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Where's the source? (An economy question.)
Rethak
Member Posts: 39
Well it's been a really long time sense I stopped playing this game but I was just thinking about MMORPG economies and realized this game was quite different in there approach.
All MMOs have some sort of money sources and sinks. Usually quest rewards and vendored items are how players produce money from nothing and every time you give money to an npc for something it essentially becomes nothing again. However most MMOs (like EQ2 or WoW) give every player direct easy access to money sources, usually in the form of trash loot from mobs and pair them up with inescapable money sinks like armor repair fees.
But in FFXI this is not the case. Sure there are a lot of the familar money sinks (paying npc's for transportation and spells) but I can't for the life of me think of a great money source. I remember FFXI really set itself apart from other MMOs I played at the time by the fact that you almost vendored nothing. Everything sold for better gil on the AH, not vendoring your crystals was news tip #1. However there was also a huge inflation problem when I played (for the record I have heard they've fixed a lot of that) but where did all that extra gil come from?
My only non-AH income came from the ~5gil I'd get off goblin kills, the occasional mission, and that was pretty much it. Every time I would farm items for money, they'd be items that sold well on the AH, and not too vendors.
I know many blamed gil farming bots and gil sellers, but I wonder, were these people actually farming gil? Seems to me that they'd get more bang from there buck farming rare items and named mobs, and I sware the only time I ran into any of these bots they were doing just that. But that wouldn't of lowered the value of gil, on the contrary, it would have lowered the value of the farmed item which should have made the prices for high quality items less outrageous. However I could easily be wrong here, if you know what items gil bots would farm for vendoring plz post something.
Did crafting cause over vendoring? I know the crafting system was basically spend a billion gil on ingrediants (almost all bought from players on the AH) and that most of your crafted products did not sell well to the player base. Did this lead the many crafters to vendor there goods for quick cash rather than selling on the AH? That could have caused a surplus of gil in the game world, rich players give millions of gil to other players for ingrediants, and sell those products to npcs which bring more gil into the world.
Could it have been the dang fish? I remember now at this time fishing was still very bot friendly, all you did was equip your fishing poll and hit a button. Some times the pole broke but if you loaded up on polls it wouldn't have been too hard to make a program that did your job for you.
Anyways those are just some of my own theories but I'm still wondering if there was some more notable source of gil in the game. I never got a char past 50 so I'd particularly be interested in hearing what high lvl'd ppl know about this stuff.
Thanks.
Comments
The reason stuff sold less to NPC's is because of the inflation. There was the issue of people fishing rusty items and fixing them to NPC to fund moats for a Lu Shang's Rod. They nerfed that though.
RMT was a huge part in it. They had to get the gil somewhere, and they did. Selling NM drops on the AH and having a monopoly on it meant they could sell it for as much as they wanted. That made buying gil a lot cheaper, which people ended up buying. That made inflation worse because they could just buy whatever without any regard to how much anything cost. Seeing gear go from 1mil to 20 mil, there had to be something fishy going on.
The RMT fish botted, camped NM's and farmed any drop that was worth something on AH.
Crafting was more AH efficient with a lot of items during the time of inflation. It's almost the opposite now.
NPC vendors are better for a lot of things now because of the deflation after RMT got taken care of. There are even people that scour the AH for items that are selling on the AH for less than they sell to NPC's so they buy all of the items up and sell them to NPC's for profit. Unfortunately, a lot of people haven't realized this and continue to sell a lot of things cheaper than they could get by just instantly getting the gil from an NPC.
Fish are still a good NPC source if you can get to the right ones. They are also still good for AH as well for other ones. Things are so much different now than they were. Even farming certain normal drops from some mobs sell decent to NPC's as a way of gil.
BCNM's, ENM's, ISNM's, KSNM's, HNM's, ect are high level ways to make gil. BCNM's can range from 20-60 though.
To be the best, you must help each other become the best.
FFXI Character: Satimasu
FFXI Server: Valefor
FFXIV Character: Tamorae Fonteil
This is what I don't get though, if gil botters were camping the NMs and selling there drops for gil they still wouldn't be creating gil in the game world. I guess it would certainly create a demand for gil though, but at the end of the day someone had to do some vendoring, and it wouldn't have been gil botters cus they'd get more bang for the buck NM camping.
Hmm... perhaps the huge demand for gil created by the NM monopolies made the real money price of gil so high that more and more players decided to sell there gil for real cash upon quitting the game. Or heck, a quitting player giving all his gil away to his friends would have the same effect. But then again, that happens in a lot of games.
I forgot about BCNMs too though but did those drop a lot of gil or just awesome items? If they just dropped items the value of those items should have gone down, espeically since almost all items in FFXI could be resold after equipping.
I wonder if there were money exploits in the game before it got to the U.S.? I played when the game was launched here and even at that point prices seemed to be extremely high compared to what the average player made without weeks of farming.
Also on a side note, is it actaully easier now for an individual player to make money? I remember one of the things that killed the game for me was just the money grind (on top of the main job and sub job grind and the fact everyone resorted to high lvl help to do missions). Like do you find yourself not needing to farm for cash every 5 levels just to affort the new gear/spells?
The most misunderstood concept about the FFXI economy is the source of inflation. The RMTs didn't really create inflation, they created economic displacement. Think of it like this:
Let's say on the Bismarck server there was 1 Billion gil in circulation. This is money that's constantly recycled through the AH(i.e.: buying/selling crystals), and not destroyed(renting chocobos, buying from vendors, etc). Now along comes a team of 100 or so RMT and they control all or a lot of the high-end items on the market(i.e.: campable items that were not rare/ex at the time, such as Emperor Hairpin, Leaping Boots). What this means is that if you want to buy your Leaping Boots, or Emperor Hairpin, you have to buy it from the RMT team.
Suddenly, most of the 1 billion gil that was in circulation is no longer evenly divided between legitimate players, and the RMT hold about 800 million gil out of the sum. Players found their source of income was running out, and they could no longer camp NMs or farm items of value. Their only option? Buy gil. Unfortunately, that did no good to help the economy. Again, it did not introduce more gil into the equation; the same amount of gil kept being recycled. If you bought 5 million gil from the RMT to buy the Emperor Hairpin or Leaping Boots that you wanted, guess who it was going to go back to? That's right, the RMT.
The huge amount of wealth the RMT managed to obtain from their monopolies allowed them to create even more monopolies. They didn't need to craft, they could afford to buy all 20 haubergeons up for 3 mill each and put them back up for 20 mill each.
So, to put it more succinctly, the RMTs didn't really create any gil, just shifted the balance of gil in circulation. By establishing monopolies on certain key items, they made sure that if you wanted a certain item, you had to buy it from them. Once you do that, you ensure that they eventually end up with half or more of the current circulating gil in their pocket. Once that's true, people will start turning to them for gil, and since they're also selling all the items you want, that money goes back to them ten minutes later.
The RMTs did ruin the economy, just not in the way many think. Gil buyers are often demonized, but at one point in time, players just had nowhere else to turn. They couldn't farm, they couldn't camp NMs, etc. They had to rely on lucky drops from BCNMs. However, all of that has changed now.
As for individuals finding it easier to make money now? Sure. SE is cracking hard on RMT now. There are still some around(obviously), but they're not as out in the open as they were before. A lot of farming areas that were impossible to farm in before are now more available. You still pretty much have to farm every few levels to ensure that you have the latest upgrades, though. That's part of the core game mechanic. No way around it. Consumables haven't changed in price much, so you still need a hefty sum of gil to play classes like RNG, NIN, COR, etc.
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So if I understand you correctly NotArkard, there was never an overabundance of gil, but rather an artificially created shortage of goods.
The RMT managed to horde the good equipment and the majority of gil circulating the servers. This meant that all items being sold by RMT we're sold on the AH for huge amounts of gil, which caused players to spend real money on gil (purchased from the RMTs) to get it. (Sounds like the RMT had a sweet exploit going for themselves).
This caused the value of gil to be different for RMTers and honest players. So instead of thinking of the value of gil as be equal throughout the game world it really had its value to honest players and its value to the RMTers. The players at first would only have 200million gil between them, but that amount would increase as the RMTers purchased more of there goods for monoplization purposes. So suddenly in a short amount of time the honest players found themselves with 400million gil between them and thus the value of gil dropped and there was inflation amoung there group.
I assume there would have been some global inflation as a result of this too though, as individual players fished and farmed more to keep up with the price of gear but it sounds like the ability of the RMTers to flood the honest market with gil when need be would have been the primary cause of the games economic instability.
The reason FFXI economy fails ,is because it is setup to operate like a Pyramid scheme.
NPC interaction is pretty much null and void.The whole economy is based from players buying and selling.Without a constant flow of new players buying,there wil lbe little to no selling.This pyramid type economy is the dumbest idea i have ever seen in a game,it does NOT work.It is VERY simple math,you cannot sell for more than what is bought.
Basically if i lost you,i will sum it up easier,$5 in =$5 out.This is why you need many new players to keep coming in to keep the AH flourishing.Instead you get a stagnant population and it becomes everyone waiting to sell ,so they can buy.A common sense approach would have to do just like all the other games and allow vendor trash to supply the players,with their gil.Of course this also means BETTER gil drops and more trash drops from mobs.
FFXI offers a LOL for gil drops,and the trash drops are also useless.I mean a simple rank 5,a big step in gaming for a new player,and quite a bit of work.What did it offer beside the airship pass?10k in gil? LMAO,that is not even one stack of food for one night of leveling,more like a slap in the face.
The ONLY reason there is still some gil floating around and the economy can survive at all,is because of past dupes.The RMT loaded up on a ton of gil from past dupes.A lot was filtered out recently,but there was millions amongst the players from the early years.Sure the gil rewards are garbage,but you get 500+ RMT on a server constantly exploiting the game it can add up in a hurry.Most everything players were selling and getting rich off of ,was because of RMT gil floating around,that allowed them to sell for their high asking price.
Somewhere i saw the Square team admit their mistakes,they did not foresee the RMT activity ,that ruined the game.To be fair to Square,they were all about console gaming ,PC gaming was an afterthought.Players opening up the ROMS to snoop through information,bots were created,many other cheats.I am pretty sure Square has learned from this bad setup and can expect a much better setup in their next MMO.Take away the pyramid design and the RMT would be near invisible.Remove the cheap spawning system and the bots are removed.It was very easy to incoporate a great economy design,if they had the hindsight they do now.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Just because it was more gil putting up NM drops on the AH, doesn't meant that they didn't NPC anything. They NPC'd a lot of stuff too. They did rusty fishing just as much as normal fishers.
There have been plenty of gil exploits that they had to patch up before and after NA release. The prices changes a lot when the game was released in NA because of all the new players.
BCNM's dropped gil and items. The good items don't always drop, so no it doesn't mean the price will drop. There a lot of items from BCNM's that still go for a lot.
Making gil has always gotten easier as the game went on. You just have to find a niche and be smart. I personally fish and a lot of my gil comes from NPCing my fish. It was never really that hard for me before that either. I don't think it's bad for newbies either, especially with the tutorial NPC's that give quests that have gil and exp rewards while teaching you how to learn the game.
Gotta disagree with you there. Just because everything doesn't sell fantastic to NPC's doesn't mean people don't use them. Yes, the AH drives the economy, but there is new gil and gil sinks everywhere. Mobs drop gil, using chocobos take gil. Item prices fluctuate on the AH, so it's not everyone selling everything for the same price. How do you think people make a profit? Like I already said, I can make a pretty good amount of gil from just NPCing certain fish. That's new money that isn't floating around in the economy already. I'm not the only person that does this, and it's not only done with fishing.
What do you think price jackers are that up the going price for an item on the AH when there are a low amount and people pay for them? Supply and demand. There are plenty of quests that can give a good amount of gil that are repeatable too. The economy is actually around where it was around NA release.
They made sure to take care of all the dupers, that gil is gone. All extra gil is mobs, BC's, and NPC's. There is more than enough of that going on. They removed billions of gil from the economy, I don't see where you're getting all of this from. Yeah, SE should have done something sooner, but all I have to say is if you sat on your gil during that inflation, you made out like a bandit.
If they interfere with the economy more by trying to overhaul the whole thing, it might crash it altogether. They're doing a fine job keeping out the inflation from RMT, I don't see a need to redo the whole system. It's not broken.
To be the best, you must help each other become the best.
FFXI Character: Satimasu
FFXI Server: Valefor
FFXIV Character: Tamorae Fonteil
Just a point of information: Yes they were farming gil reguardless of what they were farming. They could go and fish nonstop and NPC or they could run to sky and farm non-stop for days getting the pop items. When they did this they pushed other people out from being able to get the items and because everyone need everythign now they would just buy it from the gil sellers.
It was not just selling to NPCs though, they would use the AH too. Imagine you have some legit player (Player A) trying to craft. Player A might spend 2 hours farming up some materials. Player B might need some armor so he goes and farms things as well to sell it on the AH. Then you have player C that wants to craft to make high level things that he can sell for more, but is too lazy or too consumed to farm for himself so he buys the materials off the AH. Players A, B and C are all happy.
Now add is Gil Seller A who farms nonstop (possibly multiple people, if you ever saw a gil farm you'd understand). Gil Seller A can farm up 20 times what Player A or B can farm up over a 24 hour period. Now the market is flooded with too much materials and Player B is now upset that his source of income is now gone so he moves onto buying gil from a website from Gil Seller A's company. Also in this mix you have Players D through Z who all see materials at a super low price and finished good as a price level that they can turn a profit. Well, now the market is flooded with too many finshed goods. This causes a problem with Player C who was counting on at least breaking even to afford the next set of mats. Since he wants to get crafting high stuff as qucikly as possible he now turns to the website and buys gil. Gil Seller A now has 100k gil that he could sell for more real life money as well as Player B's and C's $100.
Well ... Player C is doing very well for himself despite spending a lot of real life money. Gil Seller A catches wind of this and since he has a mound of gil to play with from all that farming he power crafts to get the craft up to the highest level as quickly as possible. In doing so he buys everything he can off the AH. Supply goes down demand goes up prices rise. With the fished goods he puts is back on the AH. Supply does up demand remains constant prices drop. This is where the economy stands now (at least on Asura) where you can't craft for profit anymore. If you farm up some or all the mats you can still do very well, but the AH price of materials exceeds the AH price of the goods in almost every case. The only times where it isn't is for some intermediate goods.
The economy would have gotten to this point where the supply well out weighs the demand. But with the gil seller infusion it got excellerated greatly. No one in this game would ever bitch about someone faming constantly. There is absolutly nothing wrong with it if the ends are just. If Player B from above did what he did no one would complain. When the Gil Seller did it wasn't to enhanse he enjoyment of the game, it was to enhanse his wallet.
Back in the hayday of the GS they had so much gil amassed that they could control the AH prices of things. This caused people to buy their gil. When a lot of people started doing it, too much gil got into the system. Supply stayed constant, Demand increased (becasue suddenly people could afford it) prices sky rocketed. The normal joe sees and item he was saving up for jump from 200k to 10 mil in a few weeks. So he is down trodden and what does he do? Buys the gil adding even more money that is not needed into the game. The irony of it all is the item that joe was looking to buy was placed on the AH by the very gil seller he buys the gil from. So the GS gets paid off twice.
Once all that gil is gone from the system via the monthly bannings Supply increases (because the normal person is looking to make a profit), demand decreases (because the sourse of income is gone), prices drop significantly.
This is what happened to the economy of this game. A group of people who came into the game looking to make a real life profit from it through what basically is racketteering and price gouging.
It is possibly to play this game when you start off on crystals (it is a great source of income by the way). I ended up getting a pair of leaping boots at level 30 (which i stole from a claim bot *double points for me*) and the 200k that i sold it for combined with the money I was getting from drops can crafting took BLM basically from 30 to 75 with not much trouble. I also spent 7 mil on a Scorpion Harness (which really didn't hurt since i got a Behemoth Hide to drop in a KSNM that I sold for 7 mil anywy) ... but yeah ...
I don't want to go into technical.
But the way i level up, i never even farm once.
Just wear "decent" gear, and always have Sanction/signet up. Use the points and buy stuff and sell.
Crafting items you get from leveling, sell them to NPC... like coblibri feather and beaks, i usually earn 10k per grouping just selling to NPC
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