ARR Gil Cap Reduction

[Ferth]

what happens is that there are multiple levels of in game economy that exist. One is the npc vendor economy, then there is also the player economy. The first one is static unless they make actual changes to the game. the second one relies on the first as a small portion of it's overall effectiveness, but (hopefully) would rely far more on the value of tradeable goods in the game

in a real economy it's not just the money that holds value. every single item that can be purchased also has a fluctuating value based on supply and demand.

In ffxiv that would be crafted items, tradeable gear, materia and consumables. those items have value based on the demand for the item compared to the available supply. A great example would be explorer's gear. When they first added it to the game, things like tabards and moccasins had a much higher value because the demand was high and the supply was low.

As people started doing the required 17 minute speed runs in efforts to get relics the supply of the items caught up and surpassed the demand, now with a few exceptions their value is significantly lower.

but that isn't a one way street. a prime example being the atomos exploit they just recently tried to fix. It was possible for people to get a crazy amount of GC seals in a very short period of time by purchasing low seal cost vendable items and then selling them to npcs for gil.

You see it most with RMT because that is all they do. though in reality that is happening all the time. In a well balanced game you shouldn't be too aware of it though. the problem is that FFXIV right now is not even remotely well balanced. (or rather it's balanced around an incredibly low value for gil.)

I would hope that the lowering of the gil cap is an effort to make each gil more valuable, the fairest way do to that would be to eliminate a percentage of total gil in the game. every person loses 90% of their gil, the value AND distribution of wealth as a whole stays the same, the quantity of gil is lowered significantly. if they were to just remove all gil that anyone had over the cap gil would be worth more than it is now, but not by much and it would really only take the wealthiest people at the top and take their % of the total wealth down. people under the cap would actually gain a higher % of the wealth.

When considering vendors, gil is a static value, because their prices and their quantities will never change. When considering a player driven economy it changes all the time, both based on the current quantity of gil AND based on the current quantity of items available and items needed/wanted by the community.

[dascorp]

How is this fair to the players who put the time in and and faith in this game? Is this the reward we are getting?

SE you need to realize that all of those future new people had the chance to play this game from the start and they chose not to. So, why punish the rest of us? What are you guys doing to keep the old players?

[AeraLucis]

How is this fair to the players who put the time in and and faith in this game? Is this the reward we are getting?

SE you need to realize that all of those future new people had the chance to play this game from the start and they chose not to. So, why punish the rest of us? What are you guys doing to keep the old players?

The sad reality is that they've already got you. How many people who have devoted 2 years into this game are going to just up and quit like that? It may not be right, it may not be fair, but since when did companies stop having their bottom line as their top priority?

[Seig345]

[...]

When considering vendors, gil is a static value, because their prices and their quantities will never change. When considering a player driven economy it changes all the time, both based on the current quantity of gil AND based on the current quantity of items available and items needed/wanted by the community.

(Gotta say first that I love these kinds of discussions; Civil and beneficial in one way or another)

I agree with your post, and I really like how you summed up the two systems at the end there, but FFXIV consists of both systems in one.

That being said, I think I may finally be coming to understand here, so let me know if I've got this right:

The value of gil in the player driven economy will rise if everyone is knocked down by the same percentage? It seems like as far as the static system goes, that still relies entirely on the static system's parameters. But from the perspective of those who only earn their gil via the player driven market, I think I can finally understand why a 10% drop across the player board would be preferable.

Edit: Preferable over just a shave off the top of the cap, and why it'd be preferable to leave the cap as it is overall.

[Ferth]

(Gotta say first that I love these kinds of discussions; Civil and beneficial in one way or another)

I agree with your post, and I really like how you summed up the two systems at the end there, but FFXIV consists of both systems in one.

That being said, I think I may finally be coming to understand here, so let me know if I've got this right:

The value of gil in the player driven economy will rise if everyone is knocked down by the same percentage? It seems like as far as the static system goes, that still relies entirely on the static system's parameters. But from the perspective of those who only earn their gil via the player driven market, I think I can finally understand why a 10% drop across the player board would be preferable.

Edit: Preferable over just a shave off the top of the cap, and why it'd be preferable to leave the cap as it is overall.

Yes, sir. That's it exactly.

[Seig345]

Yes, sir. That's it exactly.

Awesome, as geeky as I feel for saying this, I feel like I've accomplished something!

I was only confused at first because my perspective comes from one who earns next to no gil off the player market at all. SO since I'm only sitting on roughly 500,000gil at any one time, and I earn it off the static system 99% of the time, I'm not exactly chaffed regardless of how the cap drop is handled.

Now I appreciate the problem more, and would say that I'd gladly take a 10% drop off my lowly 500,000gil if it meant keeping the other side in balance!

[Kestiel]

After seeing the responses I'm a bit surprised, though my rational mind says I shouldn't be. Regardless of what side you fall on (over 99m, under 99m) you have to see how unfair this is. Disregarding emotional filters and personal feelings; objectively people must know this is unfair and wrong.

Now if they were to divide everybody's gil by a tenth, then that's fair. Somebody with 500m will have 50m, a person with 15m will have 1.5m, and somebody with 200k will have 20k. Adjust the gil rewards from quests/leves/etc. and the inflation is practically gone. If you split up 300m across three retainers, you still end up having only 30m at the end of the day, so it's fair and nobody can squirrel away their gil hoping to circumvent this horribly unfair cap.

If the cap is reduced from 999m to 99m, it stands to reason anybody with over 99m will walk into ARR with 99,999,999gil and not 102,000,000 or whatever they might have. I understand why this is necessary, inflation is ridiculous and in need of a fix. But just capping peoples gil, in effect deleting hard work and hours upon hours players put into their character, will do little to nothing to help in the long-run. However, lowering everybody's gil by a tenth as somebody suggested earlier would equalize gil to a lower level while allowing the same 99m cap to remain and combating inflation effectively as they can at this point.

A person with capped gil now, will have capped gil in ARR (999m -> 99m). That way gil that exists will be more valuable, lowering inflation by a massive margin and causing people to be completely confused how to price things, but eventually the prices will stabilize or people will just take a tenth off. A 1.2m mailbreaker ends up being 120k and still retains the same margin of profit / value it currently does (assuming prices are also decreased by a tenth, if they end up more/less that skews things a bit). Each gil becomes more valuable and therefore we're just removing a zero and curbing the inevitable "big numbers" we're seeing now. For those of you from FFXI, the prices of various things would likely look far more familiar.

Most players with 300m+ will likely just buy more characters before the 30th cut-off and then they'll be able to stash their money and when the time comes, they will have the capital to buy everything up for a drastic reduction in price yet their buying power won't be diminished at all, leading to a harshly lopsided economy. Herein lies the truth; if SE does this it won’t fix things. It will fix practically nothing.

Anybody with a lot of money will get more characters and stash the money away. When ARR comes they’ll still have 300, 500, 700 million gil and since many of them are likely legacy they’ll easily be able to keep the new bank-mules at no cost to themselves. People will figure a way around this, it’s in our nature and it really would further hurt the economy.

The buying power of these people will increase, while some of you may extol the benefits of knocking these millionaires down a few notches, you fail to realize anybody who has that sort of money will still have that money, if all they do is cap gil at 99m it won’t do anything. They’ll just have several characters full of 99m, with everything costing drastically less; they can buy whatever they want for an incredibly long time without worrying about spending any gil. If getting 7/7 relics on average costs ~150m, and after ARR it costs ~15-20m, they make out like bandits and contribute a fraction to the economy that they would have before.

The players that I know that have over 100m are all those who spend a great deal of time crafting, creating goods for the market; in essence these people consider themselves too busy to go mine. They are the ones buying 10+ stacks of darksteel ore, gold ore and other raw mats that people gather. They, in turn, produce finished goods from these raw mats, which sell to people who are in need of finished goods, whether to meld, to have or for relic. The reason 'why' doesn't matter, what do you think will happen if their gil is reduced to 99m and they're capped? If they can't shuffle it off onto a retainer, why would they bother making anything more? Most of them wouldn’t, there’s nothing for them to gain from it.

These people are consummate crafters and some like to treat the AH/MW like the stocks (they buy low, and then sell high on various materials). What happens when the main producers of goods stop making them? Consider the ramifications for a moment.

Miners won’t have as many buyers. They make less money, in return more miners begin to flood the market with raw goods, the reason is two-fold; firstly, they cannot get people to buy and while they and others mine at their usual rate the wards/AH accumulate with goods that have gone unsold, secondly the more that get put up the more undercutting begins to sell anything at all, this lowers the price on goods many average players could count on for gil.

Normally, this leads to more undercutting down the line now that a crafter’s profit margin is larger, they can afford to try and sell faster by undercutting, and the buyer is the one who prospers from lower prices. But in this scenario, there aren’t as many people making these items, so the few that do get made have less competition, in turn people have to pay more and put up with shortages of items (keep in mind the population is very likely to rise, the majority of them won’t have the ability to craft these items for quite a while). This leads to an overall detriment to the player.

If you can’t make money from materia, from crafting, then what would you do? The most occurring answer would be, “nothing, I’ll just enjoy the game.” Which would be well and properly right, but the economy would suffer for it. With so many new crafters and new players the opposite of what we have now would likely come into play, a lopsided shift in item availability. High-end items for capped players would dry up without those to produce them and newer crafters who can’t HQ as easily or can’t make the higher level goods will focus on lower levels.

Miners and procurers of raw goods will see this, and follow the trend by supplying lower-end materials since they sell faster, this will speed up the atrophy of top-end gear and items. If you’ve ever played any MMO where it was easy to get items for yourself while you leveled, and then suddenly at cap you’re gouged for the few items on the market, you’ll understand the potential severity of this issue.

You might say, “But, why don’t they just spend their gil before ARR, or buy stuff after ARR comes out to be able to make gil again?”

A lot of people in this situation already have what they want, they have the gear, the melds and the jobs/classes leveled with nothing to really spend on. They might not want Relics, or that super-rare 4x meld t4 STR gloves (which may or may not take them over-cap and be less useful).

That’s how a lot of these people got the money they have, being frugal or only buying what they needed, or even making what they needed for cheap. Nobody knows what will be for sale after ARR so that’s a question that can’t reliably be answered from either camp. Even still, having to spend gil so you can get cap again seems silly at best.

Now, nobody can truly know what will happen, all my postulation is based on my own educated guesses. I’m not saying this will definitively happen, but I believe it has a markedly high probability if they just cap gil at 99m and do little else. It’s a band-aid over a gut wound that will slowly infect and turn gangrene. I sincerely hope they have some additional answer that I’ve yet to see or that they change their minds and implement a proper adjustment that is fair to all parties. This is just food for thought, or rather, a full three-course dinner due to its length.

TL;DR – This is a poor adjustment, it fixes nothing while attempting to penalize players who have worked hard to amass gil. There are many reasons why somebody wouldn’t spend their gil, and in the end it’s their money to do with as they wish (like saving it). If it’s to thwart RMT; they’ll just find another loophole or glitch and get it all back anyways, the only ‘proven’ method against RMT is constant vigilance.

[Ferth]

Well said, Kestiel.

[Luhy]

I hope this is wrong only because some people are going to find an exploit. They will either spend all of their gil on materia and re-sell it early on in ARR before the prices go down 90% or spend all of their money on something that they can NPC to make back a big part of their losses.

[Kestiel]

I hope this is wrong only because some people are going to find an exploit. They will either spend all of their gil on materia and re-sell it early on in ARR before the prices go down 90% or spend all of their money on something that they can NPC to make back a big part of their losses.

That'd work if prices would still be insane afterwards, which only an incredibly ignorant person would put up the prices as they were. Additionally investing anything in any item pre-ARR is a harsh risk that is unlike to pay out (better/newer items, less desire for that etc.) And NPCs are being adjusted so that prices reflect the gil they want in the system with new caps. Buying something now to NPC later is likely going to give a lot less of a payout.