Economy thought....I know there has been plenty.Follow

First off let me say I have never whined about the economy, I do well on my own and don't have to want for much in game. I know there has been plethora's of posts about this subject and most of them end up as rants stating the problems but never offering any type of viable solution, I assure this one will not. Last night in the wake of the update I bought some one the new items with my CP and finished up a quest I was working on and was just hanging out in Lower Jueno.

While standing around half-way watching UFC fights(btw crazy Luke kicked that boys rear), and half-way reading the shouts in Jueno, which isn't really useful but sometimes entertaining I had a thought. Like I said before I never put much thought into our economy, I've read posts by people claiming to have a degree in economics and personally I have never seen this idea. I do not have a degree in anything I am a trade school working class guy that my knowledge comes mostly from the school of life.

Many people complain about the prices of items in our game and rightfully so, some of the tags on the most sought after items are nothing short of outrageous. In my opinion it is because we are in a economic market made up of individuals. In our RL economy we have a wonderful resource in the form of corporations. We in FFXI do not have this resource and this is a major reason for our economy reacting the way it does.

If we had corporations within the game, and I mean true well formed corporations, for an example I will use an imaginary company called Reign's Low Cost Good's. Now if I was the head of the corporation and I had the opportunity to hire tradesmen(crafters), suppliers(farmers), and sales-people(bazaar or AH sellers), and chose one market to sell and buy in, with enough support and eventually enough employees our company could go in and control any market we choose at any time. This is especially true at this moment while I type this, at least to me. I have never heard of a "large" group of people forming a "corporation" within our game.

Now this theory only holds true for consumables, or items crafted from these consumables. I am not including rare/ex items because my whole idea is based on buying, and aquiring items or ingredients and re-selling in volumes. Rare/Ex items would be more like collector's items for example signed baseballs, these will not be produced in volumes but because of their rarity the retain there high price tags.

The way our economy is going now is the rich stay rich or get richer(this being your players who got in on the beginning of the game and have been crafting since then), and the poor stay that way(these being your newer players). I even read a post yesterday that stated if you were a newer player crafting is no longer a solid choice for income because of the numbers of high level crafters flooding the markets with these goods allready.

Theoretically if one was able to get enough people together and set up a "company", and I mean really create an infrastructure that mimic's companies in our society today, I think we could be looking at a REAL economic change. But the mass coordination needed to create this type of orginization in game would take very dedicated and reliable players. Something I think this game out of any I have played has plenty of, the majority of people I know in game in some way or other eat, breathe, and sleep FFXI.

The problem we face is that the "enemies" on our servers have allready done this and this is why we can't compete with them. This game is based on strategy, planning, and co-operation of people to reach a common goal. It pains me to say this but the very people that we complain about so widely in fact are such a powerhouse because they have allreay formed up. "They" have their infrastructure and are working it everyday and we as individuals just can't compete.

I didn't come here to start a flame war but to offer another point of view that I thought was relevant. I would love to hear your thoughts on this and any suggestions that may improve on anything I have said. Take care.

Edited for clarification: When I said one group has formed this type of corporation, but no one I know has I was solely referring to the gil-sellers. I meant no regular players I know that aren't named FGDFGH have started a venture such as this.

Edited, Tue Oct 11 12:29:45 2005 by ReignDrkKnight

We had something like this

8 farmers
5 crafter
3 mules
we famred misc. stuff beacuse most crafters had 2 or more maxed out craftes. and they would put the stuff in the mules.went well for about 2 - 2 1/2 months. Then they started demainding higher goods and more of them. so we pretty much left and did our own thing. 4 of us still farm cuttings im not sure about the otheres though...

Best idea Keep it small and with People you Know IRL.

Thank you all for the rate-ups and interest in my topic. I elaborated some in my server forums and thought I would add it to this post as well.


I'm glad more people are starting to catch my drift in fact Theytak is right along with my line of thinking. Last night as I played Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (speaking of if you haven't tried it you should A+ game great downtime entertainment) I was thinking about what I posted.

To illustrate my point lets just throw around some numbers. Say I had 10 people farming fire crystals on low level characters, 10 more farming beehive chips at 5 different locations around Vana diel in two man teams to ensure a wider coverage area. Five as runners to get supplies back and forth to the crafter's and to the farmers so no one has to leave an area for anything just work, work, work.

Now that being your hardest part you only need a few crafter's to keep product moving, because we all know the synth's will most likely be completed before the next shipment of materials comes in. Depending on the size of the shipment's coming in from your farmers. If you continued this cycle long enough I truly believe that you could swing any given market(excluding rare items)which ever way you wanted if not control it completely.

Take it a step further and have different groups controlling different markets alchemy, goldsmithing, smithing, etc. with one common unifier and you have a group of people who can mold the market the way they want.

I totally left out Rare equipment/items because to me that is like trying to make a living off of, I don't know, let's say catching home run balls at baseball games and selling them on E-Bay. You don't have a constant supply and can't make the baseballs so your income is based on luck. This is just like rare items and you can't run a company on luck you need hard numbers and a consistent flow of product to generate income.

Now would rare equipment be a nice supplement to your normal market? Yes. Let's face it people are not going to want to just farm one thing day in and day out this is where you need diversity. Have a group of rare item hunter's their process will be slower but turn in larger gains on single transactions. This while not a consistent income would be great for covering profit holes if something happened to one of your other endeavors.

And as well you must factor in human greed. If you give one group sole control over any given market your going to see price gouging. This is why you would need groups of people to form different orginizations and either work together to stabilize individual markets and not intrude onto the others turf. Or to compete against each other for customer's to keep prices fair.

Another hurdle would be convincing the people you have gathered to take the risk and begin to sell items at lower prices. The players involved would have to put in significant hours of play time to keep this cycle moving. And some of those people might have a problem selling their hard farmed items for 3/4's of what someone else is getting. We as human beings want guarantee's written in blood, binding contracts that can be reinforced at a later time if necessary and all of this would have to be run on blind faith and trust. A promise of greater returns later on.

Alot of people say ban gil-sellers and our economy will all of a sudden make a huge 180, I don't think so. For every gil-seller you have that sells an item overpriced you have ten more regular players that will step in and sell it for the same price or more.

So that's it basically, the best ideas I have got about our economy is right there. Will this ever happen? I truly doubt it with as much uncertainty and indecisiveness(sp?) I have seen when just trying to form a party, that type of behavior would cripple any effort to get an idea like this off the ground.
We would have to restructure our in game community to reflect the way we live in RL. Which needless to say is nothing short of a monumental task.

Too many times we as human beings want solutions for the problems that plague us in everyday life real or otherwise, but when were told the solution will take time and effort, it's not what we wanted to hear. We live in an age of instant gratification and solutions and our mindset has been warped to think if it can't be fixed in a few minutes it may not be salvagable at all.

But I could be wrong. lmao.

Thank you for your time, hope to hear more comments and discussion on this topic.

Thank you all this post has done better than I ever thought it would and I am glad to see it reaching people. As far the HNMLS and the items obtained through them goes I can't offer any insight on this because I am not a member of one. In fact even at level 64 I consider myself a n00b because I have so much more to learn about this game.

So my idea included avenues of profit that are more accessable to players of all levels. Honestly my main area of focus was common item control, since these are the items that make up and this is just a guess 80-85% of all items listed on AH.

My concept is based on ease of obtainability and ability to aquire said items in volume, which as I mentioned above I don't know much about HNMLS but I think the items granted from them would not fall into either one of the forementioned categories.

If I am wrong about HNMLS items or have some misconceptions I would love to hear from people who know more about that scene. Any information is not only a welcome addition to this post but encouraged for people like me who would be eager to learn more about aspects of the game that they still don't understand.

And to you as well Warlord, anytime I get to chat or debate subjects with fellow Texas gamers is a welcome opportunity.

Thank you all for your time and comments please keep them coming.

Great point Random and that's something I hadn't thought about advertising but that could be remedied by /shouting or posts on our major forums.

As far as the chips example goes flooding the market would be the point, instead of selling 65 stacks for 10k a piece(price on Siren profit of 650k) sell all 130 in bazaars and in the AH for 7k(profit of 910k).

That is the basis of my theory to control the markets and drive down prices by selling at discount in volume. Rather than selling sparse amounts of product at higher prices.

But again this was just an example obviously you would not have this many people working on soemthing that drops as easily as chips. I should've used something with a little worse drop rate possibly for a better example but I think I conveyed my point.

The one downside that I just thought of would be the harm to individual crafter's, farmer's, etc., they simply couldn't compete with a team of players and would either have to join up with an originaziton such as this or deal with the losses of trying to compete.

Guess that proves the old addage right, you can't make an omlette without breaking a few eggs, or pocketbooks in this case.

::Edited:: Random if you combine our calculations each person would make 53k off of that transaction in a period of 6hours. Not record financial gains by any means, this is the price those people would have to pay to influence the market and lower prices for everyone.

This sheds light on another interesting point that the people involved would have to be very dedicated to helping our economy. This is a very complicated solution in theory, trying to recreate the U.S. economy as we know it, in a very very short time. Something we had hundreds of years to "prefect" and I say that somewhat synically because we all know our markets are still far from "perfect".

Great discussions, making me think at work something I try to avoid at all costs.

Edited, Wed Oct 12 11:29:51 2005 by ReignDrkKnight

Well, a very interesting idea. Here's another perspective:

Forming "corporations" would most likely lower the price of crafted and farmable goods, since you would be increasing the supply of said items in the marketplace. You would need to keep the price relatively low to move a large volume of goods before the next "shipment" came in. This would kill the viability of said items as a reliable source of income for those outside of the corporation.

Eventually, it could also monopolize the market on certain items causing them to skyrocket due to having such control on the market for items you produce. How? Once you have enough capital, one could buy out all of those cheaper than one's own and resell them at ANY price. Given enough resources, it is entirely possible. Hostile takeover, perhaps?

Also, you would have to consider "wages" to be paid by the corporation for it's "employees". Given the volume of people necessary to do this, it would need a dedicated accountant to pay salaries and/or hourly wages. Keep in mind, the corporation would need to offer enough gil to convince it's employees that they are making better gil than selling said products on their own. Would there be any profits left? The largest expense for almost every company/corporation is payroll. How would you regulate these wages? Who could dozens/hundreds/thousands of other players trust with all that gil?

As for rare items, a corporation may only make it worse. Non-gilsellers and non-corporation benefactors would most likely NEVER have a chance at getting drops from popular NM's. Your average player trying to make a bit of gil or get an item to use would have to compete with TWICE as many NM campers.

If the corporation left expensive rare items alone, they would make them harder to obtain. While the players and gilsellers alike are constantly hiking up the price due to high demand and low supply, your average player would end up with less and less gil. This would be due to prices on craftable/farmable items plummeting due to overstock, or craftable/farmable items being monopolized and having their prices hiked. Those who had their items bought out by the corporation might be able to make a paltry sum of gil, but they would in turn need to buy something else at a hiked up price and offsetting any profits made.

And last, but certainly not least... FFXI with corporations would be basically paying monthly to have a virtual job! I REALLY don't like the idea of being an "employee" or "CEO" in a game... I work enough as it is.

Call me paranoid, but I think it might be a bad idea.

I think that getting rid of the gilsellers might not help much either. Think about it. NM's would have less competition for claims, but who wouldn't want as much gil possible per item? I'm sure that people who buy gil would lose their supply and eventually would have to be less liberal with their gil. However, there is no guarantee that high ticket items would drop in price. The rich are already rich, and they can afford whatever they want. Price won't make a difference. If we were lucky, the decreased supply of gil would cool off the market and bring prices down. Hard to say for certain.

Peace.

S.

This is true of the wax, however, what would you do with the other drops?

Giant Stingers -> Poison Dust -> Poison Potion

Insect Wings -> Insect Fletching

Many people discard these items or sell to NPC, however nearly every drop has a synthesis affiliated with it. If you use these other drops, your profit margin will be much higher.

While creating low cost wax would help crafters who are using to level, and therefore bring down costs on the finished products, you will want to use all the drops this way and not just the beehive chips.

When I farm, I kill all mobs and not just specific mobs. In lowbie areas, beastmen drop equipment that can be desynthed into base materials, as well as ingredients for cooking and crafting, worms drop ores used in smithing/ goldsmithing, beetles drop bone/clothcraft items. Some beasts such as sheep drop cloth/ leather craftables. Many of these things go straight to NPC or AH, without bringing the farmer full profit potential. Some unstackable things are even thrown away due to the farmer not knowing what to do with them to make them stack.

All these things can be synthed with very basic craft skills.

Even in Fairy Server which is notorious for its crappy economic situation, I can go out on my level 5 mule and make at least 50k an hour by crafting the drops for sale, not including crystals which I keep to synth with.

Don't let people tell you crafting is no longer viable. Anyone who takes the time to study the market will find items that they can make gil with.

The thing that seems to hang up most people is a) the thinking, as in they would rather complain they can't make any gil than seek a solution, and b) the amount of time, they want their gil now, not later.

Crafting is an investment in time, I have told off my husband when he wanted to level on an unprofitable synth and sell on AH at a loss. Levelling crafts, I broke even or made a profit, even at 85 alchemy I am breaking even. Coming into the 90's I will lose gil, however, I make enough gil from lower synths and HQs that it makes up for it. At this point, I know if I get to 100+3 my amount of HQ's in the future will make it worthwhile to invest my time and gil.

(My mule is at 51 goldsmithing so far, on which I made a large profit, and I expect to break even on the upcoming synths until ~62 when I will be profitable again. Again, research and thought! Look at the guides posted in the forums, and then NEVER use those guides. Every other schmuck is reading the same ones and flooding the market with the exact same items.)

I may be one person, but I consider my crafting a business. I do it to make gil to have the buying power to get the items I want, not to "help people out." I am not in an HNMLS, but I own gear that people join HNMLS to be able to get. My gil was made with easily farmed items, in the beginning with only very basic craft skills, and a limited amount of time. If I can do it under those circumstances, anyone who is dedicated can.

Interesting... but I am still a bit confused.

The guy farming common drops: HIs motivation is obvioulsy money. How does he get paid any more for working for the corporation than he would just to farm himself?

The runners: Here is a middle mad cutting into everyone profits.

The Crafters: They craft the items to sell. They have to give a cut of the profts to the farmers and runners...thus he could make more money by crafting alone.

Problems:
In the real world most people work for a corporation becuase there is risk in starting your own company or they just lack the knowledge. So they opt for a steady income (and benefits) rather than work for themselves. In FFXI there's not much risk in farming items and selling them yourself... and you don't need health insurance. Its not like you finanaced your sword and you have to make ends meet to pay the bill on it.

The only benefit to high level crafters would be funding. But I wont go into detail on this, since I make a lot of my gil through a similar process.



Edited, Wed Oct 12 12:48:40 2005 by Mithsavvy

I like this....but in a world where you have to worry about people leaving parties once they ding and LS fights over a simple comment it would be hard to form a corporation.

Actually this is from my second post I believe and no I didn't over look it.

"We as human beings want guarantee's written in blood, binding contracts that can be reinforced at a later time if necessary and all of this would have to be run on blind faith and trust. A promise of greater returns later on."

Also I posted this which I thik relates to the regulatory laws:

"Another drawback to implementing a real life scenario into a game is their is no repercussions for price gouging if such a company did come into existence. If the company had a stranglehold on a market they could dictate the price of any item how they see fit and would have little or no reprecussions because of the lack of competition for sales."


Edited, Wed Oct 12 13:19:14 2005 by ReignDrkKnight

Ok I see your point now just a misunderstanding. You were more so concerned with the actual corporation caring for their "employees". For this to work we would have to have a system set-up within game that would cater to this type of orginization.

To enforce contracts of any kind under our current game system would be impossible to do so would require a lengthy reprogramming of the game. But you are 100% correct there would have to be some way to keep the heads of these companies from turning on their "employees" once the profits are in. Other than that for a solution to this problem your guess is as good as mine.

I hope I fully understood your post this time, if not maybe type slower I am just a good ol boy from Texas. :p

Edited, Wed Oct 12 14:19:00 2005 by ReignDrkKnight

lol! The funniest things are usually true. :)

Edited, Wed Oct 12 14:57:49 2005 by ReignDrkKnight

I don't really see this helping the economy much at all. As the OP has stated multiple times, this would allow a 'corporation' to easily obtain a monopoly on certain items. It is highly unrealistic that this kind of power will not lead to increased prices, and highly idealistic that the solution to this would be to create more super-powered corporations to combat them.

If this could work, it would drive the solo farmers out of business. The very people that you think you are helping by lowering the prices of items. Not to mention that operations of this size would end up wiping low-level zones clear, leaving people with nothing to exp on pre-Dunes.

In the end, the only way to productively farm would be to join a corporation. This is not a direction you want the game to go in. I agree that this game is based on social interaction and grouping together, but most of us really like to have some time to ourselves as well, and farming is by far the most popular and productive solo activity.

The HNMLS example is a great way to show the dark side of this whole thing. When groups are fighting for large sums of money, it gets nasty. You get all kinds of drama, backstabbing, and LSes MPKing each other. It's so bad that many people miss out on the best endgame stuff solely due to these kinds of politics.

It is a nice idea overall, but I just don't think it would bring about good results in Vana'diel as we know it.