The economy is grinding to a haltFollow

They're not saying that the economy is collapsing because specific items don't sell. They're saying that the economy is collapsing because entire classes of items never need to be purchased again, and therefore the section of the economy related to those items has simply vanished. The economy is collapsing because large chunks of the economy have outright disappeared.

What would happen to the auto-manufacturing industry if all the best cars were available for free from a source other than the auto-manufacturing industry? The problem isn't that 1976 Chevy Novas aren't selling; the problem is that cars aren't selling.

To make a more appropriate real-life example, this is why economists and NGO's have nothing nice to say about the shoe company "TOMS." Every time you buy shoe from TOMS, they donate another shoe in a third-world country. What does dumping free shoes into an economy do? It destroys the local shoe market. It damages a working economy and replaces it with the non-economy of free handouts. Do that in enough economic sectors, and an entire economy will collapse.

That said, Abyssea was only the nail in the coffin of FFXI's economy. This has been slowly happening for years as a top-heavy player population had less need of mid-level items while leveling to 75 got faster and easier, and as quest, mission, and boss drops replaced crafted items as the best gear for slots. Remember what happened to Goldsmithing once the best rings in the game came from missions?

Really, I'd say the main reasons that the economy is "dropping" is that the majority of things nowadays are rare/ex or very rare items again. With Adoulin came a pretty big shift as far as what was worth buying and selling, and what was irrelevant, and this update added more things to the list of what's worth it and what's irrelevant. Catwho, if you don't mind me asking, what were you trying to sell beforehand that's now near impossible for you to try and sell?

Abyssea did impact the economy in a big way back when it was really big, and even nowadays it is still impacting it in some degree (moreso in the area of food ingredients). To say that it didn't impact it and still isn't impacting it is just crazy.

The reason augmented items can't be mailed is because the augments are just one or two byte changes in the item number. If you mailed it, the mail system wouldn't read those and you'd en up with a blank, unaugmented item on the other side. At least that's my best guess from a programming standpoint. It's the same reason that they strip off signatures on items sold on the AH.

I've got to disagree strongly with this sentiment that forced grouping is what makes an MMO. I, for one, cannot wait to get early access into FFXIV because grouping is optional in non-endgame content. From what I've seen on YouTube, soloing at starting levels doesn't seem nearly as arduous as it was in FFXI. In many ways it seems to take pointers from Guild Wars 2. I'd venture to guess those who are down on the gameplay seem to hate the fact that job discrimination will become less of a factor in XIV and the following will not be missed:

*SAM + 2 BRD only
*RNG only
*Ochain/Aegis PLD only (let's hope Yoshi-P doesn't fall into this developer trap)
*Delve DPS jobs only (same here)

Not to nitpick or further derail, but that's not 100% accurate for the AH. Signatures are wiped because the object you give to the AH is essentially deleted, and they just increment the value of the item on the AH by one. You aren't actually selling the item, you are just selling a replica created from the item having existed. This way, the database doesn't have to track values like who made it and what not, bloating the memory the object takes. If you look at Second Life, for example, it has a value for creator and current owner. For SE, that "creator" data is non existent. It's just owner = owner, that's all.

I should not that the signature mechanic is likely a value on the object itself, but that the values of who created it simply don't exist.

Edited, Jul 16th 2013 6:15pm by Pawkeshup

I look to it similarly to why I see Yoshi probably downplayed fishing. If you could just plop a bunch of bots down in an area, they'll profit. As is, I'm sure XIV will be hacked and botted eventually, if it hasn't been already. You may still see multi-boxers running around following a main character and reacting to their actions via chat log monitoring, players and RMT alike, but the need to quest and essentially roam to chase FATEs makes the process of automation more difficult. And just like XI, I doubt your basic mob encounters will really teach you much compared to the varied mechanics of special mobs you'll face elsewhere. There's nothing that guarantees an above average DPS paired with a mediocre tank would actually learn to play their job well, for example, when finally paired with a good tank. A situation like that essentially requires someone who can identify the issue to suggest how the DPS can change their play, and that might not even pan out well if it involves some needlessly elaborate rotation, which is something I tend to dread when MMOs get ability-heavy.

Anyway, one can still chat (zone, local, or LS) and even randomly party for quests or hunting logs. No, it's not killing crabs for hours in a safe camp, but as others have expressed for reasons ranging from the perfect party set-up to simple monotony, this is just one of those acceptable losses someone will have to cope with if they don't throw their hands up in dismissal outright. I find myself a bit more annoyed at the daily limit on leves since they can be some on-demand quests at various hubs to help spice things up a bit, including NMs and finding coffers.

When I look at recent crafted weapons, for example, I see ones on the very low end and ones on the very high end. Where's the stuff that falls in-between? Is there some problem with having gear one can simply craft or buy alongside gear one can obtain from events?

I have no idea why they're so restrictive with some of the event items, like the Nomad Moogle Rod and the Moogle Suit, but I imagine they're restricting the Destrier Beret and the Chocobo Shirt because the items are being sold on the Square-Enix store for $5.99 each. If you can pass them back and forth between characters, there's no incentive to buy more beyond the first.

It's definitely an edge case, but in the age of freemium microtransactions in the mobile realm making us pay for things we should get for free, it seems like the kind of design decision a suit would make.

I don't think your post says what you think it says.

They expect you to buy another one, and register it to the same account BECAUSE your crafting/storage mules CAN'T use it every now and then via...mailing it.

You dont really seem to understand.

An Economy doesnt equal having two synths in Alchemy for boats and people trading some gil around they have saved up for Airlixirs. Or for entry items. There isnt any crafting anymore since everything that is essentially "free" outdoes anything you can craft. It's like how Goldsmithing was in the past. All the rings and accessories you could make didnt compare even slightly to what you got from finishing an expansion or could get off an NPC in exchange for a minimal amount of points. There's no more money being generated, which is besides the point since all that money isnt used for anything anymore anyhow except getting some airlixirs.

A "thriving" economy doesnt run on a handful of in total perhaps 30 items when 99% (which is being generous) of all the other items are essentially trivial and tossed. There needs to be a crapload of production, distribution or trade, and consumption of goods and services in order for something to be working as an economy. One or two Merc groups, no crafting what-so-ever, no one barely ever using any food anymore, nor any trading except for a few raw monster drops for a quest does not make an economy...

tl:dr: Economy is DEAD. Period.

ITT: people that used to make money a certain way but can't anymore say its dead, people that used to make money a certain way and still can say it's not dead.

Even if they did that, it wouldn't fix one big problem with all this "abandoned" gear: the crafting systems are by and large designed such that you can't skill up past 70 other than by "augmenting" lower-tier items (often from a different craft) and making it gilt or whatever. Back in the day there was at least some market for that crap as people leveled slowly, and then a supply for the gear to be re-augmented later. And all the people with mid-level armor were a sort of storage for crafters who needed to upgrade gear to skill up. On one hand, making that gear purchasable from NPCs will make it easier to get for crafting, but on the other, knowing how SE prices NPC gear, it will probably cost four times what it could be crafted for. And regular players probably still won't buy it anyhow.

I've been leveling Goldsmithing lately (hey, some people just had to finish that RDM AF2, some people just have to finish their relic, this is what I've always wanted to do), and it's crazy. First of all, whether it's because of the new expansion, people leaving the game (often for XIV) or whatever, the supply of gold ingots on Sylph bottomed out a few weeks ago. There's a few more now, but the price is up. (Also, some of the cause here is that people got them from doing VW. Someone in my LS even admitted to just dropping them rather than wasting his AH space with singles, or saving them to get a stack.)

First of all, I might never have reached Goldsmithing 70 if it weren't for those new marble nuggets they added with the expansion. Of course, once people figured that out, they got real popular and the price went up. Then I was in the low 70s, aka "gold hell". I made gold gauntlets for a while until the gold ingot supply dried up. At that point the only good synth I had was level 87 elemental beads. I really did some serious chin-ups with those, but they're cheap (10k each isn't bad when you have 70m bank, and I can usually sell the bead for that much if I don't break), and I still have a long way I can go on them. Then I have a few more levels making Phrygian rings on the ingots I made on the other good synth I found, which was level 80, four ores at 5k each.

For those who already had their level 90+ crafting four years ago, congratulations, but it's harder to get there now because the pre-75 gear economy is basically dead. (And FWIW, break synthing is a great idea, but I didn't know better and tried to level all crafts at once before choosing a big one. Not a good idea.)

I'm still able to get a decent income (though many of the ways I used are already gone, like buying voiddust and selling it for 30k each, when I had 1.5m AN accumulated) but it's a moving target. Most of my money is "old money" from AH sales, rather than something like NPCing fish, so someone out there has to be generating a lot of zero-point gil. Maybe some is from people giving away their gil when they quit the game, but what are people doing that is feeding so much gil into the system? (And how much of it is "smurf" stuff like NPCing logs from VW?)

Or am I part of the problem, by hoarding gil? In a deflationary economy, it's a smart idea to hold onto cash, and while it's not so much deflationary (I started in mid-2008 and got to see the tail end of the RMT bubble deflating), it is very much depreciationary, with items losing their value from being relpaced by newer stuff, and gil has been a good "investment" since at least 2007, especially if you left the game and came back. Miss an upgrade cycle, and you get to hold onto money that would have been spent on something now useless and worthless. I got well into the mythic quest progress, but only deposited 3 (three) alexandrite because I could see the price going down. Then SoA came out and Kenkonken didn't look so good anymore. Then SE said they were offering an upgrade path... but only if you already had RME upgraded to 99, and it looked much less good. And good luck getting the stuff you need for those upgrades to 99, now that people aren't doing as much VW, etc. content that it comes from.

Edited, Jul 21st 2013 8:19am by Elwynbelwyn