If you guys could go ahead and restrict the use MBs while being on another world

[CookiesNCreams]

Also, I believe you aren’t understanding something very simple, OP. As someone who has crafted since 2.x Artisans, and has accumulated billions of Gil over the years, I can safely say that the lowering of prices has absolutely nothing to do with increased competition.

It has to do with the value of two things. Mats, and difficulty of said craft. As of 5.0, mats are extremely easy to get. There is no “challenge” to earning them compared to HW and ARR mats. Difficulty of crafting has been nerfed ever since the addition of Prudent Touch. So that devalues your time as a crafter, thus devaluing everything you make to around 200,000 gil or less. Mostly less. Whereas in ARR and HW, it was more like 600,000.

You are focusing your attention on the wrong thing. You should be complaining about the overall difficulty, not the amount of competition.

[Pinworms]

I agree the way the system is now...it’s going to make poor servers and rich servers.

[Seraphor]

I agree the way the system is now...it’s going to make poor servers and rich servers.

There were always poor servers and rich servers.
Now they're just able to directly compare their relative poorness or richness, and circumvent it by buying from other servers.

[Nixxe]

Also, I believe you aren’t understanding something very simple, OP. As someone who has crafted since 2.x Artisans, and has accumulated billions of Gil over the years, I can safely say that the lowering of prices has absolutely nothing to do with increased competition.

It has to do with the value of two things. Mats, and difficulty of said craft. As of 5.0, mats are extremely easy to get. There is no “challenge” to earning them compared to HW and ARR mats. Difficulty of crafting has been nerfed ever since the addition of Prudent Touch. So that devalues your time as a crafter, thus devaluing everything you make to around 200,000 gil or less. Mostly less. Whereas in ARR and HW, it was more like 600,000.

You are focusing your attention on the wrong thing. You should be complaining about the overall difficulty, not the amount of competition.

I agree that the lack of difficulty is an issue, but there's simply no way that this change didn't have a drastic impact on prices on many realms. Bigger realms won't notice much of a change to be sure because they're already fairly well stocked and have a lot of competition, but they will absolutely drag down the prices of the other realms on their data center (or in the case of Balmung, glamour gear, and Crystal, maybe drag them up) because prices varied wildly based on population, especially on more expensive luxury items, and people will absolutely server hop to save a few hundred thousand gild. To be sure each realm will maintain some individuality to their pricing, as the populations on the realms are different and the world visit system is mildly inconvenient, which means players won't likely hop for a 5 gil discount, but the prices data center wide are generally going to be much closer together across the board than they were previously.

[Alucard135]

You might want to go back to school.

If someone was inclined they could go to ..lets say china. They buy a ticket and everything and go there, look at local prices and then they end up buying X good for Y price with the sole intention of selling it back in.. australia. So they do this because the cost of the flight, time spent looking at good and shipping (along with taxes / customs blah blah) was low enough so they would still make a good roi. This is of course because the restriction on china is they CANT sell to other countries (which is totally illogical in the real world but here we are).

In FF all someone on a low pop server has to do is make a bit of money (how much would be dependent on their individual server). From there all they have to do is open up a spread sheet doc and keep tabs on prices of things they are interested in possibly selling from other servers. Making a table for price over time would help them a bit more in this regard but is not needed in a game such as FF (as in EVE it would be). So they click on a crystal and hop over to the other servers and do the same thing. Now they spent maybe an hour putting all the information together but they have the tools and resources to buy on higher pop server and sell for a profit on their own crappy server.

Now there are a few things that will happen from this. The higher pop server might charge higher prices because demand is higher on their server. That only goes so far as just like in the real world when prices go too high (an example of this is when a monopoly is in charge of a single product) people stop buying that product. That would be to combat not only the demand but also the prices on other servers. If someone from crappy low pop server sells their X good at 1M gil and the higher pop server get wise to this all they have to do is sell it for 950k and now both servers have a terrible economy because the seller is now acting as a middle man of sorts. Something the "Traders" are acting as right now in the game.

One of the other things that can happen is more people get into supplying that good therefore driving prices WAY down (look at oil prices). That only will last as long as the person from the crappy low pop server/s allow it as they can buy the good and trickle it onto their MB without any objections from anyone.

There are countless other things I could add but this post is already long enough but if people can't see how easy it is to exploit this system then i guess it is their own fault and I just will continue to not buy anything off the MB.

Meh.

You're just proving you're a bad businessman here. You're blaming an entire system just because you don't have lazy people to prey upon. You're also probably one of those that gets furious when they get undercut lol.

This not hurting any economy as you're trying so desperately to imply, it's only hurting you for not making more money. So if you don't have permission to sell in other countries, now the economy will suddenly crumble? You have people jumping on your server to buy things so that's your demand, make use of them and provide the supply needed and don't be jealous of their profit.

[Duskane]

i like it

its like bargain hunting

[Haxaan]

If someone was inclined they could use the gil they already have to find something that sells for 100k or whatever less on another server, buy all of them and then go to their server and sell it for 200k.

If the servers were all linked (where it was one single MB for all the data center) then the seller would be selling directly to the people of every server. If they wanted to do it in a very poor mans way they could just let you sell on other servers without making them one MB to rule them all. That way the person selling would be able to sell their goods on what ever server they wanted.

As it is right now having "Traders" that just go from server to server buying a some goods and then reselling them on their server is dumb.

Pool it all into one MB / let sellers sell on other MBs or restrict it again.

There is a reason WoW or any other successful MMO hasn't done this.

You do realize that this is how "we buy your goods and resell them" websites work right? Gamestop, Car Dealerships, and many other companies do the exact same thing. Buy low sell High. In this case, by allowing people from higher populated servers buy items from lower population servers, it lets more currency flow throughout the lower population servers boosting their economy. It also allows people, who may not be the wealthiest on a high population server, buy goods at a lower price than on their over-inflated servers. It is a win-win scenario really. If all the other MBs were linked and you could buy and sell goods it would not help the lower population servers at all because all of the wealthy people on the top control the economy of the entire data center. That is the EXACT opposite of what they are trying to do.

[Aladire]

I actually believe that SE should try to do what WoW did. With BfA, they made the AH be the same across the data center. Yeah, they had some really bad performance issues for the first 3 weeks because of that, but after they resolved that, the AH is now identical no matter what server you are on for that data center.

I would like to see that be the case now that we can world visit.

[Kaedan]

So allow me to ask you a (somewhat leading) question that has been on my mind.

From an economic standpoint, doesn’t this also create more competition and thus incentive to provide services/goods at fairer prices? I’m a consumer, not a seller. So from a consumers POV I love that I can shop to find the item I was looking for that might have broken the bank when I was on my home world but is significantly more affordable at a different location. Prices have flattened out a lot more over the recent days/weeks, but I still like knowing I can shop around the prices. I never have much Gil to throw around to begin with.

I dunno, I’m a layman and won’t pretend to know economics, but I would have thought that increased competition helps foster a healthier overall economy for everybody.

Precisely. The changes they made have created significantly more competition, which has brought the overall price equilibrium on items down, which is not only good for the consumer, but it's also good for sellers as well. While sellers are making less per item overall, they are able to sell a much higher QUANTITY of the item, so in the end, they end up making more money than they would have as well.

[PonifiedBeast]

It's more annoying to sell but advantageous to buy. Personally if they are going to allow purchasing on other servers, they should make the MB Data Center wide.