Basic Economics

[Aramis]

Everyone has made some valid comments. Here are my observations.

1. While there are lower numbers of people currently playing I see a larger percentage of people crafting than I did on FFXI. I believe this is due to the gear degradation feature and people wanting to be able to repair their own items. Therefore there should be plenty of items to buy as more are being made. But there is not.
2. I believe less people feel like dealing with the complexities of the retainer market system we currently have. Face it, on FFXI I could run to the AH and buy/sell very quickly and efficiently. Now I have to search for each item, one at a time, and then transport myself there to buy it. Takes way to long if I want to purchase several items. Less people buying = less people selling.
3. A lot of the craftables are not worth buying. Food effects are very poorly handled and therefore not really used. You cannot easily tell what food does for you, so people do not buy it, so people do not craft it.
4. There are way to few options for gear. You want to upgrade a certain piece (i.e. hands, body, legs) and there are only a total of 2-3 options available at your lvl and most of the time not in stock. The ones that are in stock are somewhat pricey and new players cannot afford them.
5. The retainers "disappear" all the time if you do not play regularly and therefore items are not available to be sold.

I do not wish to have to deal with RMTs or BOTs but I believe an AH system would work much better than what is in place now.

[Haraldsson]

1) Low population
2) difficult item search

3) Retainer setup for sales is difficult

[MassacreMassacre]

I agree with Fieros.
If tour not selling desirable goods then you won't make any gil. I farm certain areas in the game for maybe an hour and make roughly 100k + and it usually all sells over night. Also I have 2 retainers set up. One with gear I've madee ( only. Leatherworking like 10) and its low level gear and I make good profit off of it. And the other with goods that sell fast from my farming.
Also putting your retainers in cities that have highest population helps also... I find my gear sells faster there.

[Jinko]

1- If an auction house is implemented, it should be nation specific (not an instant global store).

I couldn't disagree more, unless they make traveling between cities a whole lot easier, otherwise doing this would cause huge problems in availability.

For example almost nobody visits Limsa anymore and even less visit Gridania.

Even then I still think Global linkage would be the most efficient and easiest method.

2- Nation specialization. For example, one nation has better resources for armor, another has tanning, a third has culinary. obviously not those exact examples, but you get the idea. I know FFXIV already has this to an extent, and I like it.

See above.

3- Trade boundaries. For example tariffs, quotas, price ceilings/floors. This will add a level to the market complexity, and make trade more fun. Plus SE can use these measures to fight inflation/deflation later in the game life.

I think this is something that should be used later in the game life (once there is a thriving market).

This I agree with, having say a button which would input the current average price for an item would help stabilise the economy, as would having a ceiling/floor on items.

With something like an average button players could get an estimate of what an item is worth and then decide whether to alter the price as they see fit.

Of course before any of this SE needs to find a way to remove items (mainly armour and weapons) from the world otherwise there will be a surplus and the market will crash, which has already occurred on some stuff.

[Souljacker]

1- If an auction house is implemented, it should be nation specific (not an instant global store).

I disagree as well and the proof that this system cripples an economy is no further away than this game's predecessor, FFXI. All the three nation AH's were independent, and what happened was when everyone starting hanging out in Jeuno as the "high level" hub, the starter zones emptied and new players couldn't obtain gear. No one wanted to run back there to put it on AH and I can guarantee you no one is going to be running back to fiddle with a retainer.

It would be naive to think that SE doesn't have an expansion planned without any new Jeuno or Aht Urgan style cities, so we should assume that eventually we will move on from our starter areas into new places.

What will happen to the market wards then? Will SE forgo any trade in the new cities because they have to keep us in the old ones for the market to survive? No, the most efficient way for them to solve the problem and ensure it's future-proof is to add an AH and link it all together.

[Haraldsson]

I believe that if they implemented Nation specialization it would fix the XI Jeuno problem (if it is a problem). If each nation had specific abundant resources, and development skills, then each nation would be able to produce larger amounts of those goods for a cheaper price than the other nations. As for a Jeuno type city being a center of trade, well it should be, that's why they put it there.

If the nation specialization was in place, Jeuno wouldn't have any resources for production. Jeuno would simply be a trade center, but it should have much higher taxes (as a crossroads city would tax in real life). Those high taxes would drive people to sell their goods in the other cities.

If we want to motivate players to visit the different cities, there is no better way than nation specialization. If there is an instant global auction, there is no motivation to visit different areas.

As for availability of items, currently I agree that it would be difficult; however, in the future (with a large population) I don't believe it will be an issue. Players will move the goods over into the different cities, and create a living international trade market. At that point the market will become a very complex, and detailed portion of the game.

In the end these basic economic principles will make FFXIV a much better game for everyone.

[Souljacker]

I believe that if they implemented Nation specialization it would fix the XI Jeuno problem (if it is a problem). If each nation had specific abundant resources, and development skills, then each nation would be able to produce larger amounts of those goods for a cheaper price than the other nations. As for a Jeuno type city being a center of trade, well it should be, that's why they put it there.

If the nation specialization was in place, Jeuno wouldn't have any resources for production. Jeuno would simply be a trade center, but it should have much higher taxes (as a crossroads city would tax in real life). Those high taxes would drive people to sell their goods in the other cities.

If we want to motivate players to visit the different cities, there is no better way than nation specialization. If there is an instant global auction, there is no motivation to visit different areas.

As for availability of items, currently I agree that it would be difficult; however, in the future (with a large population) I don't believe it will be an issue. Players will move the goods over into the different cities, and create a living international trade market. At that point the market will become a very complex, and detailed portion of the game.

In the end these basic economic principles will make FFXIV a much better game for everyone.

And again, I respectfully disagree and ask if you have played XI. If you had, you would know that this is exactly what they did there. Jeuno had higher taxes on selling goods at the AH but it didn't drive people to rush back to the starter cities to sell things. They just stopped selling lower level things because it didn't turn any profit for them. As a result, the starter city AH's emptied, and new players couldn't get things. It didn't matter that Gustaberg was "the" place to go for Goldsmithing, everyone still sold the goods in Jeuno if they sold them at all. You might get lucky and see some beastcoins or someone grinding out low level bars and offloading them right there, but for the most part the money was in Jeuno and it didn't matter that the guild was in basty.

Besides that, we have to think beyond trade goods and have a care for new players looking for equipment. Crafters generally NPC the low level things that don't turn a profit because there isn't a market for it in the big city and those selling slots are precious (if we can assume that SE will continue to limit us by certain amounts of slots). If the AH's are linked, they can reach a wider audience for their wares and not be limited by only those people who happened to start in the "correct" city.

Some of you preach to know economics but the truth is that in the real world, profit is made by reaching as large an audience as possible, not by cutting trade off and only being specific to one region. There's a reason we have a global economy now.

The same thing will happen here as happened in XI if they choose to go this route.

[AngryNixon]

And again, I respectfully disagree and ask if you have played XI. If you had, you would know that this is exactly what they did there. Jeuno had higher taxes on selling goods at the AH but it didn't drive people to rush back to the starter cities to sell things. They just stopped selling lower level things because it didn't turn any profit for them. As a result, the starter city AH's emptied, and new players couldn't get things. It didn't matter that Gustaberg was "the" place to go for Goldsmithing, everyone still sold the goods in Jeuno if they sold them at all. You might get lucky and see some beastcoins or someone grinding out low level bars and offloading them right there, but for the most part the money was in Jeuno and it didn't matter that the guild was in basty.

Besides that, we have to think beyond trade goods and have a care for new players looking for equipment. Crafters generally NPC the low level things that don't turn a profit because there isn't a market for it in the big city and those selling slots are precious (if we can assume that SE will continue to limit us by certain amounts of slots). If the AH's are linked, they can reach a wider audience for their wares and not be limited by only those people who happened to start in the "correct" city.

Some of you preach to know economics but the truth is that in the real world, profit is made by reaching as large an audience as possible, not by cutting trade off and only being specific to one region. There's a reason we have a global economy now.

The same thing will happen here as happened in XI if they choose to go this route.

What is the expression people use... "Quoted for truth".

An economy should strive to be accessible, convenient and efficient. If it fails in any of those respects, the money will flow in whatever way most closely approximates those three things. In the case of FFXI that meant funneling all of it through Jeuno and ignoring the rest AND as was mentioned simply not selling items where the tax didn't allow for reasonable profit. You may as well make it properly global and accessible so that people will hang out in various cities because the path of least resistance is no longer confined to one place.

The idealists or people who like to make their lives unnecessarily complicated might go to the small cities to peddle their wears on a street corner but not all of us play on Besaid spending our days RPing a shop-keep. Some of us want smooth efficient global commerce with price histories tracking back at least a year so the economy can better establish equilibrium prices for goods that will then properly fluctuate and not erratically change every 10 minutes because you're totally blind as to what it sold for 11 minutes ago. Some of us (probably just me) also want the system to better incorporate buy orders as well as sell orders so the information as to what items should cost (vis-a-vis what people are willing to sell them for and what people are willing to pay for them and meeting somewhere in the middle) is properly coming from both ends of the marketplace instead of being solely dictated by sellers.

That's what supply and demand is at its most superficial. Two lines on a graph converging and meeting somewhere along the way telling the world "this is probably the right price", not one line traveling willy-nilly all over the damn place fumbling in the dark for the best way to rip someone off.

[Jinko]

@Haraldsson you last post is the very reason why Ishguard should not have an AH or a market ward, this way it would force people back to the old cities, something SE made a mistake with when they made Jeuno and Whitegate.

All 3 AH's should then be globally linked.

As I said before though for people to do this they need to remove anima cost either between current cities or a players home cities.

[AngryNixon]

@Haraldsson you last post is the very reason why Ishguard should not have an AH or a market ward, this way it would force people back to the old cities, something SE made a mistake with when they made Jeuno and Whitegate.

All 3 AH's should then be globally linked.

As I said before though for people to do this they need to remove anima cost either between current cities or a players home cities.

Then Ishguard would be deserted... That just creates a variant of the problem.