Server Economy worth crap?Follow

Well I've recently played on Kujata, Diabolos, and Garuda servers and have found prices steadily increasing. Soon this game will end up like everquest where everything costs a million platinum (gil) to buy.....
Am I the only one who thinks this?
There's no way to correct the problem i suppose, but if they did start a new server (with no migration) how many people would actually go?
Just a thought...

all mmorpgs come to that point. but say O kotes are gonna be 35mil then. then maybe travellers mantle will be 2mil. if one thing rises in price so will everything else. thats why HELM, fishing, farming, and camping NMs will be the biggest source of income. they require the least money to start. HELM can be done by materials bought from NPCs, fishing too, farming and camping require no investment as well. crafting however requires big investments. the amount of money it takes to get lvl 100 in a craft increases everyday, it can never become cheaper unless ur lvling a craft where everything you make is valuable and will sell and increase in price. materials needed for crafts will increase because they are needed while the stuff that crafters make to lvl on might not increase because of it's lack of usefulness, thus crafting become increasing expensive. If FFXI comes to the point where everything is madly overpriced, everyone will be doing HELM and farming, which like i said, will not increase in price, so therefore, the econmy will not be destroyed.

EDIT: spelling

Edited, Wed Oct 19 20:50:14 2005 by galkapld

There really is no stopping these price increases. Because regardless of how high they rise, people will still pay, as they're conditioned to believe they're worthless without the item in question.

I'd like to point out though what we experience is NOT inflation. True, we do have inflation, but that is not cause for alarm since we're in a closed economy. As the price of certain goods rise, the price of other goods rise proportionally, however this is not the case in high end items. They increas in price far more than low end items, due to a combination of monopolizing of notorious monsters by gilfarmers and an oligopoly of high level craftsmen. There is really no way to combat either case, though the oligopoly will eventually fade as more people become higher level craftsmen, thus forcing that trade into a free market.

EDIT: SlRBLOOD pointed out a fault in my logic XD. The oligopoly on high level craft items will remain, as more people become proficient to join in the market of that item, others leave the trade when they quit the game. Sorry, didn't think of that ^^;


Edited, Wed Oct 19 21:54:26 2005 by ShyFox

It wouldn't make a difference.

When Remora was created, things were great for the first couple of weeks. And then people became greedy again. People started saying "Yeah, but LL boots are worth XXX" and sell it for inflated prices. It happened with everything.

People just bring the old prices to the new servers. The only thing it might do is decrease the amount of players on servers.

Edited, Wed Oct 19 22:05:26 2005 by Erawyn

Want to stop inflation? How about a moogle tax.. Of course there are simple ways of solving it.. I'd like to see more armor/weapons etc.. from NPC's at fair prices might lower than the cost it is to craft, then if everybody got the items from npc's not only would more money be taken out of the economy if crafters wanted to make a profit they would have to undercut the npc's which would put a strain on raw material prices.

At the moment.. Everything balances fine for me.

I have a question that is sorta related: What happened to the fees to get a Rent-A-Room in a nation that isn't yours? I remember when I bought the PC version in November 2003 the booklet said that you could rent a room in a nation you didn't have allegiance to for a nominal fee. Did SE remove that and I miss it?

As for the economy, It's basic supply and demand. The more people in game translates to more demand, thus leading to higher prices. If we can get these people to farm for raw materials and crystals prices will drop.

Case in point: When I first became a serious crystal farmer the price per stack ranged from 500-1500 and the number up for auction were always well above 100 at all times. Now prices range from 1000-5000 per stack and I typically see 40-50 stacks up at a time. So if we all decide that going from level 1 to 75 by next Thursday isn't that big a deal and farm then voila! we'll see prices go down.

Since this is the 10 buh-gillionth post predicting economic ruin for FFXI, since it was released almost 4 YEARS AGO, I'd say no, you aren't the only one who thinks this.

So, far the economy is holding up stronger than any other online game I've played. Seems to me the only time people make these posts is after they've spent a month farming 15mil for something then find that it now costs 16 mil.

Instead of only concentrating on making gil when you need something, a good strategy is to concentrate on creating a large cash flow that will keep you supplied with the gear you need when you need it. To do that you just need to set up regular money making days and methods that you do, even if you aren't saving for something in particular.

Yes, there is inflation as there is in ANY healthy market economy. When you learn to understand economics you will understand that this inflation is a good thing. The kind of inflation that afflicted games like Diablo II and Everquest were different and very destructive. The big difference is that SE acts much more quickly and effectively against exploits and hacks, that could upset the economy, than either of those game developers ever did.

Edited, Thu Oct 20 12:49:32 2005 by Pitlourde

I believe this was EQ doesn't matter... anyhow


There was a bug... gil seller found out about it, made script to exploit it, pulled in (Real live money, not game money) close to 1 MILLION $$$ by selling the game money he exploited the bug to get...

FFXI doesn't have bugs quite this bad (least not yet...) and that has helped to put server economy into turmoil... I tried to find the link talking about a this guy in china that exploited EQ and UO for millions of USD, paid for his house with money from UO (Ultima Online) he has a couple of combination warehouse, airplane hangers full of servers that run scripts making him money in real life... he pays his people maybe a dolar a day, and makes a killing.

If you really want to fix the economy, get SE to crack down and deal with people like this...

Technicality::?? if you read the user agreement, it basicly says "Selling gil for money IRL (in real life) is punishable by banning"... says nothing about actually buying it...

I suggest SE actually work harder to enforce this user agreement

"It doesnt say anything about buying"
That's your solution, you hit it right in the head. SE should combat gilselling by selling gil themselves. If SE sold gil for cheap (1 buck per 100k) they'd compete and even stomp out other gilselling companies. That helps us with the overcamping and monopolizing problems. It will however affect the economy because much more gil will be circulating, how do you combat that? increase AH rates, make other ways to get gil out of players, and sell that gil back through SE. Also, by decreasing the amount of gil mobs drop and capping repeatable quests (say, get an item after repeating a quest instead of gil) it would control the economy more, it'd even lock the amount of gil circulating around to a set number.

The reason prices are so high is beacause of the FISHERMAN and CRAFTERS(except cooking since its mostly NPC bought goods)

Here is why:

Johnny Fisherman is skilling up. He has an inventory of 30 non stackable fish all that NPC for 1k. Johnnyfisherman goes to the NPC and gets his 30k that was never originally into the economy. Then Johhny Fisherman makes a living off of this and introduces millionsof gil into the economy without that much being taken out.

Johnny Crafter is skilling up clothcraft. He has approached the "silk road". He has all the green ribbons that he has made from player farmed goods. Again the only money that has been taken out of the economy was from the measly prepatch AH tax, on the silk threads. Johnny cragter then NPC's these for 2k gil each. lets just assume that it take 24 synths to level, thats 48k per level, for 6 levels is 288k. out of that 288k only about 10k was removed.

Then there is one more that was acounted for by SE. Beastmen drops. This was controlled by chocobo fees and AH taxes.

That is the reason why your gil isn't worth as much as it used to be. The same thing happened in Germany during WW2. They kept on printing money without adding gold to thier treasury.

An effective way to combat inflation is to take gil away from those who have it, not taxing those who don't... now that can be hard to do, that likely why SE hasn't implemented a stronger method to combat this...

UO (Ultima Online) found a decent way to combat this, give the NPC's a certain limit to what they can buy, this helps to limit some of the influx of new gil into the system.

Another way, offer multiple methods to get the uber expensive gear (should lower expensive gear...)

To an extend SE is slowly implementing both of these ideas.

Food for thought... back before the US got access to FFXI, prices were stable, and by comparison to today... 1/3rd the prices of a lot of things. PC release, eventually things doubled. PS2 release, prices went up again... what you should be worried about is when the 360 is released... time to make item investments?