Yes, but the "other" game.... you didn't sell to or by from merchants at all. Ever...except for a very rare occasion of selling (which the price was nerfed, btw) rusty caps or something. But 99 percent of the time it was going on the AH. NPC merchant prices were crazy.... very crazy and no one could afford them. AH prices are almost as bad. People started getting greedy, started over-farming and getting a monopoly on the AH prices. People turned to buying gil. Now, people are running around with huge amounts of gil...and are willing to pay those insane prices. So the sellers jacked it up even more. More gil is bought. Prices rise. Viola', inflation.
Maybe you would have to have played the "other" game to know the extent of paranoia most "refugees" of that game have about it. It was a VERY bad situation. Like I said, I agree the merchant system could be changed for the better, BUT I also think it still has to be regulated and controlled, not just a 'free-for-all' because that's when you run into trouble.
If prices stay reasonable, and supply and demand balance out, and money is destroyed (by this I mean, you buy from a merchant NPC now and then instead of a PC where the money keeps flowing and building all the time...I myself, in EQ2 buy my arrows and throwing knives from an NPC, a lot of people pick up some of their armor from an NPC, it's not totally outrageous to the point you can't afford it = money destroyed ) and created at a rate that can keep up with the economy, then it should work. I agree, it's much faster in this game to "destroy" money so there's never "too much" floating around in the economy. Orc meat, for example. Most people just toss that off to an NPC rather than put it up,because it's so easy to get and no one wants to pay for orc meat they can go kill 2 orcs and get themselves. FFXI...you did not have this. You might get...let's take couerel meat for example. The NPC would give you 50 gil for it. 50 gil is....less than a copper in terms of comparing gil to EQ2 currency. You can buy NOTHING with 50 gil.
But, you could slap it up on the AH and maybe get 500 gil and was an essential part of leveling a cooking craft?
So money was being created far faster than it was being destroyed, especially with gil sellers/buyers because of the already too high prices on common items like Couerel meat. Imagine if the NPC's would only buy orc meat for 3 copper (the high end orc meat drops, I mean). Or you could put it up for 1 silver and someone would have to buy it because a) it was a higher mob lvl drop (Couerel meat was lvl 35+ mob) and b) you really needed it to level a certain cooking skill. I think you can guess where this is going. Prices went sky high, mobs got over camped, people bought gil....people sold gil.... economy hits rock bottom.
I'm not saying an AH sort of system would be bad, but SOE would HAVE to make sure they had other things in check before they did it. Really, IMHO they should have had it all figured out in beta, but unfortunately they did not. Really though, you don't want them to just rush in and establish an AH system and have it be another FFXI. Trust me. You don't want that. So ...hopefully in the future, and I do see some hope... and so far, as I said, money destroy/create ratio is good, much better than FFXI... you might still see an AH sort of system.
Edited, Wed Dec 15 00:33:43 2004 by Ivven