Thread: Fresh Start will ruin 2.0

The economy won't balance out over time because many people just hold onto 100s of mil of gil.
FFXI's economies were all relatively similar, and the game was balanced on NA release

Here you have servers where the initial influx of gil was too high (could make millions off leves really fast) and where people literally botted for a year straight.

Lets say on a current server you need 10mil to get decent to raid end-game and improve yourself.
But on a new server you only need 500k.
SE has to decide how much gil leves and such give.

You might say "well a new player can sell to the rich" but if you look at prices now, high lvl players don't care about low level equip. they want double melded stuff and rare end game drops. Sadly it takes a LOT of investment to get to the point where you can get this stuff.

My challenge to you is this: start a new character and see how fast you can make 10mil. I bet even if you get 50 in a week it will take you months to make 10 mil.
Now go on a character with stuff leveld up and decent equip. You can make 10mil pretty easy (at least i can)

Already the game has an imbalance, and it will be worse on 2.0s release. If the economy isn't handled right, most people will get frustrated and quit (just like they did in ffxi when hyperinflation hit and woodsville axe went from 200k to 60mil overnight)

The current economy is not balanced and is a complete mess
fixing it is a challenge in itself
but trying to start new servers with new economies while fixing old ones will ruin the game.

Originally Posted by Alerith

So...you think because a level 50 player can make 10 mil faster than a level 10 player...something is broken?

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight....

No... I think when you try to develop POLICIES for a game, such as:

How much gil should leves reward
How much gil should mobs drop
How much gil should things like airships, npc items, blessings, etc cost
How do you deal with hyperinflation (a serious issue which will kill of half this games population at some point)
Do you make the best gear rare/ex? or materia melds
How do new players afford equipment (ex. new players make avg or 30k a day, no old players have an incentive to sell anything affordable to new players)
How do we make it so new players can "catch up" (ex. i could make 10mil a day, and saved up gil. New players may not be able to make more than 100k a day)

... you need to consider the state of your economy.

If you have 2 different economies, the decisions required to make the game enjoyable have to be different for each one.

If you create new servers with drastically different economic conditions than currently exists, and then try to apply the -same- policies to the old and new economies you face disaster.

THIS IS NOT COMPLICATED
Look at real life or take a 1st year economics course. You cannot apply the same cookie cutter economic policy to every country in the world. You can't even apply it to the same basic economy over the years. Policies that worked in the 70s could create devastation if used -exactly- the same way today in the US. Economics is tricky, and needs to be customized to an economy. If you have 5 servers with -similar- economies because they all had -similar- opportunities to develop in the same environment thats one thing. But when you create a totally new economy based on different opportunities and a different environment you have some serious issues coming.....

The same time leves gave less gil SE already reduced the cost from the repair NPC.
And airship cost is well balanced around your highest class.

Okay, so we wanna talk first year econ, okay.

The primary monetary supply is guildleves. That's where a player from 1-49 is going to be gaining the majority of their income. These are unchanging across all servers; monetary supply is mostly static. There is no policy implementation, no one is going to be implementing any expansionary policy on an overheated economy or anything like that to somehow balance the servers.

The only other way to significantly pump money into the market is through DoL jobs. This makes up a much lesser portion of the money supply than guildleves do. However, the amount of DoL income is directly proportional to the player population.

For theory's sake, if the population on each server were the same, the amount of money supplied through DoL jobs would be nearly the same, as would the amount of money supplied via guildleves.

If we assume that if EVERYONE were to fresh start on that server, then we can also assume that the average level of all players on the server will rise towards and eventually cap out at 50. During this rise, if the average level were 10, the primary supply would be from level 10 guildleves and level 10 DoL nodes, and the primary demand would be for level 10 goods. This ratio would stay the same when the average level was 20, 30, 40, and then finally 50.

During this rise of the level average, players will be leveling other jobs, keeping the demand and supply of lower level gear healthy (debatable with the current leveling speed).

Therefor, a new fresh start server will cause the economy to be in turmoil in the short run, but will find an equilibrium based on player population in the long run.

Just because something is cheaper on one server doesn't make it's actual value any less, money supply is based on population.