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Actually living in the real world, I can say its economy is so far from ffxi's, at least here in the USA. Maybe other countries are different.

It's very simple in ffxi. A few people will have tons of gil, be addicted to this game and making money on it, and have mules with all crafts maxed plus capped gil or damn near. New gear comes out, and with the large capital they have they buy ALL the mats up, because they can. They first make themselves all HQ sets, because they use them or feel cool, and then price are so crazy high on mats that none else can compete. They then sell all NQ's at 50%+ loss, which worsens the markets for the avg joe trying to craft for gil.

To these people it didn't matter much because they would have bought said gear for 300m+ anyhow since its new and white box, and crafting it themselves took about that. So even if they NPC all the NQ then they are still break even in their minds. However they don't just npc the NQ's they sell them at such a huge loss margin that any avg crafter now is greatly impacted, where before the sell of the NQ's they might have broke even on sale of NQ and profited off the HQ, they now break even on the HQ just to recoup loss of 64 NQ's for example.

This causes the 300m price tags, and justified at that point for what the market is. The issue is that even your top 5% of playerbase cant even afford 1.5 billion gil PER job, only a select few per server.

If you made a pure gold iphone, apple would go broke, because only 1% of the population could afford it. In ffxi this isnt an issue because you could have that iPhone with your credit card. That's an outside force the real world doesnt normally have. And in ffxi only that 1% is making the gold iphone, and they arent selling it anyhow.

ffxi =/= real world.....

I've spent billions of gil on HQ cursed items. I welcome any adjustments that make them more obtainable. I don't view increased longevity due to the RNG as real content. I also question the notion that making HQ items easier to obtain would definitively reduce game longevity. A player who might have otherwise given up on HQ gear due to the high price tag on just a single piece may now be motivated to obtain an entire set even if the set ends up costing more than the single piece. They made Defending Ring nearly trivial to obtain and I feel it's one of the best changes they ever made (who wasn't happy about this?)

I feel like the tiered crafting system has always been one of the worst designs of the game. For T0, going 0/100 wasn't even uncommon. If you don't bot your ingredients (or some source of income), it can be pretty devastating. It's like an emotional roller-coaster where you usually get kicked in the balls on the way up and down.

I don't disagree with your view overall but I think you're missing another key aspect.

In FFXI nowadays there are plentiful of ways to gain large amount of gil even without crafting.
It's boring, it's tedious, it takes different amount of times, but it's possible and some people do it and end up with incredibly large amount of gil.
So large that you have to store them on multiple toons because they reached the gil cap.

When some people are able to generate such large amount of money, they are keen on spending more money on stuff they want, which raises the price on stuff you can buy on AH/Bazaar.
If it were ONLY about the crafters (like you described) the prices wouldn't be so high simply because not enough people would have the money to pay stuff so much.
Instead what you described is just part of the whole scenario, but not all.
The worst part of this is that a considerable amount of this gil is generated from the game itself, and not from the market (i.e. other players).
You are seriously underestimating the infinite source of gil represented by NPCing stuff. First it used to be Hakuryus, now it's much worse than it has ever been historically on FFXI thanks to Sparks.


Basically the game needed what in other MMOs has been called for aeons "gil sink".
I.e. stuff people can spend gil on. (think on the expensive mats they added for the latest recipes and Omen upgrades).
These are just part of the system, they create "something" people can be spending money on.
Likewise they've been constantly adding "useful stuff you can buy with gil" since when Adoulin launched.
If you try to remember how the game was before that, there was hardly anything worth buying except consumables and RME upgrade stuff.
For everything else gil was basically irrelevant (save merc stuff of course, but it wasn't as common back then as it is nowadays)


So yes, those are the pros and cons of being able to "generate" so much gil so much more easily than in the past.

I concur with this, and this process goes arm in arm with the incredibly low HQ rate.
When the HQ rates are so low, you need incredibly large crafting numbers to generate HQs, this also generates an incredibly large amount of NQs on the market, arguably more than the current request is, and then it all falls back again on the Supply > Demand thing.

What would be the closest thing in RL to crafted gear? vacation comes to mind, you can go in the same place cheap with good conditions (nq), 100m further away pay x10 but more luxury (hq).

While Omen has helped take some gil out of the economy, this quote hits the nail on the head.

Omen doesn't take (any) money out of the economy realistically. Mats sell to other players (no loss).

"most" af+3 is not worth getting so the few pieces that are don't make a dent.

Gain-Money adds literal billions back to the economy 3 times a week. Nothing comes close to negating the Inflation Gain-Money causes.

if you could -just- pay an NPC the value of a RMEA without collecting the currency and doing the menial tasks THAT would create a Gil sink. It's not like anyone with a mythic learned anything from repeating nyzul/salvage/assaults/einherjar. Just let people pay 400m.

Omen mats/ingredients are only available from guild shops minus the occasional gobbie box so they're an actual gil sink. Su3 using the omen mats also seemed to have a reasonably large effect from what I've seen (at least on Fenrir, dunno about other servers)

Unlike other recipes where mats are tipically bought from AH (where there's a player who farms and sells them) here you have expensive mats that are bought from an NPC.
The gil you spend on an NPC instead of AH basically does not remain in circulation.
Now if you're trying to say this hardly makes a difference in the grand scheme... you might be right, I have no means to tell, but still a difference is a difference and I bet it's exactely the reasoning why SE decided to add expensive mats on NPCs. It was a (futile?) attempt to offer gilsinks.

Not saying I disagree with you, but this is kinda irrelevant. You could say the same about the majority of abj gear and SU3 gear honestly.
Wether it's worth getting or not doesn't stop people from wanting to obtain a certain piece, no?

Regardless of that they're also used in SU3 recipes and maybe more to come in September.

I was talking about the deals and reductions that happen when a car company needs to push excess inventory off the lot to make room for next years products. They aren't generating excitement about a "new" product, they are just pushing inventory out and trying to make back *something* to lower the amount of red ink produced when those cars don't sell and are returned to the manufacturer.


Huh....

Phones don't "age", in theory their circuitry is good for decades. People want the latest shiniest because companies are really good at marketing and turned a commodity item into a fashion accessory.

Anyhow NQ's sell for whatever someone will pay. You can't force the prices up just because you desire them to be. Due to the insanely low HQ rate the market is almost always over supplied with NQ's and under supplied with HQ's.

I think a similar change is likely the adjustments to relic and mythic weapons over time. They're far, far more common now...but they've also likely given a much wider range of players something to work on over the years than they did originally.


As core to the economy as they are, offering currency from NPCs would likely be a very effective gil sink as well. They could do something like a black market Curio Moogle locked behind a questline or two. Could put the crafting materials there if needed, in order to ensure supply and put a cap on the price.

Curse you King Behemoth!!

P.S. I have nothing to add to the conversation, just venting... :D

I think this is an idea I could get behind for new crafting mats. Because if the crafting equipment works like many are speculating it will make the crafting aldouin ring a requirement. That means mules would actually have an advantage when it comes to crafting unless a "main" character foregoes choosing a combat aldouin ring. That is not to say mules couldn't just leech "moogle access" like they leech Aldouin missions but it very well could be that crafting on main characters is going to be at a disadvantage starting next week. I'm not sure what the answer is but its a potential problem.

I saw it as the other way around. Adoulin rings are not really that big a deal for combat/gameplay as is. For crafting, on the other hand, it will be gigantic. If you have the former best case scenario(8 characters on 1 account, different craft on each).. you're looking at what amounts to probably 150 hours to get those rings on all of your mules. If you don't multibox, you're going to have to bug people for help on the missions every time through as well. Ring is level 99, so if craft mules were minimalist lv70s for torque, you also have to kill maat and finish exping. Not really anything difficult, but the amount of time multiplied across 7-8 mules is colossal.

As far as the answer, it's pretty simple. Another ring that gives 1% HQ rate and is sendable via delivery box, like craftmaster's. Could be difficult to obtain. Wouldn't outdate orvail's other benefits or lock everyone with a craft into keeping orvail.

While that is true, you don't have to level 8 mules to replace the crafting of your main character you only have to level one. You would have to level 7 mules regardless so its really only the time it takes to progress 1 mule through the SoA missions to have an advantage over crafting mains.

Yes, the rings are losing their luster but there isn't a replacement for the pet ring. Losing that -DT would probably turn some of my solos into losses as the reward timer gets pretty thin sometimes. I get it. People sacrificed gear for their sam to get suppa. They sacrificed gear for their whm for rajas. They sacrificed gear for their tank for the pet ring. But I think people should be able to max one job while maxing one craft, gear included.

If crafters even attempt the HQs! The situation is so dire on some servers that if you don't have crafters with enough tolerance to lose money on a ton of NQ synths (with limited demand for those) while chasing the jackpot of an HQ, nobody even tries the synth - resulting in even some NQs being rarely available in the market. Again, maybe not so much of a problem on Asura, but it is on other servers. I really shouldn't have had to camp the AH for weeks to get NQ pieces that I wanted, but I did have to, on multiple pieces.

From a purely rational gil seeking perspective, for anyone who can do battle content it's likely a better gil/hour use of your time to do stuff like Ambuscade and sell the rewards for a steady income stream, as opposed to spending all of the time spent getting a crafting shield, making countless unprofitable NQ synths, and hoping for a modest profit off the extremely rare HQ synth (which has to be priced sky high to subsidize the NQ losses and large time investment). There will be exceptions like the lucky SOB who makes a couple HQ synths in a small number of tries and collects a big profit - but that's in the realm of gambling, not really a reliable crafting business plan. With that being the case, the attractiveness of crafting is so low that it's no wonder people don't even bother doing these synths. At least increased HQ rate is an attempt to provide some motivation...

Capuchin, I +1'ed because you make one really valid point- the market sizes now in many cases don't allow for accepted levels of risk for crafters. Back when all servers were cranking with 3000 active during peak hours, the pricing scheme still wasn't great but things moved. In addition, you had more farmers- never forget than MANY crafters have been forced to become self-farmers nowadays as opposed to having an Auction House fully stocked at all times.

More materials, larger market for the NQs translated to larger acceptable risks. Maybe I'm coming around to relaxing the HQ rates.

escutcheons are such *** the conversion of gp to cp makes me think i'll never have an erection again

I've treated CP the same way as GP for a while now. Even if that's the only thing I do in game at all for the day, I would do a quick twelve synths. Been capped for a long while now, and my gripe is they capped it at 20k.

these damn shields better get another skill and not some *** 2 second crafting delay on stage 4 the reward for stage 3 is like doing the old school lu shang rod quest but getting a halcyon

*** sake i would rather the shield glowed or some other cosmetic crap than the delay reduction lol

My money is on %HQ or %success.

I figured it out. They are adding day/direction bonuses on September 15th. Please look forward to it.

I was just saying something similar for what's going to be on the next escutcheon level.
"Synthesis finally affected by moon phase"
"Sphere: increases blahcraft skill"

Chance to recover materials on synthesis failure +1%

Care to elaborate?
You do not buy it from an NPC (that would take gil out of economy). You buy them with points/currency and then sell them to other players who are gonna pay with gil.

A Savory Shank cannot generate gil by itself. Only way to generate gil is to NPC stuff, kill mobs that drop gil, or receive gil rewards from missions, quests or similar.

Correct! That's not what I meant, edited my post.
I still not see how it TAKES gil out of the economy.
Only gil you spend on an NPC is taken out from the economy. If you buy something from another player that gil remains in circulation, it doesn't get taken out, it just goes from one player (the buyer) to another (the seller).