Improving the Game Economically

[Amineri]

As I said in the previous post, Xenor had valid points about the economy, albeit of a more systemic nature.

None of these suggestions are ways to improve the economy. They're suggestions to improve the buying process. To improve the economy you have to focus on what exists in the economy, not the means of trading it. So what does exist? Items and gil.

I will politely disagree that the suggestions would not improve the economy. Buying and selling are intrinsic to the economy, and if they don't work, the economy won't work. That said, I agree that simply addressing the buying and selling of items without correcting systemic problems won't by itself improve this portion of the game.

Gil! It's clear there is way too much of it in the economy when there's many people already close to or above 100 million gil only 7 months after the game was released. This gil needs removing from the economy otherwise people have the power to buy anything they want at any price. This will inevitably lead to massive inflation once worthwhile rare items are added. The average player won't be able to afford the 20-50 million asking prices.

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I don't agree that it is the sheer quantity of gil that is the problem. The number is only a number. What leads to inflation is an imbalance between the number of gil sources and the number of gil sinks.

Currently there are many sources of gil, and hardly any gil sinks in the game. The only gil sinks that I know of are (a) tax on items being bought / sold in markets (b) NPC repair costs (c) facility access for crafting (d) purchasing of items from NPCs. None of these sinks are significant enough to offset the gil flowing into the economy via the leves rewards.

To stabilize the economy, the sources and sink must balance (ideally the source is still slightly greater than the sinks). This can be done by reducing sources, as you have suggested, or by increasing the sinks.

The problem with reducing gil sources are two-fold -- it penalizes new players, and is viewed as a negative change by existing players. Alternatively, I suggest that new gil sinks be added. By adding something for players to spend their gil on, it is a positive change -- players have something worthwhile to spend their gil on, rather than having their income taken away. Additionally, keeping the gil sources allows new players to enter the game economically, and continue to earn gil as they need to.

Unfortunately, adding gil sinks means adding new content, something that takes time. In the meantime, we likely will have to deal with the current inflation.

Items! There's too many of them. People can sit and spam and spam items forever until they pop out +1 +2 and +3 versions. This makes the NQ market worthless within a day of a new item being introduced and the +1 market becomes worthless shortly after. You've got to lower the amount of items that can be spammed. You've got to solve the item problem at the source.

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Items are in the same category as gil. It's less an issue of too many items, as a balancing between item creation and item destruction.

Gathering does create a very large quantity of materials, it's true. Yet, under the current crafting system, these materials are needed in order to advance crafting. The issue, I feel, is less a problem between the gathering and crafting step, as between the crafting and using step.

Crafter must create a very large quantity of items in order to advance, far above the needs of people to consume such items. Since items never need be destroyed, the only current item sinks are (a) actually destroying an item (b) selling an item to an NPC. Both of these are used extensively now, and are somewhat unsatisfactory.

The new task system is a first step toward providing a sink for items both gathered and crafted. Hopefully this will be expanded upon in future patches.

I have thought about and discussed the concept of bind-on-equip items, as well as item deterioration to destruction. However, both of these ideas, while they do remove some items from the economy, cannot do so as quickly as items are created by crafters. Further, they are negatives, essentially taking options (or items) from the players.

Instead, some positive inducement to remove items from the economy should be introduced, as the new task system has. Hopefully, the alluded-to materia system will be such a system. In order to balance continuing item creation, however, such a system would have to be essentially consumable.

As a straw man, suppose that weapons and armor could be broken down (when combined with appropriate gathered items) into various types of materia, which could then be slotted into gear to provide it enhancements. If the slotting of materia is permanent, eventually the items are filled, and the situation would return to the current state.

However, if the slotted materia decayed over time, then items would be continuously needed to be broken down into replacement materia. For example, suppose that applying materia provided an enhancement that lasted for one hour of in-game use (approximately). Given the number of wearable items, this type of system could easily consume all of the excess item production, and create demand for more.

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In summary, I agree that there are systemic imbalances with both gil and items in the game. These are related to the creation and consumption of both gil and items -- currently there is far more creation than consumption.

However, rather than restrict creation, as you have suggested, my suggestion is that increasing consumption would create a game that is more fun to play.