How will new players perceive this game? (A pessimistic outlook)

[Azurymber]

The reason economies in online games don't work in the same way as in the real world, is because exploitation doesn't exist. There is no world system in which you can underpay some demographic to process whatever good you're selling. So profits are pretty slim. Also, everyone are on the same terms when it comes to production (aside from getting the skill level), so there is no economy of scale. Basically. Most of the incentives that drive competition aren't present in most mmorpgs (besides EVE Online).

And without competition, optimization of markets won't exist, so there is no "invisible hand" to direct the market. This is why making an in-game economy work seems almost impossible.

Maybe, what we need is some reverse Keynesian ingenuity from the developers. Creating incentives to buy from NPCs, when prices are high. But, the main dilemma we're facing in any MMORPG is the paradox of printing money, to create growth. In the mid-term, it creates inflation, because there are too many bills in circulation. So maybe what we need is regulation of gil coming into the market (in this case, the players' hands) through flexible monetary rewards and NPC prices.

Edit: Speaking of Keynes. What we really need, is incentives to spend money within the game, one way or the other, so players don't hoard cash, effectively creating the higher prices.

One suggestion could be to make NPC prices be dependant on how many gil a player has. The more gil the player has, the more expensive the items from the NPC will be. This will create an incentive for players to not hoard. The level of price increase will determine the equivalence of money in each players' hands on average. Of course, players might just start trading... But why not make a flexible tax rate, depending on the amount of money an item sells for? This might require a more advanced algorithm depending on the quality and level of the item sold (so high level rare items aren't sold for less than they are worth).

great post.

Only thing i see wrong with scaled npc prices is that people would transfer gil to another character and just buy stuff on that character.

I think incentives are the key though. This could be accomplished with the company system. Ex.
Each company has 20 really good items which you can buy with company points
Every day the company requests one piece of equipment from the game, which is random and different for every person. You can find what this item is via a npc linkpearl.
If you return it you get x points.

This would create a market for the 100s of current goods that are lacking in demand. It would force people to trade more, which would increase the gil depletion via taxation. And if coupled with NPC's that sell mats at a much better price than currently, it would provide a gil sink through purchases from NPC;s.

Then again there are 100 different possible ways to fix the problem. It just doesn't seem like SE is capable of it or has any clue what they are doing economy-wise.