Basic Economics

[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.