The Cancer Thats Killing The FFXI Economy?

In my opinion and to put a long story short, I believe it's a mixture of:

RMT's gradual decline from the inflation days

A major lack of patience and general understanding of economic basics among the entire FFXI community, thus undercutting, etc.

SE pulling the plug on numerous legitimate gil earning methods

The gap between low, mid and high level activities as well as the difficulty and lack of assistance to aid more people into obtaining things such as sky, sea, etc.

Don't forget a loan office and credit system.

nah your no noob and your absolutely right imo. Just as there are undesirable jobs today there are undesirable items, which way before were a nice source of revenue. askar/denali/goliard, NM drops being changed to rare/ex, ZNMs, all an excellent source of revenue killers. Not to mention they also kill the little style this game had before.

Today most of the time you will identify a job by what weapon the person wears (and you still might be wrong) as a lot of ppl are wearing the same equipment. Askar as an example has been standardize, you will see war drk pld sam drg wearing them. And now with the ACP gear... lets go mistake a SAM for a PLD.

Why is this bad, why do i even bother noticing or talking about it as i am myself wearing askar on war. You just cant help it to wear the better gear, but that gear was imposed to you by SE as a change. They have basically changed the good mechanics of the game that many of us have enjoyed in the past years and that have stuck with the game just cuz of thees mechanics. Then all of a sudden they decide to take the game in a different direction... no thats not acceptable and im sure more than one person has felt like droping the game because of it.

All I know is that undercutting is a huge factor, I saw stacks of scorpion arrowheads drop from 18k a stack to 6k a stack in less then a month... wtf is up with that, I'm hoping thats impart due to rmts, cause if people are undercutting by that much something is definitely wrong.

No, SE just needs to give us all in game Credit cards, (gil cards)So I can stealz yourz and yourz identity and spend all your moneyz on Socks

lol Yes and then we can start actually living in houses and rent out apartments. Start driving Hybrids, then have communities called Little Italy Sandoria or Little China Walls, then we can start religions too!

As long as I get to start my own Taco Bell chain..

Oh and dont forget we can hire players to farm for our crafting business and then lay them off. Then start a school for noobs

Wait I have it, i'll start the Church of Taco Bell.

so whats your special item for this month? "Spicy Tavnazian Taco with zesty nacho sauce"?

Ok try to wrap your brain around this idea. Take a consumable like S arrowheads like you say. I'll call them S.A

I make S.A as a way to make gil, and have just crafted 35 stacks. I check the AH and there are 20 stacks of S.A @ 20k per currently listed. Now, I have 2 choices. I can start to post stacks of S.A for the current price and wait for them so sale, OR I can flood the market and crash the price.
Let's say I choose option number 2. Now, everyone else who was selling S.A for profits pulls out of the market b/c the price is so low that it is no longer profitable. Now, I am the ONLY one selling S.A on the AH, and since I have no competition I can set the price at whatever I like, even 10k higher or even more than the original selling price, which both makes up for the gil loss in crashing the market and earns me a nice profit.

This happens all the time espec with the power crafters on each server to push poorly funded players out of markets allowing them to control them.

ITS A MONOPOLY I TELLS YA...

I know I've done this. It's just you think to yourself "ugh damn theres already 15 stacks on ah, and i got a few more to add, fuk it i'll just put it lower to get rid of it than have it returned in my delivery and have to re-ah it."

Basically your both screwing your selfs over, i did it as well with acid and bloody bolts. Your competition will not go away and you will enter a cycle of gil loss for 20 stacks you sell just to make profit on 3-4 stacks before the market gets flooded again. Its no magic, and you are wasting your time. All you do is make the market miserable. A better way of doing it is checking the market beforehand and if you see there are 20 stacks of something that selles on average 3 stacks per day to move to a different synth instead of flooding the market and innocently saying "fuk it i'll just put it lower to get rid of it".

Clever lol

Another thing might be FFXIah itself. Remember the old days, when you could price items yourself quite easily (buy and sell to yourself / friends on various mules) and basically set the worth of something? This was because Alla price checks, word of mouth, and the last 10 sales history were the only way to check prices.

Now, you look on FFXIah - and cross server compare - before making most purchasing decisions. I'm sure someone with an economics degree or something can give a full explanation of market efficiency theory depending on the information the market has available, and how that affects pricing. ^_^

Well for me I always know it will go back up, just cause I put one stack up at a lower price doesnt mean i just changed the whole market price. its usually when ppl put multiples and post it cheaper

On a side note, it's amazing how our (rl) world went from trading chickens and mules to a gigantic string of dynamic numbers that symbolize corporate confidence and thus determines the value of things.

I don't have any chickens.

the FFXI supposidly has had cancer, diabetes, this that heart attack tummy ache forever.

it'll all be fine. we arent going to be seeing bread lines or anything...you just gotta be creative to make money.

well then I'd say ur in the lower class!
:D

>.> personally I'd say inflation days...the greatest days ever :D now-a-days can't make ***for gil and u have to have gil to make gil -.-

About 2 weeks ago I had ~50k and now I'm up to almost 2 mil. I have a 50 craft and didn't land any "jackpot" items. There is gil to be made, you just have to actually go out and get it. Being lazy doesn't mean you can't made gil, it just means your lazy.

teach pl0x

Then your doing it wrong. This isn't a very profitable tactic on items that have high volume and a fast turn over, but can be very effective on higher priced things.

I for one, am happy for the deflation to a certain extent. Like someone else said, the economy during the height of the inflation was just not accessible at all to new players, and given the fact that I'm sure that S-E's ultimate goal is to increase subscriber's to FFXI, they had to do something. Yes, I know that some people were making money that started in those days, but to have to spend three hours farming to fund 1 hour of leveling is just ridiculous.

I started during the high point of inflation, and it was ridiculous trying to make enough gil to get somewhat decent gear. Sure, people could sell relatively cheap and easy to farm items back in those days and make money on them, like rabbit hides, dark crystals and sleepshrooms, etc...but I also remember that as a side effect of that, there was a lot of competition for those items, as well. I remember seeing 75's running around La Thiene killing all the Fungilars, while I was trying to actually exp on them. And mining, when Iron and Zinc ores used to AH for 2k, and Darksteels and Gold Ores were going for 20k a piece, there were SO MANY bots and ***out there it was ridiculous. So killing the inflation by removing all that gil from the economy I think was a positive thing.

Obviously, people that were already in the position to make a fortune in those days were probably pissed to see prices plummet, but to a nub, I was quite glad that things were actually becoming attainable to me when it took tons of farming for me just to afford my Beetle gear...especially since there were more people playing (so people could be pickier), and lots of gear snobs out there. When the Beetle set costs 100k total to buy, it's kinda shitty to expect someone that's got one job to 21 to have the whole thing ready to go as soon as they ding...and I really don't know how pullers afforded bolts and ***in those days, and nin's afforded tools, that must been frustrating as hell considering how fast that ***gets used up.

However, I will agree that undercutting is getting pretty ridiculous anymore. In those days, at least, even with undercutting profits were still able to made on ***. Nowadays, people don't think twice to drive ***below cost, which always made me wonder what the hell people were thinking. I just do my money making in reverse...I buy up all the ***that gets sold for less then vendor price on the AH and vendor it. If they wanna undercut ***that low so *** be it...I'll make money on their stupidity. If anything, it should serve to drive prices UP to a more reasonable level...

I for one thing that www.ffxiah.com/b/ doesnt sound too bad! :P

But seriously, I have little problem keeping up these days. I changed my gil targets from monster farming>AH to Monster Farming>quest/npc+garden>NPC. Seriously, its working out great. Couple garden mules give me about 100k-10k+35k range gil weekly and thats just NPCing what I get and AHing/using the crystals. The range is due to well luck and how many crystals I get... the hope is less crystals. Quests + Fields of Valor + Dancer Sub=really easy income while I solo level some jobs. Beaucidine Glacier for one, the tigers. 3x teeth=2.1k. FoV tigers and goblins, page 1. Free exp, tags, fov gil, and tiger teeth quest rewards and tiger hides to NPC. Plus the gil from the goblins. Sure its no Angel Skin or Hagun but ill be damned if Im wasting time while I farm. Solo + Farming the right stuff=win. Yea, its not the same but its far from horrible.

*buys up all the HQ crab sells and NPCs them for a profit*
Made somewhere around 4k the other day doing that...then the price of HQ crab shells jumped up to 5k.

/slap
no giving away secrets!