The economy is grinding to a haltFollow

XI's AH system won't change undercutting at all. Any alchemist who dared to make money with the craft could tell you that. :(

No, for prices to go up, we need demand. Without crafted gear more readily matching or even beating dungeon counterparts, gear sales will stagnate in endgame and as more people hit 50. Furniture's a joke for obvious reasons. Materia suffers in part due to the earlier mentioned gear gap. Food arguably isn't good enough to really make people want to buy it and see performance jumps. Meds simply suffer from cooldown-itis. Things with 60s+ timers just aren't going to be used often, if not overlooked entirely.

Address all that without snubbing players just to spite RMT and maybe things will get moving a bit. Accessibility is key. Fair difficulty in acquisition is fine. Terrible RNG, excessive grinds, and awful cooldowns aren't so much. "But that's how MMOs make their money!" kind of thinking some subscribe to in defense of that is what exactly gets us into this mess. The pressure needs to be on the devs to create content we can enjoy, not on the players just so they can possibly enjoy the content they do get.

I agree with that for sure.. I think it lead to allot of the problems in this game. It was just too easy to go to 50 and when people could do it in weeks,.
It is also the problem with crafting 0 to 50 is too easy. Dont get me wrong the crafting in this game is far, far, far better than FFXI but it is too easy. So you have to many people fully leveled to 50 and more people crafting because it is easier. Fact that is fun also means more people do it creating more competition for sellers.

Another issues is low level dungeons are so easy and the gear is better too many people do them for gear. Why buy gear when I can get it for free running an easy dungeon plus make a little gill and lots of exp.



Edited, Dec 30th 2013 4:44pm by Nashred

Battle classes are fine with everyone able to do anything... in fact, that would help the economy.

As for crafting classes, I like the idea of everyone being able to do everything, but clearly it's not helping the economy with the game designed as it is. I think the real problem is that crafting is too easy and accessible AND everyone can do everything. In FFXI, crafting was expensive as hell, and therefore not easily accessible unless you were willing to go out and farm materials yourself... which was very slow, considering that game didn't have point-and-click travel and super quick kills (and super low drop rates).

If crafting were easy and accessible BUT people had limits, or if everyone could do everything BUT crafting was very difficult to get into, then I think the economy would be better off.

I think it's fine to have access to all the pricing. However, there should also be a reputation system easily accessible on mouseover.

"Aha, 50 people have bought Nashred's stuff and liked it. It's selling for the same price as "Iwanttosellcheapstuff"'s but _that_ retainer has 0 likes."

A rudimentary sorting system could then put the retainer with the highest number of likes first and I could then choose to buy the cheapest goods or the most well-liked crafters' stuff.

Even if that's for some reason an unacceptable solution, I'd argue it's still better than the present situation, where undercutters simply glom together at the top of the market listings and there's no way to tell who started the undercutting, who the "reputable" retainer is, or how many felt bilauds the crafter has made and sold in her/his career. If crafting is going to be a viable career option in game, there need to be tools- just like ilvl for adventurers- to denote quality and integrity.

The point I was making back in September, almost verbatim. I wonder if Hitome still disagrees so strongly...

The problem that I have with being able to do every craft to the cap is the way they all synergize thanks to cross class abilities. If you're a lvl 50 Leathercrafter and that's your only craft, you are at a huge disadvantage to someone who is lvl 50 in all crafts. And it has nothing to do with the fact that the all-50 crafter can make his own intermediate crafting materials. It's the fact that the all-50 crafter can HQ the most difficult recipes consistently at a fraction of the cost by using only NQ materials, while a single-50 crafter may have difficulty HQing difficult recipes with even HQ materials.

The system not only allows crafters to level every single craft to cap, it encourages it, nearly to the point of requiring it.

I'm still waiting for them to do what they said regarding crafted gear: Make key materials drop in dungeons. They did this a tiny bit with WP and Relic base items but there is literally no incentive to HQ a relic base weapon.

A big problem is that those who have lvl 50 in all crafts are able to buy patrician's / dodore set and meld it so that it is the only piece that he/she will need to use to craft from all classes. While I have the patrician's set and love it (even though it is not fully melded) I can literally craft anything for any class in which I am level 50. It makes things really easy, and I can imagine that with all the others out there that have it too, it causes a market saturation.

Let is not forget that we are in a situation where many of the people playing this game are hoarding cash to spend on housing, and the lvl 80 armor from CT have literally blown Vanya out of the water. I made an astral choker, cost me about 125k. (Back when it required double the base materials, it sold for as much as 700k.) So, with the new recipe I put it up for 130k. Now its selling at the bottom of the stack for 85k. Sad face. Once more people have houses, the market will become restimulated. The lack of sales of normal goods are directly affected by these exorbant housing prices. I'm not spending money like I once would. I asked myself why that is... I came down with the following answers:

1. Not sure I can make the money back as effectively.
2. Three times harder to make a dollar because others are not buying because they are feeling the same way.
3. Realizing that FC housing is so expensive makes me want to start saving for personal housing right now.
4. My level 50 needs literally nothing from the market.
5. My level 30 is using GC items, because I'm not trying to convert my gear anymore because materia doesnt cost all that much since CT gear has ruined lvl 70 crafted gear. I'm not buying gear.
6. I'm not spending a crapton on food because it stays after my people wipe to Leroy. Not buying food as much.
7. PVP gear has stopped selling because everyone hates jumping summoners. I'm not buying that PVP stuff right now. Plus I couldnt really feel the effect that increased morale had over the terrible loss of INT I received when transitioning from my allagan gear to the HQ PVP gear I crafted. Felt like my controls were alwasy unresponsive in there when I tried to cast anything that wasnt swiftcasted. And the damn preparation time is 3x longer than the actual battle. Super annoying. I am not PVPing.
8. I would take advantage of the low low prices on potash and peacock ore, but the prices are still not low enough and the demand on those lvl 70 crafted items is dropping, and I will most definitely lose money going that route. Not buying philosophy tome-bought materials.
9. Prices on IV materias are really low. Why do I care now about spiritbonding my crafting gear? Whats the incentive to buy lvl 50 craft gear to meld when I could buy cheaper stuff at lower levels to convert for nearly the same probability? So Im sticking with my patricians set.
10. Many folks, including myself, have hit level 50 on most of their crafts, or are comfortable where they are and have moved on to all the cool battle stuff there is to do. Or they are leveling their gathering class to get treasure chests to try for those rare items we need to make the really expensive furniture pieces like the gargoyle statue or the demon wall. There are simply less people crafting so less raw materials are needed. And leves dont give as much for HQ, so I have no need to buy up the HQ stock for my triple leve. So I have little incentive to buy for my crafting. Now I can buy a bundle of shards for 6 gil a piece, buy a ton of one cheap abundant raw mats, and thanks to the increase in xp for autocrafting, just auto bust out 99, go do laundry and come out a level higher at a fraction of the cost.
11. Every formerly rare commodity provided from farming a mob (fleece, etc) is no longer rare due to increased drops. And the items that I would make from those commodities are not selling at the end product. I dont need to buy them because even at the low prices I can not make profit.
12. I'm not buying furniture cause my FC lacks a house.
13. I'm not buying materia because I'm not buying Vanya to slot.

On an unrelated note, I'm still wondering what the hell everyone is doing out in Costa gathering eggs with Apkallu's spawning up their butts. I'm not buying Apkallu Eggs. Pretty sure it is for a recipe, but it can't be selling as often since it doesn't disappear with death.

Seems truly odd that it is so easy in comparison to craft and sell a two star item, yet for the amount of work it requries to get a luminary item, the luminary (while asthetically cool hanging off your back) is only marginally statistically better than the AF tool (reduces gear wear), and that is only after 2.1. The luminary items should be of Lu Shang's significance and magnificence. Considering I had to craft 3000 level 41-50 gsm items and 1500 level 31-40 gsm items (among other lower level stuff) in order to get my gavel, it should have done more for me. I would have taken a few extra CP, craftsmanship, or control. It was easier to get my relic +1 (zenith).

Edited, Dec 31st 2013 11:14am by Valkayree

It's for Devilled Eggs and Omelettes. The down is used in a couple new recipes too.

As for the rest of your post: I still make a killing off of materia.

I have WVR, GSM, and ALC all in AF gear, and the rest in unmelded Patrician's. When I want to make a new set of AF, I convert a couple sets of Patrician's/Electrum, and make it myself and slot it without spending anything.

As far as the CT stuff killing the i70 crafted pieces, you're right to a point. Since you can only get one a week, it's not so bad, but it's definitely not worth nearly as much. In my mind, the issue is people think that crafting is designed to make you money, when in reality it's designed to save you money ;)

Not like it was a month ago though or even before that. When i leveled botany i could make 200k-500k easy in one day. Get mats put on AH, next day collect money. I'm working on GSM so I decided to level mining to 50 first, now its collect mats, put on AH, next day drop price by 1/2 cause of undercutting and you have excess and need to sell it. Next day drop price again till it just feels like its not worth putting in the time.

You want to watch something interesting, get on Miner, even lvl 1 will work. Go outside Uldah and stand on the a node where you can see other nodes. This is what happens on my server:

Invisible miner instantly jumps from node to node hitting it 1 time, the time it takes me to finish 4 hits on a node the invisible person has hit each one 2-3 times. I'm sure this is how shards are selling for almost nothing and they are in stacks of thousands.

I did report it, got a generic response about investigating it. Same bots are still out there 2 weeks later. Every once in a while they have to start their program over and you can see the person doing it. If SE really cared a GM would be dispatched within a few hours to watch it for themselves and ban the bots and plug the holes.

Demand is the issue and where do you deliver that demand in the current systems? Leveling, Materia, End-game gap equipment? The easiest thing to tackle would be to make materia worth-while on lower synths: ***** the stat cap to a certain extent, you can't modify armor values and maybe you block out primary stats...but you can allow materia to be worthwhile on a broader scope of gear. Add to that an NPC that will meld open slots for a fee and allow PCs to overmeld other people's gear. In reality, how broken is a a level 15 player with +30 crit when they can't get enough VIT to survive the next dungeon? Naturally there are holes to poke in this, but if you make materia more accessible you'll end up adding value to the entirety of the economy. Hell make +SB food!

In excess of this allow for combining of lower-level materia to the next tier: 4 vit I's combine into 1 vit II or the like. Muddle with the numbers, I'm not concerned by accuracy: the point is, if you make lower-tier materials more worthwhile you benefit the entire scheme.

You need potash for Vanya, Peacock ore for Jewelry, animal fat for leather. They move, but the price has dropped considerably. Those would be a few you could check.

Edited, Jan 2nd 2014 8:02am by LebargeX