Square Enix. Please hire an economic advisor.

[RaideDuku]

First, I love everything else about the new patch. Crystal Tower and King Moggle Mog have been a blast. However, choices that have economy have me wondering what the -hell- you are thinking? So you introduce housing at insane prices. Great, now no one wants to buy anything. Then you go and make the problem worse and make tomes stupidly easy to get. Which in turn floods the market with tome crafting materials, which causes their prices to tank. Then you give away the best materia in the game for -free- in the story quest. Yes, that will dry up eventually, but as for right now, it's caused the materia market to crash as well.

But that's ok, because now you can earn more money through quests. Wonderful, so when FCs can -finally- buy a house, the can start earning that money back quickly and ... uh ... store it all on their retainers, I guess.

Don't say "buy furniture/house parts." Any FC that has the means to actually buy a house are going to have plenty of people that have DoH/DoL maxed. They don't have to pay anyone to do -anything-, they just have to get the mats. You've effectively kicked the problem of a crashing economy a few months down the road.

So I come back to people buying a house and now have nothing to spend money on, or as an alternative, smaller FCs just say "Screw it" and skip getting a house, and individuals just hold onto their money to spend on...what? PvP gear? There are some servers that have built a small market on it, but how long until that gets flooded? Are you going to have personal housing be insanely priced? Great, piss off people at second time, and only manage to kick the problem down the road for another three months. Awesome.

You need to hire someone that has experience with making items for MMOs and how they effect the game's market. If you have to poach them from somewhere else, do it. Hell, even with my basic college class economic experience can come up with some ideas.

Have -some- end game stuff craftable. You need to get over the whole "don't want end game craftable" thing. You listed two reasons not to have end game stuff craftable.

1. "You don't want people simply buying the equipment and ignoring the dungeons." So...have the items needed to craft the items drop from from the dungeon. You don't need all the materials to come from there. Just one. You could have a goodly number of rare materials come from unspoiled nodes (Increasing the value of -those- items) You can even have have the material go through a number of crafting steps to give multiple crafts something to do (for instance, having to refine the metal/leather/cloth [Alchemy] Have the base armor made [Armorsmith/Leatherworking/Weaver] and then have the needed detail worked done to have the metal's energies flow correctly, or some other fantasy babble [Goldsmithing].) You wouldn't have ALL the armor craftable. Maybe a piece or two of the armor, and a jewelry piece or two. You make people still have to run dungeons for the material, and for the pieces that CAN'T be crafted. Hell, you can even have to go to the dungeons to even LEARN the recipes!

2. "You don't want RMTers to take advantage of it." RMT are -always- going to take the path of least resistance. Do you see lots of RMTs gearing up for Hard Mode Titan to sell Titan carrys? No? Of course you bloody don't. All the time they spend getting themselves geared to be able to do end game content is time not making money. That's why they just get a character to 10, and grab pickax or hatchet and go mine shards. Cause it takes very little effort to do, which means they can start making gil. Hell, once they get them to level 10, they don't even need a human to do the work. Just a script. Make them have to use manpower and spend the time to have to level and gear up characters to do that content, then make them have to do the content in order to make the big money? Then flush it all down the drain. Sure, you'll still have the more determined ones try, but more and likely they'll just keep farming shards.

Here's another idea. Have HQ endgame armors, but make them RARE. Hell, even have the base be hard to make. Right now, you can craft top shelf stuff HQ (if there IS a HQ version) at 100% HQ success, even without the materials being HQ. This is stupid, as it makes it easy to flood the market with the best item. You had a bit of check with having some materials be behind a tome wall, but you went and screwed that up. So for the parts you have to craft, have some chance of failure. Maybe for just the normal base armor cap it at...say...70-80%. You'll probably succeed, but just enough failure rate to stem the tide a bit. However, if you want a HQ version...well, you would HAVE to get HQ versions of the materials (dungeon drops aside) to even be able to raise that quality bar to like, 5%. Then cap the quality at 10-15%, no matter how high your Control is.

Great thing is, you could even do this to the items that can't be crafted and only drop from dungeons. Just have some sort of "kit" that you make that a crafter has to apply to a piece like materia for a chance to make it high quality, with like a 10% chance of success, and maybe even a low chance (20-30%) to blow up the armor of it fails. Hey, now when you do the dungeon, you'll have a reason to get that piece of armor you got on your last run again...so the piece you're using doesn't get eaten. Now, the HQ version wouldn't be a huge upgrade. In fact, it's just a very small boost. However, there are people out there that WILL do whatever it takes to have the best of the best gear. If that means grinding and paying gil out the wazoo, so be it. Some people will be content with the normal version, and that's fine, too.

Make EVERYTHING have the ability to have materia melded into it! Why why why isn't this how it is?! Right now, at best, you can get by skipping some Darklight (maybe some LotA) gear by materiaing up the best crafted armors...but that's it! WHY?! Once people have that, or LotA, or darklight, or coil gear, they have NO reason to get materia anymore! Just balance the end game armors to take melding into consideration! Have a robe that would give normally, I dunno, 60 INT. Have the boots not give any INT so you can shove INT materia in it. Figure out how much of an INT boost you can give the boots through materia, then subtract that amount from the 60 INT. Now you get the same stats from the set, but you had crafters make some money of the materia and synths. Oh, but the boots have Critical Hit but the robe does not? Oh, guess what you're shoving into the robe? Congrats, you just made a huge materia demand.

Have NPCs sell some crafting materials for gil. No, I'm not talking about stuff people already make. I'm talking about things like tome materials, or quenching oils. Stuff that you only can get through NPC merchants for GIL. Sure, gil passing between players is good, but you need ways to keep essentially destroying gil to keep it's circulation down in order to keep it worth something and stop inflation. The housing costs does...sort of...does this, but does it horribly. By spreading gil burning to several different sources, you don't have to have -one- thing ludicrously priced to do the job, but have several things that people HAVE to buy be reasonably priced.

Oh, I know. "But Raide, once people actually do get this stuff done, have the best stuff, have the best materia in it, all HQ...what do they spend their money on then? Huh smart guy?" Easy. By the time they get that far they'll be able to enjoy their shiny gear for maybe a month. Then new content makes it obsolete. Now, they should give a bit of a leg up to the people that went through the effort to get the best of the best. Maybe they can -complete- the content without replacing a piece or three of the new armor, but in the end, those are the people that, despite having spent a few months perfecting their gear, that are going to -go right out and do it again-.

Now I know some people are going to say "You just want to introduce grind!" To this I say, yes. Yes I do. If you want the best of the best gear, yes, you WILL have to grind. If you just want "good enough", then the grind will be lesser. I'm pretty casual, myself. I hate grind. It's why I stopped playing Final Fantasy XI. Unfortunately, it is a necessary evil in MMOs. If somehow they found a giant mine full of diamonds tomorrow, enough to put a giant rock on the finger of everyone in the world, diamonds would cease to be valuable. It is because they are rare, and that they are hard to get that they are so valuable. Same goes with items in MMOs. If you make tradable things easy to get/make, then the market will flood, making them worthless.

Seeing I've been typing this for an hour now, it's pretty obvious I care about how well this game. It's the best FF I've played since (-in my opinion-) Final Fantasy IX. It's the most fun I've had in an MMO in years, even more fun then I had in World of Warcraft. I love the story, the music, the graphics. Hell, I even have fun dodging AoEs, lag and all. I want to see this game succeed. If everything else done in the game is any indication, it has much more to give. This is something you cannot simply ignore or simply gloss over if you want to have this game to have any longevity at all. If you actually have someone that says they have this experience, then you need to find someone else.

I'm sure this is going to get a lot of TLR posts, but I think it needs to get said. Feel free to add to or pick apart my ideas. They're just ideas, after all, not necessarily answers.