Adding Pel as a currency + adding value to new zones

[Zofian]

One of the things that had been said of this expansion is that the new zones are gorgeous but a bit empty, and that the addition of flight has made this side effect a necessary trade-off. I feel that in any large zone or 'world' based game, your current location should have some manner of value- you being that at any given moment giving you an advantage in the event something rare or special starts happening. Currently the closest thing to this is basically A, S and SS rank monsters, for which usually people gather and call everyone to come anyway, and there's almost always plenty of time and only few miss out.

I am not yet in the middle of DT's story but just been doing the Urqopacha arc and this has been quite good. From this and the above issue, I think there is a way to do two things at once for XIV, by both adding Pel as a currency, and also adding Wandering PeluPelu merchants that spawn entirely randomly and trek from one spot to another within a zone before despawning (at least for 5 of the DT zones- I have heard that this may not suit the theme of one of them). I feel if they appeared for a 10 minute window per 18 real life hours, per zone, might be a good measure- the merchant needs to be truly rare.

The Pel currency would not only be for trading with the Wandering Pelupelu merchants- but also crucially a player-to-player currency. A player could trade a piece of lv80 or higher craftable gear (basically anything lv80 or higher from marketboard) to another player for an amount of Pel that is fixed for that item, with higher level items being worth more Pel. Pel itself should be a somewhat hard-to-get currency, with players perhaps being able to turn in (trade) a limited amount of gear to a Pelupelu merchant per week in exchange for Pel. In some ways this could be likened to tomestones- but as a player-to-player currency, that avoids the issues with gil, whilst also avoiding the current limited usefulness of MGP. Perhaps the amount of Pel a player can attain per week from a fixed-spawn turn-in Merchant should be limited at account level, so that players cannot 'farm' Pel with alts and then feed the Pel to their main. A weekly Player-to-player Pel limit should also exist, but be high.

As for what the Wandering Pelupelu merchants would sell- the core value for this whole concept is for their stock to be randomly chosen from a pool each time they spawn and do their short journey (and perhaps even limited supply- but one per person). The merchant could carry a various assortment of grey-tier gear, weapons and accessories from lv90 and up- and perhaps even a couple of random green lv100 craftables when those get added later (and their materials? to include the crafters/gathers into the Pel stuff). Some unique dyeable gear and a weapon set amongst the item pool would be a must- and also some mounts and minions (for high amounts of Pel that no one will get for ages). Atherpool grips and relic materials could appear- maybe even trial totems could be randomly selected to appear in the merchants list for that particular spawn. All tradeable for Pel with the merchant and also with other players.

I think it would be fine if a player was able to trade their totems to other players for Pel if the developers set the Pel price high. A player may amass, say, 350,000 Pel for a minion (again, they will need to be lucky enough to find a wandering merchant that spawned with it in their list/bag first!), but the only thing they will be able to do with it is either use it themselves or trade it to another player for maybe *365,000* Pel, with this player-to-player markup being automatic. Perhaps there could even be a random economic factor set later that results in these fixed prices going up or down depending on the 'Pel Economy' (Pel P2P price of an item goes up the more that item is traded across the server for that week?). In any case, keeping the amount of Pel gained per-player at a dripfed-tomestone like way (by limiting the gear turn ins to a fixed Pel merchant per week- also avoiding players stressing over not finding a wandering one each week) should keep things stable. I think this would be fun and give the game some vitality. A player who does lots of/thoroughly enjoys Deep Dungeons could thus use their Aetherpool to buy Grips, then trade those grips to other players or a Pelupelu merchant for the set price of Pel. So players can thus find their own preferred way to gain Pel beyond the weekly turn-ins. Also this could perhaps just be done as a temporary experiment from say 7.3 till 8.0 or something.