Prices out of wack?Follow

Good point eStellar. You are correct that the inflation should be reflected across all segments of the economy. However, FFXI does pose a model economy and as you might see IRL inflation can really damage an economy when it is out of control. I feel like it may a problem for Raganarok, especially since there are so few new players.

Isn't it interesting when you look back at how many of those "useless" Beastman Seals each of us dropped? A new player can grow quickly learning the little secrets we all struggled through. But, then where is the fun?

While remembering the "good old days", do you remember when you partied in the "Dunes" without a power leveler? Or the struggle for that first trip to Jeuno and then feeding the choco? I swore I would come back and get all those Bogies. So every once in a while I take a level 75 job out to the dunes and slice up Bogies.

The main reason inflation is dangerous to economies (such as ours irl) is when their are rival currencies. Since ffxi is gil and only gil the inflation really has no major detrimental effect.

I was going back and reading the posts and realized I misspelled your name sStellar. Time to get my glasses checked. Sorry about that.

While we are limited to gil, the economy in the game is influenced by additional forces. One is bartering which I have seen more of lately. But, to the point of some others, we are seeing gil tied to the dollar through the ability to purchase gil. It is interesting that the inflation does affect the gil selling. It lowers the price of the gil. It can be a self adjustment and balance unless the fluctuations of one exceeds the other.

While I still feel the inflation is a bad thing I don't see how anything can really be done about it. So, in five or ten years I see our situation being the topic of a college economics paper.

Edit: corrected spelling. I really do need to get new glasses.

Edited, Sun Jan 1 11:27:17 2006 by SythFFXI

I'm worried that FFXI will eventuall go the way of Diablo 2 (for those that played), and a player-created currency will start to emerge. Something that's relatively common for level 30+ characters, isn't tagged rare so you can carry multiples, but isn't so common that everyone can immediately get one (in Diablo 2 this was the Stone of Jordan ring). Neither of the two old currencies will work as the acquisition of these is generally restricted to high-level players.

But what worries me more is what will happen if the player-created currency devalues to the point where having 1 of them isn't going to buy you much, or even 10 of them. Then what we might see is almost a barter system where people will trade item-for-item, rather than item-for-gil. And if they choose a popular camped NM item, or popular tradeskill item (say Ochiudo's Kote or a Haubergeon), those with the means to camp said NM (gilsellers primarily) and those with the means to craft said tradeskill item (combination smithers/weavers) will control the market entirely.

What's happening at the moment is SE is beginning to lose control of their own market, and are either unwilling or unable to do something about it. If it were possible to completely ban all RMT it would only stem the influx of gil into the economy - whether people like it or not, anyone that fished Rusty Caps before the sale price was nerfed (and NPCd them as Padded Caps) has contributed in some way to the vast amount of gil in circulation.

I can't honestly see a viable solution to this - someone suggested elsewhere that SE allows some of the higher end weapons/armour to be bought from an NPC for pure gil; this would allow SE to set the price that they want, but for the super-impatient players that need the item NOW they can still go and buy it from the Auction House at the player-controlled price.

Let the weapon shops sell much higher level stuff that people actually use on a regular basis, let the armour shops do the same, and people will eventually realise "why am I about to buy a Hauberk off the AH for 10mil when I can walk 20 feet to an NPC and buy it for half that price". SE could even tag the higher level stuff as Exclusive and non-desynthable to prevent a flood of the base materials or players reselling their cheap armour.

Or how about having the Goblin NPCs in the beastman strongholds able to exchange currency both ways? Nobody in their right mind would buy a Damascus Ingot for 28 100-byne bills, but I'm sure quite a few would be prepared to trade a Damascus Ingot and receive even half that many bills in return. The fact that the first example is currently possible within the game should have put somewhat of a damper on the dynamis currency prices but it seems to have failed miserably (D.Ingot is 28 100-bynes, if a D.Ingot costs 10mil on the AH then a 100-byne bill should cost around 350k).

I was thinking about an idea where SE introduced a bit of a limit on the bids made at AH.

For example, picking something at random; if we saw the last scorpion harness to be sold in the AH at 6,000,000 gil, then maybe you could only bid from 90% to 110% of that, to control the fluctuation a bit more, which means a minimum bid of 5,400,000 gil to a maximum bid of 6,600,000 gil. So Player A puts a bid of 6,500,000 gil which is just over 108% of last sale, and gets the harness. But we also introduce a limit on putting items up. Player B who wants to sell their harness can put it up for 90-110% of 6,500,000 gil, and so on. Of course this doesn't need to be applied to every single item, maybe just a few.

I haven't thought about the drawbacks behind this. You'd think maybe 1-110% would be more reasonable instead of 90-110%, so you could sell much more cheaply if you wanted to, but I guess a good point is that at 90% you're still going to have to pay some form of tax, which is also helping govern the amount of gil in circulation. On top of that, who would decide the initial price of the first scorpion harness on the AH? I just chose 6 million at random since it hovered around there for some time. This is probably something that wouldn't help at this point in time I guess.

And it doesn't necessarily have to be 90-110% either, could be 85-115% maybe. I'm not an economist at all, was just a random idea. :x

The price rises on the items that were made "ex" is a little insane, but the fact still remains that people don't have to spend money to get them - only time (granted Peacock Amulet is still a horrendous item to camp for with a possible 36 hour wait between spawns).

I've attempted to camp LB myself for leveling THF, and interestingly enough even at NA-peak time competition is much less than it was before they were made exclusive. Either this means that most people who wanted them as an item (rather than as a money source) have got them, or people are unwilling to camp them (perhaps due to working odd hours) and just buy them at the inflated price off the Auction House.

And AFAIK Utsu:Ni wasn't made ex, just the marked increase in the number of people leveling Ninja has made demand surpass the supply, so what little supply there is people are asking more for - simply because they can, and someone is obviously willing to pay their price.

The absolute worst price hike I've seen so far is Hagun going from 2.3mil to 6mil in a single sale - this isn't the gilsellers doing, it's greedy/impatient players.

On a side note, it seems that while the gilsellers do have CoP, they are either unwilling or unable to progress through the missions - the group of BSTs in Attohwa (Tojeje, Owewe, Hitsasa, Rabebe) are the only ones I regularly see in a CoP area. This is understandable given the lack of easy-to-camp-and-make-money-from NMs further on in CoP.

soft price ceiling can be imposed by getting npcs to sell the popular items such as food/medicines/raw materials at prices that are high (but still lower than the current crazy prices).

Players would be able to buy from the npcs as long as they see the price from npc < price on AH.

This would force the AH price to go down.

This is a soft ceiling of course.

I'm wondering if this would work. Once you lower the prices of the necessities, the typical player would feel less taxed. And maybe a SE led boycott of AH equip is in order to force prices down in that dept (we can't have npcs selling SH right? XD).

I think SE should find additional ways to reduce the money supply. That would be the key to keeping inflation in check. Taxes, NPC transactions, etc.

Maybe they need to call Alan Greenspan to consult?

The ONLY Way to fix it is to do a gil wipe. I would say the best way would be to wipe ALL gil over 500,000 on each character. 500,000 might seem low, but people will try to avoid having their gil destroyed by setting up a ton of mules for the wipe period, hence the low cap. I have played games in the past where this was done to fix the economy. It works... for a while. Either that, or raise the price of Dynamis runs to 20,000,000 (instead of 1,000,000).

Alot of old players have quit or sold their accounts. FFXI is an awesome game but since alot of us first started many years ago the economy has really bit the dirt. I still remember when Astral rings were like 120,000 each.

Its pathetic that the npc merchants are actualkly cheaper then the AH - I was helping out a new player thats a friend of my husbands, when i was buying him his early level gear I found that the NPC armor shop was cheaper then the ah!

...and all the teleporting WHM that hadn't been driven out by the horrible market would be out of a job? The only real inconvenience to WHM (and the reason it's impossible to find a port in LJ these days) is the refusal of people to accept that inflation applies to teleport prices too.