Inflation!!!! Wtf!!!!!

[LadyKiKi]

Inflation has been happening in this game ever since it started and it will continue to do so as long as ppl require goods. There is not much to do about it.

Bingo. This game mirrors real life a lot (but some issues mentioned above, like vendor prices, are the same), inflation is inevitable. Like oil/petrol itself. As demand for it grows, the price for it grows. I don't see why people complain, it's part of life really . . .

As Moriki said, cash in on it. Go farm them and make a profit while you can. That's what I am doing =)

 

[pakomen]

Hey, all right! Another stupid inflation thread...

As players play ffxi more, they gradually increase their worth. They have more money. As their worth increases, they are able to buy more pricey items easier. To someone with 6M gil, it's fine to spend 100K over the typical price for a hauberk/tatami shield/whatever. It's fine to pay an extra 3k for sneak oil stacks.

When crafters see people paying that extra 3k for a stack of sneak oils, guess what? They up the price 1k more. Then another 1k. When crafters see people buying SH for 7M, they up the price to 8M. Because they can. And when a player gets a V.Claw in kindred seal 30 fight, guess what. He's not going to sell it for the price it was worth 3 months ago. He's going to sell it for what it's worth right now.

So, if you want to blame someone, blame the crafters and the players who have money. Blame all of us who have played the game long enough to acquire some wealth. This whole "blame the gilsellers" game is so overrated, cliche, and naive. Really, this inflation topic is so elementary it just boggles my mind that some of you can't get it.

Prices will keep rising as long as players keep getting richer and don't mind spending a little more for that something something...

 

[Raivyn]

omfg lol

 

[Prentice]

I have said it before and I'll say it again: there are only two strategies that can successfully be employed to control the (currently out-of-control) economy in this game:
1) Make items available from vendors. This puts a cap on the price of an item. Very few people will pay more at the auction house for something that they could buy from an NPC. The scroll of Dispel only sells for a few k more at the AH than it does from the Rabao vendor, and that is only because people don't want to run all the way out there to pick it up.
2) Link the NPC economy with the AH economy. Right now, there are two economies in this game:
the PC->PC economy and the PC->NPC economy. The PC->NPC economy never changes, and only linked to the PC->PC economy in the loosest sense (cheap ingredients for some crafting).

The problem with the game economy is that there is no static pool of wealth. In the real world, there is really only so much "value" distributed across the entire world. Yes, we constantly dig up, pump up, or cut down natural resources, and so as time goes on there does accumulate some excess wealth. But this happens at a far slower rate than the game because...

Every time you do a money-yielding quest in the game, everytime a new character is created, everytime you get a drop, guess what? MORE MONEY entered the game. Therefore, rapid inflation.

SE tries to control this by increasing "gil sinks": chocobo prices, availability of items at guilds, Jeuno taxes, etc.; but the current gil sinks, while annoying, can not keep up with the continuous creation of wealth. So when everyone is wealthy, everything goes up in price.

Certainly, real money trading has some effect on this, but it is not nearly as big as people imagine. Why do I say this? Just think: there is no way to transfer money or items between servers (except on the rare occasion when a new server is added or populations are balanced). Therefore, a transfer of gil (or high-value items) from one character to another simply means that the same amount of gil stayed in the game, and stayed on one character. Think what happens whenever someone quits the game and hands out millions of gil worth of gear to their friends. Is this wrong and impacting the economy as well? It really is the same concept--that character's accumulation of wealth did not leave the game with them--they are gone but the wealth they accumulated stayed behind and changed hands. Real Money Trading really amounts to someone paying someone else to farm / camp NMs / craft / etc. for them. Seriously. That's all it is. I could pay someone to search Vana'diel for the cheapest ingredients and craft up a fortune. I could pay people to play my character and farm 24/7. In the end, the result would be the same: I'd have a lot more virtual money and a little less real money. And the game economy would be exactly the same as if I had personally played all that time or payed someone for the gil. Which brings us to the real way that RMT affects the game economy: by providing a market for people to do this professionally. That means lots of new characters, lots of wealth generation, competition against legitimate players for NM's and natural resources, and ultimately, inflation at a bit quicker pace than it normally would have gone at...but that's really the only end effect, is that inflation is a higher rate than it wouldn't be without the gil-sellers / gil-buyers.

The root problem is the imbalance between sources of wealth and wealth sinks. A properly designed game economy would have limits on the number of items and gil that could exist. In such a design, when the limit had been reached, it wouldn't matter what you did; the item wouldn't drop (or a Rare/Ex version of it would drop instead) and gil would stop dropping from mobs, and prices at shops would go up in response. You could actually set the rate of inflation or deflation and the game would enforce it. But alas, that is not the direction SE took with this game.

 

[Vondoom]

Maybe Onions have spiked so much because a lot of people are leveling Cooking now. I've seen about 10x the ammount of Chefs now than I did pre-sushi. The salvation I take from this is that these people are probabally excited to make that HQ sushi and get rich, before they realize, "Oh shit, I have to join this excange thing and get a liscence to handle fish?"

I don't so much blame gilbuyers for inflation as I do the influx of RMT crafters. It seems, to me, that the average gilbuyer gets a few mill from wherever and plunks it down for the big-ticket item; ergo: SH, Hauby, Igquira Weskit, etc... It's the RMT crafter that dosen't care about the cost of beehive chips.

There used to be a time when Rones and I were just about the only ones making oils in Jeuno, and the material prices stayed fairly moderate. Now there is some guy with the typical RMT name (Kgfy or something) who dosent have the means to curb the cost to profit. I see him all the time, "Kgfy synthesized 1 lump of Beeswax." Gtfo with that. He, as well as a few others, can't HQ the wax, nor the oils for that matter, so they just keep plugging along, apathetic with HQ 1/12 times. Rones and myself crank out at least first tier HQ (2 wax, or 8 oils) 9/12 times. We double our profit off at at least a 8x rate as these RMT guys, and without price jacking chips since there is a limit we need to go to re-coup cost/make profit.

I will admit though, it seems the RMT guys are catching on that the GP exchange gear (Cadecus, Alchemists Apron) do help out quite a bit. Every day I do my slavery bit to the guild, then make 7-10 extra of the required item, and jack it by like 30-40k above the former listed price in Bastok. 90% of the time, AH history shows the item(s) bought by some alphabet name flunkie, and it makes me smile. There are times when I see normal players names on there too. Kinda sucks since jackin the average Joe isn't my intention, but oh well, I never said I was a nice guy.:dwarf:

 

[Bluefrost]

With a very good success rate, it did take kinda long to make one stack, 37 chips had to drop... Bleh, ok i see why it costs so much... I'll post this messege anyway, as a cry for an Alchemist to help me.

My boyfriend's an 80 Alchemist, and I've been using his account recently because I've been needing Honey for my Cooking, so I kept all the beehive chips for him to synth. After about 10 synths I've done, I HQ-ed 7, by only making two, made one regular synth, and broke one. All on Firesday, facing the "right" direction.

You'd think... having a skill 75 higher than the cap, I'd be able to HQ more.

 

[Foofighter]

Nothing is wrong with inflation unless you are not in the work force or on a fixed income. All items that are not sold by NPC have gone up in value. Hell even some NPC sold items are bought off the AH at double to triple the price - which is a sign of convenience or laziness.
My biggest source of income in this game now is basically price jacking. I will buy out items and relist at a higher price. Usually it is a rare item that doesn't sell often. It takes a little research and some risk with the AH tax, but I can safely say that I can double my wealth about every 2 weeks or so.
I used to farm my ass off and hunt lower level NMs and inflation was great for me. I used to go down to KRT with only a boomerang equipped and in just a few hours I could come out with 500k in batwings. Hell, now with batwings at 10k a stack I could make a ton more. Haha, and the funny thing is I would set up a bazaar mule right next to the NPC that pays for the batwings in N.Sandy and people would pay up to 1k a single wing to gain fame in Sandy.
If you aren't satisfied with the price of an item go farm it and take advantage of the trend. Some of the richest people in this country are commodities traders at the Board of Trade in Chicago. Same theory.
If you have more than a few million on you at any time you are losing money to inflation.

 

[Sculli]

1) Make items available from vendors. This puts a cap on the price of an item. Very few people will pay more at the auction house for something that they could buy from an NPC.

From experience I can say that this is not true.
When I was first playing the game some of my initial cash was made by buying Sapara swords from the vendor, running over to the AH, and selling them for 1,500 gil profit. Round trip AH->Vendor->AH, 2 minutes, max (Bastok). I also mailed those to my mules in Sandy and Windy and sold for even more profit there.

The short period of time I was playing a few weeks ago, I basically did the same thing, and it still works. It's down to 1k profit in most cases, but hey, no one ever went broke making a profit.

Some items are available from vendors, but making all items available from vendors would take the fun out for many, if not most players.

Some other games had varying success with in-game currency sinks (EQ Casino, Wow epic mounts). The main issue with currency sinks is that they need to provide an actual benefit to the players. In EQ the casino was cool the first half hour one spent there, but after that it became boring, and clear that the potential reward didn't justify the expense.

In WoW the epic mounts cost 1,000 gold, which is quite a lot for a player who is leveling up without any help from anyone. It's of course possible to attain, and it actually gives a measurable benefit to players (faster travel times, cool looks). Every time a character got to 60, 1,000 gold were removed from the game (if that character would purchase an epic mount).

I thought about what someone else wrote in a different thread about the same subject. It was something along the lines of "SE never meant for gil to become the focus of the game".

I didn't agree when that statement was first made, but I can't help to wonder whether it is true. I do believe that there are huge cultural differences between JP and NA players. I also believe that many NA players think that status can be *bought* by either having massive amounts of gil, or the most expensive gear one can purchase. In addition I believe that this is not the way JP players measure status.

 

[Padington]

The point about "sinks" is quite good but SE must know that is one of the worst ways to drain money from the economy since starting players have very little gil and are more subject to these sinks than more established players. (How's that for a run-on sentence lol). As a BLM75/WHM37 I can teleport or warp 75% of the time and avoid chocobos entirely where as a starting player won't have this option and will be crippled by Mea's 3K Chocobos and people wanting 5K to 10K for a teleport-Mea. As I'm sure you can see this will lead to many of them buying gil just to get a "running-start" in the game. These new people don't appreciate how the economy works and throw their new money around like crazy which helps to fuel inflation. If there was a better supply of materials for crafters prices wouldn't soar so quickly but in the end it's up to us what we charge and what we are willing to pay for the things we want. Thank you.

P.S. There are ALOT more people doing cooking now on the server so ingredients are becoming very scarce and prices are soaring. Alot of ingredients can be grown in your mog (ie Tarutaru Rice) but not too many people do this so prices continue to rise, the same applies to Wild Onions.

 

[Isac]

Id have to say the lack of patients is the biggest reason. Often times the reason somone jacks a price up is b/c there is none of that item on the AH at the time. and 99% of the time, if there is no item on the AH already that your about to put up, your gona put it up for a higher price. And due to peoples need to have it at the time, they tend to pay it.

And sadly this is a cycle you cant stop. B/c even if you yourself wait for it to go down, there is always atleast 1 person who will not wait, and thats all it takes to drive the price up.

Basicly there is no way to stop it, its impossible w/o making it completely available to everyone.

 

[Sneakypants]

Those are the easiet 1 shot kill drops ever.
Outer Horutoto Ruins! GO GO GO!!!
Flood the market and drop the price.


lol

 

[MajorHavoc]

When I first started, I didn't know what half the crap I had, was used for. All I knew was that if you sold it to the NPC, you'd get X amount. If you wanted to wait and sell it on the AH, you can get much more. However, I did realize that almost everything you get, has a value... great or small. At first, this is what I did for gil. In fact, this is what everyone I know, did. I was one of many PS2 newbs. This was all we had. We flooded the markets with items, undercutting to get a quick sell... The good old days. Now, most people don't want a slow, steady income, they want MILLIONS at once. Thus, forgetting that people still do need the lesser items (until they need it themselves and the AH is out of stock).

I have this theory:

Most of the newer players just want to speed-level their character to 75.

It is these types of players, that are causing many of the gripes we have now. They see that everyone else is an "uber" level 70something and races to catch up. Those with RL money to burn, buy their gil/equipment. The ones that can't buy gil, don't bother to make it and have crappy gear. Both have the same "n00b" attitude and don't know how to do their job correctly. One just looks better than the other. Both can make a good party, suck horribly. The new players don't want to go out and farm or don't know/care that they can sell the drops. All they want to do is level.

(I have a point that I'm getting to.)

This affects the economy by that most "veteran" or "established" players don't want to farm their ingredients when they can buy it and save time. Let the lower class men do the grunt work... But there is hardly anyone who wants to. If they do farm, it's for themselves. Why waste precious AH slots on things that would only get them 20-30K when they can fill it up with items that sell for a few hundred thousands or millions?

Sometimes, the newbies/lowbies do go out, trying to farm by killing mobs, one-by-one. Along comes a high level player, with a train of mobs following him and clears out the zone in a blink of an eye. Making the lowbie farmer frustrated and no longer wanting to farm. The high level player goes and puts his stacks and stacks of items up on the AH, for whatever outrageous price, because there are none in stock. Leaving the lowbie with a few incomplete stacks of random stuff that he can't even put on the AH. So he NPC's or drops all the items and goes to looking for a party, vowing that soon he'll be the one to clear out that zone. (See Paragraph 2.)

 

[Sneakypants]

Most of the newer players just want to speed-level their character to 75.

/SCREECHING HALT!!!


We all want things. This ain't the 25 cent arcades that cost a dollar to beat, start to finish. Anyone who makes it to level 10 should at least begin to realize that.


Last I checked, wild onions were like 8-10k, so this is indeed a shocker.
I don't make kabobs, but if I did, I'd go farm them to break up the repetition of any normal routine. In an hour, conservatively, I'll have at least 2 stacks of wild onions...Cockatrice meat is only 20k a stack and much harder to get than wild onions. I'm sure the price of wild onions will drop.

 

[Maximilium]

In sandy they are going for 22k a stack right now. I farmed about 3 onions from 6 thugs on my road from lv 5 sam to lv 11 sam last night.

I have a ways to go.

And I had no idea my ranting about onions being overpriced would produce such a thread, lol.

 

[Lockstar]

I have:
-8 stacks of orichalcum ingots, paid 230k a piece for them now they are 1 mil a piece
-20 stacks of platinum ingots, paid 90k a
-9 brown belts paid 200k a piece now they up to 2.5m a piece
2 Alkyoneus bracelets paid 2mil for one and 4 mil for another now they are up to 40m a piece
-2 speedbelt paid 8 mil for them now they're up to 40mil

...and tons of other investments I've made have all gone up in prices.

I've always liked the increase-your-wealth-by-trade games, and I'm loving this inflation <3 I hope it keeps on going.

 

[Sculli]

...and tons of other investments I've made have all gone up in prices.

I've always liked the increase-your-wealth-by-trade games, and I'm loving this inflation <3 I hope it keeps on going.

ROFL
The thing is that while your "investments" have gone up in price, anything you may want to buy has as well, thus your "investments" are just barely keeping up with the market, if at all.

True investments are those who outperfom the market. There are extremely few items in an MMO that will outperform the market.

 

[pakomen]

ROFL
The thing is that while your "investments" have gone up in price, anything you may want to buy has as well, thus your "investments" are just barely keeping up with the market, if at all.

True investments are those who outperfom the market. There are extremely few items in an MMO that will outperform the market.

Hahaha awesome insight sculli. Although, he certainly does have bragging rights on the big numbers when he cashes in.

 

[Foofighter]

ROFL
The thing is that while your "investments" have gone up in price, anything you may want to buy has as well, thus your "investments" are just barely keeping up with the market, if at all.

True investments are those who outperfom the market. There are extremely few items in an MMO that will outperform the market.

I have made all my recent money doing this. If you have idle cash the best investment is this method. Not everything has gone up at the same rate of inflation. ie Hakutaku eye clusters are stable at 1 - 1.5million. The items he listed have grossly outperformed the market. The amount of money he made on those investment is more than most people will ever earn in this game. Not sure why you "Rofl" at this guy. Very efficient use of capital.

 

[Maximilium]

No, it's not. Because a TON of things people use and need have gone up in value as well as his items, the prices might as well have just stayed the same. I remember when I bought my Magna Gauntlets 6 months ago for 24k on the AH. A month ago, I sold them for 120k. Now, you might say "Hey! He got lucky!" But the second Pigeon Earring I wanted to get no longer costs the 200k I spent for my first one. Last I saw, it was around 400k.

So essentially, we're still in the crapper.

 

[Foofighter]

But did you take advantage of the inflation by buying items you were not or never will use in order to put idle capital to work. I would never buy a speed belt but If I knew it would increase in value 400% I would buy it and then sell it for profit, thus all the gear I could ever want would be paid for by that 1 transaction. Anyone that has millions idle is losing money not the people who buy items that are increasing in value.