much if not more gil for the time spent through more entertaining activities like treasure maps and SE continues to be absolutely useless when it comes to banning them, so I think the economy is permanently screwed at this point.

[TwistedTea]

I'd agree more with this if not for the fact that most server economies are heavily influenced by bot farmers who oft sell at price points so low as to scarcely be profitable for legitimate players to imitate.

These guys oft exist strictly to craft/gather and aren't actually putting any time or effort into the process so all they care about is pushing sales as quickly as possible.

As much as I hate to let them have their way, there really isn't any point to trying to sell stuff on the MB if I can make just as much if not more gil for the time spent through more entertaining activities like treasure maps and SE continues to be absolutely useless when it comes to banning them, so I think the economy is permanently screwed at this point.

I like the concept of World Visit balancing the Market Boards across the data centre in theory but I feel like the devs have given bot farms/botters potential control of the entire data center's market boards.

[Elliebird]

I really hate that they let people buy from other MBs. I am watching as my server’s market is being pillaged in real time, while they take the items they got for cheap on my server and sell it for ludicrously higher prices on theirs.

Meanwhile, the prices are skyrocketing on my server because everyone is coming here to buy things to resell on their own. This was not a good idea.