RIP SPARKS!!!

They finally did it:

https://forum.square-enix.com/ffxi/threads/56904-Announcing-the-June-Version-Update

I support any measures that make life harder on Bots.

Eiryl is gonna be on unemployment

Glad they let this go on for 6.5 years. Records of Eminence was introduced on December 10, 2013.

Awww hell no.

I get they are doing this to put Eiryl out of work but damn (just kidding bro), I get they are doing this to stop RMT but this hurts legit players and especially newer players hard.

It will also encourage RMT to farm gill in other ways that are more annoying to everyone now, what a bunch of nonsense. They will move back to farming reives and stuff to sell instead.

This is stupid.

I feel a little mixed atm. This was a long time coming given the history with things like cruor, but this was on a scale way worse. If they let you spend maybe 3 dumps worth of sparks per week, it still will be decent Gil during gain EXP for newer players. Everyone else was tired of dealing with the rapid inflation caused by sparks.

They should be careful not to make it too strict - btw ***'s already getting way more expensive

There was an old lady near me that always fed the birds (seaguls and crows) every morning, the council stopped her doing it because the neighbors complained.

Now the birds are ripping up bins to get food and attacking cats.

They will fix one problem and make another one that is far worse.

The ways I and many others were making gil are all going to become worthless soon, the bots will go into farming other stuff now and destroy legit players avenues of making money. At least bots farming sparks had minimal impact on other people.

Can you imagine if the weekly cap is like 1/2 cap sparks or something.. The annoying thing is they don't even tell us what the cap is, they let us wait to find out.

I'd be fine with them mass farming Alex to deflate the prices of it on the general market.

Problem is, all the human farmers will stop because it will no longer be profitable and then when the bots get banned there will be nobody farming Alex for months.

RIOT!

Currency is going to deflate as the 1.1m gil items catch up to and surpass sparks inflation.
I'm hoping for 10x or maybe 25x sparks cap. Enough for some gain xp but not enough for continuous farming.

BURN IT ALL DOWN, BURN DOWN JEUNO! oh wait, no not Jeuno all the rich players are there. BURN DOWN BASTOK MINES!

Gil is kind of in a weird place at the moment.

Equipment is basically free from 1~119. 1~99 you simply need a weapon to keep up with skill-ups.

At 99 you have a few RoE Intermediate quests to get you into 117 gear. A few repeatable Colonization Assignments will net you enough sparks to get into 119 Peacekeepers Coalition armor which is quickly replaced by two days of Domain Invasion for basically amazing defensive gear (lacking unique job benefits, but the defensive stats are solid for a few quick daily dragons). A few more daily dragons will get you from a 117 sparks or a 119 bayld weapon into an entry Escha weapons.

Boom. At that point you can be soloing V2VE or better Ambuscades until you can start picking up Ambuscade pieces. That allows you to supplement your gil through things you can pick up in the Ambuscade Rewards that you can sell and there still is Domain Invasion Wyrm Ash, even though that has tanked pretty hard.

Everything above can be solo and if you've made friends, it can go even faster (at least Ambuscade can; not daily Domain Invasion pts).

The main thing I could see turning sparks in for, at least for entry level players, would be to afford scrolls. Honestly, a lot of them are either skippable, farmable, or cheap at a NPC shop if you look. Obscure things like Raise II may be passed over by new players until they begin to learn better farming methods, but I really simply don't know how many "new" players this game is attracting.



Sadly the market is all sorts of *** up at the moment because of 3 major factors (and the 4th listed is just a natural problem from unleashing all sorts of campaigns at once, but they do that every May):

1. People that are sitting on all of those duped medals are basically so rich from it that they can afford to buy things are pretty much any price which is making common things go up in price.

2. People that were turning out high quality synth results without losing mats until HQ tier popped are also so rich they can afford to buy things at any price (see above).

3. People with low cost of living or that prioritize this game incorrectly in their lives have used their government stimulus checks to buy gil.

4. The most recent campaign spike flail should just have been called "Make money campaign" due to how many of them were lucrative and some of them (looking at you, voidwatch botters) took little to no effort. Also, the Silver Vouchers getting people Mars orbs to sell every 3 rl days was another "make money campaign".

Since none of the above things are being addressed by SE or they were natural May campaign shenanigans, sparks conversion is just... I mean I guess if they think they saw a lot of sparks bots... it's better than them doing nothing, but there could have been other things looked at or solved a long long time ago pre-Covid19.

watch them still leave it at like 20m/week/character.

My guess is 7M

I think it's gonna be 10 full dumps. It takes 945k sparks to get a 10 of each chapter 1-5 and 8 of each chapter 6-10. I thiknk that's probably the sweet spot they want to try and hit. So 10 dumps is 20m(10m from sparks 10m from unity)

The thing that always annoys me about the FFXI developers is they give you a bit of the information and make you wait for the rest, people are going to have to literally work out what the cap is ourselves.

Infuriating when it comes to stuff like this.

I get that bots should be dealt with, but gain xp is a legit gil maker for me. Getting 30m between 2 toons for 4 hrs work has been sweet. Too bad I only just started doing it not long ago.. thanks SE.

I barely ever did it because I never have inventory space and I am too lazy to setup a trade script or whatever but damn 30m?

Ok maybe it needed to be nerfed.

What we're experiencing right now, in addition to what Aeonova said, is a result of the fact there were means to "generate" gil from zero, and this of course generate consequences (inflation).

Normally Gil is not "generated" but moved from one player to another.
Sell stuff on AH? On a bazaar? You "move" gil from a player to another.
That way gil circulates through the economy and is not artificially generated.

But what if you generate gil from zero, from an NPC?
There are several means to do that but none is dangerous, they're all small things perfectly compensated by the fact that sometimes people get banned or stops playing ("removing" circulating gil from the economy) or with the numerous "gil-sink" items that SE created (If you pay gil to an npc that much gil "disappear" from the economy. Small examples are consumables or teleport fees, big examples are the expensive mats used for AF reforge and several recipes).
You can balance things out on the way as you see fit by adding or removing "gil sinks" and everything keeps on working.

In this scenario though we have one big variable that was exploited more and more and more as time passed by and constantly generated more and more gil into the market: Sparks.
This aspect alone is the sole responsible for pretty large inflation over the months.
Then you have the aspects Aeonova mentioned, and those too make things worse (but given how the "source" was fixed, things should stabilize over the course of ~6 months).


It's only right they decided to do something about sparks. Too little too late though?
Maybe, but better late than never hey.
Hope it's gonna be the "right" choice for all of us and that, on the long run, it's gonna benefit FFXI and us, the players.

Not surprised they took this long to nerf it. I mean, how long before they nuked Castle Zvahl farming?

Choco blinkers.

Funnily enough, the only reason they nerfed this was due to the lockdown and them having a month off work and so time to ponder other stuff.

its their 18th anniversary so obviously its 18M cap.

BTW, no P-word jokes

I agree with everything you said (minus burning Bastok as its my homeland... burn just Bastok mines to deal with those galkans ***, none cares if one or a thousand galkans die).

Nerf is always the lazy way to deal with a problem. But i guess its the limited perception of reality of too shallow people that are unable to see the big picture.

The basic rule is supply and demand. While there is demand, will have some source of supply. Dealing with sparks wont fix RMT because the real problem is people already buying gil.

Sure, spark is a "lazy" way to farm cash, but can SE really afford losing 18x N subscriptions and new accounts being bought over and over every ban sweep? Well, it doesnt seems unreasonable that RMTs will try even harder to find new exploits with huge potential to disrupt economy than inflation (BTW, overall inflation is better than deflation. Yes, things gets more expensive, but people also get more cash. How can low server make cash now with so dead AH in everywhere aside assura?).

Well, nothing will die because this. Several times changes happened and just took few time for people to adapt. Till playerbase find new ways to farm gil, the SE will come and nerf, then the next new way to the next new nerf in a neverending cycle where life just gets harder and harder.

I wonder if we will still be able to spend unlimited amount of sparks on Rems Tale chapters? Pretty much 99% of my spark spend is on Rems Tale chapt 1-5...

A cap seems like the most obvious and effective solution. Regular people are not going to be spamming Sparks/Accolades at anywhere near the rate bots are and I'm sure SE has thought about it enough to put a cap in place that won't impact regular players very much.