Do you really want to know?
One reason prices were high and profits were so big in the past (non-xmas inflation) was because there weren't many 24x7's (RMT Brigade) doing everything. Normalish players aren't going to be able to spend more than 4 or 5 hours a day just synthing, farming or camp for a NM. Combine that with a smaller numbers of crafters, fewer people knowing where and what to farm and nobody camped *every* decent money NM and you have a small number of people who can keep prices up. Not like 5 or 10 people but a everyone understood it wasn't in their best interest to drive down prices and it worked well for a year or so after NA release.
There were enough legit players to produce what was needed (processed, farmed and camped things) and the illusion/reality of not enough players having time to crank out massive numbers of HQ attempts or sit at the computer for 20 hours out of the day and wait for a pop. There were never enough bodys to farm, craft and camp (can't speed up NM pop times) what was demaned in the early stages of the game.
Everyone wants to, and does, try craft/farm/camp but they do it a couple times and move on to the next thing to try, the game is new and there's lots to explore. Someone would farm something a few times and then move on and try to farm something else and nobody depended on any one thing to make them their daily gil and as such you didn't have to undercut to make a sale. There were more buyers than sellers, so it was a sellers market.
Then: RMT invasion.
More and more of these people, whoever they are and wherever they're from, sit infront of the computer 24x7 crafting, farming or waiting for a pop. As more of these yahoos join FFXI everyone (both RMT and norm) must move on to other synths, other farming areas, or to less crowded NMs because this wave of new guys is learning about them, and there are more and damn there are lot of new guys. This contiues until today where every possible NM is camped, every synth explored, every area manaburn farmed due to the sheer number of 24x7's on the server.
So now more competition in every area and everyone wants to make money. It sucks when you want that new piece of gear, you just spent 4 hours essentially *working* in FFXI and you just can't sell whatever you farmed/camped/synthed. Time to undercut a little to get the sale. Just a little is ok but in the past you had a small number of people who understood that undercutting was bad for the long term and took it easy on the undercuts.
Now you have a large number of competitors in each and every area of the game and everyone is undercutting juuuuust a little to get the sale. More and more people trying to sell the same thing and chipping the price down just a little so they don't have to sit on it for weeks. Over the course of the 1000+ days this game has been out those little undercuttings added up, among other things.
So what do we have now?
Prices down because everyone wants to sell, there's now more competition (RMT vs RMT vs everyone else) with a large number of goods to be sold. Everyone wants to sell everything and there are never enough buyers. Normal players quit and their numbers go down, the 24x7'ers never quit will and there are more always being added.
Right now the number of sellers (RMT who craft/farm/camp NMs) greatly out number the number of buyers (normal players), the opposite of when the game started and this is what's caused the deflation.
Think back to old, non-xmas inflation prices before RMT took over. 80k Raxa because not many had sky, 100k wyv skins becasue those things were tough. Now everyone and their mother has sky so Raxa is cheap and plentiful. In the beginning the only wyvs were Kuftal and Ifrit's, now anyone can smash them on their way to ENM. Way back when: A couple wyv skin a day on the AH if you were lucky. These days: 20 at all times due to 01a and 01b.
This isn't just the result of RMT: SE changing what drops what has drastically changed prices on certain items (wyv skin, behemoth hide, v.claw, spider web) and always for the worse (because there are more of them).
Now we're at what SE considers, and programmed to be, the economy equilibrium, the absolute low point of the enconomy.
Prices are at a point where selling to NPCs can easily be considered reasonable, if not a good way to make a money. The prices on farmed or synthed items are to a point where the amount of profit you make per sale or farmed item is damn near the same all across the board. You can sell 4 stacks of Mithkabobs and make 10k or go out and kill some higher level Orcs until they drop some Mythril Subligar which you can then NPC to get 10k. Your only other option is to camp something for 2+ hours, hope for claim, hope for drop, and usually walk away with nothing for your time. You can make the same amount of money killing mobs and selling the crap they drop to NPCs as you can sything, barring super duper HQ luck or big money NM drop.
I'm quite certain we are in all time low number of normal players on each server and all time highs for 24x7'ers on every server. Let's face it, game gets old, more and more normal people quit. More and more people want to try their hand at RMT so more and more join. Whoever is sitting behind these accounts that are doing...something 24x7 and RMT type activity need to be banned.
And they're never banned because the people who ban them, GMs, sadly don't have a clue or are intentionally being made ignorant at the hands of SE.
SE needs to take responsibility for what GMs enforce and how they enforce it, we're not sure if outsourcing the GMs was for quality and cost reasons or as a bullshit shield or both.
As it stands the GMs are like rent-a-cops: They are given limited powers and are dumb as bricks. SE, if they wanted to, could make them into the real police: Empowered with the right tools to find out who the bad guys are. The problem is, SE doesn't seem to want to do this yet. The Task Force is essentially what I'm describing but that's probably 5 or 10 people vs what 50 60 70 GMs who could be just as smart, just as empowered as each Task Force member?
Could a Task Force member watch someone warp claim and recognize what's happening? Probably. Can a GM? As we've seen over and over: no, never, rarely.
So the GMs are one of two things: Kept in the dark so they don't ban people and keep subscriptions up or such slow learners they should ride the short bus. If it's the first, it will never get fixed because SE is the one who calls the shots (they sign the GM's paychecks). If it's the second consider the current crop of GMs a failure after 3 Goddamn years and start over or make a serious, *SERIOUS* effort to educate and empower them.
The inconsistency in how rules and which rules are enforced is staggering and the majority don't even have mid-level player knowledge about the game. No matter what job you're in, McDonalds to CEO, you have to understand the product you are promoting with and it's clear the majority of GMs do not. What makes it worse is they're not just some bullshiting salesmen or copy boys or something: they are tech support, the supposed smart guys, the worst possible group of people to be ignorant about their product They are supposed to be the specialists.
So anyway, GMs need to ban the 24x7'ers and are the GMs suck at banning because they're stupid or because SE is making them stupid. If the GMs are kept in the dark by SE then, well, that's a tough one (online petitions and threatening to quit usually don't work out in the end). If the GMs are genuinely that stupid not to see warp hacks and the like then SE is too proud or ignorant to get new GMs and it's ruining the game.
Funny thing is, I've never even spoke to a GM.
As the situation stands, the only answer is you will have to work hard to make money because there's a lot of competition out there trying to make money too, and they have a lot more time on their hands than you or I do.
