Quote Originally Posted by ArnoMorley View Post
It doesn't matter as in it didn't really affect much, yeah the price of everything went way down but it was across the board, everybody adjusted to it. An MMO isn't a real economy where you have your life savings in the stock market that can become worthless if the market crashes, most people don't save their money on these games. The people that did save their money were suddenly a lot richer but it didn't have an impact on most people.

This threads idea doesn't eliminate RMT, it creates it. The STF is a better way to go if you want to fight RMT, and plus SE has years worth of experience with fighting RMT now, they could be even more efficient than they were in XI.
I'm not talking about deflation here. I'm talking about economy being important. Deflation isn't always a bad thing, unless it's a huge amount. But the economy itself does matter. If there's no economy, or an unhealthy one... it's not a matter of prices, it's a matter of supply. If prices are terrible, if people don't feel it's worth selling anything because the time involved is too much for the gil earned, or if people don't have enough gil available to buy anything, the economy tanks, and this affects everyone. Want some buttons in a blanket for your black mage on Garuda? too bad, no one want's to farm/sell the ingredients to make them, much less sell the food itself. Want to buy some cobalt claws+1 with materia on it for your fresh 50 mnk until you can get something better? too bad, no one sees a profit in cobalt claws, or can't find the materials to make them.

That's what i mean by economy matters. If the economy is bad, then it affects you and everyone else's experience, enough that it can make people quit. Trust me, i've played on hades server when it first came out in FFXI. it was... HORRIBLE. Nothing was on the AH, what little there was sold for ridiculously high or low prices, because people couldn't grasp the concept that the server was new and no one had any gil yet. (this was after beastmen got nerfed to drop a pittiance of gil too, so gil coming in was really slow, while the gilsinks like chocobo rentals stayed the same.) This is on top of the fact that supply of everything was very low, and demand equally low because no one could sell anything to buy other goods.

It took years for hades to resemble anything approaching a normal economy, and until it got merged with another server, it was usually the very bottom of the economy rankings in FFXIAH.com. My own experience with that server ended fairly quickly, because out of frustration i moved to another after several months. Phoenix server had been around for a very long time, and its economy was a breath of fresh air compared to hades. Suddenly, i was able to sell my silk threads, crystals, and other items for enough gil to buy armor for my red mage... and actually find it on the auction house.

And this is just one case of where one realizes how much the economy matters in a game. Anyone remember the rampant inflation when RMT and players were fishing rusty gear then repairing/npcing them? I do. Suddenly haubys were selling for millions, and the price kept rising faster than you could earn the gil to buy one. It took many months for the economy to recover from that. Certainly the STF helped on that, by banning RMT accounts loaded with billions of gil spread between them, but the RMTers just found some other thing to take over.

The STF is a great thing to have. They are like emergency workers, rushing to put out blazes as they occur, treat the wounded, and catch the offenders. But they are NOT the only method used to fight RMTers, and they should not be. Prevention is just as important as intervention, and a PLEX system is a method of prevention. Does it create RMT? in a sense, yes. It is essentially a "sanctioned" RMT. But it does so by creating competition for the middlemen, the RMTers, causing them to either lower their prices (lost profits) or quit altogether. And it does this without introducing new gil into the system, affecting people's gameplay by hordes of claimbots, or annoying /tells in the game. I think we can all agree that the root of our hatred for RMT lies mainly in issues like these that arise from third party RMTers.